I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

I never wanted to disturb Mum and Dad’s dynamic – don’t ruffle too many emotional feathers. I was hugely sensitive to what Mum and Dad had, so often just sitting with them was enough. I’ve never been to a Quaker meeting, but the notion that they just sit down and don’t necessarily speak has always been attractive to me. That is what I found myself doing.

  Mum’s visits, by their very nature, would generally be formulaic. She’d sit and talk to Dad, sometimes getting a reaction, other times receiving very little at all. They were, however, not always predictable. After all, no one on the outside can ever know exactly what is going on in a mind affected by dementia, what connections are being made, what barriers raised and lowered, what echoes of the past rattling and resonating. I love the story about him trying to kiss her in his room. She wasn’t to know, but in his head, he was thinking, I’m in here! It was still there, fancying her. I love what he, they, shared in those fleeting few seconds. A glimpse of a life snuffed out, and yet somehow ever flickering.

  ‘Ronnie, do you know who I am?’ Elsie asked him one day.

  ‘I don’t,’ he told her, ‘but I love you.’

  There is another moment of great tenderness that will forever stay with me. Three months after Dad went into the home, Albert was born in Saint Mary’s Hospital, south Manchester – I was in the city working on a TV job. I wanted Dad to see Albert and so picked him and Mum up and took them to the hospital. I sat Dad down and handed Albert to him. As ever with dementia, it was a bittersweet moment. He didn’t know who I was; he didn’t know who Albert was. But I was happy that one day I could now say to Albert, ‘You met him.’

  Dad held this tiny baby close, looking into his eyes. It brought about a calmness in him for a moment.

  ‘What a lovely boy.’

  And for me the circle was complete.

  23

  THE END

  ‘Daddy, I’m not going to celebrate any more birthdays, and I don’t want you to celebrate any more because that means you’re getting older and then you’ll die.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Albert. I plan to get younger the older I get. I’m lucky. I have a job that means I never have to grow up. I play characters. I play.’

  Children are right. Everything is as precious as they see it.

  The fact I was now dealing with a son at the beginning of his life and a father at the end wasn’t lost on me. Sometimes it felt almost mythical and biblical. Other days there was so much going on I couldn’t feel anything. What was always apparent to me was that I was building a world with Albert while the one I occupied with Dad had long slipped away. Mum was facing the other end of the line. I had renewal in my life. She had prolonged loss. Dad’s demise was always going to be long and drawn out because he was such a powerful spirit and also because he was physically powerful, which I think I’ve inherited, both being from generations and generations of workers, the same with being very strong-willed.

  Dad’s strength would trick Mum at times. After the cancer, he lost huge amounts of weight, but his physicality soon returned.

  ‘I think your dad’s getting a bit better,’ Mum would say to me.

  ‘What, from the cancer?’

  ‘No, generally.’

  She was asking for it to be true – that the dementia was in reverse.

  ‘He’s getting better physically, Mum,’ I had to tell her. ‘That’s all.’

  I’d argue that his body was kept going far too long. My mum would challenge that. She’d say, ‘No, it was his life and he had to live it.’

  Dad’s resolve to carry on, I believe, only truly left him once he entered the care home. The eagle was still in there, but its eyes lacked the spark. It was an animal stripped of reflex and instinct. With Elsie no longer always by his side, Dad lost his will.

  Early one morning, I got a call. Dad had got up in the night, fallen, and broken his hip. I put the phone down. I had only one thought. This man has woken up, got out of bed to try to reach the toilet, doesn’t really know who he is, where he is, and he’s fallen over and broken his hip – and none of us were there with him. For Mum, the sense that she had abandoned him to his fate was overpowering. The rest of us felt it too, a terrible guilt that we were all comfortable sleeping in our beds while he was lying prone on the floor like an animal. I wanted to look after my mum, to say to her, ‘Look, you had no choice, you had to put him in the home.’ But it wasn’t that easy. The spike to the conscience was felt deeply by us all. An overriding emotion of ‘I should have been there’.

  The fall meant surgery, a hip replacement. Dad was eighty-three, incontinent, and had no idea what was going on. After the operation, he was being stood up, put through rehab, and didn’t even know he’d broken his hip in the first place. He was demented, in pain, and knocked about mentally, as he had been after the cancer surgery, by the anaesthetic.

  In the wake of the operation, Dad contracted pneumonia. I woke one morning a few days later to find eighteen missed calls on my phone, mostly from Alan. I was working in London and looking after Albert at the time. The phone rang again.

  ‘Hello, Chris.’

  ‘Hi, Alan.’

  And he just started crying. At that stage, I wasn’t sure whether he was upset about Mum or Dad. Eventually, he got it out that my dad had died. My first instinct, as would Alan’s have been had he not been at the fierce end, was to ask him if he was OK and thank him for telling me, because that’s not an easy job for anybody. I felt very close to him at that point.

  I did that thing we all do – ‘Listen, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. You’ve got enough on your plate.’ Which is exactly what my dad would have told us in any similar circumstance. I then rang Mum. As much as she could, I knew she had readied herself. Just as death was a release for Dad, we’d said goodbye to the person we knew a long time ago. It’s true what they say, when it comes to someone with dementia, you say goodbye twice.

  Keith worried me more. He and Dad were particularly close. There was a chemistry between them, a special bond. Later I discovered that, at the moment of death, Keith convinced himself that the death rattle was not the death rattle and that my dad was coming back.

  He put Dad’s glasses back on his face. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you’re Ronnie Ecc. You’re Ronnie Ecc.’

  He took it very hard, and bottled it up more. While from the minute in 2001 when the doctors said the word dementia, we’d all started steeling ourselves, and there were then a lot of little steeling ourselves all along the way, the shock of the actual event remains. Somebody in your family is going mad. Your father is going mad. And the full stop will be his death. That finality still has to be met.

  Dad was laid out in a funeral parlour in Little Hulton, about 200 yards from The Vulcan where I used to go with him on a Friday night. We’d have a pint and then go and get fish and chips and take them home for my mum.

  ‘You know you can see him, cock, if you want,’ she told me.

  ‘Do you think I should?’ With me being an atheist, I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Yes.’ She was quite firm.

  I went up to the parlour and was shown into the small room where Dad was being kept. Immediately I started behaving like an actor in a film. Acting, definitely acting, maybe to protect myself from the fear – it was the first corpse I’d ever seen.

  Dad was covered up to his chest. He was wearing a shirt and tie. My mum would have chosen it, as ever. She had always turned him out beautifully when he could no longer look after himself and this was no different.

  I looked at the body before me and thought how there was only a vague resemblance to Ronnie Eccleston. He looked so gaunt. There was no life in the face, and it was the life that made the man. But there’d been very little life in that face for a good few years. It had been replaced by fear and confusion. Ronnie had died spiritually almost completely before he died physically.

  Like in the bad film that was being projected in my brain, I kissed his forehead. It was the coldest thing I’d ever touched in my life. And yet I
also felt a huge sense of relief. I realised my dad was not his body; he was his personality, and how I received his personality and held it in my heart.

  He was no longer suffering.

  Later, I had a glass of wine with Mum. I asked her why she thought I should go to the funeral parlour.

  ‘I thought if you went,’ she told me, ‘you wouldn’t in later life say, “I wish I’d seen my dad.” There’s just a chance in ten years’ time you might have thought I could have seen him one more time.’

  You’ve always been a brilliant mother, I thought.

  All three of us brothers were pallbearers at the funeral, along with Keith’s son Peter and Alan’s son Joe. I was determined to speak at the service. It was a situation not unfamiliar to me. I do generally get asked to say something at funerals back home because of my acting. I find that touching, while also liking the northern practicality of it – ‘He’ll know how to do it.’ But, having attended many funerals, I also knew I wanted Dad’s, for me at least, to be different.

  Other than always taking a hard-backed chair in a café and making a joke about it being because I’m a Protestant, I’ve no real interest in religion, and that can be traced back to my early days. As a child, Mum took me with her to church, but I was bored. There was nothing there that interested me. I’d just sit and play with the umbrella stand at the end of the pew. The only part of it I liked was getting an ice cream on the way back. Unlike the twins, I was never confirmed. I’m glad. Even as a kid I’d have been questioning it.

  My attitude echoed my dad’s disinterest in the church. There was a Catholicism to him – his family on his mother’s side are Irish – but his attachment had long lapsed. My mum, meanwhile, is very English, very C of E. I watched my dad closely when it came to religion. He always went through the motions when we attended a wedding or any church occasion. He would adopt the supplicant posture, sing the hymns, but I never bought it. I was suspicious of how he really felt. He wouldn’t go to church with Mum on a Sunday morning, which I took as him expressing his views. The difference between me and him is I don’t think a man of his time would assume he had the intellectual clout to go a step further and express atheism or agnosticism. He wouldn’t have considered it his place, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have wanted to detract from something that was clearly very important to my mum. Only when the dementia came would he actually go with her to church functions. I’ve a feeling, though, even then it was mainly for the beer.

  As an atheist, I’d often been frustrated by the religious side of proceedings taking over at funerals, with the real person, at the very point they should be celebrated, somehow lost within. I truly believed that somebody should speak about Dad unclouded by religion. Rather than it be a religious occasion, if someone had delivered the lines from ‘On Ilkley Moor Baht ’at’, about the real nature of death, that someone is everywhere and yet nowhere, it would have made more sense to me.

  I knew also that my mum, Keith and Alan are more respectful of religion, and I was mindful of that. I wanted to be reflective of what we as a family would say, but I was conscious too that all of us had very different relationships with my dad. While my mum had her faith, and both her and Dad loved that particular church and spent a lot of time there, equally I thought there was a place for me there as Ronnie’s atheist son. There will be some who’ll read that and say, ‘He just wanted to make it about himself.’ But it wasn’t that at all. This was my dad’s send-off. The church, as in organised religion, weren’t going to tell me about my father, my family, and so I delivered a eulogy that encapsulated Dad as I saw him. It wasn’t an easy task, but I tried my best to sieve the words right down to the essentials of who my dad was.

  Those words weren’t just for the family and congregation; I was talking to him.

  When Mum passes away, I will want to say something again, but I would never want to take Alan and Keith’s space if they want to. We can all say something if we want. But then I get an image of my mum in my head, the coffin opening – ‘Chris, Keith’s already said something so you don’t have to. Goodnight!’

  I think the English can learn a lot from the Irish when it comes to death. A traditional Irish wake puts the focus right on the person who’s gone, from the moment of death onwards. Stories, drinks, celebrations for two or three days. The attitude is very much, ‘This is a massive event, so let’s not draw the curtains and turn away from it.’ I love that approach. It informed my desire to speak in a different way at my dad’s funeral and it will at my mum’s.

  While the home was, quite clearly, the last stepping stone before the grave, and I had been waiting for Dad to die, grief, actual physical grief, didn’t afflict me at the funeral. I think mentally I was too consumed by events in my own life, particularly the arrival of my children. Three days before Dad died, Mischka had told me she was pregnant again – one in, one out – while Albert wasn’t yet a year old. That whole synergy of arrivals and departures again.

  Some days later, however, I went for a run on Hampstead Heath, a run that I knew was about my father’s death, just as I had known other runs had been rehearsals for it. There, 2.5 miles in, on the heath, right in the depths of winter, I saw a tree, completely bare, except for a blackbird alone on a branch. I was struck immediately how it looked like my dad in the home. Underfed. Anxious. And then it flew off. It sounds like pretentious poetic thinking, but as an atheist my sense of otherness is in nature, and that order of life meant there was a connection between that bird and my father. If that’s pretentious, then tough. Some people find comfort in the Bible, but all that stuff about ‘he’s just gone into another room’ means nothing to me. We should be careful when foisting platitudes about death onto other people, especially children. When Auntie Annie died, I was told she was ‘inside a star’. I thought the inside of a star looked like the Star Trek set. Somehow she’d fallen off the slab and ended up in there. No wonder I’ve ended up like I am.

  The blackbird, though, did mean something to me – an expression of my love for my dad. Ronnie, real Ronnie, had flown. He’s Ronnie again now, I thought. He’s been released. Ronnie had himself back, and I definitely felt like I had Dad back. This interloper, wraith-like, thrashing, kicking his sons out the house, shadow Ron, demented Ron, had gone. That wasn’t Dad. That was him trapped. Beirut hostage Brian Keenan spoke of an evil cradling, and that’s what my dad experienced, imprisoned, kept captive, reduced to a subhuman state. I was angry about that and what it did to my dad’s existence. I was watching a dance of death, and it’s horrendous to see anyone in that state, let alone someone you love so deeply. You can pretty it up – ‘The home’s nice isn’t it?’ – you have to. But my dad, could he have seen himself, would have been angry too. His dignity, his sense of independence, hygiene – his basic sense of ‘You don’t bloody have to look after me’ – was taken from him, stripped. He was, as Shakespeare calls it in King Lear, ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’. I’m not ashamed of using that phrase because, if I’d said to Dad, ‘Shakespeare called humanity a poor, bare, forked animal,’ the first thing he’d have said to me is, ‘Well, that is marvellous.’

  When it’s all over, you realise death is the eighth stage of dementia. It can come naturally, or, as in Dad’s case, a person falls, they go for a hip operation, they get an infection, generally pneumonia, and they die. And yet somehow dying isn’t the same as being dead. Some months later, I was in Los Angeles for reshoots on Thor: The Dark World. I was in a hire car at some lights when it suddenly occurred to me that, while my dad was physically dead, the love I felt from him and towards him was still coursing through me, informing my decisions and driving me onwards. It wasn’t a moment of consolation; it was one of enlightenment – ‘If there’s been love, which there was, and is, it, he, can never die.’

  He still exists today.

  24

  I HAVE THEE NOT, AND YET I SEE THEE STILL

  ‘Daddy,’ Esme looked at me, ‘I don’t want to grow up. I just want to be a child and p
lay with my toys.’ I thought of myself on the living-room carpet playing with my Indians. I shouldn’t be surprised if I had said those exact same words.

  Writing this book has emphasised to me what I already suspected – my dad has shaped me in every way imaginable. Over the past months I have taken a metaphorical journey from Salford to Stratford and back again. It is a route I thought I knew well – the key junctions, the forks in the road. Truth is there have been waypoints and markers that have taken me down routes never previously explored. Waiting for me at the end, time and time again, was a single figure – Ronnie Eccleston.

  All my choices in life, past and present, I can directly relate to him. Same with my career. Always acting for my dad, always trying to get his attention, reacting first and foremost to his frustrations, unhappiness and personal limitations. I ended up playing a succession of versions of him, characters he could have been had he been shown a different path in life. I’ve used everything I’ve absorbed and observed about my father to express Matt Jameson in The Leftovers, Nicky Hutchinson in Our Friends in the North, Drew Mackenzie in Hearts and Minds, and countless others. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t, but they were all a continuation of my lifelong attempt to work my dad out. I was all at sea in Hamlet because I could never see how me or my dad could have become a philosophy student.

  Dad isn’t alone. I’ve played versions of Alan, I’ve played versions of Keith, and I’ve played versions of Mum, too. All of them are very different people from one day to the next, but they were far easier to work out. My dad was forever an enigma, one who is following me through the generations, with me every step of the way, almost quite literally. I was getting ready to go on holiday recently when I heard ‘pad, pad, pad’ on the stairs. I turned round and there he was. Or rather there was Albert, wearing my dad’s scarf and coat, which I’d had hung up in my bedroom for years. Topping off the effect was my cap. Albert as Ronnie. He was laughing. So was I. It was as funny as it was moving.