In my mother’s study, after my father died, we found his unopened Christmas presents in a forlorn pile, not far from the ugly chair in which, ill or well, he had always sat, and a low table on which were piled his glasses, glasses case, glasses cleaner and a little cloth. He was that kind of man. Upstairs, on his desk, his Filofax lay open, kept until the last in the handwriting that had become stiff after a long-ago stroke, the entries (“scan”, “hospital”, “hospital”) more upsetting than the most explicit talk of cancer could ever be. These—the glasses cleaner, the Filofax—are the triggers for which there can be no warning. Imagine it. Contains strong references to spectacles and Filofax entries throughout.
Nobody knew what to do with the presents, but unwrapping them seemed impossible. I threw more than I could afford at them, the cashmere pyjamas, the designer slippers, as if cashmere could soften the path to the land of the dead and be some proof of affection and love, a proof that was never asked for, never needed. The day to return the pyjamas has passed, and the trousers, bought to fit his newly wizened frame (thinness such as that could never be called “slender”), are still too big for me. “Tell the shop he’s dying,” my mother suggested, when it became clear that his life was now one of hospital gowns and hospice T-shirts. I considered telling the shop that he was dead, which at that point he wasn’t, quite.
The ambulance had had to come on Christmas Day. We had spent Christmas Eve carrying up sick bowls to the sound of Carols from King’s, and Christmas Day morning was passed at the pharmacy, as well as at a garage in search of ripe bananas in the hope that he could eat them. The garage was packed, full of awkward husbands sent out to buy missing or forgotten ingredients, phoning home to say that the garage was clean out of whatever-it-was, but how about these? There was a long queue for the cash machine, and I wondered why. When we got home my mother phoned 111, and then realised that draining fat off a goose is too much when someone upstairs is vomiting blood. She found a rib of beef instead and put it in the oven. She is that kind of woman. With one eye on the lookout for the ambulance, I calculated cooking timings. It arrived when the potatoes were being peeled.
The paramedics found a blockage, suggested hospital. My father put on his dressing gown, and I fetched a swish Montblanc bag of his that I had been borrowing. “Oh have you?” he said, in mock disapproval. He hadn’t wanted to take it into the hospital in case it got stolen. “It won’t get stolen,” I said. “It’s your good bag, take it with you. They have lockable cupboards.” He is business-like. Phone charger. Hearing-aids charger. He walks himself down the stairs and waves from the ambulance, perhaps already knowing, as, somewhere, we all do , he will not see his home again. “On to the next thing”—a phrase my mother and I have used for decades to describe his almost paranoid briskness, his ability, an hour and a half before curtain-up at a nearby theatre, to start twitching in panic and asking waiters for the bill.
A fortnight later, through a morphine doze: “Your contact lenses. In my bag.” Oh, he’s gone, I thought, he’s really gone, and begin to explain that, no, my contact lenses are at home, and this is the hospital. “The black bag”, he says. “Take your contact lenses out of the inside pocket.” I open the bag, which like everything else he owns has not one but two stickers in it indicating its owner and address. And, of course, there they are, two forgotten boxes of contact lenses, which I remove from the inside pocket, to his satisfaction. For his mind to be at rest, which in this dying time it mainly is, not a tissue can be out of place on the wheelie table by his bed. The next day I found him asleep, clutching the black bag to his side like a pet.
The hands of the dying are so often beautiful, and my father’s were no exception. Long-fingered anyway, he became in death like Dora Carrington’s portrait of Lytton Strachey, and as morphine robbed him of the strength to speak, he began to point to things he needed with gestures of mute elegance. Not undemanding, but his habitual wryness lent his faux-lordly manner a self-consciousness that made it funny. His toes were prehensile, the colour of old ivory, poking out of the hole in his surgical stockings. (“How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the Gospel of peace…” But my father didn’t preach any Gospel—and had no time for those who did.) Nor did he have the toenails of an old man, because at 74 he wasn’t really all that old. When I cut them for him, they were soft and gave easily to the clippers, and I collected the clippings into the compostable sick bowls that were piled on the chair by the side of his bed. Nobody reads John Galsworthy now, but only the best of writers could have fashioned the scene in which Soames Forsyte sits at the bed of his dying father. “His arm brushed against something. It was his father’s naked foot…. Soames took it in his hand, a cold foot, light and thin, white, very cold…. [he] sank back on his chair, and fell to cherishing the foot again.” Like Soames I cherished—the perfect word—the long foot of my dying father, with its second toe much longer than the big one, like one of William Blake’s angels. It wasn’t a neat role reversal, for when I was young enough to have mine clipped for me, my mother did it. No sentimental he, though. “You’re rounding the corners. You have to cut toenails straight across.”
He was with my mother, just the two of them, after 51 years of marriage, when he learned what they already knew: that there was no cure, no treatment, no time. He says the required things, and means them: lovely life, half-a-century married, no tragedy to die at 74, morphine will help. All true. Then, for this is Christmas, and he would usually be the organist at the local church, a job he took seriously and which stressed him: “The things people will do to get out of playing for the carol service.” His eyes were dark blue, too large in a newly shrunken face. Later, my mother offering to help with something, he snaps at her. Then, “Sorry.” Then, “If you can’t snap at someone after 50 years of marriage…” “Fifty-one,” she says. He reaches for her hand.
One of the unbearable things about a long stay in hospital is its unique and constant symphony, the attempt to witness and bear pain amidst the cries of suffering and the beep of machinery. A teacher to the last, my father said to me, as a drip began its cheery little jingle to say it was empty or full, “How many individual notes in that?” Four, I thought; he thought three. If the sound is bad, the lighting is worse. He asks for an eye mask, to stop the glare of overhead strip lighting. “Neon,” I burble. “Oh no, they’re not neon.” A nurse comes up. “What’s a spigot?” he asks her. And is told. The smell of his forehead has already become familiar, as I kiss him gingerly on it when I leave, already worrying, each time, that it will be the last departure. I cleave to his forehead, because it is the portion of his face that is still recognisably his; the rest has collapsed. He smells slightly musty, of unwashed hair, with a veneer of sanitiser or antibac from a baby wipe. It stays in my nose, oddly comforting. I find myself grateful that he was a redhead. Now he is grey-haired, but his once-carroty colouring means that his arms are not the standard-issue shrivelled limbs of the dying, but made recognisably his by the scatter of faded freckles.
My mother was parking the car and I went in to see him on my own. She and I had been for lunch at a restaurant called The Bull. Up the stairs, first to Ward G8 (a summit, easy to remember) and to Ward F6 (an Auden play, The Ascent of F6, about mountain-climbing and a different kind of summit). He is asleep, looking like a dead body (or what, at that point, I believe a dead body to look like), his mouth wide open to breathe. I hover. Hold his hand, which squeezes mine. I expect him to be confused, and his voice is barely there.
“How was The Bull?”
“It was very good. You were right. It’s really good.”
“Very useful for us. Having it so close. It doesn’t look as if I’m going to survive this.” Which we’d been told a week before. “I think this is going to be the thing that kills me.”
“Yes. I know. We’ll make it as easy as possible for you.”
“I think we’ll be looking at palliative care soon.” (We’ve been looking at palliative care for a while, talking to palliative nurses. He was cushioning the blow, because he was still Daddy, after all, which is the name entered on my phone and which now I can’t delete.)
“You’ll look after Mummy, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“She’ll have to move. You’ll both have to help her. She can’t do it on her own.”
“Of course we’ll help. She’ll move closer to us.”
“A modern flat. First or second floor. With a lift. It must have a lift. Have anything of mine you want.”
“Oh, don’t you worry. I’ll pilfer.”
“You’ll have to sell the piano. And tell Mummy that if she takes the car to be cleaned at Thetford, they only take cash.”
This is the second of the two conversations we manage about his death, he not being a person who would need or want any last assurance of love or gratitude. The first was when he was in his own bed at home.
“It doesn’t need saying,” he says. “But you’ll look after Mummy won’t you?” We hadn’t at that point been told that anything was terminal. “Of course,” I say, launching into a speech. But he has stopped listening because he already knew the answer. The point was that he had said it, as his own father had (“You’ll look after Mum”). His father’s phrases, which my own father never used—“Not half”, “The guy next door”—begin to appear in conversation. “The guy next door died last night.” The family had been made cups of tea; the widow had been inconsolable. My father makes a face, having no truck with inconsolability. Other words are not at all from his childhood, and sparkle oddly amid hospital chit-chat: “panegyric”, “minutiae”. Phrases from books reappear. “Shake me up, Judy!” (Smallweed, from Bleak House), meaning sort out the pillows. And, on one occasion, a confused “Shake me up, Scotty!” (not Smallweed). And then, “I hope I live long enough to see a Labour government.” He would not, and that evening he asked for morphine, because the tumour was pressing on his spine and he could not bear the pain. I rubbed Ibuprofen gel on his back. “More. More! Lower! Not that low.” His back above the green elasticated waist of the hospital-issue trousers is comforting because, plump and pink and hairless, it looks like a back, and not a greying cancerous face or a too-thin arm on which a loose paper band proclaims ICSODEN, 06/09/49.
He hiccups constantly, comically. “We could get you an anticonvulsant? I’ll ask the nurse.” He waves a hand. “Don’t fuss.” The sin against the Holy Ghost: fussing. A refrain of my childhood. “Don’t fuss.” He wants no visitors, no music, no cards. All three require an energy he was too ill to muster. His sore back sinks into the mattress. “We could ask for a mattress topper or an air bed?” “Don’t fuss. I’ll find a time to ask.” The next day he has a better mattress.
“Do you remember ‘handhold!’?” My infant demand when I couldn’t sleep.
“Of course I do.”
A long pause.
“Handhold!”
A hospital menu arrives. Low-residue tomato soup. Enriched something-or-other. Most of what he eats reappears in bloody vomit that doesn’t come from his mouth but pulses down a tube from his nose, even as he heaves and wretches.
“I have a dilemma.”
I brace myself for a Big Talk.
“I need a pee, but if I pee, everything else happens too, and they have to clean me up.” Seventy-four, he hobbles to the loo on a Zimmer frame, the hospital trousers so loose they slip from his hips. It occurs to me that if I could legally kill him, I would, although one of our biggest quarrels was on assisted dying, in which he did not believe. Now he is dying, without assistance, we do not talk of it.
A nurse: “Have you opened your bowels today?”
“A very successful morning.” He pulls a silly face, says to me: “Well, I changed your nappies.”
It’s the last text message he managed to send. “Didn’t need the suppository thank you. Managed on my own.”
A medicine that clears a blockage gives us one day of something approaching his old self, an experience entirely discombobulating amid preparations for his leave-taking. He decides he wants to shave himself, and I hold the mirror and talk of cats from my childhood, whom he remembers to the last whisker. The electric razor is no good; he asks us to bring foam and fresh blades tomorrow. “And that apple juice you bought me is delicious.” The next morning, on a cloud of morphine, he rings my mother, barely discernible. “Can you get some different apple juice. This one is too sweet. What’s that screaming on the radio? I want MELON juice.” We bring in the foam and blades and he is too ill to need them. Dying, he has the flirtatious ease of the old man. “That nurse, she’s gorgeous.” And to us, always, courtesy. “It’s so lovely when you come. Thank you.” Then, “Don’t worry if you can’t. I worry it’s boring for you anyway.”
Always the worrier. “How I will get to the hospice?” My mother and the doctor answered in the same breath. “Oh, we make you walk in the snow.” The ambulance came later that afternoon and, not three weeks after the cancer was found, drove him up the hill to to the hospice to die.
Hospice doctors have a phrase. “Time is short.” My mother rings. Five words. “Time is short. Come now.” The hospice has warm dim lighting and is quiet. The wipeable curtains are decorated with dandelion clocks in the wind. “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” (Although I read that Shakespeare may not have meant dandelions for “chimney-sweepers”, as was always thought.) I knew he wouldn’t die that day because we arrived and he said, “Did you have a terrible journey?” And, to the nurses, come to help us after we’d failed to make him comfortable and couldn’t understand his morphined instructions: “I’ve succeeded in thoroughly confusing everybody. But then”—glancing slyly at us—“they are very easily confused.” He was dressed in a navy polo shirt not his own, stitched with the logo of a holiday resort in Tasmania that he had never, would never have, visited. His clear, not especially aged, skin hung in loose folds against pencil bones, and to hold his bruised and muscleless arm was to be afraid of something snapping. His spine jutted, a percussion instrument. One becomes so nervous of the seriously ill, who are always strangers. Asleep, breath rattling, he flung his arms out over his head, or held them straight up in the air, or pulled away the sheet so that tiny legs splayed from a well-padded nappy, marked M all over the crotch. In normal times he would be capable of a filthy joke about this.
“Water!”
“What time is it?”
“Where’s Mummy?” (He meant mine, not his.)
“Handhold.”
On the day before he died he asked for the news headlines to be read to him. My mother got out her phone, got up the headlines, and found that the first three were about cancer, premature deaths from, NHS’s failure to diagnose. We settle for Keir Starmer and the Middle East crisis, and it seems to comfort him. He opens his eyelids to find a familiar face, and his mouth opens in what is patently a smile. He blows a kiss as people leave. My mother, uncharacteristically, buys a tub of Maltesers, eats four, gets rid of the rest.
“I’m not dead yet, you know. Give me your hand.”
Much of the vigil at the bedside of the dying is dull. He realised this, muttering from a blur of anti-emetics, “Boring for you…” No, no, we reassure. But hurry up and die already, otherwise when can we have dinner? On the day he might have died but didn’t, we decided nervously to leave and return in the morning, knowing we would suffer a night in which the phone became an object of dread, even as we carefully switched it off silent mode to ensure it could wake the sleeping, and the half-sleeping.
“Bye,” he rasps, in his last lucid words to me. “Thank you.”
It’s a sentimental cliché for which he would have had no time.
When we got into the house on the final drive back from the hospice, the dead face on the white pillow still fresh in the mind, I chopped onions for a tomato sauce and fetched a bottle of champagne. Opening it had, for half a century, been my father’s domain. I presented it to my mother, who backed away. “Pretend it’s olive oil,” I said, and she popped the cork from the neck of the bottle without a twitch. By the end of the week, my scalp had started to dry up and flake from my head in a snowfall of dead skin. Feeling sheepish and dirty, I purchased a killer-strength anti-dandruff shampoo the colour of Colman’s mustard powder. Laced with salicylic acid it reeked of sulphur, as, soon, did my hair. And so grief has a smell: sulphurous, a chemical tang.
I knew he would die on the day we went in to find a candle lit by his bed and a clean white napkin draped over the plastic bag of black bile that dripped from a tube in his nose. He was yellow and unresponsive, but he was clean-shaven and shiny with moisturiser, and his hearing-aids were in. (“What the fuck did they teach you in school?” he asked in the hospital, as I got confused as to which was right and which left. “The red one is R for right, and the blue is L for left.” My mother and I agreed that we loved and clung to his occasional, not entirely characteristic, swearing, as a sign of life, for which we were greedy.)
I held his hand and there was a very slight squeeze, and his fingers stayed hooked around mine until I had to detach them when we went to get some lunch. It’s possible that I made more of a meal of this than was necessary, reassuring myself of his grip. I picked some cheese out of a panini and we took our coffees back into the room, by which time his head was on his side, his hands were up by his face, and his breathing had become shallow and intermittent, something new-born. I suddenly became aware—without panic or fear—that he had started to die, a clock running down. “I hope he knows he can die?” I said to my mother. We told him he could, and so he did, looking at my mother through half-open lids, and with my arm on his, my self-consciousness and nerves around the company and bodies of the sick dissipating entirely. His white neck was puffing in and out, the skin loose over an Adam’s apple that had never before been noticeable.
There was no real moment of death; it took a minute or two, as the little puffs and swallows gave out, began again, seemed to stop, restarted. The connecting thread that was being severed seemed less between life and death as between the family unit of three that, for 34 years, we had always been. It was tranquil and gentle, without the struggle that had characterised some of the previous hours and days, and he breathed once or twice more even after I had gone out into the corridor to tell one of the angels in nursing uniform that he had died. When I went back into the room his face, now rid of the power to hold his features in any expression, had become a head, and his eyes, as the nurses shone a torch into them, were matte stone. Another nurse felt for a pulse and took off his wedding ring, a still-warm silver band which I put straight away onto my own finger. As we walked away from the body, one of the hospice staff asked if we wanted a crocheted heart. My mother said “No” almost too swiftly.
“Are you all right to drive?” I asked her, which was silly, as I do not drive and so we had no alternative. I signed a form for the wedding ring, and we went back into the room, where the dandelion clocks had been drawn against the view. I made myself kiss his forehead, but it meant nothing, as the body now had so little to do with who he had been. We did not cry until we were wrapped in the warm embrace of the nurses. “Are you the son?” one asked. “Yes,” I said. “I’m the son.”
The word “fond” is undervalued. I am and was so entirely fond of him.
People often say—and I have said glibly to others, writing my own letters of condolence—that the moment of a death, even a long-expected one, is always a shock. This, by contrast, was inexorable, inevitable, entirely meant, like something in music, a resolution, a settling. I would say a perfect cadence, except it wasn’t a return to the home key or the tonic note, nothing so cyclical. This was an ending, a departure not an arrival, a modulation that both aged and youthened me, because the loss of a parent is bound up absolutely with the fact of being a child even as it underscores the need to be a full-grown adult in the world. I do not miss the bureaucracy and sorrow of the weeks before he died, or the inefficiencies and delays of his treatment, or the pain and discomfort, or the vileness of his illness, which tore through him like a forest fire through dry trees. But when the world, for the brief period of the dying time, is reduced to life and death much is simplified; only outside of the hospice do complexities exist and unimportant things matter. Death, as opposed to dying, is amazingly simple, and sorrow a good cure for depression.
On the journey home, we saw a tawny owl flying out of the trees by the side of the road. “It’s my father!” I said in a silly voice, and we both knew it was not. The flood of feeling was of euphoria, strange to say. Trauma came later (and trauma is the right word for the sight of his ravaged corpse, which came before my closed lids every time I tried to sleep over the next few days, attempting simultaneously to remember and to forget). The elation was partly relief—he was not suffering any more—and partly self-reflexive. I had, I hope and believe, been there for him, helped him die, passed the test. This is not a privilege given to everyone, and absence at a deathbed is no failure; some, like cats, need solitude to die, and, indeed, I thought my father might prefer it so. But when it came to it, we were there, and possibly he had waited. He had not died on a battlefield, as his own father could so easily have done; neither of his parents was living, as they just could have been; he had lost a daughter, hours after her premature birth, but did not have to live through my death; he had not, for those last hours at least, been in any perceptible pain. Cancer makes for some cruel living and some hard dying, but it offers a gentle and unsudden death. The three weeks that the metastasising cells took to kill him were car-crash quick, but they were three weeks too long, and now they were over. These are reasons enough for elation. I am conscious of his, and my, good fortune.
He had died in the afternoon, and the sky on that homeward journey, as I wore his wedding ring and clutched his grubby dressing gown and a hospice-issue plastic bag of shaving foam and nail clippers, was blue. My feeling was of having witnessed something beautiful, as one might have felt after seeing a kingfisher or an eclipse, or having been present at a birth. I have not yet seen a birth, or a kingfisher, but if there is something miraculous in a human life emerging from sperm and egg, so it seemed equally mesmerising that something alive could stop so completely. No fuss. On to the next thing.
