‘It’? Did he mean the riddle of life? Or of death? The meaning of the universe? The point of existence? Was this ‘it’ that had got him ‘beat’ that deep, dark force he had always believed ordered things? Should I say ‘it’ had got me ‘beat’ too? But then ‘it’ meant something different if clearer to me. What defeated me was why we, meaning the society in which we live and by whose rules and laws we are governed, allow no escape for people like my father whose life had gone on so long that its quality was eroded to the point where it was no longer precious, either to him or to those who cared about him. It was wearying and wearing, this agonising, long-drawn-out descent into death. Why did my father, or anyone else, have to go through this hideously slow process of disintegration? What purpose did it serve, when he was in his ninety-sixth year? He didn’t believe in God, so it would be a nonsense to say to him that this torture was God’s will. He didn’t believe in an afterlife either. He was tired, he was trapped, he was beat. And yet, because his heart and lungs were still functioning his body was not, in fact, beat. He was dictated to by what was left of his body. His wishes counted for nothing. Even if he had wished it, no one could help his body to be brought to a standstill.
We sat there in the car, facing the sea, a little longer while Hunter planted sticks in the sand so that we could see the tide overtaking them one by one. I had still said nothing aloud. What was there to say, in reply to that forlorn ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.’ I could dodge the real issue as I had done so many times and say, ‘Oh, you’ll be well looked after, Dad.’ I could be enigmatic and sigh and say ‘Who knows?’ What I couldn’t say, as always, was what I wanted to say – ‘Have you had enough, Dad? Would you like to be put to sleep for ever?’ If such an option had been available it would still have been an impossibly hard question to ask, implying as it did that I thought he’d had enough. But I might have asked it, and I firmly believe the answer at that moment would have been ‘Yes’. Unlike Marion, he was mentally fully alert and knew exactly what was before him if the infinitely painful waning of his strength went on. He’d soon be one of those comatose bodies in the home, one of those zombies whose rooms he passed every day and whose plight had always appalled him to the point of shuddering and averting his gaze. But I couldn’t ask him if he wanted his life ended because to end it was against the law – and we were both infinitely law-abiding. Every effort was being made to keep him alive and no effort at all to help him die. No wonder he was beat.
So I said nothing. Hunter came back to the car. ‘Ready, Arthur?’ he said. ‘For what?’ my father said. ‘Leaving,’ Hunter said. ‘Oh, I’m ready for leaving all right, don’t you worry,’ he said, with a sad little laugh.
Soon our five months in the Lakes would be up. The security for him of having us so close, constantly visiting, would end. I dreaded telling him the date of our departure even though, at the same time, I’d tell him of the usual winter arrangements, of how Pauline would come for a week in early November and Gordon for his birthday a month later and then Pauline again at Christmas, and we’d keep the rota of daily phone calls going and I’d write every week … I dreaded it. Wrap it up how I liked, the message was depressing: we are abandoning you. I took the calendar down as soon as we got to October. A chestnut mare trotting along a beach. Good. I’d had enough of the black stallions. For Sunday 13 October, I wrote the fateful words ‘M. and H. to LONDON’, and then the cheering ones, ‘Pauline arrives at Loweswater’ two weeks later. There. It was done. I showed him. ‘Good lass,’ he said; ‘you’ve been a grand help.’ No resentment, no requests for me to stay. He considered we’d done our bit and that, of course, we must go. No self-pity, no attempt to make me feel guilty. He made our approaching departure as easy as he could and this was more touching by far than any tears or distress.
Our last visit was on Friday 11 October. Mercifully, he said he would like to go out, though he hadn’t wanted to for some time previously. He endured the usual performance which getting into the car involved, and we set off in surprisingly good spirits. We’d discussed where we should go and he’d elected to have one of our city tours – the weather wasn’t good enough to go to the sea, where he predicted we’d see ‘nowt but mist’. He was intrigued when I said I wanted to go to the castle first to pick up a photocopy of a document which would be ready for me in the record office there. He loved driving over the moat (empty for many years) and through the arched gateway where once the portcullis had clanged shut, and into the old parade ground of the Border Regiment. The castle always pleased him, though he had never felt the need to discover its history, about which he had only the vaguest idea. He approved of its very existence, though he would have preferred to have it still bristling with soldiers. He’d taken me round when I was a child without being able to answer a single one of my irritating questions. He didn’t know when the castle had been built, or why, or by whom, or anything at all beyond the fact that Mary Queen of Scots had her head chopped off here (which, of course, she did not, though she was imprisoned there for a time). As far as he was concerned, he didn’t need to know its history to appreciate the castle’s attraction. It was enough just to look at it, to walk its battlements and peer into its dungeons.
I was out of the record office quickly, with the copy of a will I’d wanted. I showed it to him – it was Jonathan Dodgson Carr’s will – and he was puzzled. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ he asked. ‘It’s no use.’ I said it would be of use in the book I was going to write. But he had no interest in it and said no, he didn’t want me to read it out as we drove along, why would he want that? We did the tour of the streets he liked and then drove past the cemetery and the crematorium to go to Dalston. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said as we passed the gates of the crematorium: ‘take me straight to the crem when I go; no church, no parsons, no messing about. And quick.’ I said, ‘Right you are, squire.’ We crawled through Dalston and looked at the river and then came back into Carlisle by another route. Near to the home, we stopped at a florist’s. I’d heard that it was his favourite carer’s birthday that day and I wanted him to give her some flowers. He chose pink carnations and I had them wrapped in pretty paper and tied up with pink ribbon. Once he was back in a wheelchair, I put the bouquet on his knee and told him not to forget to say Happy Birthday when he presented it. ‘Do you think I’m daft?’ he asked. ‘Do you think I don’t know what’s what any more? Of course I’ll say Happy Birthday. What do you think I’ll say, Happy Easter?’
I wheeled him into his room and by good luck the birthday girl herself was waiting there to transfer him to his chair. He thrust the flowers straight at her and said, ‘Here. Happy Birthday to you. Please accept this, my gracious gift.’ We all burst out laughing – ‘gracious gift’ indeed! Where on earth had he got that from? ‘Oh, Arthur,’ said the carer, ‘how lovely, how kind. Thank you. Can I give you a little thank-you kiss?’ ‘If you must, I suppose,’ my father said, gloomily, and with the air of a martyr closed his eyes and held up his face. More laughter. We left with everyone laughing, including my father. The fuss over the business with the flowers had not been deliberately stage managed to help us get round the moment of departure, that awful ‘last time’ atmosphere, but it had succeeded perfectly in doing exactly that. It was easy to leave him, surrounded by carers and nurses who had come to see what the laughter was about and stayed to admire the flowers.
I calculated on the way home that it was probably the twentieth time I had parted from my father in his old age with the realisation that I might very well not see him alive again. This time I didn’t think it. I felt resigned to another summer, the following year, during which he would become bed-bound. Maybe two more summers. The episode in August seemed to me to have demonstrated how very gradual his dying was going to be if he was so well looked after, if antibiotics were used to combat infections and he was hauled back time after time from the brink of death. To wish someone dead is a terrible thing, but I’d grown so used to wishing it that it did
n’t seem terrible any more. Usually, I felt relief when I left him, the simple relief of knowing I need not actually witness his decline for the next few months. But this time I didn’t feel it. I felt that leaving him like that I was letting him down, a feeling quite different from guilt.
I saw later on that my father had filled in his calendar for the first half of November and then after that the eight horses thundering over a snowy field were doomed to gallop over blank spaces. On the eighteenth, there is the entry ‘Nothing Doing. Bad’, and that was the last time he had the heart to write anything at all. The evidence of his accelerating decline was there in every phone call. It was agony trying to have any sort of conversation – he could manage ‘Hello’ and that was about all, he who had always been avid for family news and expert at cross-questioning. The only thing to do was master a new art, that of talking without expecting a reply. I took to ringing the nurses’ desk as much as I rang my father so that they could tell me how he was.
How he was was ‘quite comfortable’. He’d had a few falls, but nothing serious, though in his fragile state they’d shaken him badly. He kept falling out of bed but if rails were put up round it he tried to climb over them and when he succeeded the falls were worse. Once he fell on the window side of his bed, where there was only a small gap between the bed and the radiator under the window, and he stayed jammed there until the next check-up during the night. The radiator was hot and an hour was long enough for his arm to be slightly burned. The indignities and miseries seemed to accumulate daily and little could be done to protect him from them. The matron wanted to change the position of his bed, but he wouldn’t have it and she didn’t want to upset him more, so the bed stayed and night-time vigilance was increased. She advised removing his telephone too, as she had done before, but I still vetoed that. True, he was ringing us frequently in the early hours of the morning, but it was worth putting up with this to let him retain at least a feeling of control.
December 4 arrived and Gordon went as usual, with his wife Shirley, for his birthday. It was not the jolly, happy occasion his ninety-fifth had been. He couldn’t be bothered with even the smallest of celebrations and refused to leave his room to be wheeled into the dining-room where his cake awaited. He wasn’t interested in presents or cards, or anyone singing ‘Happy Birthday, dear Arthur’ (though the carers sang it anyway). He said he just wanted to be better. Everyone who visited him now found him slumped in his chair, bent over double, visibly struggling to stay awake. Often, he stayed all day in bed. Nobody forced him to get up, but after a couple of days he would say this was no good, he had to ‘get going’ or he’d never get better, and then the nurses would go through the ordeal, for them as well as him, of dressing him and putting him in his chair. They were careful, they handled him tenderly, but they dreaded touching his limbs, seeing that the slightest pressure bruised him and caused him discomfort. But it was better for him to be up, if he himself wanted to be, because it was better for his chest – it kept it clear of the mucus which could gather, if he contracted another infection, when he lay prone. Better to be up, better to move a little. Why? To stay alive.
I was not at home when the matron tried to reach me on 11 December, so she rang Pauline and told her our father was ‘really poorly’. Pauline correctly interpreted this as dying and left immediately to go to him. She rang me from his bedside that evening and said that it was impossible to assess the situation yet. Yes, he was indeed ‘really poorly’ but it might be August all over again. Would he rally, as he always had done? Would the antibiotics once more have a miraculous effect? At any rate, she and David would stay at Loweswater and come in each day. They had been due to come for Christmas the following week anyway so might as well just stay. How lucky, we agreed, how lucky, because one of us would have had to go to be with him. The next day, Pauline rang to say that our father seemed brighter. He was still in bed and his breathing was laboured, but he was talking and objecting to various things she was doing in mistaken efforts to please him. I said I’d come up and help, but she said there was no need. I could come later if necessary and give her a break, but that it was a waste of our resources for me to come when she had just arrived. This might be the beginning of a long decline and we might need to alternate with each other again for weeks, so that one of us was always near him.
Pauline was there to give me a daily report throughout the following week. She began to realise that ‘really poorly’ did mean dying this time, but that still no one could estimate how long it would take. Could be weeks, even months. Or could be days, even hours. On Monday 16 December, she rang me mid-afternoon and said she thought our father would like me to speak to him. He wouldn’t be able to speak to me, because his breathing was such an effort, but if she held the telephone receiver next to his ear then I could speak to him. I heard him breathing heavily, each breath almost a whistle, but not like Marion’s breathing had been that last day – he had more energy and the breaths seemed to come quicker and be noisier. I didn’t know if that was significant or not. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you must be so tired. What a struggle you’re having – you must be so fed-up with all this, thank heaven you’re being well looked after and that Pauline is with you. Just try to sleep till you feel better. I’m sure that’s the best idea.’ He made some sort of sound, hard to describe – a grunt, not words, as though he was trying to say something but couldn’t. Pauline took the receiver and said he was being put to bed now and that she’d be leaving after she’d tucked him up. She went on to say there was no real change, but that the antibiotics were having some good effect, and that he seemed easier.
To go or not to go, that was very much the question. I told Pauline before she rang off that I thought I’d pay the kind of flying visit she’d paid in August and we began to discuss when I should do this. But during the night, while I lay awake thinking about it, I decided to go the next day. I’d get an early train, be with my father that afternoon, stay at Jeff’s, and spend another day, giving Pauline two days off. I slept then, relieved to have made up my mind, but was awake at six, ready to ring the home and tell them I was coming, so that they could tell him, and let Pauline know so that she need not come in. I knew the night shift ended at seven o’clock and that this was the best time to ring, when the nurses did the handover in their little room. The nurse who answered was silent when I said I was coming and would she tell my father. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘but your Dad passed on about two o’clock this morning.’ They’d rung Pauline to tell her and she hadn’t rung me, I imagined, because she saw no point in waking me up then.
I rang her at once. We both agreed we felt absurdly shocked – absurdly, because this death had been expected for so long. Expected and wanted. But still we were shocked and disbelieving. He couldn’t be dead at last; it seemed impossible that this torment had ceased for him. Then there was the regret that one of us had not been with him, actually there holding his hand (if we’d dared). Pauline would’ve stayed all night if she had known the end was so near, but nobody had predicted that death would come quite so soon. It didn’t really matter, of course, since he was said to have died in his sleep, as Marion had done, and Pauline had been with him when he went to sleep – there if not at the literal end then at the end of consciousness. The phone calls went on all day, backwards and forwards between the three of us, Gordon as amazed as we were that this incredible life-force had finally stopped. Whatever our feelings about him, none of us could deny that our father’s death removed a powerful influence over our lives.
What fascinated me, as the day went on and we discussed funeral arrangements, was the absence of that relief I had expected and which had come so quickly when Marion died. The whole horror of my father’s final ghastly two years was over and I’d anticipated feeling light-headed with relief. But I didn’t. Did this mean I wished he were still alive? Good God, no. Yet still I felt this amazement and with it some kind of peculiar agitation, as though something terrible had happened. My father’s death was the
end of a long, long tough march, but I didn’t seem able to rest. I was still on that arduous march with him, still going through the motions of keeping him company. It was as though, because he was so very old, he had come to seem immortal. I had despaired of death for him. The grim reaper had kept passing him over, constantly rejecting him, and I’d lost faith in him ever being chosen. It would never be his turn – and then it was, and the shock was all the greater for being deferred.
I thought the relief I looked for might wash over me once I’d seen him dead. Maybe I didn’t really believe, on one level, that he was. Maybe I needed to see his dead body to be convinced this was not a trick. I went to Carlisle that afternoon, stayed the night with Jeff, and then walked to the funeral parlour in the morning. It was a bitterly cold December day, the air raw and harsh with an east wind scudding in from the Pennines, blasting right across the Eden Plain and bringing flurries of snow with it. How appropriate the weather felt as I battled across the city, bright with Christmas decorations, and over Caldew bridge and up past Carr’s factory, past my old primary school, onto the Wigton Road. The cold, the bleakness, the biting wind, all pleased me. I didn’t dread going into the funeral parlour. I was intrigued, because though I’d seen dead bodies before I’d never actually seen one in this sort of quaintly named place – a parlour, indeed. As I stood waiting for the door to be opened I wondered inappropriately why it was called a ‘parlour’. Because bodies traditionally lay in their coffins in the parlour of the house, I supposed, that formal, largely unused room so characteristic of Victorian houses. Nobody had a parlour any more and yet the name had not been changed.
I was shown into the small room where my father lay and was invited to spend as long as I liked there. I could see there were lots of small rooms along a corridor, presumably all ready to be occupied, a hotel for the dead. The atmosphere was hushed, the light dim and the man who showed me in spoke in whispers. I found myself tiptoeing, as though fearing to wake someone up. Left on my own in front of my father’s body I thought what a very good-looking corpse he made. His face looked quite relaxed and even healthy, and I realised this must be due to the undertaker’s art – surely, the cheeks were padded somehow, banishing that awful skull-like appearance his face had taken on recently. His hair, a surprising amount of it for a ninety-six-year-old man, was beautifully brushed. It looked very clean, but I couldn’t believe the undertaker had gone as far as to wash it. He looked so fine, lying there, quite unlike poor Marion who had been so disfigured by her disease and who had not, when I saw her, received any attention from an undertaker. This, too, my father’s corpse, was just a thing, but the illusion that it was more than that was strong and entirely due to the way his body had been laid out. It was quite dangerous, I thought, to make dead things look living.
Precious Lives Page 23
