by Diana Athill
I had been observing the four-night/three-night plan for about a year before I realized quite how much it frightened me. Of course it was tiring, even without the worry. I was working hard on my London days, so I never had time to be on my own and do my own things in my own home. I began to feel heavily weary. I drove to work every day, leaving my car in a garage about fifteen minutes walk away from the office – a pleasant walk, taking me through Russell Square, which I had always enjoyed. Now it began to seem exhausting; my feet seemed less manageable than they ought to be so I had to be careful not to stumble; I even began to dread it. And one weekend with my mother I felt so bad-tempered, so dreary, so near to irrational tears, that I decided I must see my doctor as soon as I got home. High blood pressure, he said: very much too high. This was both alarming and a relief: alarming because I had a secret dread of having a stroke, a relief because there was a real reason for feeling lousy, it was not just my imagination. The doctor said it was not surprising that I was suffering from stress and that I must take a proper holiday, and I added a scold to myself about my weight, which I hadn’t bothered to check for months: it had gone up to twelve and a half stone! So my sister kindly came over from Zimbabwe for five weeks to be with my mother, and I stayed in my own dear bed for a week, then went for a week to a luxurious health clinic to start the process of weight-loss (successfully continued on my own). Once my blood pressure was back to normal and I was feeling well again – better than I had felt for years – I decided that I would not go on with the unbroken four/three plan, but would keep every third weekend to myself in London. This made sense, but it renewed guilt. In London I was able to shrug off anxiety and think about my own concerns (even enjoy them more than I used to because of having had to turn my back on them), but the night-time worries when I was staying with my mother were sharper than ever.
‘I am not afraid of death.’ My mother said this, and showed that she really was less afraid than many people by the calm way she discussed what would happen once she was gone. I believe the same is true of myself – but there are words which follow that statement so often that they have become a cliché: ‘It’s dying that I’m afraid of.’ When dying is actually in sight, those words become shockingly true. My mother was not afraid of being dead, but when an attack of angina made her unable to breathe she was very frightened indeed. I was not afraid of her being dead, but I was terrified of the process of her dying.
I had seen only one dead person – and what a ridiculous state of affairs that was: that a woman in her seventies should have seen only one cadaver! Surely there has never been a taboo more senseless than our modern one on death. My only dead person was André Deutsch’s ninety-two-year-old mother, who was found dead by her home help when André happened to be abroad. After the police had her body carried off to the coroner’s mortuary they tracked down André’s secretary and me and asked if one of us would identify the body. We decided to do it together.
On the way to the mortuary I recalled various reassuring descriptions of dead bodies: how they seemed empty and nothing to do with the person who had left them, and how beautiful faces become in the austere serenity of death. I wanted reassurance because I expected us to be in the same room as the body and to stand beside it while an attendant turned back a sheet covering its face, but that was not how it was done. We were taken into a narrow room with a large plate-glass window curtained with cheap sage-green damask. The curtain was drawn back and there was the body on the other side of the glass, lying in a box and covered up to the neck with a kind of bedspread of purple velour.
The words I spoke involuntarily were: ‘Oh poor little Maria!’ It did not look as though it had nothing to do with her, nor was it austerely serene. What was lying there was poor little Maria with her hair in a mess and her face grubby, looking as though she were in a state of great bewilderment and dejection because something too unkind for words had been done to her. It was a comfort to remember that she was dead, and therefore couldn’t possibly be feeling how she looked. But it was not a comfort to be shown so clearly that my favourite image of floating out to sea at night was nonsense. What Maria’s body demonstrated was that even a quick dying can be very nasty.
In other ways the coroner’s domain was surprisingly bracing. We approached it through a walled yard where white vans with their rear windows painted out were coming and going. One of them was backed up close to a small unloading bay. It might have been delivering groceries, but was in fact delivering a body. The men who drove, loaded and unloaded the vans, several of whom were drinking tea in a room off the passage through which we entered, were middle-aged to elderly and looked tough and slightly ribald. They glanced at us sideways as we passed the door of their room, and in their eyes was the faintest hint – an almost imperceptible gleam – of mockery. They knew. They knew that however nasty death may be while it is happening, it is too ordinary an event to make a fuss about. Most of them, no doubt, went about their work soberly, but that hint of a gleam suggested that some of them might enjoy doing some flippancy to a corpse – using its navel as an ashtray, perhaps – imagining as they did it the horror of a squeamish observer. They would probably respect the grief of the bereaved, but squeamishness they would despise. Having shed it, they had moved into a category apart.
My own reaction to this place where dead bodies were all in the day’s work had something prurient about it. If the men in the room off the entrance passage looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, so did I at them: I did not want to betray the extent of my curiosity, did not want to be caught at it. My awareness of the cadavers hidden in the white vans and in the accommodation specially designed for them on Maria’s side of the plate-glass window, was sharp. Had I been a dog my ears would have been pricked and my hackles up. I think this odd excitement was connected at some level with the violent recoil from dead animals which seized me in childhood when I unexpectedly came on a decaying corpse hidden in long grass, or caught in a trap, or on one of those macabre gamekeeper’s ‘larders’, the wires on which they strung up the corpses of ‘vermin’ they had trapped or shot. I often went a long way round to avoid passing one of those – in fact I think they are the reason why I have never much enjoyed walking through a wood. The two reactions seem like opposites, but could be the opposite sides of the same coin. Whatever the truth, I did call up that mortuary and those dead animals when trying to reason myself out of the night terrors in my mother’s house: ‘Calm down, this is not a matter of the mind saying “Alas, she will soon be dead and gone” – to that there is a whole set of other reactions of quite a different kind. This is simply a matter of flesh shuddering because flesh rots, and it is possible not only to acknowledge the ordinariness of that dissolution, but also to feel it.’ Not long afterwards I wrote a poem – or perhaps more accurately a short statement – as a result of that visit to the mortuary, which had contributed a good deal to my attitude towards death.
I have learnt to recognize the plain white vans with painted-out back windows and the black ones, equally discreet, standing at those backstreet doors which have a never-opened look (misleading).
The white vans carry dead junkies picked up in alleys, old women found frozen when the neighbours began to wonder and called the cops, the man who stayed late at his office to hang himself, the boy stabbed in a sudden brawl outside a disco.
The black vans, early every morning, deliver coffins to mortuaries.
Men who handle corpses despise people who don’t.
Why? How? What? Where? cry the hearts of the bereaved, and the men who handle corpses lower their eyelids over looks of secret but impatient ribaldry.
A few of them are necrophiliacs onto a good thing, but most are normal men who have learnt from handling death that it tells nothing because it has nothing to tell, there is nothing to it.
When I first recognized those vans I waited for my skin to crawl.
I am still surprised that they cheer me up.
‘There goes death’ I thi
nk when I see one. ‘There it goes about its daily work, and they think I don’t see it. They think they are the only ones with the nerve to know how ordinary it is.’
Recognition of a van: no more familiarity than that, and already the look I give my unrecognizing friend has in it, I suspect, a touch of secret but impatient ribaldry
When the time came for my mother to die, she was almost unbelievably lucky – and therefore I was, too. On the day before her ninety-sixth birthday she walked on her two sticks down to the end of her garden, to oversee the planting of a new eucalyptus tree by Sid Pooley. Halfway through the planting he thought she looked not quite herself. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, and she said she was feeling a bit unsteady and had better go back to the house. He helped her back, settled her in her chair, and called Eileen Barry, her home help, who came at once and recognized heart failure when she saw it. Eileen got her to the local cottage hospital and called me – by then it was 8.30 in the evening – saying it would probably be a good thing if I got there first thing next morning: no, she didn’t think it was necessary for me to come straight away. I reached the hospital very early and found that my brother and my mother’s favourite niece, both of whom lived fairly near, were already there. Soon after her death I again wrote a kind of poem describing it, which seems to me to belong here.
THE GIFT
It took my mother two days to die, the first of them cruel as her body, ninety-five years old, crashed beyond repair.
I found her, ‘an emergency’ behind screens in a crowded ward, jaw dropped, tongue lolling, eyes unseeing.
Unconscious? No. When about to vomit she gasped ‘Basin!’
She was aware of what she was having to endure.
I put my hand on hers. Her head shifted, eyelids heaved up.
Her eyes focused.
Out of deep in that dying woman came a great flash of recognition and of utmost joy.
My brother was there. Later he said,
‘That was a very beautiful smile she gave you.’
It was the love I had never doubted flaming into visibility.
I saw what I had always believed in.
Next morning: quietness, sleep, intervals of murmured talk.
‘She is better!’
‘She is feeling much better,’ said the kind nurse, ‘but she is still very very ill.’
I understood the warning and that what seemed miracle was morphine.
What did I feel? Like Siamese twins, one wanting her never to die, the other dismayed at the thought of renewed life, of having to go on dreading pain for her, go on foreseeing her increasing helplessness and my guilt at not giving up my life to be with her all the time.
What I felt was bad at being in two minds; but only for a while, because perched in my skull above this conflict there was a referee saying, ‘Neither of you can win so shut up and get on with doing whatever comes next.’
Her collapsed body eased, she was disconcerting to be with because so alive.
On the edge of ceasing to exist there she was, herself, tired but perfectly ordinary, telling me what to do with her dog and where to find her will.
When my cousin protested ‘But you’ll soon be back home’ she was cross.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said, ‘I could go any minute.’
Then, after a long sleep, she turned her head a little and said,
‘Did I tell you that last week Jack drove me to the nursery garden, to buy that eucalyptus?’
I too loved that garden and the drive through country we had both known all our lives. ‘You told me he was going to,’
I said. ‘Was it fun?’
She answered dreamily – her last words before sleeping again out of which sleep she didn’t wake:
‘It was absolutely divine.’
6
NOW THAT I am only seven years younger that my mother when she died, to what extent am I either supported by what I have learnt about dying, or made apprehensive about it? I have received a good deal of reassurance of a slightly wobbly kind, and also a cause for worry.
The reassurance concerns the actual process of dying. There cannot be many families in which so many people have been lucky in this respect as mine has been. Even the least lucky were spared the worst horrors of it (which can, of course and alas, be very bad). My maternal grandmother had to endure several months of distressing bedridden feebleness owing to prolonged heart failure, but she had a daughter to help her through it at home and that daughter was able to report that the attack which finally killed her was a good deal less disagreeable than some of those that she survived. My father had to endure one week that was certainly horrible, though no one could be sure how aware he was of its horribleness: he had a cerebral haemorrhage which deprived him of speech and left him obviously extremely confused. Once settled in hospital he could respond normally when offered a basin to wash in or a meal to eat, and when you came into his room he looked pleased to see you and attempted to speak; but he could find no words and an expression of distress followed by hopelessness appeared on his face. I got the impression that he knew something was dreadfully wrong, was miserable about it, then thought, ‘Oh well, it seems I can’t do anything about it so I’d better stop trying.’ The doctor saw no possibility of repair to the damage, but found him physically strong, which was alarming: my mother and I couldn’t bring ourselves to speak about the possibility of his living for a long time in this condition. But a second haemorrhage struck, killing him instantly, and whatever he was aware of suffering during the intervening days, there were only six of them.
About the deaths of my paternal grandparents, my father’s siblings and my mother’s father I know little, but nothing was ever said to suggest that they were particularly harrowing, while on my mother’s side one sister had a stroke when she was eighty-three from which she died almost at once without recovering consciousness; another aged ninety-four was distressed for less than an hour, then died in a daughter’s arms just after saying that she was now feeling much better; another went quietly after becoming increasingly weak and dozy for about three weeks; and their brother, a lucky man whose luck held to the very end, was on his horse at a meet of the Norwich Stag-hounds at the age of eighty-two, talking with friends, when flop! and he fell off his horse stone dead in the middle of a laugh. The eldest of my cousins had similar luck, falling down dead as she was making a cup of tea.
My brother, who died last year, was less lucky, but not because he was painfully ill for a long time, or afraid of death. His trouble was that he resented it because he loved his life so passionately. He was eighty-five. He knew death was coming because, having stubbornly refused to pay attention to various ailments of old age which were obvious to his anxious wife and other people, he was finally forced to recognize that his appetite had gone and that he was feeling dreadfully cold. But he still longed to be out messing about with his boats – he lived on the Norfolk coast in a place he adored and to have to leave that place and its occupations seemed to him the worst possible fate.
One afternoon not long before he died he took me out for a sail. His house is just inland from Blakeney Point, a long spit of sand dunes that runs parallel to the shore, partially enclosing a stretch of water which at low tide becomes a river snaking its way out to sea through exposed mud, but at high tide is a wide, sheltered expanse busy with small sailing boats and easily navigated by larger ones provided they are careful to observe the markers showing where the deeper channels run. On that day there was hardly a breath of wind. Sky and water were mother-of-pearl and the breasts of doves, a blend of soft blues and pinks so delicate that I had never seen its like. A small group of sailing dinghies was lying becalmed, hoping to be able to start a race (we, who were motoring, gave one of them which had no outboard engine a tow to join the group). None of the people lounging at the tiller of these little boats looked impatient or bored, because no one could mind being becalmed in the middle of so much loveliness. When we were some way past them, near the end of
the Point, almost in the open sea, a tiny popple began under our hull and and a cat’s paw of breeze – a kitten’s paw, more like it – just ruffled the water’s surface enough for sunlight to start twinkling off the edges of each ripple; I was once told that fishermen at Aldeburgh used to call that effect of light ‘tinkling cymbals’. I shall always think of it as that, and no tinkling cymbals I ever saw were better than those we moved through when Andrew was at last able to hoist canvas and very, very gently we started to sail. We didn’t talk much. Although we didn’t often see each other and differed widely in many of our opinions, he and I had never lost touch with the closeness we had enjoyed in early childhood and there was much that we could understand about each other without words. That afternoon was brimming with a loveliness peculiar to that particular place; he knew that I was appreciating it, and I knew without any doubt how profoundly he was penetrated by it. He was a man who, with the help of the right wife, had finally found himself the place and the life that fulfilled him, and lived it with a completeness and intensity more often seen in an artist than in someone who should have been a farmer, had to become an army officer, and ended by teaching people sailing, and growing oysters, on the edge of the North Sea. What filled him as death approached was not fear of whatever physical battering he would have to endure (in fact there was not, at the end, any of that), but grief at having to say goodbye to what he could never have enough of.
