My mother died in the hospice in November 2015, one hour after telling the nurse, “I want to die. I’ve had enough, and I want to die.” She was given pain medication and I watched her every breath until she passed away. Every one of those breaths was on her terms.
My brother and I were fortunate to be with both parents when they died—it could have been so different considering we lived thousands of miles away. Mum and Dad each left us with, dare I say it, memories of their passing that are quite comical—a gift in the very worst of times, I think, that are ours to remember and smile about.
Dad was in the hospice, cared for by medical staff not only expert in palliative care, but with hearts perfectly attuned to the vulnerable family. He had been due to return home on a Monday following the period of respite care, but after a fall the day before, the sister in charge called me to say that they were keeping him in. I phoned my brother in California and told him to get on a flight as soon as possible. Dad was upset at not being allowed home, but we told him that John was on his way, so that elevated his spirits.
John’s flight the following day didn’t get in until Tuesday morning, so I left instructions at the house—in an envelope stuck to the door—that we were with Dad at the hospice, and to call me as soon as he arrived and I would come back to pick him up. I will never forget the look on my father’s face as the call came in and I said, “John’s coming—Dad, John’s coming . . .” and the broad smile when his son finally arrived. My big tall brother strode into the room and leaned over the bed, almost lifting my frail father as he held him close. I knew then that Dad would be gone soon, that he had waited for John. He died two days later with John and me at his bedside. The nurses in attendance left the room after my father departed this world. They had been there supporting us, gently rubbing our backs as my father passed, John and I saying the words, “I love you” over and again. We sat for some time before we no longer felt his presence within the physical form that remained before us. As we were about to leave, I realized my brother was perturbed about something.
“Are you okay? Do you want to stay longer?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No—but aren’t we supposed to open the window, so his spirit can fly free? Aren’t you supposed to do that when someone dies?”
“You’re right,” I said, turning to the window behind me.
I slid back the catch and pushed against the window, which wouldn’t move. It was almost dark in the room with only one small light illuminating my father, so I couldn’t quite see what I was doing. I pushed again. The window wouldn’t budge. I gave it a thump, and nothing happened. I covered my hand with a sweater and gave it a good shove—still nothing, so my brother came around the bed and whacked the frame.
“Shhhhh,” I said. “You’ll have Sister running in here to tell us off.” And we began to giggle. I looked around at my father, at rest. “You know, John—he’s done this deliberately to give us a laugh. And we know Dad—if he wants to get out, he’ll put a cosmic sledgehammer through this window.”
My mother maintained that, once married, a woman should never remove her wedding ring—it was unlucky. Even during various hospital stays, when patients were supposed to remove all items of jewelry, my mother refused to take off her wedding ring. However, she had one stipulation for us—when she died we had to remove her ring so no one else would get it. She was adamant because she’d once read an article about unscrupulous undertakers stealing jewelry left on the bodies of dead people. After she passed away, the nurse who came to the room to confirm the death opened the window before she left us. At least we wouldn’t have to thump a window frame again. When we were ready to leave, my brother reminded me of one last thing we had to do.
“You’ve got to take off her ring, Jack.”
“Why is it always me that has to do these things?”
“Because you’re older.” He grinned at me.
I sighed and lifted her left hand. As I suspected, the ring would not budge.
“John—”
“Use some baby oil,” he suggested.
I found baby oil among my mother’s things in the bathroom and began massaging it into the third finger of her left hand. The ring still would not come off.
“If you don’t get that ring off, she’ll come back and haunt you,” said my brother.
“Okay, okay, I know that. I’ll give it a pull.”
I’ve often wondered if the nurse who walked in at that moment thought Mrs. Winspear had a right pair of heartless adult children, because the image of me tugging at the ring on a dead woman’s finger and my brother saying, “You’re not pulling hard enough,” must have given her a story to tell time and again. I dropped my mother’s hand and I know we must have looked like a couple of guilty grave robbers.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
“Yes, we’re just leaving,” I said.
As the nurse nodded and left the room, a wry grin on her face, I turned to John. “The undertaker can get the ring off—I’m not doing it.”
Mum may have given us a laugh, a bit of black comedy as she left the stage, but we wept all the way home.
In the days following her passing I came to a profound yet so simple understanding about my relationship with my mother. I knew she loved me—her love for her family was deep and intense. Then why did she hurt me so much? While walking alone across the fields, once again seeking solace in nature, I asked that very question aloud: “Why did she hurt me so much?” The answer came to me in an instant, as if a dear friend were walking beside me offering counsel.
“Because she knew you would always love her, that you would never falter.”
And she was right. I would always love her. As those words settled in my heart, a comfort entered my aching soul.
There’s one more story to tell about my father’s final breath—that the very moment he left this world, there seemed to be the fragrance of roses in the air around us. Even when we returned to the house, I could still smell the roses. I had taken my mother home earlier in the evening because she was exhausted, and John and I had planned to remain at Dad’s bedside throughout the night; the staff had brought in pillows and duvets for us. I knew Mum wanted to wait at home, because she believed that when my father died his spirit would return and she didn’t want him to come home to an empty house. As we pulled into the driveway late at night, with headlights signaling our arrival, Mum knew he was gone and came to the door, weeping as we encircled her with our arms. Once inside I turned to my brother.
“John, can you smell that fragrance?”
“You mean the roses? I smelled it as soon as he died.”
“Me too—what do you think it is?”
“It’s the sweet smell of heaven, Jack, the sweet smell of heaven.”
My mother finally went to bed—I was to listen to her terrible keening all night—so I looked up “smell of roses at time of death” on Google. Of course there was a raft of scientific explanations. I prefer my brother’s answer. The sweet smell of heaven.
So what if we Winspears are a bit fey? It’s worked for us.
“Take notes,” instructed Hallie. “Take notes, Jackie.”
So I made notes, recorded my memories and gathered them together in a collection of stories about a family at a certain time and in a certain place. Even as a child I felt as if I were caught in a time warp, because my cousins had such modern lives and mine seemed so old-fashioned.
I wrote a few of these stories at Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island, just off the coast of Seattle in Washington state, with a landscape so much like southern England I felt as if I were at home. On the first day at our orientation, when we were shown our individual fairytale-like cottages, each with a cast-iron log stove, the manager offered to teach us how to light a fire. I can remember smiling, because I couldn’t imagine not knowing how to light a fire—I had been doing
it since childhood. After all, it had been the only way to heat our home and cook our food.
When my mother was admitted to hospital for her hip replacement, she took pains to inform the doctor that, “I was a dancer, you know.” It was probably the accomplishment of which she was most proud—same for my dad. So I think of them as dancers, tap-dancing their way through life, quick-stepping over the bumps and cracks, cha-cha-ing around the odd dark abyss and then jitterbugging their way forward, laughing. People would stand back and watch when they hit the floor. It was a lesson for me and my brother—though neither of us can dance, not like our parents could dance.
I feel privileged to have lived that childhood, in that place at that time. Whatever came along in between, the good and the bad, and sometimes very ugly, everything now is just icing on the cake—perhaps it took writing this memoir to realize it. Perhaps that’s what I was searching for, a way to come home to myself. And hadn’t Dad always promised, “This time next year, we’ll be laughing.”
It helps if you’re quick on your feet, a dancer.
Epilogue
This Mas-cure-ayd
I know when my extended family reads this memoir, they’ll ask why I didn’t tell this story or that story. My cousins will wonder why I didn’t mention the Big Climbing Tree in the woods at the back of our house at the end of The Terrace, or the time John and Larry found the site of a black magic ritual while we were on holiday in Cornwall, or at least mention the fact that Linda was baptized in a hop garden by the village vicar, who happened to be making a pastoral visit to the hop pickers from London. And someone will ask why I didn’t write about the Wendy house my dad built in the garden, or the big dressing up trunk we had in the attic, or the time Auntie Dot made us walk in single file along the beach, pretending she was our teacher and saying, “Come along children, this way . . .” And I will be asked how I could have missed Auntie Ruby coming home from Canada for the first time since she’d emigrated, along with Janice and Christine, whom we’d never seen before. My brother chased them around the garden brandishing a rounders bat yelling, “You’re in England now and we’re not playing your rotten baseball here—we play rounders!” Or what about Uncle Joe, on his first visit back from Canada after he and Auntie Alma emigrated with Josie and Sharon, and how he drove up the wrong side of the road and all us cousins in the back of the car yelled, “Uncle Joe . . . other side!”
My brother will say I should have written about Dad sneaking off on a mid-December winter’s night to snag our Christmas tree from the pine plantation nearby, and he may wonder why I didn’t write about our final party, just the four of us coming together to say goodbye to the house at the end of The Terrace a few days before my parents moved to their new home in Sussex. We each thought we had the original idea of buying a bottle of champagne for our special supper, and Auntie Dot gave me a twenty-pound note to buy another bottle, so we’d have a really good time—which is why the four of us imbibed five bottles of champagne that evening. My brother was loathe to leave the house he’d been born into, and even after the removal lorry had taken everything in that house to my parents’ new home, John remained behind, bedding down in a sleeping bag for several nights, making tea on a camping stove and not leaving until the new owners came rumbling down the street in their removal lorry.
Remember when? Remember when? Remember when? And the list will go on. I will be treated to more family stories and I will be drawn back into the past on a tide of nostalgia. Re-memory making even the bad times good. But my big boisterous extended family will also look for this part, for an honest paragraph or two where I say something more about my mother and her stories—the truth of the matter, if you will. Her mass-cure-ayd. And I know they will read this, because my family will read what I write even when they don’t like it. As one of my cousins said, “Your kind of writing isn’t really my thing, but it’s nice to see your books published.” If that’s as good as it gets, I’ll take it.
A couple of years before my mother’s death, I was in Devon visiting my cousin Gillian and her family, and while I was there, Uncle Charlie came over for dinner—he lived in the area and it was great to see him. I’d always really loved Uncle Charlie, my mother’s youngest brother. We were talking about the past, about my Dad, who had died the year before, and I mentioned my mother’s claustrophobia, and how it probably started when she was buried under the rubble when that bomb landed in the street outside the house.
“What are you talking about?” said Uncle Charlie. “Your mother was never buried under any rubble.”
“Oh she was, Uncle Charlie—she’s told me all about it since I was a child.” I recounted the whole story to him, every single detail.
He shook his head and we dropped the subject. It seemed the best thing to do.
As soon as I arrived back at my mother’s house, I told her what Uncle Charlie had said. She rolled her eyes. “What does he know? He was evacuated at the time—he wasn’t even bloody well there!”
I accepted that.
Aunt Sylvie shrugged when I asked her about Mum’s experience, and Aunt Ruby said, “Oh well, you know how your mum could weave a story.”
After she died, so many people took pains to tell me how much they loved Mum, and especially how much they loved her stories. But there was a dark side.
“She used to tell really scary stories,” said Celia. “When we were little she made up ghost stories where terrible things happened, and we’d really believed her, she was so good at it. But they gave us all nightmares.”
Time and again, I heard the same refrain. Your mother was a great storyteller.
And so as I embarked upon writing my memoir, I started checking, where I could, and found that most of her wartime stories were true—but one big one was not. Or was it? I had to do some digging.
As a child I had been shocked by a certain story my mother recounted about Uncle Jim’s experience during the Normandy Landings in 1944, and what ensued as he went ashore and moved inland, part of a special unit tasked with a dangerous job. It had a devastating outcome and involved a dreadful decision on the part of someone in his unit that culminated in the death of a local child. Whenever Mum told this story there was always the unspoken suggestion that it was Uncle Jim who’d had to make that decision. According to Mum’s story, the men were moving into a Normandy town where it was known there were German snipers in the taller buildings, waiting to pick off Allied soldiers. The marines had to move with stealth, but their position was about to be revealed by a little boy who had seen them and was running toward them—and much depended upon this special unit breaking through the enemy line. Someone made the decision to take the child’s life in order to save more local people. I remember asking her once, “Did Uncle Jim shoot the little boy?” and instead of saying “No” she looked away, and left the question hanging in the air. I went to bed and wept for that little French boy. Now, with doubt in my mind as I recalled the conversations with Uncle Charlie and my aunts, I decided to ask Jim’s daughter, my cousin Linda, about it. In an email message I wrote down the whole story as told to me by my mother, and clicked “Send.” I didn’t receive a reply and started to worry. Perhaps I’d told Linda something she didn’t know. What if I’d touched upon a family story that was painful for my cousins to hear?
I was still concerned when, several days later, Linda’s reply popped into my inbox—the delay was due to the fact that she’d sent my message along to her brother, my cousin Jim, the family historian who was coming up with all sorts of interesting bits and pieces about our ancestors. It was Jim’s discovery of our great-grandmother’s name—Kezia—that inspired me to name a character after her in my WWI novel, The Care and Management of Lies. Through Jim’s research, I also discovered that my grandfather was born in Bedford Square, in the Bloomsbury area of London—I had worked in Bedford Square for several years and had never known the old man was born just on the other side of the square.
/> In response to my email, Jim sent me official reports of his father’s service on the beaches of Normandy, and it was harrowing. Uncle Jim had been a stoker and driver on one of the landing craft—it was his job to keep the landing craft going toward the Normandy beach while under fire, not only steering it but making sure it was fueled. After an attack that killed so many of the men on board, my uncle had floated unconscious in the bloodstained water for a long time until rescued. He had been like Charon, the archetypal ferryman taking departed souls across the River Styx to the next world. He had ferried young men to their deaths—what a terrible memory to live with. But this recounting of events was nothing like my mother’s story, about a task that would have been carried out by a commando unit, and my uncle wasn’t transferred to the Royal Marine Commandoes until he reenlisted after the war.
I read the official account twice, reconsidered my mother’s out-of-whack story, then sat back and thought, “She lied.” Never mind being good at storytelling—she had lied to me. I had not only been deeply wounded by it, but it had left me scarred. Where had the story about the little boy come from? Mum’s stories were generally founded on truth, never mind how much she might have embellished them. But this one had gone too far. I was upset about it and felt foolish because I had never doubted her. I’d believed every word of every story, and now I felt humiliated, as if I had been played for a fool. But there was a niggle of doubt—there had to be more.
I called my brother and asked him if he had ever heard the story of Uncle Jim in Normandy in 1944. I went through every detail of the story as told to me by our mother.
“Sure I’ve heard it—just like you’ve described. But I never heard it from Mum,” said John. “No, it was Uncle Charlie who told me about it when I went to Amsterdam with him.”
“I give up!” I said aloud and began to laugh. It was a nervous laugh. I didn’t know what to think. We talked some more, and when the call ended, I began to imagine what might have happened to inspire Mum’s story.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 26
