In the morning, each Marie Curie nurse (usually a different one every night) ended her shift at seven o’clock and I got up to relieve her. With luck, Frances, knocked out by sleeping pills, might sleep another precious hour. I am always up by seven anyway, wherever I am, so it was no hardship. Early morning is my best time and I’d positively bounce into Marion’s room, all energy, only to be greeted with indignant surprise. ‘Good heavens, what are you doing here?’ she’d say, and when I replied that I’d been staying the night to help the nurse if she needed me, she’d snap, ‘Ridiculous. There’s no need for it. You should be at home. It’s too much.’ I just ignored this, made tea, chatted, tweaked at the bedcovers, employed every delaying tactic to keep her in bed until Frances woke. If Marion wanted to get up, I would have to buzz for Frances, so I did a lot of rapid talking between seven and eight in the morning, anything to distract her from wanting to get out of bed.
It was somehow a sweet, consoling scene, not a sad one, when I left, each of those November mornings, to walk home. Frances would by then be up, sitting beside Marion, in her new tartan dressing-gown, both of them sipping coffee, Radio 4 on low, the dim light coming through the blind mixing with the stronger glow of the lamp, a smell of toast hanging in the air. There seemed nothing tragic about it. It was sometimes as serene as this in the evening too. I’d return about four o’clock and make a meal, and we’d eat it on a tray in the sitting-room in front of the fire. For this great event Marion would be up for an hour or so, sitting in her nightdress in the armchair, and she would sigh with what sounded so like contentment and say, ‘Now, isn’t this cosy, isn’t this agreeable?’ and we’d say yes, it was. She’d watch Frances eat proper food – it pleased her that I was making sure Frances ate good food – and sip her own soup (less and less each evening) and say she wouldn’t call the Queen her cousin, another of her mother’s many satirical sayings. Everything was lovely; she had no complaints. All the previous agitation seemed to have gone and she was drifting with some sort of hidden tide after going against it for so long.
What exactly had changed I couldn’t tell, but something had. I watched her closely all the time without knowing any more exactly what I was looking for. There was no need to look for signs of deterioration any longer – we knew she was in the last stages of this terminal illness. We had been told so, even if we hadn’t recognised this for ourselves. Still nobody would risk giving us an informed estimate of when Marion was going to die – how could they – but one nurse had murmured she thought maybe there was a month to go and another thought three weeks maximum. But not to Christmas. No, they all shook their heads over that, she was unlikely to make Christmas.
Marion herself had stopped mentioning the troubled subject of how long she still had. Once, this awful speculation had fascinated her, but not now. She was no longer interested. What I thought I saw was a retreat from thought. Other people alleged that she was now confused and hardly knew who she was, or what she was doing – she was surely muddled, no longer of sound mind – and there was the suggestion that this was a blessing. But it was not true. Most of the time, if all was peaceful, if her routine was undisturbed, she was perfectly clear in her mind. Yet at the same time she was also having to concentrate ferociously on being always present – it was as though again and again she pulled herself back from escaping. One night she said very distinctly to Frances, ‘Goodbye.’ Frances laughed and said, ‘You mean goodnight.’ ‘No,’ Marion said, ‘goodbye.’ The conviction in her voice was eerie. She never repeated this. I imagined that, on this particular night, she had realised that when the time came for the real goodbye she either wouldn’t be able to say it or wouldn’t realise she needed to. So she got it in while she was able.
There were other curious moments like that. One morning, soon after the nurse had gone, and I was reading aloud to Marion an article from a day-old Guardian, about the increase in attacks on social workers, she suddenly leaned forward and put her hand on mine. I thought she was either bored with the article or that she wanted something. ‘Tea?’ I said. ‘I’m happy,’ she said. Then she lay back on her pillows. Her eyes still held mine. ‘I’m happy,’ she repeated; ‘got that?’ I could just have said yes, or nodded. Probably I should have just said yes, or nodded. But I didn’t. I couldn’t let this go. I said I couldn’t believe it, it was surely impossible actually to be happy. Did she mean she was content, maybe? ‘No,’ she said, very firmly, ‘I am happy. And it isn’t the drugs, before you think of that.’ And again, looking quite fierce, staring at me from her pillows, she repeated, ‘I AM HAPPY. All right?’ ‘All right,’ I said, meekly. She closed her eyes, and seemed to go back to sleep for a while, as though exhausted by making herself clear.
I should have been made happy myself by this declaration but instead I was suspicious; I couldn’t believe her for one minute. What I thought she was doing, by this insistence on her state of happiness, was to make her ‘loved ones’ able to face her death more easily; we could all say to ourselves, ‘She was happy,’ and that would be a comfort. Why be unhappy ourselves if Marion, dying, had stressed she was happy? But maybe I was doubting her happiness when in fact it was real. What right had I to interpret ‘I am happy’ as some sort of trick, or a noble attempt to be selfless? What did I know about dying? Maybe, so near to it, there is a feeling akin to happiness. Perhaps, I argued with myself, I should respect this. Marion knew something I did not: the serenity that in some cases comes before death.
I’d seen something like it before, after all, and also been disbelieving. My agent, Tessa Sayle, died the year before Marion of a brain tumour, in her own home. Unlike Marion, she had no partner, no twin, and though she had good friends she didn’t appear to have ‘loved ones’ around her in quite the same way. I went to visit her ten days before she died, climbing the many stairs to her top-floor flat in Kensington, heavy with the dread familiar to all who visit the dying. What would I find? How would I cope? But what I found was a cheerfulness which confounded all expectations. Tessa was in a wheelchair, her wig (she’d lost all her hair through chemotherapy) a little crooked, but otherwise as elegant as ever. A nurse was in the background but soon went out to collect a prescription. It was April and the flat was full of sunlight. I admired the views of the trees, all thick with pink and white blossom. Tessa said she was so lucky to have such views. I think she went on to repeat the word ‘lucky’ fifty times during the hour I was with her – she was so lucky, she insisted, lucky to be at home, lucky to have such good nursing care, lucky to have so many concerned friends, lucky to have such reliable staff running her agency … On and on it went, the emphasis on her luck, and she was ten days from dying, unable to walk, unable to read (and almost unable to see at all), unable to eat much. She talked animatedly, sometimes forgetting halfway through a sentence what she wanted to say and, catching herself forgetting, saying, ‘My mind is a little affected,’ or, if she’d merely been unable to pronounce a word, ‘My speech is a little muddled.’ She was clearly quite conscious of what was happening to her but she was determined not to give way to misery or fear. This was a process, the process of dying, which she was going to go through with dignity. None of her standards were to be abandoned, no matter how great the pressure. And, as with Marion, it was of supreme importance to her not to inflict on others any of the suffering she was experiencing.
But did they do it to persuade themselves? I couldn’t decide if I was right to think it was done for others, this performance – but there I was again, assuming it was a performance. Yet surely, I told myself, dying people have neither energy for, nor interest in, performing. At any rate, that statement ‘I am happy’ was the last thing of any significance that Marion ever said to me. The following week she didn’t speak much at all. She was retreating fast into some interior world of her own. In the afternoons she liked to sit in the wing armchair in the sitting-room for an hour or so, wrapped in her tartan dressing-gown, the one which matched Frances’s, listening to tapes of Scottish songs. She s
at with her eyes closed, smiling, tapping the rhythms with her fingers, singing along with the words she still recalled from her childhood when her mother had sung them to her. Most of these songs were painfully suitable, ballads of lament and sorrow, and one especially was fitting enough to make us, listening, feel raw with the grief of it when she sang the words – The Four Maries (about the death of Mary Queen of Scots):
I ha’e but just begun to live,
And yet this day I dee;
Oh tie a napkin owre my face,
That the gallows I mayna’ see …
Their Scottish heritage was so important to Marion and Annabel, but neither of them had a Scottish accent, though they had been born in Scotland and spent their early childhood there. It was a way of honouring their mother, whose love of her native land (her family was from the Highlands originally, near Aberdeen) was extreme. As well as Hogmanay being enthusiastically celebrated, so was 25 January, Burns’ Night. Marion had organised Burns’ Night parties for her mother during the last years of her life, when she came to London to live with her. Tartan ran rampant – tartan tablecloth, tartan napkins, tartan ribbons and sashes, tartan-backed books of Burns’ poetry. Not that Mrs Davies needed any books. She could, and did, recite Burns by the yard, once the haggis had been eaten and the whisky drunk. There she would stand, before a propped-up photograph of Burns, her eyes shining, her already thick Scottish accent thickening, and out would come ‘To a Mouse’ –
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie,
O what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
wi’ murdering pattle!
followed by ‘Address to a Haggis’, ‘Tam o’Shanter’, ‘To a Louse’ and all the other favourites. Marion would watch her with such pride and love, encouraging her when she faltered (though she rarely did) and laughing when she paused to explain certain words (‘A pattle is a plough-staff’ – ‘Yes, we know, Mum. Carry on’).
A tape of bagpipe music and another of Scottish reels would be played, and when her mother asked who was going to do the Highland fling, Marion would be up on her feet and performing energetically. Eventually, the merriment would die down and, as more whisky was drunk, Mrs Davies would turn a touch melancholy and begin talking about Scottish history. Culloden would be remembered as though she had been present at the slaughter of the Scots in 1746, and the Highland clearances described with heavy sighs. There was something about the sadness of all this which had always appealed to Marion as well as her mother. They were both by nature cheerful people, lacking any trace of dourness, but they could be overcome at the memory of what the ancestors they had never known had endured.
After her mother died, Marion took her ashes back to the ruins of the croft near Bonar Bridge where her family had once lived. She scattered them there and sang to herself one of Burns’ songs (though she didn’t ever tell me which one). I thought of that now when I heard her singing, and wondered if it had been his ‘Lament of Mary Queen of Scots’, the last verse of which reads –
Nae mair to me the autumn winds
Wave o’er the yellow corn!
And, in the narrow house of death,
Let winter round me rave;
And the next flow’rs that deck the spring
Bloom on my peaceful grave –
Returning each day around four o’clock, after the few hours I’d spent at home, I’d hear those Scottish ballads again the moment I opened the door. Going up into the sitting-room, I’d find one or other of Marion’s close friends blind with tears as they sat in front of her. But Marion herself was never in tears, and she no longer saw that others were, so could not be distressed by their distress. We’d get her back to bed, with great difficulty, always liable to find she slumped onto the floor even with one of us on either side. Getting her up again grew harder and harder, and it was obvious we were approaching some sort of crisis. We had a Macmillan nurse, we had district nurses, we had Marie Curie nurses, and yet we were still on the brink of not being able to manage. The district nurses, who came twice a day to dress the now horrifically deep pressure sore and the wound in the neck (which had opened up further), had begun to murmur that Marion might be ‘more comfortable’ in the hospice. But we’d promised she could die at home, and besides, what did they mean by ‘more comfortable’? What could a hospice provide that we could not provide? Politely, they said that her dying might be far more prolonged than had been anticipated and that during it Marion’s requirements would change in such a way that we would be unable to meet them. Such as? Such as the need, once she was completely bedridden (which was imminent), to be lifted on and off a bed pan, which, in view of the pressure sore, would take skilled hands. We, Frances and I, did not have skilled hands. We just had loving ones. Love, it seemed, could not compete with skill in this case. And in the hospice they had hoists, to make lifting easier and less painful, and special mattresses, and ways of administering pain relief. There was the faintest, the very faintest, insinuation that by keeping Marion at home we might be depriving her of comfort.
It was distressing to have to consider this. If only we knew how long there was to go – the reluctant cry of everyone who watches someone die. Miracles could be performed, anything endured, anything arranged, if we knew there was only a week, a month, a fixed time to aim for. But without this information, which no one could give us (though, when pushed now, the nurses were suddenly guessing that Marion had no more than two weeks left), we were obliged to contemplate a stage where we might finally be failing her. Maybe we already were; maybe we just didn’t realise it. Then one of the nurses suggested a compromise: why not take Marion to the hospice just for a weekend? During it, Frances and I could both get some real rest, and something might be done to ease the pressure sore and deal with the oozing from the neck wound. Forty-eight hours of respite care might be of benefit to everyone.
It was a delicate situation. Frances was against moving Marion to the hospice. I couldn’t bring myself to urge it because, if I did, it would seem that I was saying I had had enough; and if I did say that, Frances could not manage on her own, no matter how many nurses came in and out. I realised that I wanted it to be over, ‘it’ being Marion’s death. I wanted it to be over now as quickly as possible and I had wanted this for at least a week. But Frances did not want it to be over. She wanted life to go on as long as possible, down to the last tiny flicker. If Marion had been writhing in pain then, of course, her feelings would have been different, but since she was not, and furthermore she was happy, or so she said, Frances saw every justification for clinging on to each precious minute of life, whatever Marion’s state. Her attitude was that since death was approaching rapidly anyway, why hurry it? Mine was, since it was coming soon inevitably, why delay it? Marion’s condition appalled me. I saw in it agonising suffering, even if there was no pain. Frances saw only an infinitely slow drifting away which she wanted to be part of as long as possible. If Marion was moved to the hospice she feared not only an acceleration of her dying but being separated from it – the intimacy we had at home would be destroyed. She didn’t want to spend Marion’s last days in a sterile white room in an institution, no matter how kind and caring and skilled the staff. She wanted them both to be utterly comfortable amid their own things, enveloped in an atmosphere domestic and lovingly familiar.
She was right. I knew she was right. Quite apart from Marion herself believing that this was how people should die, I could see that dying in one’s own bed at home is always preferable to the alternative. But still my imagination leapt ahead, to having to look after a bedridden Marion who would have to be regularly turned and whose sores and wounds would make this difficult to do. If she were in the hospice, the responsibility on us would diminish at once. If she were in the hospice, we could sleep. Instantly, I felt craven and despicable – it was shameful of me to make such calculations. So I backed t
he braver Frances up. When one of the nurses took me aside and implied that if I said I couldn’t go on, or if I suggested that the hospice might be better for Marion now, Frances would have to weaken, I said no, I couldn’t do that: Marion wanted to die at home and we must see that she did. The nurse was worried. She, in turn, began wondering aloud how long she and her team could sanction Marion’s being nursed at home. She said she would have to consult her superior.
What was very clear was that Marion herself no longer had any say in the matter. She was long, long past being in control of her own life, never mind of her death. Her earlier assurances that she would take all the liquid morphine and finish herself off when she felt she’d ‘had enough’ had been pointless. All we could assume was that while she was in control she had never in fact ‘had enough’.
That, in itself, seemed to me hugely significant.
Precious Lives Page 18