I’ve often wondered how it was that both my brother and I live in California. Yes, of course I know the details, the events that led each of us to decide to leave the UK to try something new, but it’s interesting that we chose the west. I’ve put it down to early conditioning—all those Westerns that my dad so loved, and the idea that there was a place for the individual in the west, for loners and those who didn’t quite fit in. Neither of us intended to remain in the USA forever—we were just off on our own adventures. Without doubt, Mum and Dad missed us, but I know they were proud that we’d each done something akin to them leaving London in an old Gypsy caravan.
My parents loved California, loved the United States, and I think they would have moved, too, had it not been for the abysmal American healthcare system. Even if they could get insurance, it would have taken only one accident or hospital stay and we would all have been in the poor house. They visited often, many times with a group of their dancing pals who came to Palm Springs for a month every December. Mum and Dad just tagged on another month to spend two weeks with my brother and two weeks with me. And of course, I went back to England, traveling more each year as they grew older—once a year became twice, became three times.
Then, in the early part of 2012, everything changed.
My cousin Martine succumbed to leukemia in February that year and the entire family was devastated. She was a light, a joy, the wittiest of the cousins, just lovely—her passing affected everyone, especially as she was not the first of our cadre of girls to die. Tall, beautiful Stephanie died of cancer at the age of forty-two in 1996, shattering the fabric of our extended tribe. In her later months, Stephanie would sometimes call me when the pain was such that she could not sleep—given the time difference, when she was awake in the middle of the night in London, it was only late afternoon in California and I was someone she could talk to. On my father’s side, my cousin Rita had also passed away at age sixty due to something they call “Sudden Adult Death” syndrome. At eighty-five, both my parents were as fit as fiddles, or that’s what the doctor said when Dad had his annual physical after returning from two months in California at the end of January 2012.
Not long after Martine’s funeral had taken place, my mother noticed that Dad seemed to bleed at the slightest knock. At first the doctor was not keen to do more blood tests as Dad had only recently had a full work-up and had been deemed one of the fittest men among his patients. But my mother insisted, and as soon as the results came back, Dad was rushed to hospital. Neither my brother or I were told anything for a while, though in mid-March, Mum called to tell me that Dad was having a blood transfusion, and it was nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about? A blood transfusion? As Mum was giving me the details, telling me it was no more than a bit of anemia, I jotted down the name of Dad’s hematologist.
I started a book tour in the second week of March, and at the end of the first week traveled to Sacramento, where I was a guest of honor at Left Coast Crime, a convention for mystery readers and writers. It was a great honor and I was excited about it. At the end of the convention, I would be flying on to Chicago, Boston and Washington, DC. A car came to collect me on that Friday to take me to Sacramento. I was clutching a book about grief, as I had been so downcast since Martine’s passing. I had wanted to go to the funeral, but my mother said no, there was nothing I could do and it was a long way to come for something that would be all over in an hour. As children and teens, Martine and I had been all but inseparable, but had drifted apart after she married and became a mother and I forged a different kind of life.
The driver was holding open the door for me as I approached the car, but I asked him to wait, just a minute, as I’d forgotten something. I rushed into the house, grabbed my passport and green card, and ran back to the car—a strange move, as I had no need of a passport; my travel schedule was purely domestic.
At a cocktail party that evening, I was chatting to Toby and Bill Gottfried, two very respected mystery fans who were involved in organizing conventions and were always staunch supporters of writers. Both were retired doctors, Toby having worked at the forefront of AIDS research years earlier, and Bill a well-known pediatric oncologist at UCSF Medical Center.
“How are your folks?” asked Bill. They knew I tried to get back to the UK as much as possible to see my parents, and my most recent book was dedicated to my father.
“Good, though Dad’s not been well.”
“What’s going on?” he asked.
I tried to explain, but without my scribbled notes could only remember one word: “Thrombocyto-something.”
Bill’s manner changed. “When are you next going back, Jackie?”
“After my book tour, in May.”
“Oh Bill, don’t worry her,” said Toby.
“No.” He held up his hand, looking at his wife. “I’m going to say what’s on my mind—” He turned back to me. “Jackie, I think you need to find out what’s going on, and you should plan to get over there as soon as you can. I don’t like the sound of this.”
I cannot remember the rest of the evening. I ran to my hotel room as soon as I could and waited out the hours until I knew the Conquest Hospital in Hastings would be open. I had the hematologist’s name in front of me, hoping he wouldn’t respond to my call with talk about doctor-patient privilege—that’s if I managed to speak to him. The secretary was brilliant, telling me when to call back, while in the meantime she would see if she could squeeze me in between patients. It took three calls back and forth, but finally, at three in the morning in California, which was eleven in the morning in England, my father’s hematologist came on the line. It was a forty-minute call and one I am eternally grateful for. He understood my predicament, as had his secretary—I was almost six thousand miles away and I hadn’t a clue what was happening to my father.
“I think my mother is lying to me,” I blurted out.
“Your mother is lying to herself, Jackie. Here’s what’s going on with your dad. He’s very, very poorly.”
I asked him how soon I should come home, knowing that if I turned up too soon, my father would be suspicious, and my mother even more worried.
“You don’t have to come back tonight, but I would like to think you’d be here in the next couple of weeks.”
It was that bad.
“I’ll be there for his next appointment.”
I was about to thank him and end the call when he stopped me.
“Before you go, and before you come home, there’s one more thing. When you get here, I don’t want you wrapping your father in cotton wool. If he wants to go dancing with your mum, let him. If he wants to go out to dinner, let him. I don’t want him handling sharp knives or tools, but let him be himself.” He paused. “Your father has something I cannot prescribe, and it is something incredibly powerful—your father has an amazing spirit. Don’t crush it. And Jackie—it’s a privilege to be his doctor.”
I thanked him, ended the call, then I broke down and wept. I couldn’t imagine losing him.
I think I must have been a terrible guest of honor, though I did my best, aided by writer Rhys Bowen, who was my rock. She buoyed me up every time I thought I would falter. My literary agent, Amy Rennert, along with the team at HarperCollins, especially Katherine Beitner and Jennifer Barth, pulled out the stops and rallied round to make sure everything was done to make my departure easy. As I walked into my parents’ house the following Saturday, having flown into Heathrow from an event in Washington, DC—bringing that passport with me had been a godsend—my mother all but fell into my arms.
“You’re home. Oh, thank heavens. You’re home.” The words seemed to echo down the years.
Within minutes she was on the telephone to my aunts with the news: Jackie’s home.
I set up my office in the dining room and remained in England until a month after my father passed away in July, and I returned again in October, and then
December, when I brought Mum back to California for a month. In the years between my father’s passing in 2012 and Mum’s in November 2015, I was in England as much as California. I think I might have broken some ex-pat residency laws, but what the heck.
In the year following my father’s death, my mother lost almost every hair on her head. She had reached the age of eighty without a single grey hair—certainly by the time I was forty, I had more grey hair than she had when she died at eighty-eight! But despite crippling grief, she put her best foot forward, joining lunch clubs for seniors and making some new friends. She tried going back to one of the dance groups, but it was too upsetting, so she never went again.
My relationship with my mother was always a challenge. She never stopped wanting a fight, and as much as I tried, there were times when I just felt so bullied, I snapped back. Yet amid those highs and lows, she could be so lovely and warm-hearted, so funny, so entertaining—and of course, I loved her more than words could describe. But it was when she was in the hospital in June 2015 following a hip replacement, that I had to put a final stop to the discord. I had taken to leaving a room whenever she began sniping at me, which was usually in company, an attention-seeking ploy I’d been used to since childhood. The final straw came when my brother, cousin Celia and I were seated around Mum’s bed in the hospital, and she snapped at me with all the sarcasm she could muster. I must have let so much go over my head, because I can’t even remember what it was about. I said nothing in return, but simply told my brother and cousin I would meet them outside later and to just text me when they were ready to leave because I was going to the cafe. I leaned over and kissed Mum on the cheek, told her I loved her and walked out of the ward.
Celia recounted to me that my mother said, “I think Jackie’s upset.”
“Well, of course she is,” Celia responded. “What do you expect, after what you just said?”
The following day, on the pretext of taking clean pajamas into the hospital for Mum, I left the house early. I’d probably always had trouble finding my voice with my mother—to be sure we had words, but there’s a difference in finding your voice, expressing what you really want to say in a measured tone, and being “on the defensive” against an incoming verbal missile. The issue of voice was something I’d struggled with since childhood and I dreaded being on the receiving end of what might at first appear to be witty repartee on my mother’s part, but was really a cutting comment. Perhaps I had been too sensitive on occasion, not able to see the joke.
And there had been the devastating critique of my voice when I was about eight or nine. I had started singing along with my mother while we were both in the kitchen—she would often sing as she worked. I was peeling vegetables and Mum was standing near the stove. She stopped singing, turned to me and said, “Jack, can you sing solo?”
I nodded and smiled, pleased that she’d asked, and began to sing the song with all my heart, stopping only when she held up her hand and shook her head.
“No, Jack—I mean, can you sing so low that I can’t hear you?”
She didn’t smile or laugh, so it didn’t sound like something said in jest.
I never sang again.
I mimed in music class and I mimed in school assembly, moving my lips so no one knew I wasn’t singing. I left the choir at the Congregational Church because I was sure I had the most terrible voice. I still don’t sing, and I don’t know if I’m really dreadful or just moderately bad.
But on this day, years later, I knew I had to find my voice and speak from my heart. Even though visiting hours had not started, the nurses said it was okay to go along to see Mum. She looked up as I approached her bedside.
“What are you doing here? It’s not visiting time.”
I sat down and reached for her hand. “I can’t do this anymore, Mum. I can’t do this fighting. I can’t take the nastiness, and I just cannot have any of it any more. I’m fed up with the highs and lows—it’s gone on my whole life. I’m exhausted and I’m done with it.”
She said nothing, just stared at me. Then she nodded. She had heard my voice, and she hadn’t told me to shut up.
So much more happened that summer. Before her hip replacement, Mum had decided to leave the house in Sussex where they had lived since 1982, when they moved away from the house at the end of The Terrace. Having lived in the “new” house for over thirty years, she was now on her way to an apartment in an “independent living” complex for the over-sixties in a local village. It was a lovely apartment, with views across the countryside and just a short walk from the local pub with its big roaring fire in winter, a comfort I came to be very thankful for as events unfolded. How often I sat by that fire with just a hot chocolate cupped between two hands.
John returned to England to be with us while Mum was in the hospital, so together we cleared the house ready for her move—it was a massive task as my parents were pack rats who kept sixty-four years’ worth of “stuff” in the house and garage. They had not discarded a thing prior to leaving The Terrace—they had just brought everything with them to the next house. It was during this time of packing and sorting and trips to the dump that I found one of my brother’s old composition books from school. Though he later trained in landscape gardening, design and estate management at college, and with the National Trust and Royal Horticultural Society, my brother’s disregard for school had never been in doubt. But upon finding the book, I stopped clearing and started reading stories he’d written as an eleven-year-old. I was stunned—this was very good storytelling. His handwriting was not the best—Dr. Wood’s had been much worse—and the spelling was a bit iffy, but I’ve known people with doctorates who couldn’t spell. This was a boy who used metaphor, who could weave a descriptive sentence that put you right there in the action.
The most searing essay was his story about putting down our dog, Rex. Rex was a great dog, a massive retriever/Border collie mix; what he could sniff out he could round up. He was a bored dog, though, and had followed either John or me to school on occasion. I was screamed at by the headmistress and made to walk the two miles home with Rex on a makeshift leash of string, then two miles back again, where I received another telling off for missing lessons, whereas at my brother’s school, both John and Rex were brought home by one of the teachers who thought it was just hilarious. Among other transgressions Rex had taken to escaping the house and sheep worrying, so my parents said he had to be put down before the farmer shot him—and the farmer had every right to shoot him. We were country folk, so we knew the stakes. John cried so much he became ill, and in his composition book he had poured out his heart’s pain at losing Rex. It was good reading. But the teacher had crossed out his poor spelling with her nasty red pen and given him a C-minus.
I walked over to my brother, who was putting aside a pile of my father’s old tools ready to be shipped back to California.
“This is great,” I said, holding up the exercise book. “You deserved much more than the mark the stinky teacher gave you.”
He shrugged. “Chuck it out—it’s just more crap.”
I put the book to one side, and later I saw my brother slip it into his suitcase.
That same afternoon, I received an email from friend and fellow writer Hallie Ephron, asking me if I was going to be at a certain conference in August. I replied that I wasn’t, told her what I was doing and then recounted the story of my brother’s composition.
“Take notes,” said Hallie. “Take notes about everything.”
Mum was only in the new apartment a few weeks when she began having breathing problems. In the early hours of a mid-October morning in 2015, she called to let me know she was being admitted to hospital, and that she would leave the heating on in the flat for me. I flew home that day and by the time I walked into the ward at the Conquest Hospital, she had been diagnosed with small cell lung cancer, usually associated with smoking. My mother was eighty-eight years of age
and had given up smoking thirty years before—but she had been a heavy smoker for forty years and these things can come home to roost. Hadn’t she bragged about her “cancer sticks”?
One of the questions the doctor asked her was, “Have you ever been exposed to asbestos?” And that made her laugh.
“Of course I have—I was a kid in London during the war. Bombs were dropping, buildings were falling, so we were all exposed to asbestos.”
I shared that story with Aunt Ruby, who told me, “In the war, everyone was given these asbestos mats. They were about twelve inches square, and the idea was that you were supposed to use them to put out incendiary devices if you saw them dropping in the street, or to help put out fires in the house when a bomb dropped. But we thought they were just great for making toast—we’d put a slice of bread on top of the asbestos and then heat it up over the gas ring. Everyone did it.”
There are moments of grace at times of keeping vigil. They come in as if to counter fear in the face of a most dreaded outcome. I was tired and jet lagged, not only from the rush across the Atlantic, but from months of anxiety about my mother’s future and from moving her to the new apartment, selling the old house, and sorting out so much clutter. And I’d raced to meet a manuscript deadline. On my second day back in the UK, I stepped outside the ward when beckoned by my mother’s doctor, who was completely honest with me. “We’re talking weeks, not months,” he said. Then I had to call my brother, who couldn’t get his head around the prognosis. When he said he would come back in a couple of weeks, I’d lost my temper, telling him that he didn’t have a couple of bloody weeks. I ended the call feeling just terrible and so alone. I returned to the ward and sat down next to my mother’s bed; she was dozing. I rested my head upon her lap, and as fatigue enveloped me she began to stroke my hair. At once I was a back on the bus from Tunbridge Wells, soothed in my weary sickness by my mother’s hand.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 25
