What my week of coping with death showed me

Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid…

The last few weeks have been a whirl – literary festivals, the Labour Party Conference, NOON events and Circles – but this week I have been forced to slow down. The stop was physical: My back hurt and I needed to rest and recuperate, involving bed and stillness. But as the old phrase goes, life is what happens while you are making other plans. That’s because in one way or another, I was coping with death.

Ultimately we are disposable to everyone but our family. And sometimes our nearest and dearest really need us and everything else becomes unimportant.

• Catherine Mayer on the physicality of grief
• What to do on your “sad anniversaries”
• ‘Understanding my father after his death’

This week my mother-in-law has been gravely ill. We got that call. You know the one. From the hospital advising us that she was being moved to a private room, was very weak and visiting hour restrictions no longer applied. That’s NHS-speak for: Get down here, doesn’t matter when you arrive, just come.

A race to her bedside

We got in the car at 6am in London and drove up to Bromsgrove in the Midlands (where she has lived for the last 6 decades).  Past her sheltered housing, her flat abandoned when she was taken into hospital nearly two months ago. Through the red brick suburban sprawl to an example of the best of the NHS: the Princess of Wales Community Hospital.

Her ward full of fading ladies, grey/white hair, frail bodies – attended by the kindest nurses. Nothing was too much trouble: A sippy cup of tea. A change of clothes. A rearrangement of her lolling head.

She drifted in and out. Smiling at us sometimes. The moments when she opened her eyes and really looked – and saw us – felt like precious jewels. Reverently, we watched her sleep, clocking shudders, grimaces – the changing aspect of her expressions as they flitted across her naked face. Standing watch the way we did when our babies were newly born and we’d hover over the cot and watch them breathe. Anxious witnesses to the extraordinary fact of their existence.

Watching my mother-in-law, I thought back over our 30 years. How she was once a stranger but how now I felt such a strong sense of a link between her and me and my precious girls.

This fading human is their grandmother, mother of their dad. Although we are not technically blood relatives, I have carried her descendants in my womb, so we are indeed now all of one flesh. Kin. I sat and stroked her bony leg through the covers and tears rolled down my cheeks.

There is a banal everyday quality to these enormous moments – the surroundings belying the enormity of what is transpiring. A soul hovering between life and death, balancing twixt this world and the next as nurses bring tea or offer plastic packets of shortbread biscuits.

Is this familiar? Coping with death and illness as the real grit

It is such a Queenager experience, this sitting with someone beloved who is leaving us. This is the big stuff. The real grit of life. Being present in the preciousness of these final times. There is nothing to do but to be there. We come and sit, not really knowing quite the purpose but the urgency of that presence trumping everything.

She is not my mother but she is the mum of the man I have loved for nearly 3 decades, whose children I have borne. His pain and loss is also mine, ours. Ultimately we are all each other, interconnected, interwoven.

It is at these massive times of transition – at the astral portal itself – that the bones of life itself become clear. What the true things are that matter … and what really doesn’t. The once-so-important party or deadline suddenly revealed as truly not consequential at all.

We popped out for some lunch and at the next table were a young couple, the dad holding their newborn, shushing and rocking it, walking around the pub – proud in his care. Life at its beginnings.

Then we were driving the country lanes. The yellows and golds of the leaves against the blue sky felt hyperreal.

Back home the surface of the pond is littered with red and golden leaves, brushing my bare arms; lurid green algae luxuriating in the plenteousness of nutrients. “Fall” as Americans (like our own Jennifer here at NOON) call it. The water down at 13 degrees, the shiver of winter. Darkness descends earlier, the year fades away.

Saying a final goodbye

On top of the bedside vigil, the funeral of an old friend. An old colleague whose known me since my 20s. On the order of service, the cheery pictures, his favourite songs (The Beatles, mainly). The brave speech by his young daughter, her voice quavering. Tears rolling down my cheeks. Almost like a caress. So many old hacks crammed into the Golders Green crematorium – where I have already said goodbye to too many people I love, done so much coping with death.

This, then, is the bitterness and sadness of midlife. The wrenching grief. The endings of lives: Some way too soon, some appropriate and well lived; all sad. What was such vivid present becomes the past and those whom we have know and who know and have known us – including as we once were – die. And when they die, a bit of us dies too. Gone are the parts only they knew, the jokes and banter, the precious times shared.

I contemplate never again tucking into one of my mother-in-law’s chocolate  cakes: Buttercream icing in the middle, hardened chocolate on top. Her quiche – my husband’s favourite – which I can never replicate. Never to be tasted again.

In my grief I think of all the others I’ve loved and lost… and then I remember…

What we can take away from these moments

My late stepfather insisted we owe death a living: That while death destroys a man, the idea of death saves him.

He’s right. I’m left feeling sad, of course, but with a renewed hunger for life itself. For plump seafood and a cold glass of Chablis, for garlic potatoes and the dapple on the water through the willow and golden light dancing on the tips of the poplars. For the hilarity of silly jokes and ridiculous nicknames, tramping up hills in fresh blue air or immersion into the delicious chill of the October water – and the azure whizz of the kingfisher.

Dear Queenagers – we all pass through these gloomy times, so I wish you joy in the small things, which are actually everything. The touch of a hand. A rambling conversation with an old friend. A hot bath and a riveting book.

None of us ever know how many days we have left, particularly with those we love. Hold them tenderly. Feel it all. Live each day as if you really mean it…. That’s all we ever have.

Lots of love

Eleanor

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