Precious Time!
Precious Time!
It was a beautiful, shiny, freezing cold morning, January 31st 2005. In one sense this date is not the appropriate moment to honour the death of my mother because it does not resonate properly with the rhythm of life associated with the typical Sunday night and Monday morning on which she died. Thursday the 31st does not have the same capacity to re-engender the emotions of a dreary Sunday night at the back-end of January. It was a Sunday night on which Dad’s death began, just as it was a Sunday night when I received the phone call from Pauline, my sister in law, that roused me from sleep with the news that Mam had been taken to hospital having collapsed at home. Pathetically my first thoughts were optimistic: Mam might now have take the help she so badly needed. Not long afterwards the phone rang again, interrupting my dithering and disabusing me of any thought of the positive: my brother Richard said that I should make the 170 mile journey to Darlington right now! What should I wear, what should I take? I needed a list or something; precious time that should be spent with her was being wasted, time to offer her comfort, possibly my last time with her.
The journey was too long, even in my beautiful estoril coloured M3. I arrived at the hospital only to get lost in the car park. I found her breathing heavily and desperately into a mask supplying oxygen, unconscious, in one of the places she most feared, the hospital, where too many catastrophes had already befallen her. I got close to her so that she could feel me and hear me. I spoke to her words of comfort just as she had done so often for me. I sang to her the songs that she had sung to me, so tenderly and joyfully when I was little, to make me feel safe-enough for contented sleep; songs that Grandad Maffham had sung to her – not smart, sophisticated music but music of home, loyalty and love. I rubbed her cold feet with the bunion that had always fascinated me, which had made it difficult for her to find shoes that would fit. I didn’t need to think about what she needed, I just knew. It’s what you know through love and common sense; she taught me that. It’s one of the ways you know what love is; knowing what was needed without needing to ask. Some time later I went to find the doctors to see what they knew, only to find when I got back that they had removed the mask to let her take her last breaths: she had apparently had some sort of seizure which they thought signalled the end. In these circumstances they had the better of me – I just acquiesced to their judgement. I clasped her hand for the last time, clinging to those beautiful, slender fingers that had made me what I am, fingers that scraped my face on school mornings, chapped and cut by too much housework. I held her hand till it was time to let go. The nurse removed her hair clips: I put them somewhere safe, they were sacred and ours. At least now she would no longer have to suffer the pain of her disintegrating body and the accompanying frustrations that drain the fight from even the brave and indomitable. It’s never easy for those who know love to give up; she would never give up. It’s never easy for a young woman alone, the two men she relied on, father and husband, dead far too soon. She exhausted her body on all she had left – her four children; such humble honesty unusual for a beautiful woman. Now she can rest having given it all. I am truly privileged!