There are
no tasting toes to accompany this entry. This is not about the taste, it is
about the experience. The experience in question was the evening of my mother’s
death in October last year, and the dram that I shared with my Dad in the quiet bungalow he and my
mum had shared for the last 15 years of her life. They had spent the first 45
years of their married lives in the house where I had been born, a small,
semi-detached house - tiny kitchen (3m x 2m), front and back room, tiny
bathroom, one double bedroom, one single bedroom and a box room masquerading as
a third bedroom - home to six of us. At that time it represented a monumental
step up in fortune and standard of living although I wasn't aware of that at
the time. Both my parents were from poor, working class roots (houses with
outside toilets, no heating or hot running water), and the move to the semi was
a significant one on a number of levels.
Having
spent many happy years there, the decision to move was not one that was taken
lightly. In many ways it was prompted by a perceived decline in the quality of
the neighbourhood, and a recognition that, with "older" age
approaching and my dad's knees not being what they were, a move could provide a
more suitable environment in which to enjoy their twilight years. So it was
with much enthusiasm (on my mother’s part), and a high level of anxiety and
uncertainty (on my dad's part), that they moved to the bungalow where my Dad
now lives.
Mum's
death was fairly unexpected. The illness leading up to it and the associated
complications that finally took her from us, lasted about 6 weeks in all. That
period had involved a number of hospital admissions, time in a council
assessment home, visits to the GP, and minor alterations to the bungalow to
accommodate her failing health. The merciless thread woven into the experience
was the pain that she was in, a pain that didn't respond to any treatment that
was fired at it, a pain that wracked her body, contorted her movement, a pain
so consuming that her vocabulary during that time consisted of wincing groans
interspersed with increasingly fleeting moments of lucidity and connection with
those around her.
The day
and evening of her passing were relatively quiet save for the normal hospital
hubbub. Mum's two remaining sisters and respective husbands spent some time
with her, my two sisters, their husbands, the grandchildren and myself were
there for most of the day. It was clear to us that mum was not long for this
world but the dilemma arose as the evening wore on - should we stay, not
knowing how long she would hang on for, or should we go home and get some sleep
in order to gather strength for what could be another long day? On the doctors
and nurses advice we took the latter choice on the proviso that, if there was a
marked deterioration, we would be called back immediately. No more than 10
minutes after arriving home the phone rang and we rushed back to the hospital
(a journey of no more than 15 minutes) only to find that mum had died.
Extract
from book. Her eyes surrendered two weeks before, finally, her pious body
broke, and her spirit rose through ghosted sheets, through the wrought fabric
of the flimsy hospital room, down corridors filled with "worker
bee" nurses, through the potent cocktail of anguish and hope, the banal
tedium of bedpans and drugs, past x-rays and "why now's?", up
through the not so fab, prefab shell and into.... air....deep, crisp, clean,
late evening autumnal air.....Hello God, nice to meet you after all this
time".
That she
died in the presence of strangers was not an issue. To all intents and purposes
she had been oblivious to her surroundings for some time. Indeed, in some ways
it would have been more distressing to hear her last stertorous breaths as she
finally left this world. Tears were shed, goodbyes were uttered, and Dad spent
some time alone with the woman who had been his “constant” for more than 60
years.
We
returned home, my sisters, their families, my Dad and I, to the bungalow that
was now home for one. We talked, we were silent, we smiled, we cried, we
uttered the full complement of clichés that are somehow married to discussions
of loved ones recently divorced from this world, ("she was at peace in the
end", "her suffering is over now", etc), we began to use the
word "was" in relation to my mum.
When a
heavy silence descended on the house, after the rest of the family had left, my
Dad poured two glasses of Bells Whisky. To his own glass he added copious
amounts of lemonade (I remember cracking a slight smile), my own glass remained
free of any contaminants. Now Bells blend is not one of my "go to"
drams. Indeed, it is not a whisky that I have ever purchased. This isn't due to
any inbuilt whisky snobbishness; it is simply that there are so many other
drams that I prefer. This wasn't about the whisky itself, but it was about
sharing a whisky with my dad at a moment that represented something greater
than the sum of its parts; two men sharing a dram, a father and son trying to
make some sense of a series of moments, scratching around and failing to
discover, meaningful, insightful, things to say. It was as if simply hearing each other’s
voices, filling the air with the noises of life, was enough to puncture holes
in the powerful, pregnant silence. A couple of drams, a temporary softening of
the acute sense of loss, a subtle shift into a contemplation of things beyond
the immediate - to memories of my mum as she was. Perhaps the seeds of
coping were being sown at that very moment.
Goodnight mum.....
