‘Look,’ she calls over her shoulder, ‘I’ve only got pasta. Shall we do that for tea?’
As she trails the dog and toddler through to the finished train track, I am struck by her ignorance – how could she have not known, I wonder, without giving my own idiocy any thought.
It is not a point I am able to make. Within hours of this dubious exchange, my mother is gratefully diverted by something much more important. Lunging for a ball the dog breaks (not fatally) his back. And it is in this final frazzled week that the email arrives. In the past, when she could get to them before me, my mother read my postcards. The Outlook email programme that I have left open on her desktop screen proves to be the contemporary equivalent. It is not that she must open the email to see it, but rather, like the postcard, it advertises its content, and she barrels out of her office as if she’s been struck.
It’s not even an email from a friend. It’s an email from another mother.
I have said diabolical things about mine before to friends and acquaintances. She was a source of much of my bleak comedy.
The first sentence of Caroline’s email reads: ‘Have you strangled your mother yet?’
‘It was a joke,’ I tell Mum, fear burning black within me. ‘Most daughters make jokes about their mothers.’
And they do, but our relationship is no joke. Too much is broken. However, I know I am on safe ground. Both of us remember, as we stand there in the hall, that she spent much of her twenties and thirties whining about her own mother too.
Perhaps it is this irony, or seeing the lie of our relationship laid bare, or just the sense of betrayal that the question provoked, but whatever it is Mum does not speak the rest of the afternoon and goes to bed early without a word.
As Caroline predicted, Mum will be strangled slowly. Within a year she is dead. It is as though this email kills her. That very night her diseased motor neurones begin the inexorable process of giving up her ghost.
Lie 66: Jesus loves me
Though Mum’s nervous system was already beginning to let her down, all she noticed at first was the slur. Maybe I noticed it too, but couldn’t bring myself to say. You see, I had well and truly had it with guilt. In the bitter weeks after she asked me not to tell the ‘boys’, I began digging for skeletons. The first was school. From what I’ve recorded in my diary her answers were blithe:
‘I never thought Aberlour was right for you. Or Gordonstoun for that matter.’
Then the dog would need something, or she’d be rescued by a House Group call. Sometimes, when there was no available distraction, she’d go on the offensive.
‘Sending you away to school gave me a nervous breakdown!’
Thwarted, I turned my energy to Dad, taking a different tack. I was sorry, I told her, for all the times I had trusted him over her.
However, even when I was the one apologising the subject still changed. Like dogs and bones I was frustrated enough to shout:
‘It’s not for you to feel humiliated or guilty. No man, under the same circumstances, would blame himself.’
‘Why can’t you just be grateful that your children had the kind of grandfather they did?’ She burst into tears. ‘And why isn’t Matthias here?’
It was then that I realised, as far as she was concerned, my husband and children were amongst the few things I had got right. The marriage story was the one I clung to, because for Mum I was nothing without it. I wish knowing these things had happened after her death, rather than in the months of her dying, but epiphanies are hard to plan. Sick, but still undiagnosed, she called first thing one morning, weeping.
‘I can’t trust you any more,’ she blurted. ‘Not at all.’
Months later, after she had lost the capacity for speech, Sean asked her whether she and I got on. She replied in blue biro: ‘off + on’.
Without knowing how ill she was I withdrew from the daily phone call and regular visits, reassuring myself that at least there was still the dog and still Jesus. Although, in those last months, when her toes had curled and her voice had silenced, maybe she wondered if He, like us, had forsaken her. Or perhaps she kidded herself that whatever hellish journey she was on, it was nonstop and direct, with a destination plate that picked out in capitals the word ‘HEAVEN’.
But how could she really have held on to that story? In the final few weeks of her life her despair was palpable, the illness cruel. Jesus was like a log in a fast-moving river. He kept slipping from her grasp as she was dragged downstream, the rest of us, hands in our pockets, watching from shore.
Lie 67: No it wasn’t misgusting
Within a few weeks of the strangle email, apart from the slurring Mum is psychologically up and down, or as doctors call it, emotionally incontinent. It is September. She is put on antidepressants. I have depressed her for sure.
A long history of her psychological lows proves to be a diagnostic handicap. The professional presumption is that her symptoms are psychosomatic. Although she already has debilitating physical changes to report at her first appointment on 30 August, it is not until February the following year that she is diagnosed. Her diary is painful to read. By Christmas she is being helped to the car, and into her seat-belt. Every day she feels ‘shattered’. She cries uncontrollably, she is very ‘wobbly’ on her feet, finds her voice ‘very ropey’ and suffers long and intense dizzy spells. Dr Bowman tells her on 11 January: ‘These drugs [meaning her antidepressants] all have side effects. It will be interesting to see.’
‘Again I felt really angry,’ she writes, ‘no real taking on board that I have become totally incapacitated by taking this drug.’
She hopes that the GP will take her seriously. It will be a hope that is answered in the bleakest terms.
In the meantime the slurring gets worse. Then her balance. She falls over. I am speaking to her every day, and then I begin to withdraw. My mother’s need has grown so overwhelming that I spinelessly go along with the doctor’s diagnosis of clinical despair.
Her counsellor suggests that she email her children and ask us to outline the reasons why she is a great mother. I hesitate to tell you my response. Rather than risk putting anything down in writing I call. Not that I say so explicitly, but in that moment I can think of absolutely nothing that is great about her mothering. Perhaps I bully her, asking her what on earth it is that she wants me to say. Can’t she see that she’s forcing us to tell her only what she wants to hear? This conversation I will come to regret. To have lied would have been a much more gracious response than the truth.
Finally diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or, more simply, motor neurone disease in February, her first and fleeting reaction is relief.
When I see her at home in March 2006, my diary reads: ‘Last day. Matthias cuts her toe nails, thick as hooves. We uncurl her shoulder support, tangled beneath her bra. We push and cook and clean and rearrange and all the while I am thinking – do I have the energy for this again? This dying that needs to be done.’
After her death a GP tells me that doctors refer to a book of illnesses as a guide in professional practice. It is a book bigger and deeper than a well, and of all those ailments, chronic or acute, that are named between its covers it is motor neurone disease, she says, that every clinician wishes never to have to confront.
It strangled Mum slowly, yet burned along her neuromuscular pathways like fire through grass. Within a couple of months a feeding tube was attached to her stomach and she was issued with a speaking machine, an electric wheelchair and someone to take her to the toilet at night. Quite literally her toes curled up. The last weeks of her life were spent in a hospice, three doors down from where Dad had died. She struggled to breathe.
Last time, with Dad, we had experienced the dying days together. Like pensioners waiting at a bus stop, we would sit in companionable silence at bedsides and outside consulting rooms. Though Dad spoke to other visitors he slowly stopped speaking to us, either because he did not think us worth pretending to, or because he tru
sted us enough not to have to.
At her bedside that August I faced a lonely truth. She had slipped from visitor to patient and without her beside me through her own dying days, I had no courage. I longed for her struggle to be over, selfishly hoping for my own to be over too.
‘They have tanked her up with sedative like an elephant so she’ll sleep, her face fallen in a great sag of despair.’ I had not brought those who were easier to love with me. Matthias, and our children, I left at home. It was a final disappointment that I hope she was able to forgive.
When others said their goodbyes an eye would open, large and swimming. One by one she watched them go until only Ed and I remained. Together we counted between each breath and got as far as seventeen. ‘Sometimes we two look up from our writing and Sudoku to wait in the silence for her gasp.’
Both desperate to dive into the car and run. She breathed on.
‘I said goodbye tonight and again those brown, misted irises glimmered. Her hand fluttered a wave and I wept. Have wept a good part of the day.’
By dawn she was making horrible sounds. Ed retreated to the family room as the rattle deteriorated to a groan. Then a ‘sickeningly wet gurgle’.
‘They have lain her on her back so as to quicken the pace, her face the colour of a stormy sky. Her breath stops – twenty elephants. Twenty-five, mucus bubbles from her mouth. The hospital chaplain says a prayer as the snotty bubbles grow and fall, trailing green tears on her cheek.’
Apparently I attempt to wipe the slurp from her chin with a tissue, and yet it seeps and runs, a pool gathered in the well of her mouth. With the sticky tissue still in my hand I back from the room, jogging towards the family area. The curtains are open, a clean summer morning visible through the window. Ed is at his computer. Distracted he looks up.
‘She’s dead,’ I tell him and pass into the bathroom.
I wash my hands a long time. When I reappear I find him ready and packed to go. Through the fire door we watch her body being wheeled away. Then with our bags over our shoulders we jog back to the ward, ripping everything from the notice board by her bed, emptying her cupboard into plastic bags. Within twenty minutes we are in the car, the relief so tangible it feels like that bus scene in the closing minutes of The Graduate. We say nothing.
On the way out of town we stop at the same funeral director’s that had buried Dad. Remaining on our feet we deal with catering, floral tributes and the cemetery paperwork, and when the undertaker pulls out the coffin catalogue we respond in unison:
‘Same again.’
Two days later my daughter asks:
‘Was it misgusting when Granny died?’
My diary claims that as I try to divert her with talk of nighties and pyjamas, she blurts:
‘Tell me the truth.’
Lie 68: Stickers are fair
‘So how’ll we carve up the stuff?’ asked Adrian.
Someone suggested stickers.
Stickers will be the last game that my three brothers and I ever sit down together to play. There were a few in the art cupboard my mother had established for visiting children, and the refugees at Dungavel House Removal Centre, where she volunteered.
Adrian began to sticker the items he wanted.
‘Anyone else interested?’ he asked, his circle of green already pressed in place.
Ed took up a couple of stickers of his own. Sean and I left the room. We didn’t want to play.
The next morning we buried Mum, and everyone headed south.
Though stickerless and the only one with young children, a few weeks later it fell to me to pack the house. I suppose I was the girl. It took me two weekends. There was too much to manage in one. Sean, also stickerless, turned up both times. The first weekend, I arrived a day earlier so as to get as much packed as I could before Sean arrived. A firefighter, he always takes an emergency approach.
I worked through Mum’s stuff, packing, sorting. Then I lay awake most of the night, every single light in the house on. By the time Sean arrived the following morning, I had emptied the sitting room, two bedrooms and the bathroom, arranging her possessions into a charity pile, a sticker pile and rubbish.
As soon as he was through the door, he tore through it all. Everything, bar the stickered furniture, was slung into the back of the car for the hospice shop, including the rubbish. As he left, he went through each of her coat pockets in the porch and then took off.
Back from the hospice shop he trailed me.
‘What do you want me to do?’
I asked him to pack away some paper trays and boxes from the study.
‘But they make the place look homey.’
‘Okay. What about the shells in the conservatory? Put them in the bin?’
Same response.
‘The only thing left then, Sean, is the kitchen.’
‘I’ll go have a look at the garage.’
When I went out to see what he’d achieved half an hour later, he and his car were gone. My diary entry from the return flight reads: ‘Feel too exhausted and terrorised to give any of this the vocabulary it deserves.’
The second weekend there was fog at Stansted and I was late. Sean was already in town, but not in the house. I had only two hours till the Pickford’s van arrived to collect Adrian’s furniture, and I still had the kitchen to do.
An uncle and aunt, on Dad’s side, arrived on my tail.
‘Good-quality stuff,’ Uncle Richard said to himself on his way out to the garage. ‘Good-quality stuff.’
Three dear women from church arrived soon after and rolled up their sleeves. I had never been so grateful to see anyone.
Uncle Richard peered over our shoulders as we packed. Saucepans, plant pots, telephone, lamps, he disappeared. At one point I saw him with a windbreak under one arm and a brass coffee pot under the other, heading out to the car. The Ford Focus wallowed low on its axles. A little while later, he was seen trying to manhandle a large pine box into the boot. It wouldn’t fit.
‘You cannae leave that to the hospice,’ he shouted over his shoulder, parking the box on the verge amongst the stickers. ‘Take it yourself.’
Too exhausted to argue, I left it where it was.
By five the house was empty, the Pickford’s van loaded and the rellies headed east. I stood in the derelict house, feeling as though I’d been raped.
As I waited in the airport terminal, I sent a text to Adrian, who was receiving the Pickford’s delivery.
‘There’s an extra piece of furniture in the shipment,’ I told him. ‘I’ll come pick it up when I can.’
‘Really?’ he pinged back. ‘My sticker must have fallen off it. Unless you are really desperate I was rather looking forward to owning the chest myself.’
‘I’m not “really desperate” but thank you.’
‘Well then,’ he replied, ‘I look forward to receiving your cheque for £41.62 in carriage.’
Perhaps he is hard-wired to escalate. Escalation is, I have later learned, essential if you want to win.
But I was done with losing. I emailed Adrian a bill for the cost of my flights north.
‘I have donated the trunk to Oxfam,’ he replied.
‘All items of furniture are still in the possession of the executors. You have no right to get rid of anything without the full consent of every beneficiary,’ I lied. ‘I have contacted my lawyer.’
His final email was apoplectic.
‘You are insulting,’ he wrote, ‘and bullying and I never ever want to see you again.’
I picked up the chest a fortnight later, on our way south to Brighton. Forlornly it sat on another verge. Put out.
Lie 69: It’s not easy for me to do this
I don’t remember Dad ever saying to Mum that fundamental sentence – the one using those all-important pronouns, ‘I’ and ‘you’, with which to sandwich love. But that is no proof that he didn’t say it.
Of sorrys – the other indispensable currency of any successful relationship – he never spoke.
>
I am reminded of the ghastly apology dilemma when, out of the blue, I receive a letter from Adrian. We haven’t spoken in a decade, and the first word out of my mouth, as I look at the signature, is an expletive. He is the last person on earth I want a sorry from.
Thankfully though, it is not true remorse. He writes, by hand: ‘it is not in my nature to back down or give in.’
The only relief, I tell myself, is that a sorry on these terms needs no forgiveness at all.
When I was younger not saying sorry was something that enraged my mother. Understandably. Perhaps Dad never said he was sorry, because he wasn’t. Sleeping with other women was not something he could ever feel sorry about.
Later the lack of apology became a family joke. We would tease him with it, and he’d giggle, but still he would never allow the incriminating word to pass his lips.
A paper in the European Journal of Social Psychology outlines that although apologies do make apologisers feel good, refusing to say sorry makes withholders feel even better. Empowered, and in more control, they ironically have a boosted sense of integrity when asked to relate the experience.
Narcissists, to avoid an apology, prefer diversionary tactics – they will tend to give a present rather than apologise, or will bury the S-word in a self-justificatory lecture. Or worse, indulge in self-berating, so as to compete with the victim over who feels worse.
The Encyclopaedia of Deception’s entry on ‘Infidelity’ notes that if philandering doesn’t kill a relationship it will be because the deceived party has either colluded or connived.
So Mum found a way of getting round the lack of apology – with the reusable sorry card. Dad would only have to sign and date it, in order to show that his repentance was current, then leave it on her desk.
After Mum’s death, I found proof that she had always been complicit. To me it was evidence that the reason our own relationship had suffered was not that she had gone along with his philandering, but that she had pretended to me that she hadn’t.
A Book of Untruths Page 18