The Sandstone Blog
Valediction
The phone rings and your life changes. This time it was one of the District Nurses who visited my mother at her sheltered accommodation in Glasgow. ‘Robert,’ she said and, after some preliminaries, ‘She is not responding’. In return I made some spluttering noises that amounted to denial. The nurse cut through with, ‘She is at risk’. Bang! Reality.
Between the District Nurses and me we got things moving and, in fact, in a few weeks Mum made enough of a recovery to be deemed able to return. Eight months later she died. The entry in my diary for Saturday 15th December 2001 is simply ‘Mum died.’ Two words and a full stop, but that’s it – finish. She had lived for eighty one years, two months and ten days. The rest is tears and memories.
There is a thing that happens to us boys and our Mums as we get along in life that, at first, I thought only applied to us. Since then I have had quite a few conversations on the subject and it seems that it is pretty general. In my early forties, which is to say her early seventies, we became very close.
I think there were subliminal elements in the altered relationship. The shift in dependency between my childhood and her old age was moving towards completion. I was on my own and so best placed, between my brother and myself, to be her champion and representative. In many ways I was her voice. Neither of us at that time cared to look at the shadow that fact threw back on us from the future. This shadow was that when the time came for her to move permanently, or be moved, into a Care Home, to die as would be completely understood, the effective agent in closing the circle would be me. Trust would be everything; trust beyond normal understanding, trust that would extend out of life.
This came to pass in the weeks after her return and was made all the more difficult by a movement out of full communication in the two or three years prior to the District Nurse’s call. This had been of her choosing, not mine, and I guess it was in anticipation of this time. In these years she kept things from me, more especially she removed me from the decision making process. It was my difficult task to accept that she had the right, that her life was her own.
She also fell into other old age practices such as phoning me and saying nothing, and hoarding money. When I discovered how much was stashed around the house I feared for her safety and took such measures as I could to protect her. From time to time she had hallucinatory experiences. In these ways and others her condition worsened and I more than once had to wilfully confront her difficulties, picking up from a position of not knowing, to ‘interfere’ as she described it. These events aside she remained in charge of her own life until close to the end.
After a number of incidents, some of them dramas, especially after this last incident, senior social workers put an individual I felt I could trust into place. We talked around Mum’s condition and her situation through many conversations, some two way, some three. It was pretty clear that we could not continue as we had for much longer. She was a cottage industry of carers coming in to get her out of bed and into her chair, getters-up and tuckers-in, to wash and dress her, to cook for her and help her to eat, to keep her company, to put her to bed at night.
The latest collapse proved that a permanent eye was required. At home she was alone at times through the day, and all through the night. I am sure she saw the future at least as accurately as I, but there is an old Russian proverb that says most prayers amount to a plea for two and two not to make four, just once. She resisted the final move to the end.
The end had come though and as we had understood all along, she and I, it fell to me to make the decision which she had to articulate and sign for. This she eventually but graciously did and moved into Ailsa Craig Nursing Home in Brand Street, Ibrox, just round the corner from the street we had lived in until I was ten. No, I don’t remember those early years as a golden age but they were what they remain, irremovable from our two personal histories.
Her Parkinson’s Disease progressed as rapidly in Ailsa Craig as it had at home and after yet another collapse she was admitted into hospital. Somehow, in my heart of hearts, I guess at least part of me believed it would go on forever. Not so. A Consultant gave me the news I least wanted to hear but quickly absorbed and accepted. ‘It is time’, was the sentence that came to mind and would not go away. In kindness he kept her in the ward for a duration that should have allowed her time to die. I am kind of proud that she was too strong to depart according to schedule, but there was to be a twist.
She returned to Ailsa Craig and her room, not to rise from her bed again. I visited as often as I could: staying in hotels, a Youth Hostel, bed and breakfasts, and amazingly the closeness began again. It re-established itself during her periods of lucidity when her memory proved to be far reaching and detailed. I would listen and say little but remember one time sitting with my head on my folded arms on her bed and being wakened by the sound of her reciting the names of her grandchildren and other children who had been close to her. Time was no barrier in this as she included the names of her two sons and our cousin Charlotte, but most definitely as children.
There was no question of remaining in Glasgow all the time. Life really does go on. More than once in those closing weeks the nurses called me to say, ‘Mr Davidson, we think you should come down now’, and I would go to sleep on the floor of the room beside Reception so I could be close and ready. Through those long weeks she was constantly on my mind.
At the time I was engaged in the task of altering Northwords into a general arts magazine and getting it onto something like a commercial footing. Battles were being fought with one funder in particular and hard lessons were being learned. I was also involved with composers, musicians and visual artists on three performance projects. On Saturday 15th December, I was engaged in a series of exciting phone calls, lots of things were falling into place and my mind, for once, was entirely engaged elsewhere. In a sense I had released her without knowing it.
It was Moira Forsyth, now a Director with Sandstone Press, who arrived to tell me that she had died in the course of the morning. The nurses had been trying to get through for ages but my phone was constantly engaged. In the end they called my brother and he called Moira. Since then I have often felt that our strong reconnection had held Mum for some time longer than she would otherwise have lived, that my distraction that morning had temporarily released her and allowed her to leave. I actually still believe that.
On the following Saturday, the 22nd, her remains were cremated with many guests present at the service, including her last surviving sister, my Auntie Elsie up from her home in Bamber Bridge. Old friends I thought were by now more or less out of my ken were surprisingly supportive. At my request the minister read ‘Everything is going to be all right’ by Derek Mahon which is not only one of my favourite poems but also very suitable for someone whose life was as constrained and limited as Mum’s became, but who maintained her spirit well against hopelessness and depression.
Here below is the poem I wrote later about the events of the 22nd.
VALEDICTION
Silver haired the children of the dead
arrange themselves by age, their long coats
brush the ground, their shoes like ebony
reflecting on the passage of the old.
A garden of remembrance of their own,
they are like flowers; they are like roses
enduring winter, lilies white as snow.
Like circled wreaths they wait beside the door.
They are the dutiful and the bereft
standing by the end of time, night watchers
mindful of the light. They hold respect
like tensioned ropes, their love is not lost yet.
***
Who could have known the unexpected guest
would arrive? Balanced on her husband’s arm
against the strokes that felled her, at her best.
Her adult children follow on like guards.
The mourners rush to take her other arm.
Last link that she is to all those passed,
she must be protected, kept from harm,
their whole family recalled from the past.
Embraces, kisses – a sense of relief,
the day has turned on her being here.
With her present it has all become real.
They drift like a cloud through caller air.
***
The absent presences of children
run silently around the mourners’ feet.
Tugging on trousers and lifting their arms,
the tousy ghosts are stealing from the feast.
Inside the hall they girn on adult knees,
demanding to be noticed, to be held.
Far away and safe they place their needs
against the present absence of the dead.
***
He shoulders the black to ascend the stairs
while all the gathered faces lift as one.
elevated and apart he says
the words they have come to depend upon.
He recites the details of the life that’s gone.
They sing, ‘All people that on earth do dwell’
and ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I shall not want’.
The silent casket settles on its dais
until the moment of curtain closure,
the slow, theatrical whisper of drapes,
when all but one of the heads bow low.
A face that never wept, whose heart still waits.
***
It is done, the casket curtained and gone,
the hymns all hymned and the prayers prayed.
Her arm links the arm of her sister’s son,
these two together through the bright day.
‘Yes, it was a good parting, somehow right,
and this clear sky’, she thinks, ‘a late blessing
for Ana – free now, free as the light.
Time comes, a peaceful end is best.’
She has travelled great distance to be here.
It’s distance she thinks of now, and time,
the oldest sister, Nell, their mother Ada,
and Annie, aged eight, first of all to die.
***
It is like a void they are passing through.
little more than a whisper in the ear,
a touch on the arm from someone gone.
The day observes more than they can say.
What it is most like is an explosion,
blowing them all their different ways
to be themselves again. Their lone shades
stretch before them and out of the day.
This mourner travels through a world made strange,
of failing light and no ground left that’s sure.
Wide eyed he stares from a slow moving train.
Starlight sparkles on a frozen moor.