In the summer of 2002, in my 57th year, I gaze into my mother’s eyes as she lies dying. They are partially open, the pupils highlighted by the window behind me, and as I speak to her I wonder if she is hearing me. The light in her eyes glints slightly, and perhaps I am seeing a slight movement in her eyelids as if she is trying to convey something to me. Might she be trying to say, I am very happy for you or, Oh Chap, how will you manage? A baby at your age? Aren’t three children enough? Because a few minutes ago, convinced that we were communicating, I wrote in pencil on a scrap of paper, we’re having another baby, and held it up for her to read.
I wrote it in case she could not hear me, in the faint hope that she might read what I had to say through those ambiguously half open eyes. I wanted to tell her that she could go now, that another little soul is on its way in, that she may pass him at the threshold so look out for him - for he is a boy - and there can be a spiritual handover between the two of you, grandmother to grandson, as you leave and he arrives. I’m attracted to this karmic conceit. It happened when my father died and my second child arrived, a quarter of a century ago and now, who knows, another magical rebirth may be on its way. I show her the scrap of paper again and for a moment I convince myself that she has understood, until a protracted groan makes me think maybe not.
This is the dying room on the women’s ward of Winchester Hospital, close to the nursing station, set discretely aside from the main ward. I am pleasantly surprised by the sensitivity of those who are caring for her. I work in a hospice where we are used to hearing horror stories about dying in hospitals butthe term palliative care is understood by everyone to mean the kind of care offered to those for whom no cure is possible - medication to alleviate physical pain, and other therapies that will ease the spiritual and emotional journey. This is in perceived contrast to the experience of those who find themselves dying in a hospital, where the ethos of cure can create an institutional denial of death, which comes to be felt as a kind of failure. Add to this the sense of being merely an NHS number, rather than a person, in an understaffed bureaucratic system that’s geared towards trumpeting good health and recovery, and you can see what an alienating and stressful business dying in a hospital, rather than a hospice, can be. But it’s not like this here, which suggests that a change may be occurring in the way NHS hospitals treat the dying. There’s a soft respect towards my mother from the nurses I meet, although perhaps this would change if she were conscious and suffering tangibly.
She has lain here, in what I suppose to be a coma, for two weeks now. The room is slightly scruffier than when she first came in, reflecting the sheer time it can take to die, the slight but not disrespectful easing of care that’s happened because she’s taking so long to go. The water in the glass vase of green Honesty that I picked from her garden now needs replenishing. Her notes, attached to clipboard at the foot of the bed, now have dog-eared corners. But the nurses still look in at regular intervals, to turn her gently or clean her. The drip is checked and oxygen flow adjusted.
So there she lies with those partially open eyes, perhaps still seeking to convey something to her beloved son, to express a sentiment that the blood drenched language centres of her brain can no longer construe in words and syntax.
Summer 2002
by Chris Rawlence
