MY MOTHER STANDS at the door. I know from her face that he is still alive—and from his, as I rush past her, that he won’t be for long. He is asleep, though awake or asleep is hard to tell. Asleep, his right eye won’t quite close, and I can see the rolled-up white of the ball. Awake, he can’t open his left eye fully—the lid stays low and hooded over the pupil. His cheeks are hollower. His chin, with its week-old stubble, is an offence to his philosophy of close shaving. He is breathing simultaneously through his mouth, which falls in a kind of rigid open slackness, and his nose—I can see the contractions just under the bridge, the skin tightening as he snuffs fiercely for air. His bottom lip falls away from his teeth. Something pink is gumming them up—bits of unswallowed or regurgitated pills. His hair drops long and sleekly over the tops of his ears—it just doesn’t seem to have got the idea; it keeps on growing regardless.
He is propped high on the bed, to keep his lungs clear. I feel I am looking not at him but at his death-mask—something to do with the puffiness of the eyes. He has always had huge pouches under his eyes, leather purse-size, and now they are pouchier still. I sit in the chair next to him, catching a reek from the bedclothes. I hold his hand, the one unshrunken part of him, still so big and autocratic and can-do. I can see the holes and crevices opening up in him—above his collar-bone, between his ribs, under his ears—as the skeleton seems to move up through him to the surface of his skin, in charge, taking possession, turning out the flesh. I lift the sheet and see the pads under him and the nappy round his middle, its two sticky-tape ties at the side. He is far gone from himself, yet the breathing is deep and regular. I thought that he could not shrivel further, could not become any more ill, but I was wrong.
All his adult life he has spent among medicines and now he is going to die among them. They sit like nurses on the window-sill—Diconal, Frusemide, Largactil, Periactin—not the old glass jars and coloured bottles and round cardboard pill-boxes of his first postwar practice, but white plastic containers with push-and-screw safety lids. There seems nothing odd about them being there, only that they’re for him. His home has always been an overspill for pills and equipment from surgery—he liked to be on the safe side, to have spares and duplicates to hand, not least for his own family. For a time, when I was twelve, he had given me small plastic syringes to play with, a sixties advance on the old metal ones—with the needles snapped off, they made good water-pistols, and I’d found them a nice little earner, selling them to schoolfriends for a shilling or florin according to size. When word got back he was furious and stopped the supply: it wasn’t my capitalistic enterprise he minded but the fact that I was a doctor’s son—what if people gossiped that Arthur Morrison was using his son in this way to make a bob or two?
The newest syringes, which he has by his bed now, are smaller and more disposable still: they come with a glass capsule, and you break the end off, dip in and fill your needle, administer the injection and throw them away. The medicines he can’t take by mouth he takes in this way from my mother: a quick swab of the thigh, the prick of the needle barely registering in his eyes (because he is too drugged? because there is too much pain elsewhere to notice a pinprick?). The left thigh is now blotchy with needle-marks: he is bleeding gently from one of them and my mother washes the blood away.
I leave him asleep and walk through to the living-room where David and Vera Whitehouse are drinking coffee, having driven down from Redcar for a last visit—it is thirty-three years since they left Earby, after David’s twelve months as a trainee, but they’ve kept up the relationship. We shake hands, and agree how sad it is, how sudden, how Arthur has always been so fit and active, all that. And then they’re brisk in a way my mother and I need: it seems to them, both of whom have done work with terminal cancer patients, that he has no more than forty-eight hours to live—do we have any morphine? There are patients who get very restless, panicky, even violent at some point in their last hours, who are climbing up the wall in pain one minute and dead a few hours later. With his lungs clogging up, my father might react this way too, and we will have to have something to sedate him. Do we have all we need—syringes, morphine, Largactil? And then, having sorted us out, the Whitehouses are off: it is a two-hour drive back, and they’ve stayed only half an hour, but this is what impending death demands, what people give in friendship and tribute, what my father would give, had given, too.
Half an hour later, he gets himself upright on the edge of the bed. This is his single obsession now, to keep his chest vertical—everything else, even the drugs schedule, has been forgotten. Every hour he wakes and struggles up; even asleep he leaves his right leg dangling over the edge in readiness, and we put a chair with its back against the bedside to prevent him falling out. Upright now, he’s mumbly, breathless and wants a drink. Under the sheet I can see his lumpy belly with its rip of stitches—like the wolf in the children’s story who swallows the goat-kids, falls asleep, and wakes to find its stomach full of stones. I hold a half-pint tankard of iced water for him—not one of his old silver golf club tankards (burglars had made off with those), but a glass one with a red fox-hunting motif in a panel on its side, one of a set I drank my first bitter shandy from, at his behest (‘Learn the taste of beer now, and you won’t go wild later’), when I was twelve. I put a towel under his chin, and tip his head back, and he forces a bit down, and a lot more comes back up, his hands shaking as he tries to steady them round the glass. ‘Is that better?’ I ask, and he manages ‘Yes,’ and then I try him with a straw, aiming its end between his teeth, and he gets the idea, seems too weak at first to draw anything up, but then makes a stupendous effort, the indents under each ear drawn in fiercely as he sucks, sucks. A drop of water makes it into him, and as he struggles for breath again I imagine, no, hear , this drop of water he’s swallowed pinballing down and through and into the dry places inside.
His burnt lips look moister now, his voice-box is oiled and working again, though I can’t make out what he’s saying. My mother, responding, chats and flirts and teases, and there are certain words she says at which he seems to prick up. He had said to her in the night, ‘Could you move me, pet,’ and that pet has convinced her he knows she is there and recognizes her still, but I can’t say with confidence, or even without it, that he recognizes me. His eyes have milked up, distant, unfocusing. I had hoped he would know me one more time, but it doesn’t look likely now. If the point of my coming here was for that recognition, to get some sort of return for my nursing and attending, there is no longer a point, for he’s off on his own. There is a Robert Frost poem which says this, or some of it, or more than it:
… The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.
No, from the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone.
As we help him back on to the bed now, lifting him under the arms, his body so wasted away yet so heavy with fluid, and as we heave his bottom (BTM he used to call it, a euphemism for a euphemism) closer to the pillows to keep him upright, and as we swing his legs back up and straighten him, I wonder whether these manoeuvres are more a comfort to us—an illusion of doing something —than they can ever be to him. Perhaps if he had bedsores, our tending, even at this late stage, could provide some relief to him. But now he has got near to a place so far away that what’s happening to him here no longer seems to register.
There are to be no more moments of lucidity, no more conversations, only the look of him all afternoon and evening: the stubble, the left eye half-open, the head sunk on his chest until some word in whatever anecdote we are trying to engage him with—my train journey up, my mother’s dealings with the gardener—seems to catch and snag for a second, to trip some not always related words of his own, then to ratchet away hopelessly into space again. Yesterday he had drunk some milk and asked: ‘Can I have some more wine?’ Even that sort of irreality, that hallucidity, seems unattaina
ble now.
As the day drags on, it becomes harder to ignore the stench coming from his bed. Finally, around teatime, with my sister there and a few drinks inside us, we resolve to change him. It means my catching him under the armpits, lifting him up and off the bed, then turning him through 180 degrees to plonk him on his bedside chair. While I hold him there, my mother clears the pads, the soiled cotton sheets, the swimming rubber sheet underneath, and my sister puts down new sheets in their place. Then we unsnap the ties on his nappy, and I lift him upright again while my sister slides it off: it peels away crooked and slantwise, snagging on his thigh, but at least the wiping of his bottom, which is smudgy but not sore, need be no more than perfunctory. Then we slide the new nappy under him, my sister proficient at one side, my mother—a fifties terry-nappy mother—struggling with the technology at the other. I have to slide my right arm through my father’s right arm and across his chest to support him under the left arm, while with my free left arm I hold the nappy firm so my mother can stick down the tie. Now he is done, and I begin to lift and turn him in a semicircle back again. But to do this means moving the chair with my knee, and I miscue and tilt it, and for one horrible moment one of its legs catches his leg, spearing the instep, pressing hard into the puffiness, skewering him to the floor, enough for him to mumble: ‘Chair’. Then I see and lift it off again, and I get him up and then recumbent on the bed, his chest vertical, the pillows propped behind him. And I sit there breathing heavily, his hand in my hand, wondering if he, being the patriarch he was, ever changed a nappy of mine, and wondering if this might be a definition of what it is to be grown up—not changing your child’s nappy but changing your parent’s.
When I walk my sister back in the dark, clear skies again, I say: ‘I hope he dies tonight. I don’t want him to go on any more.’
‘I hope so too.’
‘Shall we ring if he does?’
‘No—in the morning.’
‘The only two mongol children I delivered,’ my mother says, over her whisky, ‘were both to girls in their twenties. One was a mild case, a happy boy, really, the other died of pneumonia at six months. It just goes to show, it’s not only women over forty. These days they can catch them, and give terminations. I referred girls for terminations, too, if that was what they wanted—rather than what their boyfriends or parents wanted. But I sometimes think, especially if the girl didn’t marry and have kids later: was that right? Should I have done more to persuade her to go ahead? Of course, I always feel lucky I didn’t have more Thalidomide cases—I never prescribed it myself, there was another drug I’d always used that was equally good for sickness, and I saw no reason to change it. The one Thalidomide baby I delivered was another GP’s. All I can remember was having no warning there was going to be anything unusual, and the head coming out, and thinking: Jesus, what’s this? The only way to describe it is that it looked like a penguin—flippers for arms, no legs, and something monstrous about its face: I saw it for only a second, but it looked like a single eye in its forehead. Another doctor, with a needle, came and took it from me—it died almost at once. It was only years later the Thalidomide scandal came out and we realized that’s what we’d been dealing with. I don’t think the mother ever had any idea how bad it was. She was a Mrs Molloy, and she went on to have about six kids, including one who drowned in a culvert. But the worst death like that was Jean Harrison’s—remember? She left her one-year-old in the bath with her six-year-old, then the phone rang, and when she came back the baby was under the water, and the brother hadn’t noticed: it was evening surgery, and Dad and I drove there at once, and he was pumping away for half an hour on the bathroom floor trying to revive her, and then the ambulance came with oxygen, but it was hopeless, hopeless.’
*
Now my mother is asleep and I sit in front of the television and watch the news (another policeman stabbed, name of Morrison), and then a film, Escape from Alcatraz . I fall asleep in front of it, waking in some dark and nameless hour to the sound of the phone, which I rush to knowing it must be terrible news, that my father has died at home, and then I find myself in his bedroom, where the phone by the bed is disconnected, and there he is breathing next to my mother, neither of them hearing, and I rush back into the living-room and pick up another phone—it’s the GP, checking on progress and inviting us to feel free to call him any time of night at the following numbers. I thank him and hang up, wondering why he has felt free to call us at any time of night without being invited to, but then I find it is only eleven-fifteen. I wander back to my parents’ bedroom. Her hand is in his, I see, like the couple in Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’, though the little dog is not at their feet but in the kitchen, and both are flesh and blood, not a monument, though one may be tomorrow. My eyes fill at the sweetness of her hand in his, sleeping beside each other as they have for forty-five years, love surviving them.
But then my father seems half to wake, and tries to move his hand from hers, needing to get upright, can’t understand what is loading his arm down. My mother wakes too, and we get him up, and he asks for ice. Ice in a glass? No, he shakes his head, just ice, and my mother comes back with two slivers of it which we stuff into his mouth. He keeps them there, superhuman, clenched between his teeth, and his voice is lubricated again and he asks, ‘Are you keeping the schedule?’, and we laugh and say, ‘Yes, Dad, all your medicines are noted down.’ ‘Good.’ It seems the right time to sedate him, but my mother resists the morphine, makes do with the Largactil, which should knock him out for a bit all the same. I go to bed, can’t sleep. Within an hour I can hear his voice and when I go down he’s sitting on the edge of the bed again, wanting water. Another hour, his voice again, but I leave them to it this time, and in my half-asleep state think of him there below, fighting off sedatives, an eternal life force, a fridge that will never be turned off.
I wake at six-thirty, utter blackness, and, descending the stairs—some anxiety but quietly certain he is still alive—hear the regular sniffy intakes of breath. My mother lies on her back, a copy of a large-print Dick Francis novel flat across her breast. My father is on his side, and every so often seems to want to raise himself, his right hand feeling for the edge of the bed, scrabbling to get a grip, the arm tensed. But then the hand weakens, the arm slackens, he lapses back into sleep. I go to make tea, and return to sit by the bed. My mother wakes, confused for a moment to see me there. I hand her a mug of tea, and she sits up:
‘How’s he been?’ I ask.
‘He woke at four, and sat on the edge of the bed, and coughed and coughed until he seemed to get something up and felt better. Then I gave him an injection.’
‘Morphine?’
‘Yes. For once he didn’t ask what it was for. All he said was: “Can I lie down now?”’
I point to his frail flapping efforts to get upright: it seems cruel not to help him, but it would be crueller to sit him up when he’s so weak and out-of-it. Then I notice him opening his eyes, which seem to fix on something beyond the bed, and I walk round, into his line of vision, hoping I will register in them. But nothing registers at all: his eyes are looking cloudily into some middle distance—they seem to have died. His breathing, too, has changed in some way—my mother remarks on it—slower, though still regular. Then he gives a slightly bigger breath than usual—and stops. I nod at my mother. After about half a minute, he breathes again, lightly, a wisp only, and she puts her left hand to her chest, as if to say, Christ, what a relief, I thought he was gone . Then nothing again. Another half minute, another wisp. Then silence. And more silence, restful. I look at his clock: seven o’clock. Then at hers: seven-ten. It is very quiet: I can hear only the distant cawing of rooks.
He is dead, and I feel an odd triumph about it. He is dead, the thing (when I was small) I used to dread more than any other, but I’m still here, my mother’s still here, I can hear her breathing, the world has ended but we’ve survived, we’re OK. He is dead—no rage against the dying of the light, no terror and deli
rium, only a night-light smothered in its own wax. Sitting here, the body silent between us as we peer into it for a sign of some kind, I’m on a shock-induced high. If I listen hard enough, I know I’ll hear his own count-your-blessings verdict: ‘Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? When I think how it could have been—drawn-out, or abrupt and messy, or in hospital rather than here—it makes me feel lucky. A good death and a good life too: who could beat it?’
‘The GP said to lay him flat.’ My mother rises, icy calm, and we lift his head and remove some of the pillows from under it, straighten him on his back, pull his right leg up from its dangling position, and draw the covers up to his chest—why would anyone, except in the movies, draw them over the head, and shut out before time what will soon be unseeable forever? I’m crying quietly through this, and then leave my mother alone with him, and cry more noisily at the kitchen window. Outside is a tree-stump he left as a bird-table, with frills of white fungus growing out of its side.
I keep shooting back to see how she is, to see how he is. I feel a lifetime has passed, but the clock says seven-thirty, and here I am in the living-room, twenty, thirty minutes after his death, wading in boxes and boxes of photographs. It’s something I do every Christmas, but Christmas has come a little early this year. Even now I can see it’s some futile struggle to resuscitate and preserve him. His face swims up from the bendy sheens of black and white, the cardboard transparencies, the tiny sepia squares—in RAF uniform in the Azores; in his wedding suit in 1946; with a litter of twelve labrador pups, with babies, with toddlers, with his leg in plaster; being carried downstairs ‘fresh’ by a collection of male friends at his retirement party. There is something boyish and little in these that won’t do, won’t measure up. Then I find something better: a photograph of him outside our old rectory, leaning dandyishly against the side of his black Mercedes, a cigarette dangling from his right hand, his beautiful wife, fortyish then, posed beside him—an image of wealth and health and substance to set against the poverty and sickness we’ve lived with for the past month; an image, too, of the aspirations and affectations death has snuffed out.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 13