Nobody wants their parents to outlive them. It's not the way?it should be. The thought of any parent having to bury their child is so awful, so?bleak. Yet that doesn't make it any more easy to lose your mum and dad. My mum, Winifred, died last Saturday, just over five and a?half years after my dad, John. A 50-year-old orphan is hadly the stuff of?grand tragedy. Yet the feeling of bereavement is so intense that it's virtually unbearable. My younger brother, Dave, feels just the same.
My mother suffered hugely before she?died, and you'd think that would make it easier, knowing that her pain has ended. But it doesn't. Instead, the?thought of how she spent the last eight months, with her illness ? renal cancer that had spread to her spine ? dominating utterly, robbing her gradually of every pleasure, every activity, every independence, before it?stopped toying with her and allowed her to go, is torture.
Worse, she'd never in the least been able to come to terms with the death of my father. So, although she still had happy times, she never stopped missing him, yearning for him, really. That Win struggled on for those years, carrying that huge emotional burden, only to be?dealt the blow of having to face a lingering death without him beside her, is wretched beyond belief.
One very cruel aspect of things was that my mother's death was in too many ways a protracted replay of my father's. Both of them turned up at the A&E department of the local hospital, in agony too excruciating to bear any longer, having complained of pain to their GPs for many months. Both received the diagnosis of the disease that would kill them during that trip, in that hospital. I was with my mum and dad when he was told that he didn't have digestive trouble after all, but incurable secondary cancer that had spread from his oesophagus to his liver.?John was told that people in his situation tended to survive for another four months, and he survived that long, almost to the minute. He spent his last weeks in a hospice, the hospice that my mother also died in. Except that she sat by his side every day. Desperately as he would have wanted to, John wasn't able to do that for her. None of her family were. We visited as much as we could, but none of us could be a constant, daily support, at her side for every miserable development, in the way that she had been there for him.
We'd tried to persuade my mum to come south to live after John had gone. She was from Essex, and my brother's in?London, too, not far from me. But while she was always distraught when our frequent visits came to an end, she couldn't face the idea of leaving the home she had shared with John since the beginning of the 1970s. She lived with her memories and they pretty much engulfed her. But she couldn't let?them go, or let go of the people and places that had been part of their daily life as a couple, and whose continuing presence comforted her.
Anyway, she'd never liked travelling and neither had my dad ? despite the fact that they'd travelled all the way from Essex to Scotland to start their married life on my dad's Lambretta. Eventually, Win stopped taking the train?to London, even at Christmas, and stopped wanting to leave the house for more than a few hours. This time last year, I'd booked a holiday for us all in Mull. But when we went to pick her up and drive her there, she said at the last minute that she didn't want to go. It was?a wonderful holiday, even without her. I wished so much that she had been there, with her grandchildren, in all that beauty. It exasperated me that she'd ducked it like that. Now, I see that she must already have been feeling much more ill than anyone realised.
When the consultant first called me, in November, explaining that Win had a?tumour in her spine, that could be shrunk to relieve the pain but not removed, my first reaction was to try to?have her transferred south. At that point, she thought her life would return to something like normal, as it more or?less had after she'd had a kidney removed almost three years before. We?did try to look after her in her own home, as Win so ardently wished, but eight days was the longest single stretch that she coped with at home. She was just too ill, too helpless. Every moment physically hurt. Next, I tried having her moved to my place in London. After a lot of discussion, she eventually decided not to do it, just a few weeks ago. In a?way, it was a relief, even though I'd hoped to take her on excursions and what-not once she was down here.
On my last visit to her, a couple of weeks ago, my mum had rallied a bit, and I hired a wheelchair cab to take us from the hospice to New Lanark, a place we'd loved as a family when we were kids, and had always carried on visiting. The Christmas before Dad died, he'd walked with us all the way up to the top of the Falls of Clyde.
Even though it rained, we had a great time. Win bought and wore a new scarf, and she wore lipstick for the first time in months, and looked pretty again. We watched the Falls and talked about John. We had lunch, probably the last meal she actually enjoyed. I had wanted her last months to be full of treats like this. But instead I wasted my time, dreaming that all this would happen once she was in London.
It wasn't until she'd gone that I?realised Win's refusal to move was probably right. These last few days, as Dave and I have slowly begun attending to the task of sorting out their things at home, have shown me that it was this, above all, that Win couldn't face. The ploughing through of a lifetime of mementos, deciding which had to stay and which could go ? it's all so touching, so heartbreaking. I was moved to tears by a little paperback book called Winter Health that had been?a fixture around the house when I?was a toddler, and which, of course, I'd?forgotten about. It's?when you can't work out why these things were hung on to that it all seems most poignant.
Maybe because the second world war,?and rationing, had dominated the childhood of my parents, they were careful with things. My mum got a glass jug with matching tumblers as a wedding present ? really nice. But the glass was delicate, and a couple of them got broken. So the rest went into the cupboard, for safety, and now that jug and the remaining tumblers have outlasted them both. Win and John so often saved things for best, or for the future. They have both run out of future.
I've had a difficult relationship with?my mother ? who was very much a traditional woman in many ways ? ever since I insisted on going to university, having a career, all that. In a way, that's what the ongoing travel-struggle was about. Win always thought that since I'd been the one who'd insisted on leaving, it was up to me to make the effort to keep the relationship going. She didn't seem much interested in hearing about my work, and I resented that, the feeling that she disapproved. Hidden away in?the cupboards, I found loads of clippings, even copies of old trade magazines that I worked on in my early 20s, none of which I'd even kept myself. Yet, this is the first time in my life that I've even been able to write a personal piece without fretting that my mother might see it and take umbrage, which she did quite frequently. It does not feel?like much of a liberation.
My mum left a lovely note for us, saying that although she had indeed suffered greatly in her loss of John, it had been wonderful to love and be loved with such constance and profoundity. She told us all how much she adored us. I want so much to lay my forehead against hers and tell her that she is adored in return. But it's too late now.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/my-mother-died-unbearably-intense
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