by Emily Dean
‘Wishing I was Lucky’ by Wet Wet Wet suddenly filled the car. I was transported back to the little two-up two-down we lived in with Mum after our family imploded. Rach was the custodian of the precious Top of The Pops video on which we had recorded our favourites. It had ‘Rach and Em’s music – do not wipe!!’ scrawled across it in felt tip. ‘Rach, get the tape out!’ I used to yell and she would tolerantly indulge my fondness for Wet Wet Wet’s frothy blue-eyed soul, which sat awkwardly next to her archive of Morrissey’s reluctant outings on the same show.
The cheesy Eighties synths built into the chorus and I thought about what Rach would say if she were here. “Wishing I Was Lucky”? That’s our relationship-defining song? Fucking hell.’
The medical team was gathered in the waiting room when we arrived, lined up formally as if awaiting a visit from wealthy benefactors. They greeted us with the deference of those charged with delivering difficult news.
My mum sat down with an expression of disbelief etched on her face. She was facing the moment she had promised herself wouldn’t come. And then it did.
They told us that that Rach probably wouldn’t last the day.
I fell into Adam’s arms as we slowly absorbed the news that was lurking around the corner, waiting to strike. We tried to restore some semblance of calm as we prepared to enter Rach’s room.
My mum’s face was a mask of shock. ‘I still believe she will get through this,’ she said, almost angrily.
‘We have to listen to the medical team. They’ve told us, Mum. Rach is going to die today.’
It came out all wrong. Cruel, unforgiving, brutal. The force of my tone was propelled by a knot tightening in frustration at our wildly differing approaches to this disaster. I was the adult finally snapping at a child when they repeatedly do what they were warned against. I knew why my words had landed so heavily. The detached, professional opinions of the consultants were one thing – but to hear the truth from me, so unadorned, clearly felt like a profound betrayal.
She looked at me with fury and confusion. ‘I am not going to write her off. I am not like you. I have to believe,’ she snapped.
‘I don’t know what to say to you anymore,’ I sighed.
I left the room, marching angrily through the doors into the ladies’ loos, and sat down on the cubicle floor. Stung by the suggestion that I’d written my sister off. Our exchange was prompted by fear – that we were losing her, that we were helpless to do anything about it. And we were fighting for ownership of her. Perhaps we always had been. But this conflict was crass here, today. Rach always said, ‘Never fall out at Christmas – it’s a bit Noel and Liam Gallagher.’ And I figured we had to assume she would extend that rule to an intensive care unit.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I told her, re-entering the room, soothed by time out and canteen tea, that comforting all-purpose solution in soap operas that actually holds some truth. ‘I just want you to be prepared.’
‘I know, I know. I’m sorry too, darling,’ she said, holding out her arms, and I nuzzled my head into her neck and the woody amber scent of my childhood. But her eyes were glassy with refusal to really take in what was happening.
I called my father. He hadn’t been part of our vigil over the last few days, something he accepted with good-natured grace, aware that his role in our lives had been too erratic to now warrant a place in the heart of it. I’d called him with updates about Rach and he had spoken eloquently about our collective pain. His sadness never dissolved into an entire loss of composure. Perhaps his philosophical outlook made him resigned to the tragedies of human experience. But he was still a father, about to lose his daughter.
The night before, I mentioned to him that I’d spotted a painting of Baroness Burdett Coutts in the Marsden. She was the Victorian philanthropist who financed the hospital. She also built Holly Village, and this odd coincidence brought back memories of that brief period in our childhood when we had something that felt like a home. ‘How fascinating,’ he had said, suddenly reaching for a TS Eliot quote to capture the symbolism of life’s circle.
‘As Tom said in the Four Quartets, “In my beginning is my end …”’
‘Yeah. Keep it light, Dad.’
He chuckled. It was the standard Morecambe and Wise comedy dynamic we had always employed – him as slightly pompous highbrow, me as sceptical lowbrow, shooting him down.
I met him today at the intensive-care unit doors, messenger bag, as always, slung across his chest. He was holding a copy of The Times and raising a crumpled moist tissue to his eyes. I showed him to the area where the transparent gloves and aprons were kept and prepared him for the atmosphere on the other side of the glass.
‘We mainly just talk quietly to comfort her, Dad. I’m not sure how much of it she takes in now. But … nothing heavy.’ It was my way of saying ‘don’t start quoting passages from Hamlet.’ And he nodded, self-aware enough to know that his ornate rhetoric might not sit comfortably here.
His face was a complicated blend of affection and agony as he stood over the bed where Rach lay, breathing slowly underneath the paraphernalia of survival.
‘Hey there, Wodge,’ he whispered, using her childhood moniker, based, like so many, on a toddler’s struggle to master their own name.
He joined us in our peaceful low hum of chat, and then suddenly started telling my mum about a David Hockney exhibition he had seen recently.
‘I found Hockney’s landscapes sensational – yes they’re fundamentally less elegant …’ He continued, talking about the Californian golden age and Hockney’s graphic strengths.
I looked at my mum, in panic. Oh Christ. It was all getting a little late-night-arts-review. Not really final hours around a deathbed.
‘It’s on until April,’ he said. The words floated in the air. I didn’t want April mentioned. Exhibitions that would still be here when Rach wasn’t.
It was my fault. I had forgotten to tell him the first rule: we don’t talk about tomorrow in the intensive care unit.
I gave my mother a despairing glance.
‘Darling, I think Em would prefer not to dwell on the Hockney, maybe?’ she said.
‘Yes, yes of course.’ He shook his head at his own lapse in judgment. ‘You’re absolutely right.’
Every slightly outré remark my father had ever made had seen the three of us scurrying to cover it, leaping in like disaster-response units, trying to restore the social norm. There were only two of us now to share that workload. Thank God my mum had covered my shift this time.
Rach slept on peacefully, unaware of the complex pre-death dynamics taking place beside her.
I glanced at the clock, my new enemy. Willing it to stop.
‘The Hockney thing, Dad,’ I said when we left the room so that the nurses could make Rach comfortable. ‘It’s just … she loved Hockney. And I hate that she won’t get to see it.’
He offered a hug. It wasn’t something he and I did that often. Expansive affectionate gestures always belonged to my mother’s arena. He tapped his hand repeatedly on my back, in that resolute way of someone raised by nannies in the 1930s, who learned about feelings from literature. ‘Dad, you’re so un-gesturing,’ I once complained after some stiff hand-tapping on a childhood birthday. ‘I think,’ he said, laughing, ‘the word you are perhaps searching for is “undemonstrative”, Emmy.’ But the stoical rhythm was strangely reassuring today, anchoring me in the past.
It was a couple of hours later when one of the nurses said, ‘We thought maybe now would be a good time to move Rachael next door. If you would like.’
I knew what this meant.
The medical team had agreed we would let her slip into death peacefully in a smaller room, a quieter, less clinical environment where she would be liberated from all the machines.
My mum took one of the many bunches of flowers that had been sent and placed them in a vase. I found a patterned scarf in Rach’s bag and laid it on the foot of the bed. The ward sister found a candle for us to light.
The nurses opened the door for us. Her blonde hair was escaping from a hair elastic in the way it tended to when she greeted you at the house, Bertie on hip, mug of tea in hand, Giggle panting at her heels. She looked more like herself again, free from all the apparatus. As if she were just making the most of the brief bliss of a lie-in, before the family noise erupted.
We sat silently and watched her breathing. I focused on the familiar curve of her mouth. ‘How come Rach got the blue eyes AND the big lips,’ I used to complain. Those ‘great brows’ that she always resisted over-plucking, calling it ‘a fast route to Coronation Street-pensioner.’ Her face was more familiar than my own, a monument to everything that reminded me of safety. It was home. As comforting and soothing as the smell of baby lotion or antique books or the sight of motorway signs on the journey back from Heathrow. I just needed her to hang on a little longer. We needed more time.
She exhaled slow, familiar breaths. The ones I used to hear when we shared a bedroom in Holly Village, when Rach’s ability to switch off her active mind meant she always slipped off to sleep first. The ones that annoyed me when she dozed off during Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and I yelled, ‘Rach, what was the point of even renting this video? Wake up!’ The ones we have been listening to in her bedroom over the last few weeks as she encouraged us to carry on talking to her. ‘I’m just resting my eyes for a bit.’
And then suddenly, they stopped.
‘Rach?’ I said. ‘Has she gone?’
Mum called for the nurse.
The nurse came in, took Rach’s pulse and said softly, ‘Rachael’s left us now.’
I was glad she had said ‘left us’. It made it sound as if it was her decision to finally leave, rather than a life that was stolen.
Adam and I cried on each other’s shoulders. My mother fell into my father’s arms, united in the shared loss of a child.
‘The best one has gone,’ my father wailed suddenly to my mother. ‘She was the apple of our eye.’
I was stung by those words, even if they were just Alzheimer’s robbing him of self-censorship. But I believed them to be true. She was the best one. It felt like a hideous miscarriage of justice, as if someone had messed up our family narrative. The fast-living, stability-avoidant loner is clearly the character who should have burnt out mid-way, while the responsible, maternal heroine makes it through to the uplifting conclusion. Fewer lives would have taken a direct hit if it had been me; the collateral damage would have been less devastating. She had a more fundamental right to a future than me.
‘He didn’t mean that, Em,’ Adam said quickly, seeing my face. ‘Don’t be upset. He’s in shock.’
But my father had spoken the truth. And the truth is harder to recover from than a lie. Rach didn’t live the kind of life that deserved to burn out swiftly and dramatically. She was entitled to a life of quiet old age and reflection.
The nurses asked if we would like to say our goodbyes individually. I headed in for my last moment with Rach.
I kissed her forehead. She belonged to another world now, not mine. It was almost my sister, but not quite. It was as if someone had made a very good Madame Tussauds waxwork of her, one which followed to the letter every single physical aspect of her face, but they had forgotten to add her essence.
I felt oddly peaceful sitting next to her. She would always be my home. Death couldn’t change that.
The nurse offered to cut off some locks of her hair. ‘It’s a nice keepsake. For her girls, too,’ she said sweetly. She organised the hair into bags. The locks curled up neatly like question marks. Pale golden strands that should have been hanging over glasses of Prosecco in family gastropubs, or whipped up by a sudden breeze on walks with the dog. They didn’t belong in pharmaceutical polythene bags, in a room full of graphite-coloured machines.
‘Take this, darling,’ Mum said, and handed me Rach’s coat. ‘I think she’d have liked you to have it.’
It was the leopard-print Top Shop swing jacket Rach wore into hospital. She must have worn it only a handful of times. I put it on and enveloped myself in her smell. There was a Starbucks receipt in the pocket and an old hair bobble. Fragments of an ordinary day.
We headed in silent assent over to the tiny pub opposite the Marsden. I’m not sure why. To give the sudden brutality of loss some sense of occasion. Perhaps we wanted to prolong our proximity to her. It felt overwhelming in there after the antiseptic coolness of the intensive care unit. Doctors boomed to each other over pints as they discussed recently finished shifts. Glasses were thrown into the dishwasher, ice shovels burrowed into a steel chest, a cash drawer was slammed shut. We raised glasses of red wine in a toast to Rach – it felt the thing to do, to mark her existence with some vague ceremony.
The cab took us all back to north London. I didn’t know what happened now. How this worked. Fear keeps you moving forward, endlessly on high alert. Grief seemed far more vast and complicated. But I didn’t say any of this. Especially when I thought of Adam having to break the news to Mimi that her mother was not coming back. A conversation none of us could have imagined having, four weeks ago. My mum and I offered to come with him but I understood why he wanted to tell her quietly, by himself.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come back to mine, darling?’ my mum asked as we pulled up outside my house.
‘No, I’ll be fine. But call if you need me, Mum,’ I said. ‘Love you.’
And then I let myself into my flat, lay down on the kitchen floor and stayed there for a few hours. It was cold and the laminate flooring felt hard against my cheek.
I knew what Rach would have said if she’d appeared outside my door now.
‘Em, what are you doing, you freak?’
And then we would have laughed.
30 January
I asked my colleagues to send me over a dress to wear for the funeral. We regularly borrowed sample clothes for magazine shoots and occasionally designers lent us outfits for big events. I decided that events don’t get much bigger than burying my sister. I wanted a costume for the day, to be handed in afterwards along with my composure, not left hanging in my wardrobe as a daily reminder. But mainly, I knew she’d never forgive me for not sending her off in style.
‘Dark or a colour, darling?’ texted the fashion assistant.
‘I want to wear black. I really appreciate this.’
‘It’s a privilege. You have to look the BEST for your darling sis xx’
Adam and I went to meet Bryce, the reverend who was going to be conducting the service. He was surprisingly young and handsome, with the hint of a blond hipster beard and two toddlers climbing all over the shabby vicarage furniture. It seemed right to have someone like him overseeing Rach’s funeral, a parent at the same stage of life, suffering through Disney films while nursing a hangover after a friend’s boisterous fortieth birthday party.
We settled on his sofa and he asked about Rach. His face briefly crinkled up when we mentioned Mimi and Bertie but he regained his composure and told us about a service he did recently for a father of a similar age who’d had a fatal motorbike accident.
‘How are your parents coping?’ he asked me.
‘It’s hard for them,’ I said.
I didn’t tell him about Mum and me snapping at each other in the funeral directors over the choice of casket, flowers and urn. About the tussle over whether to use the King James version of Corinthians, which refers to charity, or the newer version, which refers to love.
‘The charity version’s four hundred years old!’ I said.
‘I want the King James version for my daughter’s funeral,’ my mum replied, her voice firm.
We were fighting over irrelevancies. The funeral director diplomatically pretended not to notice. She’d clearly seen all this before. Grief churning up all sorts of strange emotions, people projecting the stress of loss onto obsessions over font size and hymns and who goes in which car.
We left the funeral directors and walked down the hill to se
e Adam and the girls. My mother said she’d arranged for us to visit some family friends for lunch the following day.
‘I don’t know if I’m up to it, Mum,’ I replied. ‘I think I want to spend some time alone.’
Which was true. But suddenly I also felt engulfed by her need to blend our loss into one, desperate to separate my mourning out from hers. The regular social arrangements she made with her vast circle of friends, which we were always expected to attend, felt suffocating without Rach. I knew that saying no marked a turning point in our relationship. It was a rejection of the way we’d always done things, the travelling triumvirate who would put on a great show, even now.
My mother stopped walking. ‘It’s all about you. What about me? Us? What about doing things as a family! I’ve lost my bloody daughter, Em.’ I began to run. Not a jog. More like someone possessed. I raced past groups of schoolchildren, forcing them to disperse, nearly collided with a group of mums with buggies and dodged the workmen unloading scaffolding, who laughed at me. I ran until I arrived at Adam’s, breathless and sweating.
My mother got there fifteen minutes later and we pretended that the dramatic tussle of wills had never happened. As if we had mutually realised that, as with affairs on location or bridal hissy fits, we were simply victims of context.
No one warns you that grief isn’t just about crying into each other’s arms – that you’ve lifted up a rock and you can’t control what will begin to emerge. The entire infrastructure of our lives had disappeared along with Rach. I was reminded of something Frank once said about dynamics changing forever after you’ve had an epic row with someone. That it can be like two continents seismically separating. But that sometimes those new borders make a better world. I really hoped he was right. I’d completely buggered my ankle during that run.
9 February 2012