Precious Lives

by Margaret Forster

  To relieve both our boredoms.

  To help me feel more comfortable.

  To stop me screaming at the agony of all this.

  To stop me running away.

  To stop me falling asleep.

  To make me feel useful.

  To avoid asking questions you consider daft.

  To do some small thing for you because I can’t do any of the things you would like me to do such as wave a magic wand and either have you back digging your garden or else end all this.

  But what I said was, ‘It’s got to be done’ – an answer absolutely in line with his own way of thinking. Piously, I continued, as he would have done: ‘It’s got to be done. The clothes have to be marked properly, or they’ll get lost in the wash.’ He sighed. ‘Well, I won’t be needing them much longer. I can’t go on for ever.’ And what did I say, given this opening? I said, as I always had done when he made this comment, ‘I don’t see why not.’ Oh, how droll, how amusing. And he was amused. His mood changed. He snorted with derision, but seemed pleased. ‘Good lass,’ he said, as I went on with the wretched sewing.

  But I knew I wasn’t a good lass. I was a cowardly one. Always, I’d resented the fact that my father would never talk about feelings, his or anyone else’s, and there he had been, getting as near as he was able to confessing that he knew he was near to dying, and I had chosen to be facetious. Why did I do it? Why does anyone do it? When an old or very sick person says they feel they haven’t got long to live would it be better to respond with, ‘Yes, I think you’re right, you’re dying at last.’ Or even more brutally with ‘That’s good.’ But evading the issue seems the only kind way of dealing with forlorn statements like my father’s. I don’t think I’d have been rated a ‘good lass’ if I’d agreed he wasn’t likely to need his clothes much longer. Silence might have been best of all – silence and a pat on his hand (very bold) and a little whimper of sympathy. But would silence have been kind or cruel in a different way from verbal agreement? As for using his remark to launch into a discussion about whether he actually wanted to go on living, that would have been the most interesting way of tackling it. Could I have said, ‘You’re right, you can’t go on for ever, but then perhaps you don’t want to?’ But I know what his reply would have been: ‘No choice. Can’t be helped.’ Exactly; so it seemed better not to have said it.

  We left him fairly cheerful that particular afternoon, and the next time we came he wanted to go out. But from then on we were never certain how we would find him. His favourite carer was concerned. ‘He isn’t himself,’ she said. She thought he might be sickening for something. I could hardly restrain myself from suggesting ‘Death?’ On Friday 23 July, we visited but he wouldn’t go out. We passed the time well enough with me showing him photographs of Carr’s biscuit works at the turn of the century which I’d been collecting for a book I was researching. He liked that. It stimulated him to talk about Carr’s and my aunt who worked there. On Sunday, when I made my daily phone call, there was no answer. The telephone was right beside him, on the little cabinet next to the chair, from which he could not now move unaided. I rang the nurses’ desk. Arthur, they told me, had elected to stay in bed all day. He didn’t want to be bothered with the telephone. They’d rung to warn me and to assure me he wasn’t ill, just tired, but there had been no answer (we’d been fell-walking all day and came back only at six in time to phone). They said not to worry, they’d report his condition in the morning, which they did. Arthur, they said, was still in bed. He’d had a stomach upset in the night and they were going to send for the doctor to be on the safe side. We went in straightaway, hoping to catch the doctor, but he’d already been. It seemed that as well as a stomach upset my father had a chest infection.

  He was in bed, with the curtains half pulled, lying propped up on several pillows, his eyes closed. We crept in, noting how odd his face looked without his heavy spectacles, how exposed. He was very pale, quite devoid of colour, his complexion (always good) wax-like. But he wasn’t asleep. He opened his eyes and turned to look at us and said, ‘What are you here for? It isn’t on the calendar. It’s not Tuesday yet, is it? Or am I going barmy?’ I said no, he wasn’t barmy, it was only Monday and he was right, we’d said we’d come on Tuesday, but when he hadn’t answered the phone we were concerned and wanted to see how he was. ‘I’m a bit off,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what the devil is the matter with me.’ I said he seemed to have had a stomach upset and now he had a chest infection. The doctor was going to call again tomorrow and keep an eye on him. ‘Put it on the calendar,’ he said. ‘Keep me straight.’

  I took the calendar off the wall and studied it. The illustration for the month of July showed a black stallion galloping across a field of buttercups. The space for each day had been scrupulously filled in but my father’s handwriting for the whole of the previous week had become progressively less certain and there were lots of crossings-out. On Friday, he’d noted our visit, without any comment; on Saturday it had been ‘a hot day, a long day, no visitors’; Sunday was blank. Now we were at Monday. I took his Biro and carefully wrote, for Sunday: ‘A. in bed, so-so’ and for Monday: ‘Dr called. M & H here.’ I showed this to him for his approval. He grunted. Then he said, ‘This is no fun.’ It was an odd phrase to use. Had his life ever been fun? I doubted it. But he hadn’t been searching for appropriate words. Those he used were just what occurred to him and it was useless to ponder over whether they were accurate. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can see this is no fun.’ I was sure he was not complaining but trying to express despair. ‘This is no fun’ also could mean ‘this is no life’. He was acknowledging that, at almost ninety-six, he had come to the end of his life but nobody would admit it. Everyone conspired to keep him going, in this state of ‘no fun’.

  This was the point I had hoped he would never consciously have to reach. He had a chest infection, known once upon a time as the ‘old man’s friend’. In the days before antibiotics it would have killed him, but now it would not be allowed to.

  The doctor came again the next day and this time I was there to see him. He said he’d like a word with me. A nurse showed us into the little staff-room so that we could have some privacy. The doctor explained that my father’s chest infection was a form of pneumonia. One of his lungs was already quite heavily infected and the other slightly. He was wondering how the family felt about this. His language was so careful I in turn wondered if he was using euphemisms, but I don’t think he was. It then emerged that, apart from the chest infection, there was something else wrong which would need admission to hospital for proper diagnosis. (The home didn’t have the necessary sophisticated equipment.) At least this was easy to respond to. I said my father emphatically did not want ever to go back into hospital and that he’d said so, loudly and often: he was not going into ‘that place’ again. So that was clear. The doctor nodded. There was still the delicate matter of antibiotics. A course of these might clear the infection up. There was a pause, perhaps unintentional, and he asked once more how the family felt about this. I said we were all in agreement: we wanted our father made comfortable and relieved of pain if possible, but that was all. ‘He says his life is no fun now,’ I said. The doctor smiled sympathetically. He said my father had amazing powers of recuperation, but he was nearly ninety-six and very frail and anything might happen, quite suddenly, antibiotics or not. I said I understood.

  What I thought I understood correctly was that my father was literally at death’s door at last, arriving by a different route from Marion but finally there. I wanted him now to go through that door as smoothly as possible, with no banging on it, no standing in the rain waiting, with none of the hanging about he loathed. He looked so peaceful already, lying still like a good boy, pyjamas buttoned up to his neck, white hair neatly brushed, muscles of his face relaxed. He was ready. He could just drift into death. No more hauling him about, no more bruising of his poor limbs with every assistance given, no more forlorn hours trapped in his chair. I wished I had sa
id, ‘Please, no antibiotics.’ But I didn’t want him to be in pain and a chest infection is painful. It was a Catch 22 situation: deny him antibiotics and he might suffer unnecessarily. If he didn’t respond, that was different. And I doubt if the doctor would have permitted me to insist on antibiotics being completely withheld.

  I reported all this to Pauline and Gordon. Pauline was about to go on holiday to Italy. When our mother died, she had been on holiday in France. She had ever since regretted not being with her when this happened, so she decided at once to come to say goodbye – if that was what it was to be – to our father. I stressed that the doctor had said nothing was certain, that a recovery was perfectly possible. But she wanted to come, just in case. By the time she arrived, our father was sitting up, dressed, in his chair. The antibiotics had zipped through his system with spectacular results – probably because he’d never had any in all his ninety-five years. It was remarkable to witness his recovery, almost a resurrection, or so it seemed to me. The air of celebration around him was remarkable too, all the staff delighted he had rallied and actually proud of him. They attributed his recovery not so much to the miracle of modern medicine but to his own determination, and treated him as a hero. My sister went off on her holiday amused that yet again our valiant father had insisted on holding on to his precious life and in spite of saying it was no longer fun had certainly not turned his face to the wall and given up.

  He was full of awe at his own survival. ‘That was a close shave,’ he said, and, ‘Thought I was a goner there.’ The doctor complimented him on his resilience and seemed so pleased himself. ‘Is life fun again, Mr Forster?’ he teased. My father took this the wrong way. He looked at the doctor as though he were mad and bellowed, ‘Fun? Fun? You call this fun?’ I had to defend the doctor later. ‘He was only picking up what you’d said yourself, Dad. He was only being kind.’ This drew the retort, ‘Kindness is no damned good. I want him to make me better, that’s what.’ I pointed out that he had indeed been made better. The doctor had successfully treated his chest infection and brought him back from his ‘close shave’. This only irritated him. ‘That isn’t the point,’ he grumbled. ‘I’m still in a chair, I still can’t walk or do any damned thing for myself. I’m helpless. That’s the point.’

  And by then we were into another month. August on the calendar was another black stallion – the one I’d liked when flicking through – stationary this time, standing on a rocky outcrop above a distant valley. My father started making entries on it on 10 August – just two shaky letters: ‘OK.’ But it was obvious to him and to me that he was not really OK. He wasn’t dying any more but he had lost more strength. He was more frail than ever, and horrified to discover he now couldn’t stand up at all, not even when he pressed hard on the arms of his chair. This panicked him. ‘Look!’ he cried, ‘look! Can’t get up! I’ve had it!’ It appalled him to have the last vestige of independent movement taken from him. ‘What am I going to do?’ he asked. I found myself saying, ‘You’ll manage.’ I meant it to be a soothing phrase, the one he always used himself in difficult circumstances, but it sounded more like an order, you will manage, though I hadn’t stressed any word. He would manage because he had no alternative. The alternative was illegal. This was the final test of his own pragmatism. He would adapt because he had to, and what he had to manage was being trapped.

  Because he was trapped he began using his telephone in the kind of random fashion he had never done. ‘If you put a phone right next to his bed and chair he’ll be bothering you all the time,’ the home authorities had warned me, but I’d known this would not be true. He was disciplined in his use of his telephone, as he was in everything. But now this control broke down. Unable to move without assistance, trapped in his chair and raging with boredom, he began picking up the receiver and pressing any of the call buttons without paying attention to which one it was. They were all labelled with our names, the names of his family, but he had no idea whom he’d called until they answered. He started to do this random calling at all hours of the day and sometimes the night, and we had to be alert and act as though it was perfectly normal to be called at four or five in the morning. We had to do all the talking too – gone were the days when he told us things. Answering his call, I’d say, ‘Hello, Dad?’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, it’s you. What do you want?’ and I’d think of something to say to satisfy him. He was just playing with the telephone because he felt so isolated and had nothing else to do. But then, by the end of August, there was a new urgency to the calls. He wanted to know where he was, where his kitchen was, and most of all where the hell Lily (our dead mother) had got to and when she would be back. This confusion was minimal – he quickly accepted the truth when reminded of it – but it was real and it upset him. He sighed, and said, ‘I’m going daft. That it has to come to this, trapped and going daft.’

  Going to see him now became even more of an ordeal. More and more often I arrived to find him not bolt upright and alert but slumped forward in his chair, his head on his knees, as though he had collapsed onto them and couldn’t raise himself up. It was a terrible sight, seeing this abject figure as I entered the room, and then when I spoke and he struggled to sit up, it was even more terrible to see his spectacles dangling from one ear and his look of absolute weariness. He had no energy to talk and barely enough to listen. He didn’t seem to care about anything – the birds no longer caught his attention, he wasn’t able to tolerate television, and he stopped chatting up the staff. All he wanted to do was sleep. He asked to be put to bed earlier and earlier and was only comfortable when there. They weighed him and found he was only six stone but this was no surprise. He was visibly a skeleton, his face sunken, his hands ridges of bone. But he tried so hard still to respond to my presence, struggling to remember what I was working on and never, ever, moaning about his fate.

  Early in September, he picked up a little and said, one beautiful day, when the sun was streaming into his room and he could see the sky was a cloudless blue, that he’d like to go out for a drive – ‘A breath of sea air might do me good.’ It took an army of us to get him ready and into the car. He needed a jacket on top of his cardigan and I couldn’t even manage that without help – it was extraordinary how difficult it proved trying to get his arms into the sleeves as he sat in his chair. I thought they might snap as I tried to manoeuvre them. I couldn’t do it. I had to go for a nurse and she in turn had to go for another and at last he was clothed in tweed with his cap firmly secured on his head. Two nurses and I picked him up and put him into a wheelchair and then we were off on stage one of this laborious journey. He became quite cheerful as we trundled along and when he saw one young carer coming towards us he was ready with some of the old banter – ‘Oh, it’s you, is it? What have you been doing with yourself? You’ve a barnacle on your chin again.’ The girl laughed, taking his rudeness as they all seemed to, as a mysterious sign of affection. ‘You are awful, Arthur,’ she said: ‘it’s only a small spot,’ and then, to me, ‘What was he like when you were young?’ and she rolled her eyes in mock horror.

  What was he like when I was young? As we went through the next stage of getting my father into the car I thought about how I could have answered her. He was a nightmare, I could have told her. My appearance, while I was growing up, was endlessly commented on and always critically. I was getting fat (though ‘fat’ was a euphemism for ‘developing’) and it didn’t suit me; my hair looked as if a mouse had chewed it and it made me look like a lad; my spots were all barnacles (though, in fact, I hardly ever had even a small spot) and should be covered up if I didn’t want to scare people; and, worst of all, I didn’t look like my mother. Everything I wore was given the same treatment. Why didn’t I wear nice frocks/high heels/nylon stockings/a decent coat? Why did I wear trousers/boots/polo-neck sweaters/duffel coat – and all in black or grey instead of pink and blue? I learned to rise above all this. I learned how wonderfully effective it was merely to smile condescendingly and say nothing. But the carers a
nd nurses didn’t need to learn how to do any such thing when my father was offensive. They didn’t care what he said. He was very, very old and allowed to say anything. Personal remarks made to them were taken as a sign that there was a spark in him still and they liked that. He was harmless, and at least he noticed them and their barnacles, their hair and earrings. The closer he got to dying, the more outrageous he could be and they would go on admiring his spirit. It suddenly struck me that this might be the only advantage of old age I had ever identified, and I said so as finally we drove off in the car. ‘One thing, Dad, now you’re a Grand Old Man you can say what you like to anyone.’ He snorted and said, ‘I always have. Nowt special about being old.’

  Sitting in the back seat, I realised my father had shrunk in the last few weeks. His head wasn’t anywhere near the head-rest. He had withered away to such an extent that it looked like a child’s body curled up there. He looked like a rag doll, merely a bundle of clothes, limp and loose. I realised he could hardly see out of the windows – he had sunk so low in his seat – and I longed to pull him upright. Then when we had meandered to our favourite stopping place, Glasson Point just before Port Carlisle, there was another sign of his weakness. He simply couldn’t hold his binoculars up to his eyes. They were old-fashioned big heavy things (he’d refused to let me replace them with a small, lighter but just as powerful pair) and his arms were no longer strong enough to lift them. ‘Damn,’ he said, then, ‘Here, you look. Tell me what you can see.’ I took them and focused them and reported I could see seagulls and some driftwood floating in and the tide beginning to surge over the grey-brown sand bars and some cows a long way off, bunched on the marsh grass right on the edge of the sea. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘You look, I’ll hold them,’ and I put the binoculars in front of his eyes. ‘It’s no good,’ he said, and I took them away, thinking he meant the focus was wrong for his eyes and he couldn’t see. ‘It’s no good,’ he repeated, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. It’s got me beat.’