A Lonely Death
On the morning of Sunday, September 4th 1966, I was chatting to Mam while she was doing the dinner about Dad and what was wrong with him. She announced that he had cancer. At some point she must have mentioned the possibility of his death and I retorted that ‘the Emmersons don’t die at such an early age’. Something like 14 hours later he was dead.
It is very very strange how you can live so close to somebody who is fatally ill and not know it. Christmas 1965 had been rather strange. There was a coldness about the place that had never been evident before: Dad was rather subdued – he wasn’t himself. Not long after, I think it was February, the doctor arrived to see Dad. This was something that had not occurred before. The outcome was that he went into hospital to have an operation. He’d been into hospital a few years earlier for an operation on his nose but this was different, he didn’t return to work. Dad always went to work, even when he had severe hay fever during late June. Even so, it didn’t occur to me that anything serious was wrong that could not be cured, and anyway, he was indestructible.
The operation seemed to work and although he had a series of post-operative visits to Middlesbrough General for radiotherapy, he returned for a while to his old ebullient self. Even so, I can’t understand why I didn’t put two and two together. Then one fateful evening he suffered an attack of pain in the side of his face and head, which subsequently was accompanied by the loss of tension in the muscles of his face. The doctor was called and diagnosed Bell’s palsy, possibly caused by a draft from the car window. Again I didn’t read the signs correctly.
More time went by. I can’t exactly recall when, but he spent some time recuperating at Grandma’s back home in Darlington to give Mam a break: I remember this because I visited him after my first day at work in the foundry. He subsequently went back into hospital for more treatment, this time at Sedgefield. The severity of the situation still did not dawn on me, even when so many of my aunties and uncles turned up for his birthday in hospital. He returned home, as I later realised, to die, supplied with plenty of Brompton’s cocktail.
The events of that final Sunday are dominated by two things: Mam’s terrible news about his illness and our last Sunday tea as a whole family. Now that I knew what the stakes were I could join the fight. At around 5 ‘o’ clock I went upstairs and encouraged him to come down for tea: we nearly always had tinned fruit and Carnation milk. He sat in his chair by the television as I helped him eat accompanied by It’s a Knockout, a programme that I became extremely aversive to, for a long time. On going back to bed, I had to support him up the stairs by having him put his arm around my shoulders. I was devastated by how light he was. I have never forgotten the experience; a man who had fired railway locomotives, flown war planes and policed the streets of Durham County had been wasted in 6 months and now weighed no more than a child.
I don’t remember anything of the evening. However, at around half past midnight Dad had asked for some tea in his white pint pot. Mam and I were at the bedside: David, Richard and Victoria were asleep. He struggled to drink. The next thing I remember was him trying desperately to tell us something, but he was so weak that the words he was attempting to vocalise were undecipherable. A short time later he gave up and lay on his left side, Mam soothing him, while I clung to his back in what I realised were his last moments of life. His body made sounds like a great ship coming to grief on rocks. It was not long before he took his final breaths and all was still.
Why did a man I loved and revered choose not to share the agony of his fatal illness and death and leave me, and my brothers and sister, so unprepared for the desolate times to come?