Last week I went back to the place where my mother died. It was the day after Mother's Day and the first time I had been to the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead since the
day after she passed in June 2012. On that day my sister and I went to see her
body before they took her to the morgue. I remember being full of fear as we
climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked down the corridor to Room 4.
The lights were dim inside the room and there was an air of calm. The drone of
the oxygen machine was gone as were the hum of the nebuliser and the wheezing
struggle of Mum’s clawing for breath.
Final resting place
Mum lay neatly tucked up in bed in her nightie with her
hands clasped across her chest. Through her tears my sister remarked how Mum
looked like she was smiling. All I saw were her sunken cheeks and waxy
complexion. The person lying in the bed in front of me had the physical
features of my Mum but seemed like an impostor. Death had turned her into a
stranger. We didn’t linger in that room with the body that had contained our
Mum. I was full of dread at the inescapable finality of her state. There would
be no more treatment, no more hope. She was not ‘doing okay’, or ‘responding
well to treatment’, she was dead. There is no ambiguity in that. You will never
hear the question:
“ I'm sorry, can you explain to me exactly what you mean by
dead?”
Face to face with Death
The easiest way I can describe meeting death is to think of
a traveller walking along a road. One day, a giant boulder blocks the
traveller’s path. Having never seen a boulder so big before the traveller is
terrified. He turns on his heels and flees back the way he came, shaking with
fear. After a while, he calms down and chastises himself for his temerity. He
returns to the boulder and now he is full of rage. How dare this boulder block
his path, what has he done to deserve this? With a great wailing and gnashing
of teeth he sets about the boulder, uselessly slamming his fists into its
solid sides. Finally, he collapses exhausted,
his shoulders heaving from the futile exertion. He begins to understand that
the huge rock is immovable. There is nothing he can do to affect the boulder but
it affects him profoundly. He must change his course. He must find a way to
accept its presence and carry on with his journey, or be stuck
forever in the same place.
Unfortunately, the boulder is not only tall but also long.
The traveller cannot simply step past it, but rather must journey along its
length for as long as it takes. I took another step on that journey last week
when I cycled through the threatening wind to attend a memorial at the hospice.
I arrived to find my sister and 30 others neatly seated in front of the
chaplain who was about the begin the service in memory of those who had passed
away at the hospice in the summer of 2012. I bustled into the room and found my
seat in a sweaty post-cycle kafuffle, removing layers and stuffing noisy
garments into my too-full bag. Rows of sombre faces eyed me warily.
In January, when I received the letter from the hospice
inviting me to the memorial, at first I thought “No way!” The place was full of
fear for me, a reminder of a terrible time, a house of death. Its brick walls
loomed in my mind, the last place I had seen my mother alive. There is an image
branded on my memory of Mum waving to me from the window of her room on the 2nd
floor as I cycled across the car park and away after a visit. I didn’t want to
go back there. I couldn’t see the value in sharing my grief with a load of
strangers in a scheduled session. The idea felt alien to me and I dismissed it
immediately. And then I thought about how grief draws people back to the last
place a loved one was alive. Families visiting ground zero, or parents at the
scene of the crash that killed their son or daughter. These places do stir up
powerful emotions and facing them and exorcising the fear is a meaningful goal.
Grief O'clock
The rabbi began the service by playing a melancholy tune on
his guitar and the sniffling started. Once the song was finished the rabbi’s
roadie, a plump girl wearing a plaid skirt and squeezed into a plastic chair by
the window, turned up the volume on a portable stereo and more sad music filled
the room. Responding to the cues (commence sadness….NOW!), the sniffling
intensified. The rabbi and his roadie had clearly not been working together
very long because the chaplain gave a curt wave of the hand to indicate the
music should be turned off.
The rabbi introduced the service before various members of
the hospice staff stepped forward to read poems. There is one that stood out
for me, a poem called ‘What is Death?’ by Kahlil Gibran, which was full of
beautiful imagery. Soon, the grieving family members and friends were given the
opportunity to share their experiences. The first person brave enough to step
forward was a young woman who had lost her mother to cancer. She described her
mother as ‘an artist and my best friend’. The similarities with my own mother
and her relationship with my sister were so striking that I felt the breath
knocked out of me. As I struggled to maintain my composure, a fat-faced
gurgling baby smiled at me from his perch on his mother’s shoulder in the row
in front. I thought it appropriate that there should be a new life present in
the room as we gathered to honour those who had passed.
After the service, we were invited for tea and cake in a
communal space down the hall. I had been unwilling to share my private feelings
with complete strangers but I was connected to them by loss and that made
conversation easy. It was liberating to be in a room where I could speak freely
about my memories of Mum and the experience of her death without making anyone
feel uncomfortable.
What a way to remember
I met a lady called Pat who lost her sister to cancer at the
hospice in 2012. She described her sister Jo as a zesty character who made the
nurses blush with her dirty jokes and shouted at them when they turned music on
at the wrong time. She had lived life to the full, drinking and smoking and
enjoying herself. Pat recalled the exact point at which her sister died; just as
Pat was about to leave the hospice with her children and take them for a curry.
A routine decision that acquired deep significance. Pat had felt guilty at
wanting to leave her sister in order to feed her family but she was glad that
she had been in the room when her sister passed. Not everybody is allowed that
privilege. Jo lives on for Pat, especially through her sister’s spoilt poodle
that she now takes care of. The poodle has a habit of emitting foul belches,
which always used to make Jo laugh wildly. Whenever the dog belches, Pat is
reminded of her sister.
A toast to the dying
As I ate a doughnut, which was practically rammed down my
throat by a smiling lady wielding a sweet tray, two elderly gentlemen
approached me. They were brothers; Australian and their sister had died at the
hospice the year before. None of them had ever married and the three of them
had lived together for 17 years. The elder brother had sparse tufts of hair
here and there on his shiny head. There was a strange crater on the right hand
side of his skull and I wondered if it was a war injury, or something more
mundane. His eyes were bloodshot and he had the habit of drawing his plump
lower lip into his mouth as he drew breath. The younger brother did most of the
talking. And boy could he talk. After asking me why I had chosen to read an
extract of Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem My Last Will during the service, he began
his onslaught. His monologue ranged from the Russian Tsars to parties in Paris
and his religious faith. He kept up his barrage with barely a pause while all
the while drenching me in his damp aged odour. Despite the eccentricities of
this elderly pair there was clearly a deep affection between them and their
departed sister and so I endured the one-way traffic. They were probably just
glad to get out of the house. They described the two weeks their sister had
spent in the hospice and how they had slept on mattresses on the floor for the
entire time. They even celebrated the elder brother’s birthday in the hospice,
with champagne, smoked salmon and a cake. I pictured the scene in my mind, the
dying sister propped up in bed with the two brothers sat close beside her
sipping bubbly. A beautiful image, in its way.
Angels on Earth
I faced my fear of the hospice and I was rewarded with a
most uplifting experience. It was comforting to be reminded that we are not
alone in our grief and to share some of the strange and amusing experiences
that life is full of. It was also an opportunity to thank the Marie Curie staff
who do an amazing job making people’s deaths as easy as possible. Their
strength and compassion is admirable and they go about their work with a
selflessness that we should all aspire to. I don’t know when I will next go
back to the hospice but I know will not be full of dread when I do.
