A Year of Doing Good

by Judith O'Reilly

  My best gay boyfriend works with the most vulnerable children in society: the victims, the unfortunate, the troubled. ‘What these children need is help to understand their experiences and their potential – not forgetting that it’s also important to support the parents or carers because they’re the ones at the sharp end, day in, day out.’ I regularly witness this friend’s charm and patience with my own children, and think of him walking patiently alongside those others, through the dark, tangled places where they have lost themselves or been abandoned, nudging them towards the grassy path, towards the sunlight and away from prowling, yellow-eyed and mangy wolves. He dismisses me as I get misty-eyed about what he does for others in his day job. ‘I don’t feel any more compassion, don’t feel any more benign than anybody else. I get a lot of satisfaction from what I do, a lot of fulfilment when I see myself being useful – I enjoy that more than I enjoy other things.’

  My daughter leans against me, pulling at my sleeve, her face looking up at me, her voice low. She wants me to stop talking about anything other than her. She wants me to tell him about her dancing lessons. Her godfather stops talking to me, puts his elbow on the table and leans his handsome head on his hand. He is all attention as she begins.

  Good deed no. 176: bought a friend coffee.

  Sunday, 26 June

  Good deed no. 177: sent a whodunnit to Merry.

  Monday, 27 June

  Good deed no. 178: picked up change which had fallen from a man’s pockets as he sat in a deckchair by the sandpit at the Museum of Childhood (and gave it to him).

  Tuesday, 28 June

  I love the virtual world. Someone I know from Twitter alerted me to the fact that Karen (who is someone she knows from Twitter) was coming up to Northumberland and would be staying up here on her own. As my good deed, I have invited this stranger to my house for coffee tomorrow morning. I am hoping Karen isn’t a nutter, and doubtless Karen is hoping the same.

  Good deed no. 179.

  Wednesday, 29 June

  One year, I will actually arrange something for my birthday. I mean to every year, and each time it manages to creep up on tippytoes and yell ‘Surprise!’ very loudly in my ear. On the upside, I am still only twenty-four. (It is entirely legitimate to lie about your age – mine is now forty-seven – if you don’t feel the same on the inside as you do on the outside.) My ever-helpful daughter pointed out I was ‘twenty-four’ last year too, but birthdays are like that – magic.

  I got a card from the village priest who had advised me to pray to the Virgin Mary. In any event, his thoughtful card acknowledged the ‘sadness of recent days’ and wished me a joyful birthday with love and prayers, which was nice of him. At first, I panicked that I hadn’t set up coffee or lunch with girlfriends. Usually I go shopping on my birthday, but courtesy of the state of my finances that’s not really a goer. Despite my lack of planning, though, the birthday turned out great. My little girl gave me a kids’ DVD she wants to watch with me, my younger son a pencil sharpener ‘Because you always get so cross when you can’t find one, Mummy’, and my eldest a bag of chocolate-covered coffee beans. Oh, and my husband gave me a battery for my watch. But I love those gifts. I wanted all of those things, to sit with my daughter in front of the TV with a sharpened pencil in my hand, eating chocolate espresso beans with a tick-tock watch. Hurrah. And best of all, Karen (from Twitter) arrived and turned out to be completely sane and entirely lovely.

  THE CARER

  Karen works for a wholesale bulb outfit based in Urmston, Manchester, and was up to talk to the Duchess of Northumberland about a daffodil grown especially for Alnwick Garden called Alnwick Magic. We got to talking, as women do, and it turns out that she is one of the most caring people I have ever come across – and God knows she has had to do more than her share. She first started caring for someone when her 36-year-old mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and had to have a mastectomy. Karen was ten at the time. A year or so later her mother had to have a hysterectomy, and throughout that time Karen helped around the house, went shopping and did what a child could to make things easier. Ten years after her mother was first diagnosed, when Karen was twenty, the cancer came back worse than ever and her mother was given only a year to live. With her father poorly and unable to cope, Karen started doing the night shift, drinking tea with her mother, trying to ease her pain and breathing, while the rest of the world slept. ‘I regret the things I could have done better, but you do what you can do at the time and hope it is the right thing,’ she said, and I struggled to grasp how you believe you could have given more, when you have given all you have.

  She might have cared for her mother and thought herself safe, that she had done her bit, but within six months of her mum’s death her dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which went on to ravage him. ‘He didn’t like to speak because he felt we couldn’t understand him, his walking got worse. They changed his tablets and he started having hallucinations, didn’t recognize us, became incontinent. I had to hand-feed him. I became a mother to my own mother and father. That was a hard time,’ she told me, shaking her head at the memory. Things weren’t all bad, though: when she was twenty-six – five years after her mother had died – Karen fell in love and got married to Rod. ‘But it broke my dad’s heart. He told me I was doing the right thing, but bless him, in the Rolls-Royce he held me and cried all the way to the church the day of my wedding. I felt as if I had betrayed him.’ Karen moved out, and her brother and his family moved in to care for her dad. He died two years after her marriage.

  Rod was everything Karen needed; a handsome engineer, she adored him and loved his parents, both of whom suffered from angina. She checked on them every week. In 1991, when she was thirty-three and Rod was thirty-seven, he was knocked off his motorbike, shattering his knee. The car driver, taking part in a treasure hunt, had turned his head to talk to a backseat passenger – having missed his turning – only for his car to veer across the road, straight into Rod. Over the next ten years Rod was in and out of hospitals for more than a dozen gruelling operations and bone grafts, in constant pain and prone to infections. ‘I’d leave him a Thermos of hot water in the living room because he would be too bad to carry anything. I’d come home at lunchtime to check on him. Sometimes he could walk, sometimes the pain was so bad he would cry in his sleep. I’d wake him and we would talk for hours to try and take his mind off the pain. There was one night he was screaming because it was so bad and the knee was huge because there was an infection. All this time, he begged them to take the leg off, but they wouldn’t.’

  Things got worse when Rod’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and Karen spent her fortieth birthday in Wythenshawe hospital after her mother-in-law fell down the stairs from a brain haemorrhage. Every night after work Karen went round to her in-laws; every Saturday she took her mother-in-law shopping. By the end she was feeding her with a syringe, and when her mother-in-law died after pneumonia set in, she died in Karen’s arms. ‘I never thought in my life I would be able to do that,’ Karen told me. ‘I felt guilty that with my own mum, I wasn’t at her side when she died, but that was the first time somebody so close to me had died. This time, I found the strength from somewhere.’

  She didn’t get that chance with Rod. In 2001, at the age of forty-seven, Rod died from a blood clot from his knee. ‘He phoned me at work on a Friday and said, “I think I’m dying” and then put the phone down. I said, “I’ve got to go home,” and when I let myself in, Rod was dead on the living-room floor.’ But Karen’s caring still wasn’t over. There was her father-in-law to visit every other night and every weekend, easing him through emphysema until his death from an aneurysm a few years later.

  Toileting, bathing, feeding, medicating, barrier nursing: spread across decades, these are a powerful testament against sentimentality and mawkishness, against those who say, ‘I’m sad to hear that’ and turn on their heel and walk away. I am looking at this short, pretty 53-year-old bundle with her round, smiling face a
nd wavy, silvering hair, and I am wondering how she has the energy to get up in the morning. ‘I never felt caring for the people I loved was a duty, it was a pleasure,’ she explained as she sipped hot water. She doesn’t drink tea any more – she drank too much tea as she sat through those long nights with her mother, the lights turned down low, the bedroom more like a hospital ward. ‘Because you love them, you want to make it easier for them, you want to protect them and you want to help them keep their dignity.’ She went on: ‘You do grow, you can cope with things differently, and when someone is ill there is a different sort of love, a deeper love – you cherish them more deeply.’

  Is there consolation in knowing that you cared for them? That you eased the suffering of those you love best in the world? That your constancy and devotion were ranged against their indignity and pain, your humanity taking on their mortality in a battle you can never win but one which you have to fight. Because it is hard to lose those you love the best. ‘There are times that I do feel like I’m the only person left in the world – times when the loneliness can totally crush you,’ she told me. The husband she lost. The children she never got to have (she herself had to have a hysterectomy only weeks after her husband died). ‘On a girls’ weekend, they’re always phoning their husband to say they’ve arrived safe or “How are you?” – you miss that, because you’ve got nobody to phone and say, “I’ve arrived.” ’

  Later, when I check her Twitter profile, it describes her as loving friends and family and explains that she is ‘trying to make life easier for others’. I hope, I sincerely hope, trust and pray that she too is cherished as she deserves to be, that she is honoured as an aunty and as a most decent human being, that the love she spent so freely comes back to her a million times over from her sister and her brother, her sister-in-law and her nieces and her friends, that when the time comes she is carried and her feet not allowed to touch the floor, that a mirror is held up to her and she sees beauty there.

  Good deed no. 180: emailed three people to try and get work experience for the media student.

  Thursday, 30 June

  Some of these good deeds are a complete pain in the arse. I have a grant application form to fill in for the local Citizens Advice; I have a letter to write to the trading standards people on behalf of Karl’s mam about her car, which keeps breaking down; and today I was supposed to take Cryssie for her writing lesson. Which I did. Her dad arrived with Cryssie at 9.45 a.m. and said he would be back at 11 a.m. Since it was a public sector strike day, I already had my youngest son off school pleading for a game of tennis. I couldn’t manage the game of tennis with Cryssie here, so I said, ‘Later’ and, grumbling furiously, he went to slump in front of the telly. The problem was that no one picked her up at 11, or at 11.15, or at 11.30, or at 12. Finally, about 12.10, I rang her mother and Andrea said hello in her usual friendly sort of way, and I said hello all friendly back, and there was a silence, and I said, ‘I still have your daughter in my kitchen.’ And there was a gasp of horror, and Andrea said, ‘I’m so sorry, I completely forgot she was there.’ And I said, ‘It’s fine – don’t worry about it.’ I absolutely didn’t mean it.

  I got over myself when I opened up my email inbox. Yesterday, I emailed round contacts pleading for work experience for the media student, and somebody has agreed. Truly excited. This kid is the first in her family to go to university (way too distant a relationship to count me as true kin on this). This kid is clever and beautiful with long, shiny dark hair and a wicked sense of humour. She also has a dad she hasn’t seen since she was two, a brother who died of cancer at seventeen and a mum with poor health – and she has kept going, kept wanting, kept pitching. I am proud of her. Up the revolution.

  Good deed no. 181.

  Friday, 1 July

  Things are reaching the point of no return. This evening, I picked up Al from the railway station and the first two carrier bags of change people have brought into the Gazette. We then called in at a friend of a friend’s house for jam jars she didn’t want any more. The lady makes jam but needed her spare room clearing for family who are visiting over the weekend. I was expecting a fair few jars – we counted 481. All shapes and sizes – not just jam jars, but empty jars of Nescafé, gravy and baby food too. She virtually cheered as we drove away. The car isn’t running properly at the moment and is driving really slowly, so there were five of us in the car with a boot full of spare change weighing it down. The boot was also full of the jars, which were also rammed into any and every space between children and onto laps and under legs. At one point my eldest son said, ‘Seriously, I can’t feel my legs any more,’ but we just kept driving and the strange jingling, tinkling noise almost cloaked my screams entirely. There are 481 jars in my kitchen.

  Good deed no. 182.

  Saturday, 2 July

  I am more than halfway through my year, which is a strange thought. How am I doing? On the downside, it is hugely more effortful than I expected. On the upside … actually, I’m not sure there is an upside.

  Good deed no. 183: counted one of the bags of money. (£41.70 counted in 1 hour and 40 minutes. Counting is the worst job ever – my brain stopped using numbers and used shapes instead.)

  Sunday, 3 July

  Al counted the second bag of money (which took him less than half the time it took me; then again, he can add up). We have a grand total of £88.80. That’s £88.80. Our Jam Jar Army target is £10,000. That’s £10,000, not £1,000 or £100 – £10,000. Oh my God. There is no silver in the money coming in. Everything is twopence pieces. If this doesn’t work, I’m going to be known as the Tuppenny Tit. On a more positive note, staff at the local Barclays bank in Seahouses have agreed we can bring the money into them – which is incredibly community-minded of them – despite the fact the hospice doesn’t bank with them. It strikes me there are ‘bankers’ and then there are sensible people of goodwill who work in banks.

  Good deed no. 184.

  Monday, 4 July

  So six months of good deeds and I am the perfect citizen – you just wouldn’t want to have me to dinner, I am so effing worthy. Today I did so many good deeds, my sandalled feet are in danger of lifting off the ground and my entire physical body ascending straight into the heavens.

  I put the last touches to Karl’s mam’s letter of complaint over the car for the trading standards people.

  I asked a café owner to take nine jam jars for her tables (£88.80 keeps going round my head, and not in a good way).

  I stuck labels on a couple of dozen more and popped into the community centre to talk to them about publicizing the Jam Jar Army, which they agreed to do.

  While at the community centre, I offered to put the organizer in touch with someone who could help them on a heritage project they have going on (thereby potentially earning my history friend some dosh).

  I liaised with Berwick Citizens Advice Bureau re the grant application.

  I advised Lily on publicizing the IT company she is working for.

  I discussed work experience with the media student.

  I am ready to kill.

  Good deed no. 185.

  Tuesday, 5 July

  Good deed no. 186: bought a photo from the Gazette of my son and a friend’s son together at the royal visit and framed it for his mother.

  Wednesday, 6 July

  It can be a tricky business being a good-deed doer. I duly advised someone who had asked me for help, which required in total asking favours from one mate, one acquaintance and one total stranger, but when I actually checked, the girl who had originally approached me hadn’t done anything much at all with the help I had given her. This means:

  a. I wasted my time

  which means:

  b. I feel like only helping those who help themselves

  which is to say:

  c. The project is turning me into a Tory (runs screaming into the distance).

  No, I won’t let it. I will be compassionate and empathetic and charitable. I will not judge. Repeat a
fter me: I will not judge.

  Then again, it is hard not to.

  If the recipient does little or nothing, the good deed having been done, that is at least relatively straightforward. Account closed. Once you help someone and they act according to your advice, however, it turns out there is an absolute obligation on you to help them again. I have a CV to revise for the media student (who needs it for the work experience), and a feature to edit for one of the students on my blog course (having helped her get a magazine commission). Not to mention the grant application which is still outstanding for the local Citizens Advice Bureau – oh, and the fact my friend rang for a briefing about that heritage job and, laughing, said, ‘You should be my agent’ and, laughing, I said, ‘Actually there’s a price – I want your school to do jam jars,’ which is when she stopped laughing.

  When this year is over, I am not helping anyone ever again, ever.

  Good deed no. 187: arranged jam jars in two cafés by the till and took a dozen to the local village shop for distribution to regulars.

  Thursday, 7 July

  Good deed no. 188: took thirty-five jars round to Lily for distribution in holiday cottages and local shops.

  Friday, 8 July