by Benjamin Mee
“No,” she said. And I still can’t understand why.
Duncan also knew a few doctors, and one in particular who might be prepared to step outside his comfort blanket. I thought he was too far removed from Katherine to go so far out on a limb for her, but I was wrong. A surgeon, he looked Duncan up and down, took his word, risked his career, and signed a private prescription. He wanted to liaise closely on dosage, which we worked out as best we could together from the existing literature, and he gave us a month’s supply. Or rather, he prescribed it. Actually getting hold of an unlicensed drug that is at the center of an international controversy, even with a private prescription, is not easy. It took a further week of overcoming quite substantial bureaucratic and logistical obstacles, but unleashing Duncan onto a project is like unleashing the Terminator. Though his mission was benign, he’d be back when it was achieved. It was reassuring to know that he was out there, relentlessly tracking down this drug, which seemed like our absolute last chance to save Katherine. Even if it only slowed down her decline, the medics might take more of an interest and make it easier to get hold of, or, ideally, take over the treatment.
Finally, on my birthday (which we’d all forgotten about until I started opening cards in the evening), Duncan sat in a room in a London hospital with a still-suspicious head of pharmacy examining the paperwork in front of him. The two key elements were the prescription itself and his conversations with the doctor who had written it, and the diagnosis of palliative treatment only for Katherine. The pharmacist left the room and came back with a carrier bag full of bottles of DCA, but resumed probing Duncan about this unusual procedure. “As soon as I saw the bag,” says Duncan, “I knew I was leaving the building with it, even if I had to take it off him and climb out of the window with it.” Fortunately, this drastic action was not necessary, as Duncan answered the pharmacist’s questions to his satisfaction and he peacefully handed over the DCA. Duncan leaped on a train down to Plymouth, handed over the bag, and we gave Katherine her first dose. It was, without a shadow of doubt, the best birthday present I have ever had. It gave us hope.
I drew up a chart so that I could monitor her progress, and added four doses of DCA to the ten or so different pills, such as steroids and anti-epilepsy drugs, she was still taking every day. The key with DCA is to soak the system in it, so that there are no peaks and troughs in concentrations; so, doses were administered every six hours around the clock. Her sleep was already disrupted, and it was easy to administer by mouth in the form of an almost tasteless liquid. If it worked, it was the least invasive of any of her treatments, and I scanned the notes I made every day looking for signs of improvement, or patterns of decline.
Despite everything, the time spent so closely with Katherine was enormously rewarding. We had our secrets. She was largely constipated by the steroids, which meant long and often fruitless sessions on the toilet, culminating in a successful launch about every four days. These heaving tribulations, punctuated by infrequent but periodic sweet success, were special times. We smiled and laughed at these bodily anomalies, with their involuntary contortions and novel procedures—such as the poo stick. By the time the poo actually exited “the building,” it was so dense and turgid that it wouldn’t flush. Previously, this had been an achievement only I had managed a few times in our twelve years together. Now, Katherine was dropping whoppas that could survive several flushes absolutely unmoved. So we had the poo stick, specially sourced and cut to shape for breaking up poo into flushable sections. We giggled conspiratorially through these sorts of things as we stashed the poo stick (thoroughly cleaned, obviously) for future use where no one would find it, or if they did, would never suspect what it was for.
The children also took an active interest in toilet matters, perhaps because this was an area they had learned about relatively recently themselves. The best piece of equipment to come from the NHS was a mobile commode, a gleaming, new (small wheeled) chair with a detachable seat, very useful in the nighttime but also at other times when conventional lavatorial facilities were just too far away. Several times on excursions with Katherine the children had witnessed us being caught short. Generally, I would go to the nearest shop and insist, with varying degrees of forcefulness, on using the staff toilets. They always agreed in the end, and we never had an accident. But the children both said about the commode that, “Now Mummy can be wheeled along and wee at the same time.” Katherine smiled, and I had to explain to them that it didn’t quite work like that.
With the DCA now our last hope, in which I still fervently believed was a genuinely possible route out of this nightmare, there was nothing to do but monitor her progress through my handwritten chart. Some days her speech seemed to improve. On 14 March, the entry reads, “Speech and movement slightly better.” On the 15th, at the GP’s, she eventually managed to say, “I understand everything.” But the general trend was toward less movement, less language, and more sleep. Then her appetite rallied extraordinarily on the 27th. She consumed an entire meal of diced sushi, ate a whole basket of raspberries followed by half a bar of chocolate, and washed it down with a large glass of chilled white wine. “Superb. Superb,” she said, giving enormous reason to hope for an improvement. But these were among her last words.
Toward the end of March, our good friends Phil and Karen came to visit, as they had been every few weeks, and we took Katherine out to the garden center in her Red Cross wheelchair. We were looking at adjustable recliners, a comfortable way to spend the day when you are triplegic. Katherine obviously liked the trip, looking at the scenery, and enjoying being out with us. When asked which recliner she liked, she shrugged and smiled and flicked her hand up to indicate that she didn’t care. We settled on a silvery gray model that had real wooden armrests, as beautiful an object as possible within the confines of the genre and available market. When we got back to the house we maneuvered her into it; she was wearing the lovely fake fur coat that Phil and Karen had brought her on a previous trip down and that she had requested every day since. Katherine looked surprised by the chair, but was obviously delighted, and rubbed the armrest enthusiastically up and down, smiling to us to show her appreciation that we had got her the nicest chair we could. One week later, she died in it.
Katherine’s breathing stopped at 3:30 AM on March 31, while I was a few feet away working on my computer. In the last few days her swallowing had become more difficult. I’d been expecting her to live at least a week or so longer, as my dad had lasted on liquids administered by means of spongy lollipops dipped in water for about two weeks. She never got to the spongy-lollipop stage, and the packet remained unopened. But I wasn’t completely surprised. In death, once again, she was absolutely beautiful. The puffiness of her face, which had aged her so dramatically because of the steroids, was gone, and the Katherine I knew was back. Except that she was dead. I woke my sister Melissa, who was staying with us, and then Katherine’s two brothers, Dominic and Guy, and we stayed up, not really knowing what to do, as the shock set in.
Throughout the DCA treatment I had genuinely clung to the belief that it could reverse or at least arrest her symptoms, if we got the dose right. And then the medics might take an interest and take over the management of the treatment. Even if she was left utterly dependent, she was still Katherine, my friend, and able to communicate this through the confusion. But soon after that last proper meal three days before, she became unable to swallow, not even enough to take her pills, or the little squirt of DCA into her mouth, and I knew that that was it. Suddenly without hope, I was stunned. Melissa advised me that the literature recommends telling children before a significant death, if there is an opportunity, so that they can prepare for it. This seemed to make sense, so I took them out onto the picnic area of the park and sat down at a table to tell them the saddest news I hope they will ever hear. Mummy, whom they understood had been very poorly for a long time, was going to die. As soon as she had grasped the enormity of the concept, Ella burst into tears and climbed across th
e table to me. “I don’t want Mummy to be dead,” she said. But Milo stayed where he was. I told him it was okay to cry, but he just became very still as he took it into himself, and he said; “I don’t want to cry. I want to be strong for you, Daddy.” Everybody has their own way, so he just watched Ella and me cry.
At the funeral in Jersey, where Katherine grew up, it was odd being the focus of what seemed like such a communal loss. Everyone who knew Katherine quickly appreciated what a special person she was, and felt the appalling injustice of her, of all people, being taken away. Faces I’d known to be always creased into smiles and laughter were now all drawn and haggard, pained beyond endurance, with tears in every eye. The strain, the horror, the disbelief, the sheer agony no one had been expecting to face, confronting the inexplicable, unjustifiable, inexcusable loss of such a favorite person. She was the one person for whom nobody present had ever had a bad word or negative memory. The women looked at me with extreme pained sympathy, but somehow the men moved me most: big Neill, unable to speak, tears bursting from his eyes and rolling down his bearlike face; Tim, his fraught face full of fear and pain; Seamus, a school friend of Katherine’s and now a local politician, so capable and composed in every other situation, stretched beyond any careful planning or considered charm. And while she had been alive, Jim and Mike, both big and strong, were so tender with her on their visits.
After the funeral, the full horror of the last three months began to sink in. With hindsight killing off hope, her decline looked different. But even within a few days I was able to appreciate that although this was a tragedy for us, it was not such an unusual one. Many people endure far worse. We were not in Darfur, or Srebrenica, or the Congo, where people have recently been eaten by rebels in front of their children. Katherine had had a good life in a wealthy country, and died peacefully and virtually painlessly in as measured and gentle a way as possible. We are designed to accept this loss—particularly children, who have had to evolve in groups where parental mortality was high. Daddy might not come back from the hunt. Mummy might die in child-birth. Different caretakers would take them in and they would either adapt or reproduce less well. We are mostly descended from those who adapted. This almost makes evolution sound like a religion, but I took comfort from these arguments. And, even amongst the luckiest people in the world today, we were exceptionally lucky. As well as being in England, with healthcare, laws, and privilege, and being surrounded by loving friends and family, we had a zoo out there. And one day soon, I’d get back to it.
In the meantime, I felt like I needed a mild sedative, preferably something organic, made from natural ingredients, like water, barley, hops, and perhaps about 5 percent alcohol by volume. Luckily, just such a sedative is widely available: Stella Artois. Just what the doctor didn’t order, but in the early days, it worked perfectly.
6
The New Crew
After Katherine’s death, I felt as if I might not give a damn about the zoo. But actually I did. Technically, I could see that the zoo was still possible—inevitable, in fact, or we were bust and the animals would be dispersed or killed— and this fact was bolted to my mind. And as far as I was concerned, other people who couldn’t see this could simply fuck off.
Grief, apparently, according to the widely accepted Kübler Ross model, generally has five stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining (where you try to make a deal with God or fate, or in lesser circumstances, the person who has left you), Depression, and Acceptance. I feel as if I skipped the first three and went straight to depression and acceptance simultaneously. But the idea of anger intrigued me. I didn’t feel anger as such—there was nothing and no one to feel anger toward for this random biological event, apart from some small-minded mishandling by some of the healthcare people involved, and they were just institutionalized cogs in a flawed machine. Besides, I didn’t have the energy for anger.
But I did feel a strong sense of disbelief that people could be so petty. I didn’t mind seeing people arguing in the street, or not appreciating each other or frittering their valuable time in some other way. I could understand that they had drifted into this perspective and it was quite normal. What really got me, though, was the pettiness of many of the people at the park, particularly when there was such a clear and obvious common goal to reach for. I sat in on meetings and listened to endless silly bickering and power plays: “I can’t work with so-and-so”; “He said this, so I said . . .” I stood out in the park in the rain impassively, awash with keepers’ complaints about things like leaking wheelbarrows when they already knew that replacements were on order, and I wondered how anything in the world ever gets done. But these tiny, seemingly irrelevant preoccupations, I realized, were the stuff of life. People’s daily experiences, what they had to deal with on the ground, were what it was all about—and that was somewhere on which I had to refocus.
Being part of the zoo had definitely helped, even in the most extreme times. Looking out of the window and seeing young keepers laughing as they worked, aware that someone was ill in the house and obviously sympathetic, but still knowing they had a job to do looking after the animals and getting on with it. Keeping the park going was participating in the cycle of life. Things were born, like piglets or a deer, and things died, like Spar the Tiger, or one of the owls. And Katherine. But no matter how devastating for me, the children, or Duncan and Mum, life goes on. It was like being on a farm, where it can’t simply stop because one person isn’t there.
For now, there was work to do: new repairs to make, new staff to hire, and most important, getting our license to trade as a zoo. This is a complicated procedure, whereby you have to give notice of your intention to apply two months before you do so, to allow objections to be raised, aired, and assessed. In our case we knew we could expect strong objections from animal rights activists who had targeted the park’s poor practices in the past, but the local community was supportive, and the council was showing no signs of being obstructive. An inspection date would then be booked, after which a verdict could take another six weeks to deliver. So far, straightforward. But the problem was that if we failed this inspection, we couldn’t just rebook one in a week or so; we would have to go through the whole procedure again, complete with the two-month delay and possible six-week wait for the result. If we failed the inspection, it would be catastrophic for the business plan, which relied entirely on maximizing the income from the summer season.
By early April we had already missed Easter, the first and sometimes biggest bonanza weekend on the leisure-industry calendar and a significant pillar of our business plan. As the winter progressed, we’d tentatively suggested early June as our opening date, backtracking our inspection date from there. But in view of the amount of work to be done, eventually we settled for July. Which gave us an inspection date of June 4. There was a clear deadline to meet, a certain number of tasks to be carried out before then, and as long as these were addressed accordingly, it was a done deal. Probably.
My participation was clearly necessary, but it took me a while to readjust to this already broadly unfamiliar environment. In those days, I needed to be alone to cry every few hours or so. I was lucky that the nature of my job, as roving troubleshooter and director, allowed me to be able to do this. I could steer a meeting or oversee the siting of a fence post, and then make my excuses and leave, ostensibly to pursue some urgent business about the park. More often than not, however, I’d hole up in one of my safe havens—the attic, the top of the observation tower, the fern garden—and let the tears roll. It was like a bottomless reservoir, busting at the dams, needing to be drained before any progress could be made.
While I had been watching from the house or the front lawn, Steve was recruiting two new senior keepers. Normally it would have been unthinkable that I wasn’t involved directly in the interview and selection process, as I obviously have a keen personal interest in who is employed on the site. I want to know about their philosophies of animal management, their interpersonal skills, and see ho
w they respond to the interview itself. I find that with the few staff that I have interviewed and then taken on, the interview itself comes up in conversation from time to time as an important part of the transaction between us. I may remind them of something they agreed to do, or they remind me of a commitment I made, or we laugh about some embarrassing moment. But the interview is critically important to me in establishing just who exactly we will be putting our trust in, and several candidates fell very wide of the mark. But as it was, I was distantly aware that the selection process was going on, and trusted Steve’s judgment entirely.
And I was right to do so. The two keepers he recruited in that time, Owen and Sarah, had both participated in internationally recognized rare-animal breeding programs. And both of them brought useful contacts lists for exchanges with other zoos, and the personal credibility to back them up. In other words, each keeper carries a direct experience of breeding rare animals that follows them around. Sarah, for instance, has unique and direct experience of the fishing cats at Port Lympne Zoo, whose directors were so impressed with her that they said a breeding pair could come with her to DZP, as soon as we could build them a suitable enclosure. Owen, a soft-spoken but assertive young Scots man who grew up on a croft, or small farm, also has a portfolio of rare animals—in his case birds—which follows him around, and his best idea was to cover the flamingo lake with a large enclosed aviary and put in a mangrove swamp to house some of his more exotic future acquisitions. I agreed immediately, and then asked how we would go about putting mangroves in. “I don’t know yet,” said Owen. “But I’ll find out and let you know.” Then it would be over to me to work out whether we could implement it. Such are the challenges that face a zoo director, I was discovering. But these are enjoyable challenges, and being able to commission a mangrove swamp is a position I never thought I’d be in.
