Green on holiday?

I’ve had four lovely days in Chester, staying with a Quaker friend and going to three concerts in the Chester Music Festival. Highly recommended: the young piano trio who played the Beethoven ‘Archduke’ trio were superb, giving new insights into a work I know well. Gothic Voices, famous for ‘Feather on the Breath of God’, the music of Hildegarde of Bingen, gave a fascinating and informative concert, marred only by their having to compete with the local fire brigade who for some inexplicable reason were doing an exercise putting a man on the cathedral roof – a failure of communication, they should have been told to come back and do it next week when the festival was over! And finally the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic performing Mahler’s great Resurrection Symphony, a huge work of hope and optimism in the end after a terrifying opening of funeral rites: so well done we stood and cheered at the end.

I’d gone by car. The UK is simply not designed for side to side rail travel! And actually I’d changed plans at the last minute – twice – because a friend was planning to visit right at the start of the week and then moved it to the following week: so it would have been prohibitively expensive. I can’t afford spontaneity! It does seem a bit anti-green of the railway companies to penalise the late booker so much: why can’t they do a standby system like the airlines used to, whereby those who use up the unsold seats get them at reduced prices, not increased ones.

But the house where I was staying was about half a mile from the city walls, so I walked in and back each day, good for my exercise regime. It’s an amazing city, Chester: there are mediaeval shops there, double-storied, unlike anywhere else in the UK. These are really ancient monuments but they are used for ordinary things like the sofa shop which has an interior almost unchanged in four or five centuries. It’s living history. I’d gone because someone had told me how good the Roman bits were – and foolishly I never checked it out first in my English Heritage book: but in fact that was one of the two disappointments, there is a dig of an amphitheatre and that’s about it for Roman. (The other disappointment was the river cruise, which was up the Dee, pretty and tree-lined but with no really distinguishing features, on a boat where I had to queue for 20 minutes to get a drink!)

A pleasant holiday, nevertheless. I was staying with a friend who lives a very simple life – no television, little alcohol, veggie eating: if we all lived like that, somehow the nation would be better, more peaceful, more at one with itself. My friend has been peacemaking in Israel, putting herself in danger to try to bring understanding, but with tonight’s news of Israel bombing a UN post this seems unlikely. But one must try, and she did; I’ve every admiration for that.

Back home, then, for a busy weekend: a friend to stay on Friday with whom I did a workshop on erosion of Civil Liberties (read Henry Porter in ‘The Observer’, or see their website, to see more; it’s horrific what’s going on), a couple for dinner, then another friend to stay for three very happy days. And only today have I had time to recover, wash, shop and begin on all the domestics I’d been putting off. My friend texted me to say ‘back to reality’ – but I replied that her visit was the reality, the nitty-gritty real world was the illusion! I shall visit her domain in the Spring: reality will set in again then.

The Merry Widower?

It’s hard to tell how my Dad is taking things. He must be missing Mum a lot: they were married for 67 years, after all. But she was a very controlling woman, and now he’s able to watch television (and fall asleep in front of it) and rustle the paper and drop it all over the floor to his heart’s content, he does seem to have perked up a good deal. This week, Janet, one of his carers, took him out in his wheelchair. It has a motor assistance underneath, so she can push him quite easily for some distance. She took him up to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre coffee shop and bought him tea and cakes, then on to Woolworths to choose a photo frame. He wants this for two pressed flowers, one from Mum’s garden and one from her funeral wreath, along with a photo of her. I think it will be a lovely memento, and will give him much comfort.

Anyway, the day after this outing, he was very bright and perky. He was awake all morning – unusual for him – and we chatted for nearly an hour, which is unheard of – I don’t ever remember chatting that long even when he and I were much younger! Mum would never let him go out if there was any wind: but I think if he’s wrapped up warm, the fresh air keeps his brain going, and being confined to barracks is a major contributing factor to his moments of confusion. It’s as well he was having a lucid period, as we needed to get him to understand and execute a power of attorney so I can run his finances for him. He never signs anything without looking at it for ages, so it’s really slow if you actually want something done! (At least he signed a cheque for all the money I’d spent on his behalf, though.)

I suppose it’s early days yet: next Tuesday will be a month since Mum died. To me it doesn’t seem any time at all: I’d been vaguely wondering if it would become clear in two or three months whether Dad would be able to cope, but now I think it will take longer than that. I’m so aware than many couples of long duration follow one another quite quickly, but I’m not at all sure that this will be the case with Dad: but then, he’s 94 and his own health isn’t exactly A1.

But we’ve done a bit of ‘greening’, nevertheless. Mum used to have heaters on all the time, even in high Summer, because she felt the cold: as we discovered, she had a lot of arteriosclerosis and so must have had very limited circulation. And the immersion heater was on 24/7: I’ve now got the carers to have it on in the morning (hot water for the washing machine) and turn it off at teatime, which will save Dad money and the Planet a little as well. So I’m doing my greenish bit down there as well as up here – though it does concern me, the amount of petrol I’m burning going up and down the A1/M1 all the time. I’ve been three times since mid June, and will go again at the very end of July, so it’s lots of miles – but I can’t do what’s needed quickly enough without a car, and things like shopping are really hard as there’s no bus to where my Dad lives. They did try a wonderful pollution free electric bus (well, only the pollution from making the electricity!) which went round the town, but that would have meant two bus rides – not free for me down there, why can’t my ‘free bus travel’ cover the UK instead of only my home area?! – and shopping would have taken about three hours. I don’t like to leave Dad that long, though of course I’m leaving him three weeks at the moment! And if I do move to Banbury, the drive over will take half an hour, but the train takes an hour and a half – so I ain’t using the train a lot!! Time and Greenness is so often a conflict. As ever, one has to strike a balance: at least I’m making some sort of effort to decrease Dad’s footprint as well as my own.

What to do when someone dies

I was glad the hospital had given me a booklet. ‘Which’ magazine used to do a little book with the same title as this post, but where my Dad’s copy is I’ve no idea: probably Mum threw it out as unnecessary (!).

So first I had to get in touch with the coroner: because Mum had died in hospital following an operation, the death had been referred to him. The Coroner’s office were a model of helpfulness. They explained the procedures and timings, and they had said a post-mortem would be needed in order to establish beyond doubt the cause of death, and that it had been arranged for the following day (Tuesday – the contact was on the Monday, the day after Mum died). And indeed on the Tuesday at lunchtime the coroner rang to say that it was all done and he could release the death certificate, which meant we could get on with the funeral arrangements and with registering the death: he’d faxed the necessary document through to the registrar.

Meanwhile we’d had some angst as to what to do about the funeral. Mum had originally put in her will that she wanted to be buried, but in fact this was a little inconsistent with her leaving her body to Birmingham University, and there had always been a question mark over whether they would take it. She had then left a subsequent note asking her executors to disregard the clause about being buried: she wanted to be cremated after the hospital or anyone else had finished with the body. I hadn’t known this: if I had, I’d have talked to her about green funerals, which weren’t much known about in 1989 when she made her will. Birmingham University had left a helpful and informative leaflet about bequeathing bodies to them, and amongst other things the leaflet made it clear that if there had been a post-mortem then they could not accept a body in any circumstances. So that option was out: it seemed that cremation was then the expressed wish.

I wasn’t yet convinced: I felt that Mum might well have felt differently in the current awareness of climate change and the need to avoid adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. So with the help of my friend Marlene in Birmingham, I investigated a little further. There is a green burial ground in that part of the world: but although it’s called a ‘woodland’, in fact it’s currently a field. A tree is planted within a year of an interment – presumably you have to wait for the right time of year – so eventually the field will be full of trees. But there is no marking of individual graves: we would not have known where Mum was, only that she was ‘somewhere in there’. We all felt this wasn’t adequate: we need somewhere to meet and bring flowers on anniversaries and go out for a meal together afterwards. So in the end I swallowed the green implications and arranged a cremation: it was, after all, what Mum had explicitly asked for. I’d chosen the Co-op Funeral Service, as being as good as any and one who at least knew about the green funerals: so after registering Mum’s death in Leamington, I went to see them to fix it. We had to go for a date not too near because of nephews flying back from Bahrein and Montreal, but we’d got a tentative date arranged and it proved possible, so I booked it. I had to make other decisions, too, without consulting: did we want a Minister (yes – I didn’t think we could do the service ourselves and remain steady-voiced), what sort of flowers (I chose a spray of lilies that in the end looked lovely, to be from Dad and my sister and me), what about other flowers (family only, donations to RNIB as Mum was blind), notice in the paper (yes, but very simple, listing no relatives lest anyone get upset at being missed out). I said I’d write a tribute to Mum, which I’ll put on here as the next posting: my sister Hilary altered it a bit (the posting will be the original version that I still think is better – my sis hasn’t too much sense of literary style and was going to leave out Mum’s greatest achievement as a young woman, playing in a recital at the Wigmore Hall of which my sister had never heard!!), and suggested that one of the grandchildren (her oldest) might read a poem chosen by her youngest. I agreed to all of that: I wasn’t going to have rifts in the family at such a time. Then the night before the funeral Hilary rang again to say her son would like to read the tribute (he’d loved my original, as did his brother!) and let someone else read the poem! Ho hum… so I rang the vicar who was great about it and fixed it all, and my oldest daughter Clare who agreed to read the poem.

On the day I’d fixed a wheelchair taxi to take my Dad, the first time he’d been in a car for about two years. Hilary and I went with him, her in front with the driver and me in the back with Dad. It all worked OK at the Crematorium, though Scott in the end found it difficult to maintain composure towards the end of the tribute, which was precisely why I’d thought it better to have the Minister read it. It was really good that all seven of the grandchildren were able to be there. Then back to the sheltered housing where Dad still lives, me again with him in the taxi as Hilary was showing a friend the way, for what I’d arranged as tea and sandwiches but where Hilary had insisted on having a glass of wine available (and yes, I had one, I needed it by then!) Dad’s carers were wonderful, looking after him all the time and taking some of the burden off me. They took him back home after a bit as he was feeling tired: and then when everyone was dispersing I asked the family about going out together for a meal, which I’d mentioned long before. But they all had other things to go to, and in the end all Hilary’s family went back to Scott’s – I think they were going to eat at a riverside pub near there, but they didn’t ask me if I wanted to come, and I was left alone with my Dad and our collective emotions. This was the hardest part of the day, and by the end I was praying for the carers to come and put him to bed with his sleeping pill: but of course they were running late because of the funeral and time seemed to drag on endlessly. But eventually they arrived, we tucked him up and I hugged him and kissed him goodnight, and went to watch the world cup, blessed distraction. I felt totally deserted, totally alone: I felt everyone else had come, done their bit, and signed off, but for me there is no signing off, there’s my Dad to look after. At half time I rang Liz, just for a moan and a voice, and she as ever was very calming: and after the match I had another glass of wine and went to bed myself, the end of a long, hard day.

The day my Mum died

My niece Michele rang at about half past eleven on Wednesday (14th), to say the hospital were worried about Mum’s condition and thought we should get down there. So I packed, did the things that were vital – my divorce going on all in the middle of this – and drove down to Warwick, arriving about seven in the evening and having realised en route that I’d left behind my eyedrops, without which my incipient glaucoma would get quickly worse. I went to the ward and met my sister Hilary and her daughter who’d rung earlier. Mum was showing no signs of being conscious: she was breathing rather heavily from an oxygen mask. I asked the nurses first about her blood pressure, which was apparently up a little (relief!) and then if there was any way they could help over the eyedrops. They were marvellous: they sent me round to casualty where a helpful doctor wrote a prescription straight away, and the nurses gave us excellent directions to find the only pharmacy still open (Sainsbury’s in Leamington, if you need a late chemist down that way!). Hils, Mich and I decided we could do no good staying with an unconscious Mum, and so went to get the drops and then have a meal in a pleasant riverside pub nearly. They then went back to the Travelodge where they were staying, and I to my parent’s flat in Stratford.

Next morning we met again at the hospital: Mum was still showing few signs of consciousness, though she did appear to open her eyes occasionally, and to make small muscle movements. The other two stayed till lunch, then decided they should go home, Hilary telling me quietly that Michele was getting very upset and as she might be newly pregnant it was doing her no good to be there. I stayed with Mum until late, and went back home at about 7.30, by which time Dad had been put to bed but wasn’t yet asleep, so I could give him a hug and a progress report. This was the pattern on Friday and Saturday too: I stayed with Mum all day, wondering if she was at all aware of my being there and holding her hand, slipping out to the hospital canteen for lunch, reading, snoozing, doing the odd Sudoku and finally going home at around 7.30. As I got up to go on Saturday, one of the other patients said to me ‘You’ve had a long day’: it was good just to have an acknowledgement that what I was doing, sitting with a dying parent, wasn’t easy. The carers all popped in from time to time, and one thought Mum was beginning to recover, but the nurses made it clear to me that recovery wasn’t happening, they had no way of feeding Mum that would allow her to build up any energy: though on Saturday, ironically as it turned out, the dietician asked me to choose some liquid food for the next day in case Mum was well enough to take it.

At 4.45 a.m. on Sunday, the hospital rang to say Mum had deteriorated and they felt I should come in. I threw on some clothes, grabbed a quick plate of cereal so I would not be feeling too weak, and drove though the empty streets. I arrived just as she was taking her last breath. The nurse with me said ‘she’s gone’, and she turned off the oxygen and removed the mask, and I could see my mum’s familiar face properly. Then, tactfully, she left us alone together as Mum began on that last journey. It takes a time to die: there are plenty of cases of people who stop breathing and are resuscitated a few minutes later. Brain activity slows and stops, and the soul takes a careful leave of the body that it has inhabited, particularly if like my Mum it has been there a long, long time. Mum had had her 94th birthday ten days earlier.

I stayed an hour. When I first thought it might be time to go, I kissed Mum and pulled the sheet gently over her head: but I just couldn’t do it, I couldn’t leave this lovely, amazing woman who had been so important to me all the years of my life. Maybe Mum hadn’t quite gone at that point, and was holding me back until she had truly finished her time on earth, this time round. After another quarter hour or so, I tried again. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, leaving her there, even though in fact she had left me and there was only the empty husk.

The charge nurse was, as ever, very helpful. She explained the procedure: Mum’s death had to be referred to the coroner because it had been following an operation from which she had not recovered. She gave me a booklet that described what I had to do: it looked very complicated but in fact this was only because it tried to cover all eventualities. She gave me a hug, and she too had tears in her eyes. She asked if I was OK to drive home, and I said yes: it was still only about 7 am on Sunday morning and I knew there would be little traffic. So I walked, finally, out of the hospital, back to the car, and drove home. It was hard, but by concentrating on driving very precisely I found I could postpone the overwhelming emptiness for long enough to get home safely. Dad was still asleep: I had to come the task of telling him that his wife of 67 years was no more.

I made a cup of coffee, and waited in total aloneness until just before the carers were due to get Dad up, at 9 a.m. Then I slipped into his bedroom, hugged him, and told him I’d been to the hospital because Mum had been worse, and that she had died early that morning. He said ‘Oh, dear’: he sounded half asleep at the time, and when the carers arrived I told them too. As they got him up, I heard him asking ‘how’s Audrey?’: they avoided replying. When he was in his chair, dressed and waiting for breakfast, I told him again, putting my arms round him and saying very clearly that Mum had died. This time he said ‘Oh, no…’, and I think he began to realise what I’d said, because in a little he asked when the funeral would be. I explained that we had to wait for the coroner and there might have to be a post mortem, which would affect whether her body could be used by Birmingham University Medical school, which she’d wanted. He didn’t cry, not then, and simply sat, eating his weetabix as normal and saying nothing. Meanwhile I started to make lists of people to tell, and then ringing my sister and then my children. It being Sunday, I couldn’t do anything about banks and officials.

I don’t know how I got through the rest of the day. Nobody else came: there was just me and Dad, and the carers when they arrived. I have to confess I was relieved when they finally put Dad to bed with a sleeping pill, and I could weep and then get some supper and go to bed myself. Bless the World Cup: it was a welcome distraction. And I knew there were more difficult days to come: but that this one had been, perhaps, the most difficult of all.