A Portrait Of (A) Death

I’ve seen quite a lot of dead people in my time and been with a few when they died.  Two were peaceful, the others weren’t, and the worst was the Squire.  When I got the call from Mama about the diagnosis – they were in Herefordshire and I was in Newbury - I didn’t know how to process it, to be honest.  He’d been a giant in my life, a sort of living hero as well as in adulthood a friend.  All of us, including Mama, assumed Mama would go first.  This wasn’t meant to happen!

Anyway, he had cancer of the oesophagus, pretty advanced, and though they were going to operate they didn’t reckon much to his chances.  I’m not sure when this all was now, sometime in the early 80s, anyway, and the call was during a school holiday, I had just had a new partner move in with me, and I couldn’t quite get my head around things.  Essentially I didn’t eat, just drank Holsten Pils lager for a week and played pool at my ‘local’ pub.  I wasn’t that great at pool but that week nobody beat me.  They weren’t being kind – they didn’t know – but I just put all of myself into it so I didn’t have to think about the Squire.  An interesting lesson, in retrospect, on what can be achieved with sheer concentration.

I guess my subconscious maybe needed that space to chug along, and so it was at the week’s end I suddenly knew what to do.  Then it was just down to logistics.  Valda, Rex’ Mum was the new partner.   I’ve got to give her her due; she hadn’t been moved in for long and I said I was selling the house, quitting my job and going down to Herefordshire.  She said that was fine and quit hers too.  The head was very kind and offered to keep the job open but I didn’t think it was fair on the kids or the staff since I didn’t know how long I’d be away so I turned the offer down. 

I was fortunate.  I’d bought a little terraced house after leaving my first wife, dear Magee and then living with Annie for a while in a rented farmhouse and then leaving her.  Valda moved in after I’d been there for quite a bit.  Property prices had shot up and I lived next door to an estate agent which wanted to expand, so I flogged it off to them.  At the same time I got in touch with folk in Herefordshire and rented a little black and white that was about a mile, max, from my parents.

The Squire had his operation and it went much better than expected and they even reckoned there was a chance there would be no recurrence.  Judas, that was a bloody Hallelujah time.  I drank Pol Roger and Bollinger with great, relaxed and joyous enthusiasm, and a fair few bottles of Remy to celebrate.  I was gloriously happy for the Squire and Mama, but also a bloody dark demon had been ripped from my back too.  I have to wonder if that was selfish?  Maybe it was.  Anyway, in that great cloud of bubbles and happiness I also asked Valda to marry me and she consented.  Everything was groovy!

Obviously I was living off capital and that wasn’t going to last for ever.  Luck was with me though, and I got a job straight away, there being an immediate vacancy, teaching English to mostly top ‘O’ level sets – the easiest money I’ve ever made! – and Valda and I got married in a quiet ceremony with the Squire and Mama in attendance.  The Squire looked good, strong and relaxed, and it was a grand day.  Little did I know how much it was going to cost me to untangle the end results of that moment in time, but that’s another story!

Everything did seem great.  Valda and I decided – well, truth be told, I decided but Valda was happy enough with the decision – to get a job abroad and there was a post came up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia wanting a couple, with the post to commence in around 9 months.  It was a large British School and the contracts were guaranteed by the British Council.  The salaries and conditions were more than acceptable, there was a promoted post which they gave to me, so that was us sorted.  So we thought.

Then the Squire started to show symptoms that the cancer had returned, and this was the first time I’d seen him ducking the truth, because he did not face up to the fact that this was the case for as long as he possibly could.  Maybe I would have done the same.  I don’t know.  I guess some day I might find out.  Anyway, in the end the biopsy showed that it was back and after further tests it was decided that this time it was inoperable.  I remember, I’d taken him to Hereford County Hospital to get the results.  He came out into the rain and got into the car, telling me that he was going to have to give Mama some bad news.  Mama knew.  We all knew … and now the Squire knew, whether he wanted to or not.  I told him that I thought she wouldn’t be surprised and we drove home in silence.

You know that thing about no man being an island?  It’s bollocks.  Sure, we were there for him.  When you get a death sentence, though, that, in the final analysis, makes you an island.  Your death is personal, obviously, but you really do have to do the dying.  Nobody can do it for you, no matter how much they love you.  In some ways, too, everybody who loves the person who is dying is an island also.  Yes, again we’re all there for each other but in the end you’re in a place you can’t really share.  I couldn’t go on about my feelings, for instance, to my mother.  Hell, she was his wife and I was one of the people on the scene who was meant to be helping hold it all together.  We were all islands, in truth, with temporary bridges joining us in this particular event.

I’m not saying any of the above for a ‘poor me’ moment.  It was as it was.  I’m just writing of a great learning experience in life.  Your death’s your own, and in the finals analysis, so is everybody else’s grief their own.  Hanging together through the whole experience is to be highly recommended though, and we hung together well, including Valda who was obviously new on the scene.  Remarkably, actually, we all had some good times after that, after all accepting what was really happening and our roles in that ‘play’.

The Squire’s health deteriorated pretty quickly after this.  I quit my job again and Valda and I moved in with the folks.  A sort of pattern was fairly quickly established.  You know that thing where you think about 4 o’clock in the morning as the darkest hour before dawn and all that?  Well, I think we felt, without discussing it (and erroneously, it transpired) that that was when the Squire would die.  He very quickly lost weight because his throat was wrecked, so he drank some slosh that was apparently full of goodness but wasn’t, and eventually his strength really failed and he spent a lot of time in bed.

On the theory that 4 in the morning was the big danger – bloody daft in retrospect – and the fact that the Squire now didn’t sleep in long stretches but dozed off and on, which became increasingly the case when the morphine was essential more often, it was necessary to rethink how we dealt with the days and nights so he always had company.  We didn’t want a nurse. Too impersonal.  So, during the day I’d snatch bits of sleep and Mama and Valda spent time with him and then I’d sit up with the Squire all night.  We’d talk about this and that; anything from Einstein’s theory of relativity and my difficulties with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to times he’d had as a child, times we’d had together when we shared a house in Wiltshire and Mama was in Herefordshire, politics, philosophy, favourite places, authors, plays, music – hell, we talked about everything.  It was great!  And then when the light started to change and we could make out the hedge from his bedroom window there was a little moment of unvocalized triumph.  We’d made it to another day!

I’ve written before about his confession about cheating at Pooh Sticks for all those years, about watching Noggin the Nog together, his taking up the fags again, and enjoying the whiskey.  We had some good times, and, yep, some pretty low ones, but the good way outweighed the bad until pretty close to his death.  Of course, he didn’t die at 4 in the morning, more like 11.00 ish, but I happened to be with him.  It suddenly became pretty shitty.  He managed to tell me I’d better get Mama and I gave her a yell.  She cuddled him as everything went to hell in a handcart and told him to let go, and I injected him with a huge dose of morphine so he didn’t really have any choice other than to do what she said.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I reckon when somebody dies it is obvious pretty much immediately that they’ve left the building, so to speak.  That has been my experience, anyway.  When, years later Mama died, very peacefully, I was sitting ‘vigil’ with my brother-in-law, a doctor, and though her breathing slowly became shallower and sometimes stopped, when she died it was obvious. Thus it was with the Squire, but Mama needed to do all the old stuff with his pulse and then a mirror, which was fair enough.  Her island had just had the most important bridge blown-up.  I’ve got to say, during all of this my Mama was incredibly good, selfless and strong, right from the first diagnosis.  T’was not always thus, but this was her finest hour, as they say, or year really.  Anyway, Valda phoned the doctor who was a family friend, while I put the Squire’s teeth back in – I remembered when his father died and we went to view the body he was really upset that his teeth weren’t in, so this was a duty I felt I had to undertake.  It was somewhat uncomfortable, in truth, but there you go; it needed to be done and was.

As I was doing my stuff and we waited for the doctor, Mama went down the garden and sat in the summer house.  She was calm.  It was a relief, in truth.  Valda made some coffee and I finished the rest of the glass of whiskey the Squire had been drinking earlier and sat quietly and looked at his body, sharing that last drink together, sort of, and toasting his freedom and journey.  My solitude was broken with the arrival of Brian, the doctor, who checked to confirm the obvious and then asked where Mama was.  I told him and he went down stairs to go to the summer house.  Moments later I heard an almighty crash.  I shot down stairs and found him unconscious on the floor.  He’d whacked his head on a low beam.

Now, dearhearts, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to put your dead father’s teeth in while you mother grieves in the summer house, but somehow Brian’s timing for knocking himself out wasn’t really all that great!  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and briefly, to my shame, thought of kicking him!  He came round quickly however, staggered to his feet and somehow had the ability to realise that everything was teetering on the edge of becoming a farce.  He looked at the beam, apologised profusely and tottered off down the garden rubbing his creased head while Valda waved me to a chair in front of the Rayburn and put a coffee in front of me.  Suddenly everything was so normal it was bizarre!

Anyway, the normal stuff then had to be done, and it was blessedly busy, busy for a while.  Of course the church and crem were packed, everybody sang up  (It was odd somebody else, a friend of the family, being up in the organ loft playing, since the Squire had normally been the organist)  and everything went off very well, in terms of there being no further fiascos!  With the singing, though, there was a little part of me hoping that he’d play an extra verse, as the Squire did if he thought people hadn’t sung very well, or sometimes dropped a verse because he’d lost count and everybody sort of blurted without music and then ground to a halt.  Naturally it didn’t happen.  Those days were over, for ever.

That was it, sort of, but of course it wasn’t.  As well as learning about being an island I learned something else, something which is extremely selfish and makes me really a somewhat tacky human being.  For months, if not years, my abiding memory of the Squire was of the way his body looked when he left it, sans dents.  It was the image that came to mind whenever I thought of him, not all the fun things we’d done over the years.  Not him as a tall, charismatic, handsome, smiling man.  His life was defined by his death, which was ridiculous but it was really hard, and required a conscious effort, to shake off.

When my Mama was dying it was obviously my filial duty to be there to the end, and her end was a different ball-game altogether, and I wanted, of course, to offer whatever comfort one could.  Because, I think, her death was so ‘comfortable’ and she looked pretty much as she had for some years, it somehow didn’t define her life when I thought about her.  Other deaths, unfortunately, tended to do to me what the Squire’s did, in terms of remembering them.  This cumulative bit of experience made me do what was tacky, but before that I had to go and visit my most beloved sister Carol as she was dying, at 49 which still has the illogical power to make me angry at the ‘injustice’ of the event.  She’d had MS for yonks, but her death was caused by an aneurism in the brain.  Whether that was something to do with the MS I don’t know, but anyway it wasn’t a bad death.  She sort of hovered in a kind of surreal, betweeny world for a bit and we had conversations about a Plantagenet man, of all things, and weird stuff which made no sense but seemed quite smooth at the time, oddly requiring no effort on my part to stay in the groove with her.  Anyway, it wasn’t bad, just far, far too early, but didn’t really define her life too much in my memory.

As a total aside, before I reveal the tacky thing, a little amusing event.  Carol and I had had a deal for years that the first one of us to die, the other one had to go to the funeral in a yellow Rolls Royce.  My brother-in-law Ian who sat with me some years later while Mama died, knew of this deal and he was happy enough for me to go for it, but also kindly said that I didn’t have to if I didn’t now want to or couldn’t.  I don’t when you last tried to hire a yellow Rolls Royce for a funeral but if you ever have to, you’ll find they’re not as common as you might think!  Patti, my partner at that time, was relentless, however, and managed to get one.  The last funeral it had been to was Freddy Mercury’s.  Anyway, my dear Mama had been going on fairly relentlessly about how incredibly vulgar it was but when it pulled up at the house she apparently had a change of mind.  She looked at it, in all its beautiful canary yellowness, and said, “I think I’ll come with you Christopher” to which I replied, “Fat too vulgar for you Mama” and Patti and I got in and off we went.  End of story other than to say that when we got to the crem we thought we must be hitting the end of another funeral because of the crowds of folk outside the doors.  We weren’t.  These were people who had come for Carol’s funeral but couldn’t get in because it was packed inside apart from seats reserved for the family.  A whole lot of people, rightly, loved my big sister!

So, that bit of light (ish) relief aside, on to the tacky and selfish thing that I have learned from various experiences.  When it looks like somebody is dying, don’t go to see them.  Oh, I would if I felt I could make a serious difference to them somehow, or their family.  I don’t however, if I know they are supported by friends and family and I’d just be going to say goodbye, essentially.  If relevant I write to them, sometimes daily, as was recently the case, but I don’t go to see them and, hugely selfishly and importantly for selfish old me, their final decline and death does not define them for me.  I remember them pretty much hale and hearty.  I can celebrate a life, not remember a death. 

Now, it’s wonderful, though tacky.  These folk remain ‘untainted’ by dying in my memory. There can be odd, somewhat bizarre spin-offs from this but in a strange way they’re quite pleasant.  As an example, I met somebody here in France who had once lived in Kerlanguet with her now dead husband,  and loved it as I do.  She was in her 80s, tech savvy, artistic, into dowsing, hypnosis, flower essences etc – a real broad character – and we became firm friends.  She’d come every week and we’d paint together, eat cakes and natter.  (Actually Ali and Barbara would paint and I’d sort of colour in!)  Anyway, we really hit it off and in the 4 years or whatever, we knew her, we really became friends, the sort of friendship which usually only happens when you’ve known somebody for years.

So, what happened was she started presenting with the symptoms the Squire had.  She had all sorts of bits and pieces wrong with her wee body – nothing wrong with her mind though – so she was used to odd physical things happening to her.  Now, I’m not a doctor but it did seem similar, and of course I Googled it.  I didn’t feel I should say, ‘I think you’ve got cancer of the oesophagus’ – in retrospect I wish I had - but I did nag her constantly to see a doctor.  When at last she did, it was confirmed. 

Off to hospital she went but being frail it was difficult for anybody to do anything.  She had with her her very dear friend, a constant and most loyal and dutiful companion, during her decline and eventual move to a hospice to die.  Family came and lots of friends visited.  I didn’t.  I wrote often long letters to her just about every day and they pleased her and cheered her.  She knew I wasn’t keen on hospitals, not having had a ball in such establishments myself, and perhaps knew more, but anyway, it was as it was so I didn’t see her ‘decline and fall’.

Now I drive past her house which has the shutters closed and my mind plays foolish tricks, seeing her in there, listening to loud music and painting, the whole death thing being a ‘mistake’ or hoax.  I still see her alive, as I do another less close but none-the-less real friend who I didn’t go to see in his final days, knowing his family and friends were supporting him, and now I see him in my mind’s eye as big, bluff, laughing and taking the piss out of me about Brexit!  It’s selfish, I know, and if everybody did it, which is a question one needs to ask oneself if one is truly exploring one’s responsibilities in life, it would be a disaster.  In my defence, if there weren’t sufficient family and friends about and somebody I knew well was dying I’d do my damnedest to be there for them.  Otherwise, though, I won’t, and my life is much better for it!

As for my own death, I’m most certainly not ready now.  I don’t fear death; I do however, fear a death that is lingering, painful or, most of all, includes dementia, for it is my mind that most matters to me.  I don’t fear the personally big event, and am very curious and quite excited to understand the more relevant existence that will be clearer to me when my clogs have popped, though I do not want to leave loved ones and beasties.  I know I’ll see them again but the circumstances will be different and anyway, they matter very much to my daily / general existence and it is hard to imagine that not being the case, or not ‘hurting’ because of their absence.  On the other hand I’m looking forward to seeing family and friends again, or at least those who are still doing whatever it is we do in between incarnations. 

Looking worldwide, 151,600 people die each day; that’s 151,600 personal and family griefs and, in relative terms, often tragedies.   Almost double the amount are born each day, 360,000; that’s potentially 360,000 joyous celebrations.  Personally I find the numbers staggering and am unable to get my head round so much grief and so much joy.  Also, if you believe in reincarnation, as I do, one has to wonder where the 208,400 additional souls come from!  Maybe one is being somewhat parochial, assuming that they come from the dominant species of this planet.  Maybe they come from an inferior species on another one.  I don’t know and, in the final analysis, I accept that there are certain things which are inevitably unknowable.  I find it a curious conceit that different kinds of Mosques, Churches, Temples and Gurdwaras etc contain billions of people who apparently know what the plan is, what God is thinking and what his – it’s generally a him, though not for Hindus – rules of play for the game of life are.  Me, I think what I think based on personal experience, talking with loads of people, thinking and reading.  I have no desire to encourage people to my truth since I don’t for a moment think I, or anybody else, is capable of understanding the creator of the whole kit and caboodle.  The idea is absurd!  From my own experience I know there is an immeasurably large amount of love involved and as for the rest, whatever else is going on, I’m sure it will all work out okay. Relative to my belief systems, logically, new life is worthy of celebration, each an individual, unique and to be treasured, but death should be celebrated also as, at times relief from pain etc. but more importantly because the ‘soul’ / consciousness or whatever is going on into the next phase of development.  Our grief is a ‘selfish’ thing, in a sort of unselfish way, because we’re going to miss whoever it is who has died.  Logic, however, doesn’t take the pain of loss away, nor the anger when the death is that of a child, or happens too soon to a very good person like my sister Carol, who was the pick of the litter! And that’s about it, dearhearts.  That’s my portrait of (a) death.  C.S. Lewis said, ‘We do not have souls; we are souls’, or something to that effect.  I agree, and life as we define it normally is not the most precious thing there is, souls are, whatever they are, souls and love. Love to you all.