Taking a cue from the TV Licensing people, I can be persistent, too.
Two years ago I watched my mother-in-law die. It sounds like the beginning of a revenge fantasy joke. She checked into a hospital in Austin Texas; a week and a day later she was gone.
She was 77. She had ovarian cancer, undiagnosed till the end despite obvious symptoms that something was amiss, including a blood clot, bloating, and no appetite.
My wife Therese and I had flown to the States, informed of an upcoming operation, pessimistic of her chances despite an upbeat assessment that she’d be up and walking around in 4 to 5 days.
When we arrived at the hospital she already looked dead.
The first thing she said was “You came.” Then, to me, “You’re wearing glasses. You look old.” We all held hands then they wheeled her away.
When she came out of surgery she was in a great deal of pain, so they gave her morphine with a morphine chaser. The surgeon had found cancer, far too much. The prognosis went off a cliff.
She was able to talk for two days. She asked me to make it stop hurting. She asked for my forgiveness. (We had been estranged even as we became inlaws a long time ago.) She didn’t ask my wife for the same, though she had practically forsaken Therese for decades.
Her last words to Therese were “Am I getting better or am I getting worse?”
She told her husband, “You said we would go together.” She sounded hurt. He said she would be waiting for him. It felt awkward to be witnessing these intensely private moments between a couple who had been married for 53 years. Theirs wasn’t a marriage made in heaven, but that didn’t really matter at a time like this.
We gave her a sponge dipped in tea. She was Sri Lankan, where tea is in the blood.
At one point a doctor came in and asked “If your heart stops, do you want to be resuscitated?” She ignored the doctor.
On the second day the priest came. Then the morphine, given in ever larger doses as a soft parachute into death, took her to a place beyond talking. This did not, however, end her murmured distress. She did not seem to go gently into that good night.
The dying room was kept dark. The five of us kept watch: husband, two daughters, daugher #2’s ex-, and me. Other relatives came and went.
When we were told she might die at any minute, we watched her as closely as you will watch someone about to leave forever. The minutes ticked away and turned into hours. At one point – it strikes me as odd how we all reached this point together – when it was clear she had a little more time left, we all abruptly dove into our laptops or phones or whatever connections we had brought with us to the outside world. This was life going on, I guess.
We had to leave for the UK a few days into her troubled sleep. Therese’s last hours with her mother were a nightmare. She had been moved into a small, cramped room, like a ticked box being put into storage. My wife’s sister, never easy to get along with, had switched into gargoyle mode, jealously guarding the deathbed from what she saw as intrusions into her own private grief. Even her father was not immune, and was pushed away. Having decided to give only the most immediate family some space, I didn’t bear witness to any of this, but waited in a kind of stasis in our oasis of a cool hotel room.
Three mornings after we got home Therese learned that her mother had died the previous midnight. She cried, and I held her. Four inlaws between us, and she was the first to draw the short straw.
She still thinks about her every day, she says. Ira could have treated her much better, so many of the thoughts would not go into any book of remembrance you’d want to keep. Still, you can’t not think of the woman who brought you into the world then spent half your life angry at you for not staying in the mould she’d prepared. You can be sad, and wish it had ended differently, that so much had been different. You can listen to your father on the phone, who has spent the last two years wanting to die, and try to cope with that. You keep living the life you’ve made for yourself, far away from where you were born and who you were born from. Perhaps you wonder about the next short straw to be drawn.
I am officially declaring today, the Ides of July, Take Your Own Advice Day. This is the one day of the year set aside to thoughtfully consider what we say to others and make sure that we are listening to ourselves.
For example, I often bid my wife “Be careful!” This coming from a man who has been knocked unconscious three times. I also nag her to make sure she gets enough sleep, as she runs a permanent deficit…
Other historical events that happened on July 15th, according to Wikipedia:
1099 – First Crusade: Christian soldiers take the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem after the final assault of a difficult siege. Needless to say the church has been a rich source of advice throughout history, much of which it has itself struggled to follow. “Thou shalt not kill” springs to mind.
1799 – The Rosetta Stone is found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign. This is OT: I just thought it was a fun fact.
1838 – Ralph Waldo Emerson delivers the Divinity School Address at Harvard Divinity School, discounting Biblical miracles and declaring that Jesus… was not God. He did not, however, go so far as to call him a naughty boy. Emerson was actually pretty good at following his own advice, talking the talk (“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”) and frequently walking the walk. However, the author of Self Reliance did rely for much of his income on an inheritance from his first wife, who died young; he even had to file a lawsuit to get at the money.
1870 – Reconstruction Era of the United States: Georgia becomes the last of the former Confederate states to be readmitted to the Union. Georgia’s motto is “Wisdom, Justice, Moderation”. Georgia would later be one of those states in the American South that had a spot of trouble meeting at least a couple of those bars in the civil rights wars nearly a century later.
1858 – Emmeline Pankhurst is born. Pankhurst was a pioneering British suffragette, who like Moses would not live to see the promised land, as she died mere weeks before parliament passed the Representation of the People [equal franchise] act of 1928. If my quick researches have not uncovered examples of her failing to follow her own advice, it’s because after reading a bit of her life and struggles I was minded to give her a pass on that score. I especially liked this anecdote: During a tour of Bathurst, the mayor showed her a new building which would become the Home for Fallen Women. Pankhurst replied: “Ah! Where is your Home for Fallen Men?”
1984 – National Ice Cream Day. The legal underpinning for the important piece of legislation making this day possible received president Ronald Reagan’s signature about a week before. Reagan famously said “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Help us enjoy ice cream?
2006 – Twitter is launched, becoming one of the largest social media platforms in the world. Twitter itself has 42.9 million followers, but only follows 138. While it would be unreasonable to expect them to show commensurate reciprocal Twitter love, this does seem a bit lopsided.
A policeman helps Emmeline cross the street as she struggles to ask him not to do her any favours.
So ask yourself, is there any advice that you may not normally be so great about taking, but give to friends, loved ones or the world-at-large from your choice of social media platform?
Next in this series is Scotney Castle, which narrowly avoids East Sussex to land in Kent. When most people think of Scotney, they probably think this:
Instead I’m going to concentrate on the house up the hill.
It’s chock-a-block with the usual paintings
The horsey set considers an offer
Old photographs
old books
and bells to remind you who was in charge.
As you wander from well-appointed room
to room
Dinner for 10? Not feeling sociable today, Sir?
you can almost imagine living there, including the helpful volunteer staff on hand to answer any questions, like Google. It also gives you ideas for your own cheerful hovel. For example, I’d love to have one of these
to coddle my favourites. The pantry is definitely better stocked than ours
including sugar cubes for the horses.
Margaret Thatcher rented rooms on the estate for years, possibly to be close to Disgusted down the road in Tunbridge Wells. (Denis also liked a nearby golf course, according to one of the volunteers.) Wikipedia says the flat she was installed in was called the Belfry, which is such an obvious setup for a joke it would be unsportsmanlike to go there. I don’t think she was on an Assured Shorthold Tenancy, either.
