It is unreal yet a fact that we can only truly reach out to our parents when they are less and less present, that the final farewell has to come before we no longer confront each other as parents and children.
If anyone had told me fifteen or twenty years ago that mourning also contains rage, seething rage, or surges of unbridled desire, I would have nodded pityingly as if listening to an obscure mathematical equation being explained by a fruitcake. The raw blessing of being knocked to and fro in the surf of longing, tumbling with the surging tide, to break on the beach, to feel the fear and sadness being pulverized. Honi soit qui mal y pense. One can be too young, or at least too wet behind the ears. One can know everything but not all knowledge has already been embodied. If only there were someone who was given time, before the body turns out the lamps in all its rooms, to write down what it is, if it is only: there’s not much to it. It’s over just like that.
I try to tell myself — it seems to be best for everyone, not least myself — that there is no longer a person contained in that body. That when you feel in my drawers for spoons or forks or try to pull the hem of the tablecloth level with the edge of the table with your fingers, nothing more is involved than a set of reflexes, remnants of a memory of actions that flares up momentarily in your neurones.
It’s easier when I write about it than when you’re in front of me. My imagination, that most human of our characteristics, gets in my way, and despite everything reconstructs a personality from that battered mosaic. Then I find it difficult to think of the moment when we shall have to decide that it’s enough. Then I think, though I am not religious at alclass="underline" a human being has a soul.
But it may be that we need precisely that illusion to be able to let her go lovingly.
Were we right to keep silent with her? For as long as she could still speak, however falteringly, she never indicated that she felt there was anything seriously wrong. But what about afterwards, when language had already gone, but there may still have been some more or less lucid awareness in her mind? Should we have said: you’re ill, Mum, but it doesn’t matter, we’re with you. You’re forgetting all sorts of things, and you’ll forget even more, but it doesn’t matter.
Would she have wanted to give some sign? There is no answer to those questions, although they will go on gnawing at me as long as I live.
I don’t believe she would ever have opted for an assisted death. When she had cancer she reacted in an oddly calm way. She seemed ready to accept that it could end badly, but fortunately it ended well.
What can make me angry is the thought that all kinds of grousers and plaster saints will find her suffering more edifying than the painful dilemmas, the struggles or the pain of those who do decide to bow out in good time — and by extension the suffering and concern of my father and his children — more virtuous then those who help and support their loved ones in their conscious decision to end their own lives. The impoverished view of morality this expresses, and the exalted way in which the grocers of suffering set themselves as prophets.
If only I could have just one look inside that head of hers. If only I could check to see if there is still “anyone” there. I was in the bath last week and heard on the radio a piece about scientists who have succeeded in talking to whales or dolphins. Even whales are more communicative than my mother now.
If I could look into her head, and someone were to say: I want to stick it out to the bitter end, I would be reassured. But if the message was: let me go, please — I wouldn’t hesitate for a second, not a second.
When he drops by he leaves her sitting in the car, it would be too much fuss forcing her to get out.
How are things? I ask.
Pretty poor, he says. Very poor indeed.
When we say goodbye I see her figure behind the window glass of the car, the outline of her head, her thin shoulders.
I knock on the glass. She doesn’t look up, she doesn’t wave, she no longer smiles.
I have leaked out of her.
The district nurse calls in twice a day. In the morning she pulls my mother’s nightdress off, washes her and helps her on with her clothes.
She also replaces the bag hanging round my mother’s waist twice a day, cleans the hole in her abdomen and the rubber of the ring that keeps the bag in place.
Twice a day my mother is in a panic. When we lay her on the sofa, on her back, she grabs my forearms tightly with both hands and as we lower her there is fear in her eyes, as if we are pushing her underwater, indescribable and hardly bearable.
Keep hold of her, says the nurse, as she detaches the bag and my mother cries like a child. Are you OK? It’s a bit of a shock, the smell, I know…
But I’m not shocked by the smell. I’m shocked by the sight of my mother’s body: pale, emaciated. Not an ounce of fat left under her skin, her muscles sinewy and thin as threads or cables. And her sadness, her infinite sadness.
I might as well put her nappy on too, the nurse says casually. Then she can go straight to bed.
I wonder why that sentence echoes in my head for so long.
I stroke her cheek and her forehead. She calms down, and when it is all over she lies on the sofa and looks at me. Not a sweet look, but fear lying low, like our cats when there’s a storm and they crawl under the table and stare at us wide-eyed, as if it’s our fault.
And so that happens twice a day, again and again, because by evening the whole morning ritual is forgotten again.
We probe her like a piece of stone that has fallen from space. We take samples in search of life forms, death forms. We listen with stethoscopes to what is happening beneath her parchment surface.
She has the heart of an eighteen-year-old, say the doctors.
We push needles into the relief map of skin that her arms have become.
Her blood couldn’t be better, say the doctors. All the values are normal.
It’s only her muscular stiffness, say the doctors, that causes concern. But how do you get someone who’s no longer aware of anything to do stretching and limbering exercises? How do you give someone who’s in a constant state of panic a massage?
She must become calmer, say the doctors. Otherwise there will come a moment when she will be using more energy than she absorbs by eating and drinking.
Cardiovascular.
Intramuscular.
My mother crumbles into fragments of rock-hard Latin.
We are like a ground-control station that with all kinds of techniques is keeping a precarious satellite in orbit around the earth — but for how much longer?
Every morning at about ten, except for Mondays, he takes her in the car to the home where she can receive day care. He could also have her collected by a minibus, the dementia bus, which every day bumps its way along the country roads for miles around, carrying its load of superannuated schoolchildren, but he doesn’t want to, and I understand him. He takes her in the car. He only accompanies her as far as the entrance. He stops at the sluice gate that screens off the area where she is from the exit.
One of the old ladies, who is also in day care, recognizes her and pulls up a chair for her by the big window. And so that’s where she sits. The nurses have asked me if they can pop her in the bath on Tuesday.
That’s all right by me.
At home it’s impossible to get her into the shower any longer. It seems that hot water calms her down.
That she still responds when the nurse calls her name.
My godchild comes to visit. He goes into the garden with his younger brother in search of skulls and bones from the blackbirds and pigeons that cats have caught. Their father and I drink white wine, and talk about life, about loss, about the life urge that in unguarded moments translates into raw pleasure, singing hunger. He lost his father early.