The Nature of Life and Death

by Patricia Wiltshire

  About thirty years later, in 2005, my mother died in my arms, just as my ex-father-in-law had done. The sudden switch from life into death was the same dramatic metamorphosis, but my almost detached interest in the demise of two old people was that of a curious scientist. I have only experienced the agony of real bereavement for two other people, and every cat I have had the good fortune to cherish.

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  —

  It is hard to believe that, at the time we divorced, I had been married for forty-two years, and yet I knew my husband little better than after our very formal, gentle courtship of nearly five years. For decades, emotionally we had been a pair of satellites revolving around each other but rarely touching. He was a hobbies man and was an excellent photographer, then scuba diver, then pilot of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, as well as being a good horseman. He later became obsessed and highly competent with computers. He always had to have the very best equipment, and no one else was allowed to touch any of it. I thought we were very well off and, at one time, we owned a Porsche, then a Ferrari—and I loved driving both. We had a twin-engine, eight-seater Cessna light aircraft, two horses, goodness knows how many computers, and other various electronic wizardry. Ever cautious, I learned to fly because I was terrified of being alone at five thousand feet with a heart-attack victim slumped over the instruments. We flew all over Europe at whim, stayed in lovely hotels—Cannes was our favorite resort—and no wonder many of our friends shared my illusion that we were wealthy.

  At the age of sixty, when I was looking forward to a comfortable and fruitful retirement, the ugly truth was thrust in my face. I was left bereft and bewildered. I found out that for years I had been betrayed in every way a woman could be. We had never really had cross words or even disagreements—we were not close enough for that. I had had plenty to engage my attention while he gallivanted off on his various hobbies and, as I later found, conquests. Again, how sad. I politely asked him to leave, and after some equally polite resistance, he complied. That was that.

  We divorced about seven or eight years after parting and, in the meantime, I had to earn my living. We were not rich at all; he had frittered away nearly everything we had on sheer hedonism. I was left in this huge house on my own with my two cats. But, that meant that I was never lonely and, in fact, I hardly noticed that he had gone. One welcome difference was not having to wash his shirts and cook his dinner every day. I certainly was not going to waste money on lawyers and I carried out the divorce proceedings myself with a little advice from my attorney niece. The whole thing cost a couple hundred pounds; I even asked him to reimburse me for that and he complied. That was such a painful time, but certainly not as bad as the very worst thing that happened to me. How did I survive that physical and mental agony?

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  —

  The first disaster in my world was the sickening news that my beloved grandmother had been killed in a car crash. I just could not take it in and, for the first time in my life, I felt alone and frightened, shaken, and disoriented. Worse was to come within the year. My child was a spark of joy, certainly the sunshine in my life, and my reason for being. I lived for her—my blue-eyed, golden-haired daughter, Siân. For the first nine months, she was remarkably well and robust, and she was, of course, an exquisite child, as is everyone’s. We were very close and I used to nurse her in a Welsh shawl, wrapped around my body, singing to her, with her slung next to my bosom. We both loved it. I still have the shawl.

  They say that bad things come in threes, and they certainly did then. One morning, Siân was very fractious and we were both shocked when, at the minimal rebuke, she burst into violent floods of heartrending tears. When I took her to the doctor, he dismissed me as being a neurotic first-time mother. Even when it was obvious that something was really wrong, I was still treated as a nuisance. Not long afterward, her back was covered with a mass of tiny purple smudges, which I now know to be caused by bleeding under the skin. These were purpura. There was no internet to consult and we only had the GP for advice. This time he took me seriously and Siân was urgently referred to a consultant pediatrician. I cannot bear to dwell on the details of the months that followed but she was eventually diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma—essentially a blood cancer. The local consultants did not have the level of expertise to deal with this in such a young child and St. Thomas’ Hospital in London became our second home for the next few months. Eventually, they realized a misdiagnosis and it turned out to be a very rare autoimmune disease called Letterer-Siwe disease. The next ten months were sheer and utter hell. Every time I went to her cot, I half expected her to be dead. She had too few red blood cells and I was able to give her my blood—anyone can have my blood because I am a universal donor (O rhesus negative). The horrendous medical and surgical interventions went on and on, and I realize now that the doctors just did not know what to do.

  My only regret now is that she did not die more quickly. If she had, she would not have suffered so much, because suffer she certainly did. Even after all these years, I weep over her grave and think of her every day. What might she have been? Would I have had grandchildren? Would she have been more like me or her father? I never had any more children and do not know whether I would have been a good mother anyway. I always expect everyone to do their best, to excel at what they try. I know I am critical and would have probably been an unconventional mother. Perhaps Siân would have disliked me as much as I disliked my own mother—but I know I would always have put her first. I delighted in her existence. I desperately tried to protect her, but she ceased to be Siân on that cold January day. I stared in numb disbelief. I felt an electric shock and then the draining away of my insides. Not everything that left me ever came back. There is still an overwhelming void that nothing will fill or satisfy.

  When the nurses gently led me away, I realized that the worst thing that could ever happen to me had happened. No disaster or misfortune would ever have the same impact, or ever hurt me as much. Since that day, I have been magically protected from being hurt by anyone. Nothing and no one would ever be as important to me as Siân. I am grateful that I had a daughter.

  Being so protected can give one an air of arrogance. For the most part, I genuinely do not care what people think of me, and it has led to my being outspoken and direct. Nor am I afraid of anything or anyone. Perhaps that is why I have been able to cope with so many hideous and shocking sights and events during the course of my forensic career. I know too that my great concern for badly treated and neglected children and animals must, somehow, be linked to my daughter, her suffering, and her death. I know that some consider me to be fairly hard, but actually I am as soft as a marshmallow under the brittle exterior. Those who really know me are never frightened, but I know I can stop an undesirable in their tracks with one of my looks.

  * * *

  —

  After I lost Siân, I was very thin and continued to suffer with my breathing. One day, in the medical school where I was working, standing over a bottle of urine collected from a ward, the professor commented on my cough.

  “Oh, I have always had that.”

  “Well, I think you need to have it investigated.”

  And investigate they did.

  In those days, they put you on a table that could rock in all sorts of directions, put a tube down your nose, poured a radiopaque liquid into your lungs, swirled you around on the table until the lung was coated, and then took multiple X-rays. I remember watching the screen in fascination even though I felt I was drowning. The only way to get the white stuff out was to be turned over and thumped on the back until it was all coughed out. This procedure was called a bronchogram and has thankfully been replaced by the CT scan. No child or sick adult will have to experience this ever again. It was like being tortured by a group of white-coated aliens from a spaceship.

  The diagnosis was swift. My right lung had completely collapsed into an abscess and my left one wa
sn’t too good either. Within the month I was a patient at the same hospital where my daughter had died, in a ward right opposite Big Ben. Who would ever believe that, after a short time, one was not even aware of the bell booming out so regularly. Most of my right lung was removed and these were the days when anesthesia and pain relief were not particularly good. My memory of that time is acute; I was sucked down into a maelstrom of pain and misery, and the only escape was morphine. The euphoric sensation of being lifted up, up, and away from agony was truly magical. At first, I resisted because the needles hurt so much but, as soon as I asked for relief, it was refused. Obviously pain relief had to be weighed against the possibility of creating addiction. I can well understand how the next fix of a strong opiate can be the raison d’être for those subsumed by wretchedness and despair. It would be so easy to succumb when the reward for the prick of a needle is bliss and elation.

  It took a long time, but I recovered and went back to work. My psyche and thin little body had taken too many beatings. But I am strong and robust mentally—if only I had the physical strength to match.

  CHAPTER 12

  Poisons

  I may not have been able to go school as consistently as my classmates, but until I passed the entrance exam and ended up in that forbidding grammar school—that place at the top of the steep hill—I loved it, with the wonderful and kindly headmaster, Mr. Davies, and “Shorty” Jones, our teacher. What utterly gifted people they were. Mr. Jones brought the best out in all of us and yet managed never to show favoritism, nor make a child feel marginalized. I had not realized it myself, but more than sixty years later, at a reunion lunch, an old classmate told me that everyone knew I was the headmaster’s favorite. She rolled her eyes and laughed when she told us all how he would always turn to me for answers, or ask me to set the class straight when we were floundering over some simple concept. I was full of facts imbibed from my encyclopedias and they were my favorite reading. After all, they were full of stories as well as being instructive and a great source of information and wisdom. My long hours spent in bed, when others were out enjoying games and adventuring, gave me the reward of knowledge, even if it was eclectic in the extreme.

  My special friend was Jeannie Bruton and, when I was well enough, we would set off together looking for adventures. It was not far to the open hillsides outside the village where sheep and mountain ponies roamed free. We would be gone all afternoon, sustained by Marmite or jam sandwiches . . . if the ponies didn’t get them first. They really were thugs at times, eager for more interesting tastes than the hillside turf offered. Jeannie and I were true companions. We picked bluebells and made scent in washed-out sauce bottles, ignoring the lingering sauce smell in the fermenting mush. We knew where to get frog spawn so that we could follow the progress of the tiny black commas in the jelly as they took form, and eventually hatched into tadpoles. By leaving bits of raw meat in the water, we even managed to get exquisite little froglets sometimes. We caught a slowworm and kept it in a big jar on our hall windowsill, although my mother eventually freed it from its glass prison and I bawled in fury that she had had the temerity to do such a thing without consultation. My dearest wish, which was eventually granted, was to have a penknife so that Jeannie and I could dig up pignuts. Conopodium majus is in the carrot family and it produces a tasty little tuber deep in the soil. We knew an area of grassland at the edge of a path where we could unearth these from a depth of only about four inches, which is fairly shallow for this plant. Anyone would think that we had unearthed treasure when we eventually got a few of these. We would wipe off the soil, scrape the outside a bit with our penknife, spit on them, rub the outsides on the hems of our dresses, and then eat them straightaway, even though they were sometimes a little gritty. They have a lovely, delicate taste and we always felt the digging was worth it.

  Later, we would trek up the hillsides and pick wimberries. We loved them and came home with blue mouths, fingers, knees, and rear ends. Along with everyone else, we picked blackberries from September onward, and my knowledge of their leaves, picked up as a child, would later help me to tell the police how long a body had been in its grave. Simple childhood memories of being close to wildlife helped in a lot of my later casework too.

  The big outdoors offers many treats that are quite safe to eat; the young leaves of hawthorn have a lovely taste and their berries later in the season have an interesting flavor and texture—although too many can be harmful. The berries of the elder bush have little taste, but they give stewed apple a lovely color when cooked with it. Local people called them gypsies’ currants because, apparently, they were used as a substitute in cake-making. Most people know about the sloe or blackthorn, and I try to collect the tannin-rich, little plumlike fruit every year to make sloe gin, which is always delicious. If you try to eat a fresh sloe, your mouth dries up as the tannins in the fruit combine with the proteins in your saliva. It is a horrible sensation and you feel as though your tongue will never taste anything again. Freezing or heating the fruit, or soaking it in alcohol, destroys the cellular structure of the fruit and the tannins are released and lose their effectiveness. They certainly disappear in my sloe gin and, although I never manage to get the same flavor every year, it is always marvelous. Jeannie and I knew where and when to look for little treats and I am so sad that so many children today are too fixated by electronic games and texting to have adventures.

  As mentioned, there are many wild plants that are safe to eat, but there are also many plants to be avoided at all costs. Plants and animals have evolved together over millions of years and, because no animal can produce its own food and must rely on plants at some level in the food web, if some defense against predation had not evolved, plants would have been chewed and sucked out of existence. Some plant defenses are exquisite and they show us how nature works toward balance. Protection can be mechanical, chemical, or a combination of both, and some involve mutualistic relationships with an animal.

  The young leaves of the stinging nettle make good, nutritious soup—but to protect itself from too much predation, a combined mechanical and chemical defense has evolved. Specialized hairs on the leaves are intricately modified to inject a mixture of formic acid, histamine, acetylcholine, and serotonin into whatever touches it. This mixture causes a painful and burning rash, and there are records of dogs being poisoned due to running through extensive stands of nettle. Other plants, like wild parsnip and the giant hogweed, can cause a blistering rash if touched in sunlight. The books and papers written about harmful plants are legion and everyone should have at least a basic knowledge of them.

  Defenses like this help to maximize a plant’s survival in a competitive world. The thorns produced by many in the rose family are long, sharp daggers, and a hedge of hawthorn or firethorn acts like a wall of barbed wire; the thorns certainly deter foraging animals. Some Acacia species have thorns that become hollowed out by ants. The ant produces formic acid, which makes a sting long-lasting and painful, and it will protect the tree from browsing animals such as the giraffe, as well as other insect pests. There are many examples of such elegant symbioses in the woodlands, savannahs, and jungles of the world.

  The number of plants with physical defenses like these, however, pales when compared to those that have evolved chemical defenses in their ongoing quest to survive and spread. The array of chemical compounds produced in the plant kingdom is bewildering, and many of them appear to be for protection—defenses against chewing insects and other animals, shields against parasites from entering their bodies, and some for which, as yet, a function has not been clarified. Plants, fungi, and bacteria are the astonishing factories of organic compounds on this planet. They can sustain the rest of the living world by providing food, but they also make compounds that cause discomfort, and even death. Vegans and vegetarians (nonhuman and human) are testament to plants’ ability to sustain other living things, but there are plenty of examples of them being harmful or even deadly.

&nb
sp; Throughout history, crimes have been committed using poison. It is held to be the preferred murder weapon of the female. We only have to think of the rumors and scandals surrounding Lucrezia Borgia, the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI, born in 1480; and Livia, wife of the first emperor of Rome, Augustus, who is supposed to have poisoned his figs in AD 14.

  What is a poison? Does it differ from a toxin or a venom? All of these can be harmful to a person’s well-being and can sometimes kill. Poison is a general word that covers any chemical that alters the normal body function. Inorganic substances like the element arsenic, or the compound potassium cyanide, can both be deadly poisons, but the ones delivered by animals such as snakes, scorpions, and spiders are termed “venoms” and they have a very complex chemistry. Most plant, bacterial, and fungal poisons are termed “toxins.” Ironically, both venoms and toxins can be beneficial if taken in the right dose and will harm only if the concentration is too high. An example of this is the cardiac glycoside, digitalin, originally extracted from a species of foxglove (Digitalis). The genus produces a range of related, deadly cardiac and steroidal glycosides; in appropriate doses, digitalin (digoxin) can regulate heartbeat but in a large, unregulated dose, it results either in a lethal slowing down or speeding up of the heart, confusion, nausea, and even hallucination. It is easy to see how the humble foxglove could have been used to murder a victim in years gone by when medicine was relatively primitive, and before toxicology came into being. A victim might simply have been diagnosed with some kind of heart failure. Even the pretty pink- and white-flowered shrub oleander, seen all over the Mediterranean, has similar compounds and can cause cardiac arrest if even one leaf is eaten.