Sheila seemed almost disappointed that Matthew’s partner, Angela, didn’t jump for joy at the offer of a sage-green leather coat from the 1960s, though everyone agreed that it would look well on her. Matthew had brought along a digital camera to film the get-together, not so much on his own account as to provide some sort of record for his baby daughter, Ella, who wouldn’t otherwise have memories of her grandmother.
Sheila’s only worry was about where she would go after death, not a theological matter but a question of storage. Her final destination wasn’t in doubt — she wanted her ashes interred in Llansannan, Dad’s birthplace, next to his ashes when they arrived there. But where was she to go until then? It seemed silly to be planted in terrain where she had no independent sense of rootedness, twiddling her immaterial thumbs while she waited for company.
To me these seemed abstruse considerations. If you imagined your ashes as sentient, it was hard to think of a place where they were likely to be happy, but if you didn’t, how could it matter where they were stowed? Even so I realized that I was missing the point. Sheila was temperamentally a worrier, and not all worries can be taken away, least of all from those who have put in the hours, but perhaps this one could. ‘I could look after you here, if you like.’
‘Here? Where exactly?’
‘Upstairs. In the top of a cupboard. Would that be all right, do you think?’
It turned out that this little piece of symbolic hospitality was enough to bring her peace of mind. After she had died, early in the new year, I had no feeling that she had moved to the top of an upstairs cupboard, but in other ways my feelings took an unexpected turn. After the elevated mood that accompanied her last weeks, I had expected a comedown and a grief proportional to my love and liking, but nothing similar happened. Instead there was a stable sense that she had died in character, with nothing left undone or unexpressed, and that I had made a satisfactory job of helping to make that possible. She seemed absent without being missing, and mourning was beside the point. It didn’t match anything I felt.
Dad had been going steadily downhill while in my care, but I managed not to notice. I suppose friends who hadn’t seen him for a while were in a better position to notice. The obvious comparison, with its kitsch symmetry between early and late life, first and last steps, would be with parents being too close to observe developmental spurts in their children which are very clear to outsiders — but there are other examples of the outsider having a privileged view. Friends who meet you after a gap will notice that you’ve lost a few pounds, and say you look marvellous, or that you’ve gained a few stone, and say you look well.
I was slow to acknowledge that Dad was fading. He seemed to have been fading for a long time, and there seemed no necessary end to that fading. There’s an element of that old philosophical conundrum, Zeno’s Paradox. Dad had to cover half the distance to death, and then half of that, and half again. Logically he would never get there, and perhaps that’s what people feel about their parents in particular.
If I was partly in denial, I may have also been hiding from the possibility of exhaustion. By convincing myself I was in for the long term, I could guard against the running out of filial energy, never a very dependable fuel. How long would it be before I was resenting Dad for taking up my time, my hand trembling with suppressed violence as I stirred the thickening agent into his tea?
Being an attentive son could co-exist with some low-level posing. While my mother was dying I had once needed to take an oxygen tank to University College Hospital for refilling. Such things are heavy, unwieldy, whether empty or full. I couldn’t imagine taking one onto a bus, but it would be awkward lifting one into a taxi. In the end it seemed simpler to walk to the hospital, only about a mile away. It was a rational decision, but I couldn’t help being aware of the figure I cut, reminiscent of the beefy man in a Guinness advert from my childhood, shouldering a girder. Now while ministering to Dad’s needs I got a certain small kick out of parking my fat motorbike outside John Bell & Croyden on Wigmore Street and striding in wearing full leather for a bumper box of incontinence pads. Posing can be a defensible strategy, a way of skating on the surface when you suspect that it won’t be possible to return from lower down.
Dad was admitted to hospital early in the new year, and died of pneumonia on the 10th of January. It happened while he was being turned by the nurses, with no family member present, though Tim was visiting and I was on my way. A discreet exit, and a common pattern, as if the person dying was tiptoeing away from the body with the minimum of fuss, though of course the assisted movement of being turned in bed may be enough to give the software of shutdown its prompt.
There’s a famous study that shows that death rates among the terminally ill go up after family festivals (Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, Passover), as if people could somehow hang on for a celebratory event and then stop the struggle, choosing in some limited way their moment to die. I say ‘famous study’, but I can’t find it anywhere on the Internet, which is a pretty strong indication that it doesn’t exist. It’s not exactly proving a negative to any elevated standard, but it’s a good rule of thumb: if you can find something on the Net it may or may not be true, but if you can’t find it then it isn’t. So perhaps I made it up or have garbled some quite different piece of research.
Even so, the first time someone died in my presence I had a sense of intention. This was the artist Mario Dubsky, who was the first person with Aids I was assigned to ‘buddy’ as a volunteer for the Terrence Higgins Trust. The year was 1985, early days for the Trust’s buddying initiative, so that a handful of us did our best to meet the basic needs of sick people spread out across London. In his teens Mario had been diagnosed as manic depressive, and couldn’t be described as an easy person, but then he would have disliked the very idea of easiness, in people or anything else. In theory he was very self-absorbed, but he also had a marked ability to stand outside himself. I remember once, when he was bringing up with great difficulty small quantities of yellow liquid into a bowl, that he looked up at me and said, ‘This must be very hard for you.’
When he was ill enough to be hospitalized in the Middlesex, the institution that had given him both his diagnoses, thirty years apart, first manic depression and then Aids, I would visit him several times a day. He wasn’t conscious, but I hoped to find him alert sooner or later so that he could make a will. Mario hated his mother, or rather ‘hatred’ was his name for the love he felt (he phoned her on a regular basis to keep her informed of the progress of his loathing). If he died without a will she would inherit as next of kin, in theory the last thing he wanted.
I had fudged the opportunity of suggesting the making of a will earlier on. Now it was a priority. I understood perfectly well that his dying intestate, leaving his property to someone he claimed to hate, was the outcome that most closely corresponded to his feelings for her, refusal without disconnection. I had to take his stated wishes at face value, just the same. If he was lucid on one of my visits I would contact a solicitor through the Trust and see what came of that.
Mario died, without returning to consciousness, the first time I spent more than a few minutes by his bedside. The nurses weren’t expecting this, and nurses at the Middlesex were knowledgeable and canny. Certainly he seemed to be recovering from this latest infection. It happened late on a Saturday evening. Flibbertigibbet that I was, I planned to go on to a bar for some night life after an hour or two by Mario’s bedside. Of course Mario didn’t ‘know I was there’, but to absorb the event in the immediate aftermath I needed to think that he did. He had many friends, but I was the only person who was at all close to him not to have known him before he was ill. Death was part of the part I played in his life. In my presence his body seemed to shut up shop with great efficiency, as if dying was no more than a knack, something like double-declutching (in the days of gearboxes without synchromesh) or even throwing a frisbee with the proper flick of the wrist that sends it sailing.