And the seasons pass, and all is change. Because that’s
the way it is with seasons, with the movement of time, with the turning of the
Earth, with the ageing of our bodies and the tiring of our minds also if it
comes to it . . . however much we wish it were not so.
It’s been a while, I know. And a lot of life has
happened, for me, for you, for everyone really, since I last made an entry
here. And as we all know, along with life there’s life’s dark companion, the
big old bad we tend not to talk about, because we are all, to one degree or
another, in denial of it. Such a crude thing, a hard terminology, is death, but
that’s what it is and unlikely to change, no matter how much everything else
changes. Death’s the constant. And there’s been a lot of it, too, in my days,
since last we spoke. More so than life, it’s been death that’s kept this blog
quiet for as long as it has been . . . along with the hardships of lives coming
to their end.
Time.
Passing.
So my parents died, and being my parents, they did it
in what felt like the hardest way imaginable. The uncomfortable disfiguration
of a severe, slow-crawling cancer in my mum’s case. A cancer that turned an
already small, narrowly-built woman into someone who looked like a famine
victim in her final years, and then began to eat into her face so that even she
didn’t recognise herself when she looked in a mirror. There was pain with it
too, and tiredness, the like of which most of us won’t be able to imagine. And
the cruellest of death’s thieves took my dad, vascular dementia. And being
dementia, it took him again and again and again each day and every day,
sometimes hour by hour, a new horror striking him as he slipped further away in
the wilderness of mirrors where our consciousness, where we ourselves stand, or
think we stand, a hologram of Id and Ego and all the rest. It’s the place where
we are as real as we believe ourselves to be, and where we lose ourselves,
ghostly vapour fogging the silver of the mirror, where tarnish rusts our
memories.
It was a hard time, looking after them, and though I
had passing help, the majority of the care-giving came from me. My mum went
first, her spirit finally broken as she saw her husband slipping away, his
memory all but broken. But I saw him through to the hospice with her at the
end, and that brave man who’d been the ogre of my childhood and then the hero
of my adult life was present enough to hold her hand and find the will to say
goodbye, to be there as the rise and fall of his sleeping wife’s chest came to
its end and her breath went, deflating and there no more. After which it was mostly
just me, looking after dad, and trying to help him cling onto who he was. I
barely saw my partner through these times, much as I love her and so wished she
were with me, and for the year when the pandemic was at its worst, and while
that scarecrowed egotist Boris Johnson’s bring-your-own-bottle parties were
being held each weekend at Downing Street, I sat with my dad as the world
sweated a fever of love, loss, denial, and greedy self interest. Alone in ways
I hadn’t really believed it was possible to be alone before, run ragged beyond
exhaustion at the twenty-four hour a day care my dad needed. I don’t think I’ve
ever known a despair so profound, nor a night so long and desperate as many of
the nights I knew then.
In the end, his passing was every bit as hard as my
mum’s had been. He forgot how to eat and drink, and so away he went, starving
and dehydrating, burning up in the bed my brother and I put up for him in his
living room at home. Was he there at the very end, did enough of him surface to
know we were there, his two sons? We spoke to him and perhaps a flicker of
something stirred. And then, toward the end of a long hard afternoon, as my
brother came back into the room and said he was there too, with me, my dad let
go his grip on life and went, leaving a grimacing death mask of the pain he’d
been in. There, and then not.
Just a week or two before he died, my dad - all but
monosyllabic and communicating through
gesture as much as anything else - surfaced enough to speak. How he did it, I
don’t know. But the man I’d known for so long was there enough to say the words
to me he’d never expressed so openly before: “It’s important that you understand I
love you.”
A day later, when he’d sunk back down under the
dementia, he was fighting me and trying to kill me. As I say, like my mum,
being not a person to do things the easy way, the fight - on his part, I was
just stopping him hurting himself - spilled onto the street and the police
arrived . . . But we got him calmed down, with the help of a visit to the
hospital, which sort of shocked him back to calm - and not very much longer
after that his final days were upon him.
I do wonder if he was himself at the very end, before
he finally let go, upon hearing my brother’s voice. I’d find it hard to believe
if not for that earlier rising he made, when he said words I’d never heard from
him but knew anyway. My partner’s dad made the point that because it’s
impossible to know, I get to choose. Choose whether my dad came back for his
final moments before going or not. And I should choose to believe he was there,
I really should. It would make life easier, to think he was restored – that the
vital part of him was there – but somehow I find it very hard to do that, however
much I want to believe it. But I’ll try and remember that, through the sadness
and all the rest.
There’s so much more I could say here, but I won’t.
There have been other losses, painful and cruel in their own ways - my Uncle
Ken, a character you couldn’t put into fiction because no one would believe in
him, my Uncle Arthur, a different character but equally as incredible, and even
Jess the cat, inherited when my mum and then my dad died. All gone. All having
left, in one way or another, their mark.
And so there’s this, the here and now, which is to say the
aftermath of all of this. I’m a changed man, both physically (hell, carrying
your dad up the stairs each night to bed as he is fighting you takes it out of
you) and mentally (I still leap out of bed if I’m sleeping and a car horn
sounds - luckily, I don’t live in a city - thinking it’s the pressure mat
sounding its horn, and telling me my dad was out of bed and needing help). I’ve
probably got PTSD from it all, is the truth of the matter.
But I’m learning to deal with it. Such as it is.
A change of season.
Bringing us all a little closer to winter.
