Tag Archives: death

21 Jan 2024 · 7:25 pm

Aftermath …

Well, since we’ve talked about my lovely mum dieing, we may as well go on to talk about her funeral and the general aftermath. I wrote, possibly the longest eulogy on earth, except there was so much more I could put in and my brother wrote an equally lengthy one, my nephews and nieces said things, and my son read the lesson. The rain fell out of the sky like someone emptying a bucket over us but strangely, nobody really cared. Not even my poor uncle, who can’t walk without assistance but made it all the way up the church path because I forgot to get the wheelchair out of the church room! What a plank!

One of the important things about a funeral, I think, is that it should be a celebration. It’s like a send off where you laugh and tell stories about the person you loved. It’s how I was taught to do them and I find them enormously cathartic, done that way. So Mum was carried in to Lord of the Dance, because she’d always said she wanted that at her funeral but the priest pointed out that the words are a bit hard core. They are actually. So she got her wish without the hard core words. We tried to keep it short. And failed. We had a requiem mass because that’s what Mum wanted, she was always very disparaging about anyone having ‘a hymn sandwich’ as she and Dad called it. Mwahaharhgh, except she wasn’t because she wouldn’t have criticised anyone who’d decided to have one, she just didn’t want to do that for any of her rellies or have us do it for her. We found a whole bunch of lovely photos of her which I’ve uploaded to her memory wall because loads of people couldn’t come. We also got the service recorded. Originally we were going to try for a live stream but the signal round the church is even worse than it is round my parents’ house so it was loaded onto the web afterwards.

Slight hiccup when I went to the cupboard to borrow Mum’s dark blue coat only to discover that my brother had already taken all but a single puffa (which was even mankier than the one I’d brought with me) for the Ukranians. Luckily we found some kind of embroidered affair upstairs in Mum’s wardrobe. I put it back when I was done and now I’m slightly regretting it. I’ll definitely nick it next time I’m down. It absolutely threw it down with rain. My poor friend who came from Worcester took five hours to get home, and another friend who was about an hour up the road took two and a half hours to get home. Joy.

How does it feel now?

Kind of weird, if I’m honest. There’s still an absolute metric craptonne of admin, forms to fill in stuff to scan, copy and submit, and an absolute gargantuan raft of other shite. And I’m skint. As ever. And will be for some time because … probate. Obviously we’ve had to take anything worth nicking out of the house as well, and put it in storage and then we’ll have to bring it all back when we get a date for the probate valuation. Head desk. Oh well.

Apart from that though …? It’s hard to explain but, this last ten years as I’ve shared my frustrations at my complete inability to write books at a reasonable speed and my all general ineptitude with you lot, it’s been quite a struggle. A lot of the time, this blog was all I could write. The eyebombing helped of course. That was a bit of a win. But the thing about dementia is it’s sad. Even when the person is quite happy the way Mum was. I’ve been sad a lot of the time for the past eight or ten years and the five before that I was just exhausted.

We have a memory page for Mum with a link to give to the Dementia Society (Admiral Nurses) because they were incredibly kind to me when I rang their helpline which I did, in pieces, several times.

Picture of a lady in a chair reading a newspaper

I love this picture of Mum.

My godmother and I were chatting today and she said she’d looked at the page, and the pictures of Mum and found it very distressing to see the last one, at Mum’s 90th birthday celebration because she felt, looking at the picture, that a lot of Mum had already gone. It’s probably true. At the end, Mum was like a tiny flame, a pilot light compared to the brightly burning, vibrant personality she had been. It was hard to watch her like that, although, since she wasn’t in distress, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

Mum was so energetic though. Back in 2015/6 when this all started, I would go and stay with my parents and I would help Mum around the house, being a spare; running to fetch things because I could move faster, cutting stuff up for her because her hands were too arthritic. I had a small child but I would still come home exhausted after a few days trying to keep up with my nearly 80 year old mother. I remember Mum’s annoyance when, aged 77, her doctor suggested that perhaps it was time to stop digging potatoes herself and that maybe she should ask someone else to do it. I also remember when she was embargoed from going to that part of the garden because her panic button wouldn’t reach there. I arrived one Wednesday and found her arranging flowers, including some flowers from a tree that was well into the verboten zone.

‘Have you been down to the fruit cage?’ I asked her.

‘No, no. Not at all,’ she said.

She laughed like a drain when I pointed out the blossom and told her I’d got her bang to rights.

Sorry, none of this is really how it feels is it?

In truth, I feel as if I have lived the last 15 years of my life in twilight. First with a small child although that was uplifting, even if it was exhausting, and then with my parents. One of the hardest aspects with Mum was that there was no ‘sane’ one. Whereas with Dad, I knew exactly what to do because Mum was his soul mate and his best friend. She knew him so well that she understood exactly what he would have wanted us to do, had he been mentally equipped to decide. Except that it does get more complicated than that because the person with dementia changes so instead of putting the others round them at the centre of the world, they centre on their own needs. And those needs change. Case in point Mum, who went from ‘the minute your father goes, I’ll downsize to a nice little bungalow and then we won’t have to worry about money because it’ll see me out.’ To, ‘the house MUST stay in the family at all costs.’

Go figure.

Also, I’m not quite sure what was worse, watching Dad’s suffering or watching the effect it had on Mum, so having a sane one to consult did have a downside. The good thing was that Mum had given me a perfect demonstration of how caring for someone was done, so it was straightforward enough to just do what she did for Dad, for her.

I miss her though, and I will for a while, but when I think of her, I see light in my mind’s eye. Kindly, gentle light. And peace. So that’s grand.

Rain soaked town … Long passage of doom. I dunno. Go figure.

I have her engagement ring. It means a huge amout to me because it meant so much to her, but also because she meant so much to Dad, so it’s kind of the love of both parents rolled into one. At the same time, it’s also a lovely thing, and I am delighted with it on an asthetic shiny-thing-appreciation level which actually makes me feel a bit guilty. (Now I can hear the voice of Dad in my head telling me there’s nothing wrong with thinking it’s a beautiful ring because he thought it was and so did Mum and that being able to appreciate the ring in both respects is nothing to be ashamed of. Nonetheless …) My ring size is N and a half. Mum always joked about having hands like shovels and massive knuckles. I never thought she did until I tried to wear her ring. It was U and a half! I could have worn it with gloves Lord Vernon style … on the outside. Mwahaharhgh. When I picked it up from the undertakers, I put one of those plastic things you can get on it to make it smaller. It was two weeks before I could bring myself to remove it so it could be altered. But I knew that if I didn’t get it altered soon, I’d gesticulate and it would ping off somewhere and I’d never see it again. So I went to one of the lovely jewellers in town. I got it back on Friday. I’m not sure I’ll be taking it off again for a while.

Sometimes, on sunny days, I imagine my parents’ drawing room. I see the way the sun shines through the windows casting bright slanted oblongs of light across the wooden floor. I hear the birds outside. I see the ashes of the most recent fire in the grate. It’s a lovely room. Sitting in there is like being hugged. No wonder that house has only had three owners since 1911. It’s a bit special. It feels kind. Perfect match for my parents really.

What next?

Nothing much for a while. We have the interment of both Mum and Dad’s ashes on 10th. Which reminds me, I must pop down there and rescue Dad from Mum’s desk. We’re going to drop him off at the undertaker’s for a quick holiday so they can pop him into his casket and Mum into hers. They’ll be interred at the school where Dad worked, next to several of their much loved friends.

On the writing front, there’s not much. That’s fine. I didn’t write a thing for three months after Dad died. And then it only built up very slowly. I’m not expecting anything much there, although I will welcome it when it does start up again. Which reminds me. The eyebombing book’s on its way. I’m launching it on 7th February and the campaign will be live for 15 days. Hopefully I’ll hit my target of five purchasers but if I don’t I’ll just have to chalk it up to experience. It’s good to try these things.

Other than that. It’s drifting in limbo until probate’s done. And as for my newfound freedom … that feels as if it’s not going to come true. We’ve inherited a house miles away from either of us and not enough money to keep it going, unoccupied, for more than a few months. Something’s bound to go wrong, it’ll burn down … or thinking about it WWIII will start. Yeh. That’s more likely. Just as my kickstarter goes live they’ll have some massive, hideous war and it’ll fail because we’ll have all fried (hey, guess what? I never catastrophise, not at all). But it does all feel a bit weird. Like I’ve crept under the radar of the fates. It can’t last. I’m going to get rumbled.

After some years where I’ve found it difficult not to feel that, if life is a gift, there were parts of mine that were definitely a dog turd in a paper bag, I’m standing on the brink of a new kind of existance where I might, possibly, have some time and mental energy. Part of me feels it’s one I don’t deserve, or at the least, that I’m not going to get away with it. A simple, straightforward life feels like one that isn’t possible, moreover like one that I’m not entitled to. A big part of me is waiting for something to come piling out of left field to make certain sure doesn’t happen. As if things aren’t allowed to go right for me. I suspect this is part of the process after anything that’s been a bit of a long schlepp. Or maybe it’s survivors’ guilt messing with my head.

Mwahahaargh! As you can see, I’m still the same gargantuan melmet I ever was. Melmet: someone who is such a plonker they are a melt and a helmet, ergo, a Melmet. This is one of my son’s words and I think it’s brilliant. I can also put it into my books as I’m sure Big Merv will be calling The Pan a ‘melmet’ and can even explain that it’s toolbit and melt, which means I can get away with it because even if helmet is a bit rude, toolbit isn’t. Mwahaharhgh!

So there we are. And now McOther has arrived with a glass of sherry and I must take a sip or two and then head off to collect McMini from his boyfriend’s house. So that’s me for this week.

In the meantime, if you are a friend of the family visiting and you want to visit Mum’s memory page, you can do that here:

Memory Page: https://elisabethbell.muchloved.com/

Playback of the service: https://visual-memorials.co.uk/elisabeth-bell

If you are not a friend of the family, you’ll not be interested in those but you might be interested in my forthcoming release: Eyebomb, Therefore I Am which is launching on Kickstarter and then will probably be available from my website (because I might have some copies left). If you’re interested in that, you can follow the campaign and it will let you know when it launches. I now have the princely sum of 36 followers on it, although I suspect they are mostly people who have absolutely no intention of buying the book but want to make the algorithm think it is popular! Mwayaharhgh! My mates being kind basically.

Eyebomb! Thereofre I am.

Anyway, if you’re interested in having a look you can also see a preview of the campaign which I have now finally finished! Yes! Even also including the video.

You can find inks to those below:

Follow and get warned when it goes live here.

Have a sneak preview here

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Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as an author with children, author blog, death, dementia aftermath, Eyebombing, M T McGuire, M T McGuire new releases, off topic

26 Dec 2023 · 7:52 pm

The end …

This is weird. I’m posting to wish everyone a happy Christmas, although it’s so long since I’ve written anything that there may be no-one here!

But also because, if anyone is still likely to read this, there’s something you need to know. You see … my mum died.

Yep, exactly three weeks ago yesterday, my brother and I became orphans. It’s sad in a lot of ways, obviously, but strangely, the main thing about Mum’s death so far has been that it really wasn’t sad. Poignant? Yes. Beautiful perhaps, and moving, oh yeh. But sad? No. Not really.

Mum on honeymoon taken by Dad.

I’m going to tell you about it, partly because it always sets my head straight to write these things down and partly because there’s an outside chance it might help other people.

It all started on Saturday 2nd December. The carers rang to say that Mum seemed groggy and was looking a bit blue. We agreed that she probably had a chest infection. I told them that Mum had left instructions for this and that she would want to be at home. They understood but also had to walk the line as professionals so they dialled the out of hours doctor service at 111. 111 sent a paramedic who wanted to take her to hospital.

The carers rang me and put the paramedic on so that I could say no. But when she spoke to me, she explained that Mum was not about to die but needed access to pain meds and antibiotics which she would not get until Monday and that while letting her die at home was one thing, and perfectly possible if she was about to die, this wasn’t actually a life threatening situation. She totally got about Mum’s wishes, her own mother having been the same. It’s just that. In her view, Mum was going to get better, anyway, ergo denying Mum access to antibiotics for two days was actually just a bit mean.

So I let her go.

This is the bit where I experienced some of the crappy aspects of the NHS.

The paramedic with Mum told me that casualty wasn’t busy and that I would probably get a call by 2.00pm but if I didn’t to ring at five. In the event, I rang at 2.30 and got nowhere but that was fine, they’d said five so I waited and tried again then. I got through to a nurse who told me she hadn’t been allocated to Mum but went and asked the nurse who was how she was doing. Apparently Mum was through triage and in ‘major’ whatever that was. They were waiting for a doctor to see her a second time and she was settled and comfortable. I rang again at 7 and failed dismally to get anywhere. Actually, I failed to get anywhere every time but every three or four goes, I’d throw myself on the mercy of the lovely ladies on the switchboard who would try to help. A couple of times they managed to get me through to different people who could ask a nurse to find out if there was any news or look at a database, which did, at least, have the basics of were Mum currently was in the system.

Nobody would answer the phone without help from Becky and Wendy on the main switchboard who deserved a medal because they were fucking golden … and later, in the night, Jacky.

A bit like the bit in Red Dwarf where Rimmer says, ‘You can’t scare me I’m a coward! I’m already frightened.’

The only actual doctor I spoke to in that time was an arrogant bastard with the bedside manner of a particularly unsympathetic cyberman. I pity anyone in dire straits, in casualty, who got him. He told me to get off the line because he had an urgent call coming in. The fucking knocky prick. I asked him how I was supposed to find out about my Mum. He told me I’d have to go back to main. I asked what the hell was main? He said that was the main switchboard. I asked him how long he thought I’d been trying to get someone to answer the goddamn phone and why, having finally made this major breakthrough after twelve fucking hours, he thought it was fair to ask me to go back and start again (only without the swearing). He said tough and hung up.

So that was that.

I went back to ‘main’ and threw myself on Becky’s mercy (or it might have been Wendy). I explained that I lived two hours away that my mother was seriously ill but I didn’t know if she was just seriously ill, or dying and NOBODY WOULD FUCKING TELL ME. I told her I’d been trying to get news on Mum for nearly 12 hours, that she was a dear person but she had dementia so she might be frightened and confused and no-one she knew was with her, and that I’d been told she’d be there for a couple of hours … AND that, had anyone bothered to tell me how long they were actually going to keep her sitting around on her arse with … whatever it was that nobody would confirm or deny to me was wrong with her … I would have jumped in the car when it happened and been with her from about eight bloody hours ago.

Except that, also without the swearing. Indeed, I was actually really polite about it, but laid it on a bit thick because I did want her to hoist in that I was only asking all this because I was desperate. She managed to find a member of clerical staff in casualty who was prepared to answer a phone and able to access the database. She made me wait while she spoke to the woman and told her she had to talk to me. Then I was put through and I found out that Mum had been admitted with a chest infection and was now in the emergency level. I said nobody had called and this lady said the next of kin was listed as Dad. I said I was a bit surprised as he’d died three years ago and Mum had been to hospital since, and she said, get this, ‘Oh, I see. So you haven’t changed the record.’

I? That’s right. It was all my fault. I pointed out that I’d given the paramedic my number and she said that no-one had passed it on. Since she was actually prepared to speak to me and give me information, I didn’t get as antsy as I felt or ask her how come the database hadn’t been mentioned the other time Mum had been to hospital since Dad had died, or why this was suddenly my fault.

Finally at 9.00 pm I managed, with the help of Jackie, another lovely switchboard lady at the hospital, to talk to a nurse on the emergency floor. Mum’s nurse was on her break but this one was kind enough to go and find out how she was for me. She also apologised and said that I’d probably have to ring the following morning to get any sense out of anyone. She confirmed that Mum was admitted, receiving treatment, sleeping peacefully and in a bed. Yes it was serious but no it wasn’t life threatening. So there was that.

Mum in the pink jumper in the chair at the back celebrating, being 90. The reason all the other chairs look small is because those blokes are all over 6ft. My uncle there on the right, he doesn’t sit down, he folds up.

It took until 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon to get proper news of Mum but at least they were nice about it this time. She’d had breakfast and was responding well to the antibiotics but would probably be going up to a ward rather than straight home. The nurse also told me that Mum had been sleeping most of the time so probably wouldn’t have noticed time passing or got bored and confused the way I’d feared. Her care team also said that. One of Mum’s lovely care team went in to see her and phoned me so I could have a chat to her, which was wonderful and a huge relief as she was very much herself and, if anything, a bit more switched on than usual.

I went down on Monday to see her. At this point we were still expecting to move her so I popped in at her house. The gardener was there and wondering what had happened so I had a chat to her and I discovered the carers had looked out some chicken thighs for Mum’s lunch on the Saturday so I cooked them in the oven for myself and roasted a bit of cauliflower. I decided I’d have cauliflower cheese next time I was down (Wednesday). There were quite a lot of chicken thighs but I cooked them all and gave the gardener some to take home.

When I got to the hospital, Mum was in a ward. And this is where the NHS was absolutely bloody golden. Hats off to Byworth Ward. They were lovely. Yes, as compassionate, kindly and attentive care goes they absolutely smashed it out of the park. The staff there were wonderful. Watching them look after some a lady with quite challenging dementia they were so patient and so sweet with her that it made me want to cry. When I arrived, the first thing they said was, ‘how lovely is your Mum?!’ the second thing they said was sorry for the way I’d been kept in the dark. They said Mum was knackered and sleeping a lot but that she’d been very chirpy when she’d arrived on the Sunday afternoon. She woke up enough to be pleased to see me and then slept most of the time but that was fine, because she knew I was there, so we just chilled together. I’d brought my knitting and spent a couple of hours hanging out with my mum, knitting, relaxing a bit actually, patting her arm every now and again so she knew I was there and chatting to her when she woke up.

The staff told me that my phone had no voice message and because it didn’t say it was me, if someone did ring and I didn’t manage to pick up, they couldn’t leave a message because it would breach confidentiality rules. This was absolute news to me so thanks O2 for your arbitrary decision to delete my voice message. I can only assume it got deleted when I renewed my contract but the Vodafone one never used to disappear so I wasn’t ready for that. Weird. I recorded an answerphone message as I sat by Mum’s bed.

One of the care team went in on Tuesday and I visited again on Wednesday with my brother. I made us a cauliflower cheese and added some macaroni, mainly so my brother would have something to eat for supper as he was staying over, but also because at 6ft 4, he’s a big unit, so he does eat a lot. Mum was much perkier but still a little frail and sitting in a chair by the bed. She was still quite tired and a bit confused, but the staff were lovely and she seemed cheerful, so I felt confident that she was in good hands.

My brother visited again on the Thursday and he thought she looked even frailer at that point but the prognosis was still that she’d get better and leave and certainly that if it went the other way, she’d be in there for a while before anything happened.

I cocked up Friday, so she didn’t have a visitor, and the person I’d arranged for Saturday was one of the care team and couldn’t make it at the last minute because one of her other ladies was ill and she had to stay with her. I made doubly sure someone was going on the Sunday and got ready to go down on the Monday either to visit or help her move.

Sunday morning, as I was getting ready to go warble in the choir at church, a doctor from the ward rang saying that Mum was very ill. I explained that I was over 2 hours away, 3 in that day’s weather and that my brother was 4 hours, how bad was it? Did we need to come? The doctor said it was a bit up in the air but that if she carried on deteriorating the way she had over night the outlook was not good. If the worst did happen, and I wanted to see her, I should come now.

I rang my brother who was about to attend his goddaughter’s confirmation in Wales and we decided that since he was outside the church, he’d better carry on with that and come after.

As I joined the M11 it ground to a halt. The whole journey was a bit like that. Oh and it absolutely pissed it down, it was more like driving a submarine than a car. I drove faster than I was comfortable with but I still didn’t exceed 60mph. It was that soggy and the roads that waterlogged.

A still from my dashcam in one of the clearer bits …

Luckily in the many bits where the traffic stopped, it was just caterpillaring as it slowed for patches of extra heavy rain. As I joined the M25 from the M11 the doctor called again to check we were on our way. I explained that we were and she said that Mum was fading quite fast. Which was a bit stark.

I thanked her and then remembered that I’d booked Mum holy communion, so I rang the ward and asked if they could get the chaplain to give her the last rites, instead, as it was important to her. They did and Mum was awake and conscious, and bless her heart, still thinking of everyone else first. She gave the chaplain a message to give to the ward staff. She said that her son and daughter were on their way and if she went before we arrived to please tell us not to worry because she’d be quite alright. God love her. I didn’t find this out until later but it was a wonderful thing to say and even more wonderful that after two years of not being quite sure, most of the time, what our relationship with her was (only that she loved us) that she knew exactly where I and my brother fitted in. They gave her a cross and taped it to her pillow. The chaplain sent an apology via the ward staff that they are all stamped ‘Bethlehem’ at the moment because it’s Christmas. It’s on my desk.

The cross …

There was a bumpy moment when one of the carers rang me. I was over the bridge stuck in a traffic jam near Clackett lane by this point, pretty much in the exact same spot where, three years before, as I sat in a similar traffic jam, the same carer had called me to say my Dad had died.

However, luckily, this time, it was just to say a group of them had arrived and would stay with Mum until I got there. The gods were smiling, the traffic kept moving and I kept creeping closer to the hospital. Would I make it? Would my brother? I had no idea.

The car park at Worthing Hospital is notorious for filling up extremely fast. On the Wednesday, when I’d visited with my brother, I’d noticed a spot where I could use the raised surface of speed bump to mount the kerb and get my car onto a small patch of grass, next to a wall where it was out of the way. Yes it would get clamped but it wasn’t actually blocking anything so I could Break The Rules to save time if I had to, without being a selfish bastard. There are advantages to driving a car the size of a peanut.

When I arrived on that Sunday afternoon, at 2.30, the car park was absolutely rammed. I didn’t even bother to scope for legitimate spots. I headed straight for my kerb mounting area only to find that there, right beside it, was a single, free legitimate spot. I flung the car into it and ran for the ward, saying a small prayer of thanks to the almighty as I went and then giggling because I remembered that Wendy Cope poem, ‘Jesus found me a parking space! Bang the gong and praise Him.’

The carers were there, I said hello and then I Did The Thing. Yes, like Dad, my poor mum had to sit through me telling her what a fucking legend she was and how lucky I was to have her as a Mum. And yes, I cried because … tension … and also relief that I’d made it to say good bye. And because I couldn’t help it. She laughed and said, ‘Oh Mary!’ and I laughed too because I was being a fecking eejit and we both knew it but at the same time, I meant it and we also both knew that because it was the last time I’d get to say it, it was important that I did.

So then the staff asked about treatment. Did I want them to give Mum more intravenous antibiotics? I had plenty of time to think because her next dose was due at 11.00 pm they told me.

‘Will it make her better?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. But some families prefer to have more time with their relative.’

I remembered how Mum had been when she’d had pneumonia in 2012. She’d told me afterwards, that it was ghastly and that she’d felt terrible and if Dad hadn’t needed someone to look after him she ‘would have gone then’. Her words.

‘Will she suffer, will she be in pain?’ I asked.

They explained that she would feel short of breath and feel tightness and pain in her chest but that she could have morphine for that. I remembered a friend once telling me that having pneumonia was like trying to breathe through a straw. It didn’t sound pleasant and I didn’t want her to have to put up with any more of it than was absolutely necessary.

‘So basically, are you saying antibiotics won’t do anything but she’ll just take longer to die, so she’ll be in pain for longer?’ I asked, just to check.

A beat. ‘Yes.’

‘Then, if it’s not going to help, that’s just prolonging her suffering. Please don’t let her suffer any more than she has to. This is about making her comfortable and relaxed. Plase stop everything that is extending her life and just carry on with things that are going to ease her pain or help her breathe.’

So they took out the drip, because it wouldn’t help her dry mouth and she’d be more comfortable without the cannula in. They kept the oxygen because that was helping and they told me they would give her morphine as soon as she or I asked. They said they’d carry on turning her because that would ease the pain and obviously they’d keep changing her pad.

She was breathing through her mouth and it was drying out. The carers showed me some ointment to put on her lips with a nice brush thing that would feel pleasant and explained how to wet the inside of her mouth with tiny bits of water from a cup, or a toothbrush. Then they went.

Mum wanted me to make sure that the people in the care team who joined her after she made her will got the same as the others, and after they’d gone, I promised her I would see them right.

She took off the oxygen line and tried it without for a bit but didn’t like it and decided to put the line back in. I helped her do that and they fixed it up for me so it was working, but at a lower pressure which wouldn’t dry out her throat so much.

She was very sleepy but would wake up for a few minutes here and there and I’d tell her that I loved her. While she slept, in case she was drifting, half awake, rather than sleeping, I’d reminisce about things we’d done as a family; holidays, day trips, parties and of course, the time she and I had turned out a perfect apple suet pudding together … on the kitchen work surface, because we’d missed the dish. And how my husband came in and caught the pair of us, crying with laughter like naughty kids, as we tried to fix it. Mum was holding the dish under the edge and I, with rolled up sleeve, using my forearm as a giant spatula, was attempting to coerce the pudding across the formica surface to the edge, the plan being that it would make a short fall into the dish, hopefully landing the right way up, without compromising its structural integrity.

It hadn’t really bothered to get light that day, but darkness closed in outside anyway. Mum slept more and was awake less as the day wore on. I kept getting the water wrong. I used the wrong cup and made her cough, then it kept running out of the side of her mouth, down her chin and onto her chest. So I spent a lot of time apologising that it must be horrible and cold and making jokes along the lines that I was a shit nurse and that I wasn’t going to be admitted into the Royal College of Nursing any time soon. She laughed at first and then as she became weaker, it was a smile and finally just an imperceptible lightening of her face.

At one point she tried to sit up a bit and speak, so I put my arm round her and propped her up so she could. She said, ‘I love you darling, I love you very much.’ I just hugged her and told her I loved her too and that she was brilliant. That was the last full sentence she said to me.

Her voice sounded incredibly croaky and I remember thinking that she must have a horribly sore throat and that I must step it up with the water, which I did. We had a bit of a giggle when they gave me her shepherd’s pie to eat because she was too weak to swallow safely. I went to the loo and when I came back one of the nurses had left some packets of biscuits for me. They got the tea trolley in and gave me a cup of coffee. They were absolutely lovely to me (and my brother when he got there) as well as to Mum.

Mum was very peaceful, the staff remarked upon how relaxed and unafraid she was. They’d given her a little cross when she’d had the last rites or Extreme Unction as I prefer to call it because that sounds like some kind of superpower and is much funnier. I kept doing the water thing, at first asking if she wanted more each time she woke up and waiting for the, ‘yes please,’ but then I just put it into her open mouth with the toothbrush. She would usually suck it but towards the end she hadn’t the strength to do that. picture of the south downs dappled with sunlight and shade

My brother arrived and she tried to sit up a bit. I think she wanted to say the same thing to him as she’d said to me. He doesn’t think so, but I do. I missed my cue though and didn’t twig and pass it on for her. Mainly because I thought she was also in pain, which my lovely bruv thought, too, and I was concentrating on that. I suspect she had lost her voice by that time. I took her hand in mine and asked her to squeeze if she wanted morphine. She did. So we got some for her.

We held her hand, and stroked her face and told her we loved her, did the water thing and the lip stuff and chatted to one another. By 1.30 am, my brother suggested that we go back to the family home and get some sleep. I didn’t want to leave her but she seemed very peaceful, her breathing very regular, and as my brother pointed out, if it took a while and we were with her the next night, we’d need some proper zeds in for when it really mattered.

We consulted with the nurses who said it would be a sensible decision and that’s when they passed on the message she’d given them, via the chaplain, that we were not to worry if she died when we weren’t there.

There were some other quite challenging patients, people with Alzheimer’s with disrupted sleep patterns and I explained that while I had every confidence that they would make regular checks on Mum, if she was in pain and called out, they might not hear her straight away, or they might be with one of the other ladies and not be able to come at once. We agreed she should have some more morphine as that would see her through until 7.30 am and we’d aim to come back then.

Sometime around five they turned Mum and one nurse went off while the other primped her pillows, did the water in the mouth thing and made sure she was comfortable. She noticed Mum’s pulse was quite weak so decided it might be time to call us in. She went to get the other nurse to see what she thought and when they both came back, Mum had died.

Sunrise Over West Sussex, 1996 by Christopher Aggs, Worthing & Southlands art in hospitals project

We went into the hospital to see her, and I dunno, give her a hug one last time while she was still warm and it felt as if there was still someone there or at least, hovering close.

It was 11th December.

My brother and I spent three days at Mum’s house, going through her stuff. We did the desks first, which was hilarious. Mum had kept all our school reports and we found all his letters home from boarding school asking why I never got a star at my school, ‘Mary, you got full marks for that test but your handwriting is too untidy to give you an A so I’m afraid that’s an A minus, no star for you this time.’ (Or any other fucking time to be honest because my handwriting was always too messy for me to get an A. But that’s what school was like in those days. Luckily the only people who didn’t value the neatness of my handwriting over what I actually wrote were the examiners who marked my O and A level papers but I digress.)

We also got very giggly about Mum’s photos, we used to have to wait ages for her to take one and then she had a tendency to line it up wrong, that was mostly the camera rather than her but bless. And then we had an old friend round for dinner. It was interesting trying to cook vegetarian, because though my brother is, I’m not at all, but we ate a lot of roast veg and we had cheese and eggs with us so all was dandy … and we’d gone down there equipped with wine, which was great.

It being Christmas post, there was fuck all I could do about telling anyone by that time other than phoning a lot of people, including the local undertakers who knew both my parents well (Dad was church warden and Mum did the flowers) and who are lovely. Turns out there is a new vicar, who comes over as one of those rather difficult Christians who’s rather big on the ‘thou shalt not’. How he’s ended up at an inclusive church with its roots in the Oxford movement is beyond me but hey ho.

Luckily Mum was too infirm to get to church by the time he arrived and he never visited her, so he’s no clue who she is. As a result, he won’t be having any input into her funeral other than issuing the odd bizarre diktat to make sure we all know that the church building belongs to him and he’s in charge. The rest of the team are as lovely as they ever were. They quite clearly loved Mum to bits and it’s one of them who is doing the service. So that’s grand.

So there we are…

Looking back on it, there’s a waiting phase before death, a kind of state of grace people go into and if I’d thought about it, I’d have seen that Mum was in that on the Wednesday, I’d have known, and maybe visited on the Friday, too. Maybe … I dunno.

Am I sad? Well … yes but also … no. My overwhelming emotions are gratefulness and joy that I had such lovely people as parents. Mum was totally OK with dying. She’d told me less than five weeks previously, a propos nothing much, that I did know, didn’t I, that if she died, she’d be quite alright and I was not to worry. Other good bits … having been really quite batty for a week or two, she’d been very switched on for my last five visits. And even when batty her perssonality and generally lovely demeanour was unaffected.

Regrets? Not really, I wish I’d got the cue to ask her if she was trying to tell my brother she loved him, and I regret that my last two visits to her at home I was running round like a blue arsed fly, first showing some people over the house, then with the photographer (both times pretending they were surveyors come to look at the roof). I’d been going to make sure that on the last visit I really made up for that, but she was in hospital that week.

The fact is, Mum was about to leave her home forever and go to Shrewsbury, because it was time, and because we’d run out of money and had nothing left to pay the care fees other than the house. Mum and Dad’s furniture was all brown stuff and is therefore worth about five pence a pop if that. If we’d sold everything in the house, we might have covered care fees for a week or two. Instead she died while she was still living in Sussex, in the same house (even if she wasn’t there at the time).

Other positive things … Well … the move might have worked, but if it hadn’t it would have broken my heart as well as Mum’s. I’d have had a hard time coming to terms with it, even though there was no other option. As it is, I didn’t have to break my word to her. I didn’t have to move her. I never had to hurt her and I never have to worry about her any more. We get to do her funeral on home ground, where the highest numbers of the people who knew and loved her have the easiest access, if they want or are able to come and with Britain’s loveliest undertakers. I am incredibly grateful for that. And although she was still living in it when she died, we had conditionally accepted an offer on her house, which might help hurry up the paperwork.

It doesn’t really feel real. I suppose it won’t for a bit. But it did feel peaceful, and full of love and right. For the first time since 2012 I can say that I know, categorically, that both my parents are absolutely alright. That’s about the best Christmas gift of all.

Meanwhile at home, I’d bought a handful of presents but otherwise there’ve been no presents, no cards, indeed, not much of anything as we were busy taking anything of value out of the and into storage. We’ll have to put it back to get it valued for probate at some point but at least, for now, it’s safe. And all the Christmas malarkey? Well … there were some crackers in Mum’s cupboard, so my brother and I had a box each. I sang in the choir for midnight mass and we relaxed. McOther gave me a book to wrap up and put under the tree for him. He’d already given me a fitbit and McMini had already spent his Christmas money on stuff that arrived by post the previous week. He received a hefty wodge of christmas money from his grandparents but that was it.

When it comes down to it, all the gifts and the trimmings and the shit aren’t really so desperately necessary to make it work. It seems the Beatles were right. Love is all you need.

And on that rather schmultzy and trite note. Happy Christmas … a day late … because … this is me writing this, after all.

The end

Congratulatinos if you’ve made it this far. Weighing in at a hefty 5k, there are novellas out there and entire film scripts that are shorter than this post.

If you want some Christmas books, I’ve two available for your delectation; one reduced drastically to 99 American cents or British pee and another free. You can find them, in ebook or audiobook format until December 30th on this here page here:

https://hamgee.co.uk/christmas https://hamgee.co.uk/christmas

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Tagged as author blog, death, dementia, dying (not in comedy), M T McGuire, off topic, registering a death, sad

26 Feb 2023 · 7:45 pm

Discombobulation … is the name of the game

Yes, you find me all arse-about-face this week. Well that’s the default state, I grant you, but in this particular instance I’m probably a bit more arse-about-face than usual. Yeh. I know. Impressive. Even for me.

One of the difficulties I’ve experienced recently with my blog is that there’s been so much to write about I haven’t really known where to start, so then I’ve just gone a bit droopy and given up on it.

The past few weeks have been rough.

On the Mum front, nothing much seems to be happening about getting her an official diagnosis for dementia and we are reaching the stage where she does need one. It’s a pain to have to keep chasing her doctor and getting absolutely nothing back. He’s normally excellent so I don’t know what’s happened but I think I’ll have to book a call next week and get to the bottom of what’s going on. If he can’t refer her to the NHS memory people for some reason then presumably I’ll have to try and get a diagnosis done privately. It will cost money but the expensive bit is the brain scan which has already been done in hospital and should be with her NHS record.

On the upside, having done my tax return which showed I owed tax, and having paid said tax, it now turns out I don’t so they’re going to give it back to me. On the downside, some numb nuts reversed into me at bloody Tesco’s filling station … why is that place always trouble? Turned out he wasn’t insured because he was driving his friend’s car and didn’t want his friend to know. I explained about fibreglass and the cost of repairs and he looked at the bill and decided he couldn’t pay so I reported it to my insurance company. Apparently they’ve agreed that the repair can be done by the bunch who always look after my car. Unfortunately they’ve told Enterprise rent a car that, and they’ve rung the fellow who will be fixing the damage and have left a message that he must call but when he does all they get is a message telling them that all their operators are busy and to ~~piss off~~ call back at another time.

Incidentally, since every single call centre has been experiencing ‘an unusually high demand’ since covid, I’d be tempted to say that the level of demand has been like this for three years and therefore it isn’t unusually high; it’s simply a case that they sacked everyone after covid and have decided they’ll make more money if they sacrifice any customer service principles they had and run on a shoe-string staff. But I digress.

As the mechanic apologetically explained to me, after making five attempts, there are only so many times you can call. So now I have to ring my insurers between 10.30 and 4.30 (nice hours if you can get them) and they’ll put me through ‘because they’re more likely to answer’ and get the bloody job number myself. FFS.

The next week, going to Mum’s because I’m so fucking intelligent, I was a bit upset by seeing a rolled horse box and car on the motorway and the green we’ve-just-shot-this-horse screens. Late for Mum’s and in a dither I reversed my car into a flint wall, fucking the other end of it although—thank the lord for small mercies—the wall was unscathed. Since it was the random wall of someone else’s drive that is a Good Thing. Why? Because I can’t claim on my insurance or I’ll lose my no claims bonus and my excess is just shy of £300 so unfortunately the £800 for this one is on me because if I lose the no claims I’ll only be getting about £100 for a claim in real terms and paying the rest in increased premiums and excess. It’s tough being this much of a twat but someone’s got to do it.

Another up and down one, I had planned to see Abba Voyage with a friend this week. She’s one half of a lovely couple who absolutely get me. They also like me as much as I like them and there is a huge amount of mutual respect and ditto with McOther too. McMini also loves them. The chap has had cancer on and off since just before lock down. It’s been a virulent bastard. He’s been playing bash-the-rat with it and we’ve been seeing them in the gaps between bouts of chemo. He’s not had much respite between ending one lot of chemo and it popping up again which is highly unfair.

He faced it with a great deal of courage and liberal dashings of his habitual droll humour. Last time we saw them, at the back end of last year, he was unable to eat all of his dinner round ours and suspected he had another tumour somewhere causing a blockage which would mean more chemo.

Knowing this, we sort of left them to it. McOther and I tend to take a, ‘you know where we are if you need us’ approach to this kind of thing and then give people space. We have a kid and if someone’s immune system is compromised with chemo we’re probably more likely to bring pathogens than most people—although McMini doesn’t get all the colds like some kids, it’s probably me that will bring the bugs in. Typhoid Mary anyone? Oh yes.

Long and the short, friend messaged me on Tuesday to say that he was in the hospice. I was particularly amused that, as a keen Viz reader, he should have ended up in the J Arthur Rank … which is ryhming slang for a wank, snortle. But it is a fab hospice and the original J Arthur left a lot of money for cancer care (I’m not sure if he died of it or someone close to him did, I should probably check). She explained that her other half had talked to her about Saturday and told her she had to go, whatever stage he was at. However, she felt her attendance still might depend slightly on him. I totally got that if he was dying, she would probably want to be holding his hand rather than watching Abba Voyage with me and I assumed, from this, that the odds were, he might be. I said that whatever she needed was fine.

Looking at the map, I realised that the hospice was only about 10 minutes out of my way on the way home from Mum’s so I arranged to pop in and see her the following day, and him if he was up to it. You know how with some people you can be really quite rude and abusive to one another and know it’s a joke. If you don’t you should as it’s an incredibly joyous and liberating thing to be able to insult people ironically because you love them.

These two were like this, with one another but also with us so I also told her that if his sense of humour was still in evidence to tell him that all she and I wanted was to nip down to London for a day to watch Abba and he had to make it all about him!

The next morning she contacted me to say that he had died very peacefully in the early hours of that morning. She must have told him I was coming to see him. I mentioned that to her, but obviously I offered condolences first. Then I cried a great deal, most of the way to Mum’s.

JD, the chap in question, was the absolute best of people. Much like my friend Duncan, he was into cars and was not remotely phased about speaking his mind—well, he was a Yorkshireman—or pricking the bubble of the pompous. He saw the humour in everything, but not to the point of offence, or at the expense of the humanity or pathos. Both he and his Mrs coped with the world using gallows humour, and wit, the way McOther and I do. Presumably that’s why we all got on so well.

He was very intense—but not in a way that was at all wearing—very intelligent and well informed about many things. He had an enquiring mind, so I guess if he was interested in something he needed to know about it. Properly. Among the things were music and cars to name two but history and wine, F1 … he was also a fabulous cook. Oh and he was endurance fit, one of these people who gets up at 6 am and goes for a 50 mile bike ride before breakfast. He was also highly amusing. He had a way of calling everyone by their surnames but in a way that felt rather less formal than using first names would be, although he always called me Sweary, for that is my nickname with that group of friends and they all call me Sweary.

His dry wit made the world a better and kinder place and when the cancer appeared he faced his affliction with so much positivity, pragmatism and courage. It’s clear, from talking to his Mrs, that he never gave up until acceptance was the best path. I will miss him dreadfully but, I’m very aware as I say this, that his wife and his mother (God love her, poor woman) have this way, way worse.

His Mrs is being as brilliant as I’d expect her to be. They were great friends, anyway, and clearly grew together rather than apart as his illness progressed. It can’t be easy though. They’re in their mid 50s. And I mean, as it is, I feel as if someone has turned a light out. There is so little humour in the world right now, so few people with a light touch. So few people who will catch my eye, in a situation where everyone is taking something far too seriously, and I will know they’re laughing inside as well. It feels like the world is being run by clones of Biff from Back To The Future. The Biffs are on the ascendant and those of us who understand the importance of humour to civilised living and discourse are fewer and further between than ever. And lightness and humour are so important. If you can be funny about stuff, you can explore some really scary shit in comparative safety, or at least, in a way you can’t if you are a humourless automaton.

The day after breaking the news, my friend contacted me to say she wanted to go to Abba because he would have wanted that and also that he had left instructions that his life should be celebrated. I said that was OK and did she want me to come and pick her up and drive us down there. She said that yes, if I could, that would be great.

I took a half bottle of champagne and on arrival we drank a toast to him. I think it made us both feel better. Then we had lunch and went to watch Abba Voyage which was very impressive and which I can recommend. It did strike me that some of the words were a bit close to the bone but it was only the second to last song where I thought she looked a bit wobbly and gave her a hug. She hugged me back so I think she may have needed it.

The audience was dancing but I was amused to see that, while they clearly wanted to dance the way they had as teenagers and kids, they were nursing the kind of backs, knees, ankles and collapsed arches that meant the couldn’t quite do it the way the used to. The intent was there though. There was a woman about our age near us who stripped down to her bra like it was some kind of 1990s Ibizan foam party, which we thought was hilarious, if a trifle weird. She came over as insecure and wanting to impress, like a teenager, rather than just being overheated, menopausal and giving no fucks. But what do I know?

When we came to leave we had to walk miles round the houses because West Ham were playing at home and turning out at the same time as us. All the streets had been barricaded so you simply could not leave them. I stopped to take a few photos, including a rainbow. A promise? Maybe.

The shopping centre we’d walked through to get to the Abba Arena was closed off with massive metal shutters like the blast doors out of a nuclear shelter and the streets lined with unhelpful stewards who said we had to go round.

We’re not football folks though, we’re here for Abba and we want to get a coffee. Never mind, that. You have to walk round the outside in the pissing rain with the West Ham peps.

Is the car park open? Are we allowed to go into the car park to get our car?

You have to go round. That way.

Yes. We have twigged. But are we going to be allowed into the car park to get our car?

You must go round.

Yeh, right. Thanks that’s been a great help.

On the upside, they demonstrated, clearly, that Westfield shopping centre could survive the Zombie Apocalypse, which is useful to know.

It was bizarre though.

Luckily, we were able to get into the car park, although not into the shopping centre from street level. But by climbing to the next floor we were able to walk into the shopping centre from there and go with our original plan to grab a cappuccino and an arancini.

When it was time to leave we found that the pay machine in the car park was one of these ones where you put in your number plate and it just tells you how long you’ve been there and presents you with a bill.

Except it didn’t.

It kept presenting us with pictures of wildly inappropriate and unmatching vehicles. The more times I tried to find my car’s numberplate, the more bizarrely wrong the suggestions it offered; enormous munter trucks, saloons, and the odd van. Each time it was kind of going, ‘well, there’s an A in the numberplate on this one, is this your car?’ I’d press ‘no’ because it was a bus/estate car/motorbike etc and it would start again. Finally it suggested a massive van which shared one of the same numbers as my car’s number plate, ‘What about this one?’ it says hopefully.

‘Nah-uh.’ Say I. And so on.

After we’d done about seven of these we were both snorting with laughter because we reckoned it would be just our luck to get trapped in the car park forever, unable to leave. In my head I could just hear JD laughing at our antics. There were many jokes about how us two could get in to the most ridiculous scrapes. McOther calls me The Woman THINGS Happen To and they had a similar gag running themselves. I pressed the help button and was told that we should just drive to the exit and ring them again and they’d charge us then.

Off we went. I managed to tell two lurking motorists that I was leaving, by mistake, but my friend explained to the second one that we’d told the other we were going first and so we avoided precipitating a hand bags at sundown situation over our parking spot. Phew.

When we reached the exit, I discovered that the help button was about 3 feet above the roof of my car. I dunno, maybe there were some exits for buses or something and I’d inadvertently picked one of those, but they’d all seemed to be the same. Then again, there were about 60,000 West Ham fans making their way home and most of them seemed to be parked in that car park so maybe it was just that there were cars over the top of the writing on the ground and I’d not seen the bus label on this one.

On the up side, there was a guy there and I explained what had happened and asked him to help. He pressed the button for me, not quite what I was expecting, I’d assumed he’d be able to work the machine. Never mind, it was a start. The sound of a distant phone ringing drifted down from above me as the help button attempted to make the connection. It went on for a while. Some of the West Ham fans behind us tooted.

‘I’m going to let you go,’ said the man and proceeded to raise the barrier just as a tinny voice 3 feet above my head said, ‘Hello?’

I’m afraid I didn’t reply. Instead, I thanked the man, hoofed it out of the car park and headed for home. As I drove, my friend had to ring some folks to explain when her husband’s funeral was. I listened as she spoke a cross between Italian and dialect to a cousin in Sicily. And tried to shut up Margaret (the sat nav on my phone) who seemed to be shouting orders on full volume. (It’s called Margaret because it sounds like Mrs Thatcher.)

As we got to the bottom of the M11 she (my friend, not Margaret, the sat-nav, obviously) was saying, ‘Caio, Caio, Ciao …’ exactly the same way Brits say, ‘bye’ successive times, really quickly, when ending a call. But then the person on the other end clearly asked her something and they started talking again and went on for another ten minutes.

This got me chuckling because I could imagine her husband laughing at this so vividly it was almost like he was in the car with us and I could hear it. And I immediately remembered a conversation the four of us had had with him and McOther ripping the piss out of myself and her over our inability to say goodbye quickly. McOther complained how, when I was leaving my parents, we’d suddenly start another conversation in the doorway and talk for another twenty minutes in the cold instead of getting into the car, at which point JD had cited examples of similar behaviour from her while visiting the rellies in Italy.

Once her call was done, we put on my Abba Gold CD and did some hard core singing as we drove up the motorway. I managed to get cramp in my shin on the home straight going to her house, which was interesting and made us laugh some more. It did go the minute I got out and went inside to say a quick hello to JD’s mum and have a wee. Then it was home for a well earned spag bol. I’d done 23,000 steps and an hour and a half of dancing so I had no qualms about eating a generous portion!

So yeh … all in all … a bittersweet few weeks. I haven’t written anything, and I can’t, but that’s OK.

On a vaguely book related note …

Graphic book cover with two old ladies silhouetted against a darkened street If you have the remotest interest in any of my books, I have a page on my site where I list all the stuff that’s reduced or free so you can try it out and see if you like it. If you think that sounds interesting (oh yes you DO think it sounds interesting) then click on this link: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot3

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Tagged as death, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T McGuire, M T McGuire audiobooks, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic, women in sci-fi

16 Nov 2019 · 12:00 pm

Alarums, excursions and jolly japes

This week, I am speaking to you from the past by the wonders of scheduling, as I do from time to time. When this post goes live, I will be at Dad’s memorial service, which, incidentally, takes place in a building that, with a few tweaks, became the High Temple in the K’Barthan Series. Here it is. It looks a bit frillier in this picture than it really is. I think I wrote in prettier chandeliers though.

This is where I went to church every other Sunday in term time, from eight weeks old to when I was a teenager. We sat in a stall; one of those raised seats at the sides, the second one on the left in this picture. As a small child, I remember playing in the Chapel (that’s its name) while Mum did the flowers. Running up and down the aisle under the kind auspices of Mr Kendall, the verger who would warn me not to run past the altar rail for fear of setting off the burglar alarm.

Once he gave me one of the hosts to eat. It was delicious! Just like a flying saucer only without the sherbet. I also remember playing with the hassocks, but they were blue leather, like cushions rather than the traditional home-embroidered, sorbet-rubber brick, so they couldn’t be stacked into walls or towers, and weren’t nearly as much fun as they should have been. It was a school, so they were probably designed like that deliberately. Therefore, I usually eschewed hassock-related japes in favour of running around. Sometimes I went down the stairs into the crypt, although, not so often after I fell down them and cracked my head open (3 stitches).

Later it wasn’t as much fun. If you will, imagine sitting raised up on high like that as a shy gawky teenager, looking out over around 500 or so boys who were sitting in the seats below. I was a shade of puce throughout the whole hour and it felt as if every single one of them was staring at me. I liked the music, I sang in the choir of the other church we went to and I enjoyed listening to most types of music (still do). The hymns helped, in that they were usually tub-thumpers and it was fun to listen to the boys and try and work out what their alternative words were; Glory, glory Brighton Hove Albion, with a small contingent trying to shout Glory, glory Man United more loudly, etc. But apart from that, mostly it was a pretty cringeworthy experience.

If you do that every other term Sunday, and get as many regular bollockings at your own school as I did (a different institution to the one attached to the chapel in the picture) you come out the other end almost unembarrassable … if that’s a word. I was so glad when I finally went to the school I actually lived in (girls were only allowed in the sixth form in those days) and I was able to leave the stall and disappear into the anonymous mass of pupils below. Actually I sat in about the position this picture was taken from.

Anway I’m wandering off topic terribly here, what I was really going to say was that I’m actually writing this from a few days in the past. It’s been a busy week but all in all, things seem to be going reasonably well.

First up, Mum. After discussing it with her financial advisor, we have decided it’s time to get Mum’s enduring power of attorney for her finances activated. I looked out all the paperwork we’d done on Dad’s and dropped the solicitor a line, by email, explaining what we were going to do and asking if she could send me the original document of Mum’s enduring power of attorney. I did it first thing but got one of those weird, ‘your message couldn’t be delivered so we’ll try again’ type things. Not an out-and-out bounce but a kind of, might have, maybe bounced.

After a bit of thought, I decided that the best thing to do would be to ring the solicitor, explaining what had happened and apologise for pestering her by phone as well if it had got through. The lady who answers the telephone there is great, we had a chat, I explained what had happened and I gave her as much info as I could. She asked the date Mum and Dad signed their powers of attorney and I reckoned it was 2004 but I had all the paperwork in front of me.

‘Give me a sec, I have Dad’s here, I’ll look it up,’ I said. I grabbed the document in front of me. ‘Oh … hang on,’ I said as I read the name on the front, ‘Um … this is Mum’s. Oh … I must have got you folks to send it through when I did Dad’s. That was … surprisingly organised of me.’

‘I bet it’s a nice surprise,’ she said.

‘It is but I still managed to forget, phone you lot and make a monumental twat of myself,’ I said.

She laughed, which was lucky. I doubt she gets many people telling her they’re twats. She told me she’d tell the lawyer I’d emailed that I didn’t need her to do anything and I thanked her and hung up. Then I made some toast by holding a piece of bread against my red face. No. I didn’t make toast actually even though I was quite embarrassed and my cheeks were burning. NO! The ones on my face you dirty bastards!

And there we have it. Three years ago, while sorting Dad’s enduring power of attorney I had been prescient, not to mention organised, enough to get them to send me Mum’s as well. It was heartening to know that I am capable of such giddy heights of organisational prowess, but it would have been more heartening if I’d remembered, or at least discovered my uncharacteristic attack of forward planning before I’d made a tit of myself.

Ruthless efficiency, and yet also, gargantuan twattery. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

Meanwhile McMini is enjoying his new school and is as nuts as ever. Lately, he has introduced me to the joy of ttsreader.com This is a site which allows you to type text into a box and it will then read it in an electronic voice. For some strange reason best known to ourselves, McMini and I find this unaccountably funny. Obviously, we don’t use it as it is intended. Although we do happily conduct whole conversations using it in about six times the time it should take were we speaking; laboriously typing what we want to say into the reader, highlighting it all and clicking play. Clearly we try to do more than talk with this thing, I think McMini has come closer than I to getting it to produce a realistic raspberry but that’s not for want of extensive effort on both our parts. All the while, as we pursue this ridiculous game, tears of laughter stream down our faces – because we’re really mature. Well, OK to give him his due, McMini is only eleven, after all, and probably is quite mature for an eleven year old. He already displays a great deal more maturity than I but then, I guess that’s not difficult.

Even McOther started giggling the other day, though, when McMini finally scored a realistic sounding raspberry.

On the books front. They’ve managed to squeeze me in at the Christmas Fayre so I am busy ordering books etc, which reminds me … Even better, the date of the new release creeps ever closer. Anyone who has pre-ordered it should get the ebook on Monday 29th. Woot. The paperback is coming later. I have also been doing lots of research into audio books. It’s kind of doing my head in because there have been a lot of changes to the audiobook scene just recently, with evidence that Findaway Voices might be edging ahead of ACX as a provider. I might post more about that as I discover it, or at least, some pros and cons if I can. But my own experience is going to be atypical because Gareth The Voice and I have done pretty much the opposite of what you’re supposed to! Mwahahahargh!

Anyway, that’s enough of that, here is a quick reminder about my two new releases … on about to come out and one out already. Pipple toot!

Small Beginnings, K’Barthan Shorts, Hamgeean Misfit: No 1

Available for preorder. If you are interested there is a page which gives you link to the main book vendors. Just click on the picture or follow this link here …

http://www.hamgee.co.uk/infosb.html

There will be print links, to follow. The print version is out on 23rd November.

Here’s the blurb:

Terry Pratchett meets Dr Who … sort of. When your very existence is treason, employment opportunities are thin on the ground. But when one of the biggest crime lords in the city makes The Pan of Hamgee a job offer he can’t refuse, it’s hard to tell what the dumbest move is; accepting the offer or saying, no to Big Merv. Neither will do much for The Pan’s life expectancy.

Future Adventures Box Set … Gorge yourself on free sci-fi!

This features full length novels from eight science fiction authors. I can vouch for the quality of the books in here, even more so now that I’ve read some of them!

But, if any of you haven’t read my first full length novel, Few Are Chosen, and would like to, it’s in this book, which is free, but more importantly it comes with all these other brilliant stories by seriously accomplished wordsmiths who really know what they are doing. So, you can grab a copy of Few Are Chosen with seven other books by authors who are seriously gifted and of whom I am, frankly, a bit in awe. And all for zero pence. If you want to pick up a copy, just click on the picture to visit a page of links to find it on all the major stores … or click on the link below:

http://www.hamgee.co.uk/infofa.html

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Tagged as advice from writers, bargain ebooks, cheap quality books, death, grief, guest posts, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, jim webster, new book releases, new books, quality books cheap, Tall Family Tales

28 Sep 2019 · 12:40 pm

A snapshot of blue …

It isn’t always like this, but I’m feeling a bit blue today. Then again, it’s probably only to be expected because I have, as we might euphemistically say, the painters in. But I’m going to take a few moments out to bang on about grief again because I suspect the way I’m feeling is pretty universal, so it might help someone to read it and see they aren’t alone.

As a human, I’ve always approached my life, and my future, with an attitude of mild interest, a kind of, ‘I wonder how this is going to turn out.’ That doesn’t mean I don’t try and mould my destiny at all, but I am aware how many other riders there are affecting the outcome of anything I plan. I hope my actions make a difference. Fervently. But I also think I’d be a fool to think I can realign the stars and guarantee anything about my destiny through my own efforts … well … you know … beyond how I react to what happens.

So my dad died. It happens to lots of people. And I’m OK with that and, more to the point, he was. It was his time, he led a full and wonderful life, he was loved … it was, dare I say it, beautiful.

The thing I am having trouble with is what happened first.

Losing someone to Alzheimer’s is really hard. There’s a strange mixture of emotion at the end where you’re glad their suffering is over but really want them back. There’s always hope, until they draw their last breath, that a miracle will happen and they’ll come back to you, that the gradual extinguishing of the light can somehow be reversed, the damage undone, your loved one returned. That you’ll find them again.

It can’t, although you might find enough of them. Dad definitely came back to us a bit at the end, I am in no doubt whatsoever about that.

They say that you don’t get over some things but that you do get used to living with them. That makes perfect sense to me. I try to give myself gaps to grieve, and in between, I tell myself it’s hormones, and yes, I am looking forward to reaching the stage when I no longer have a cycle, when Psycho Week, Misery Week (which is probably where I am now) Extra Special IBS Week and of course, not forgetting Brain Fog and Constipation Week all come to an end and every week becomes Mary Week. I do have a Mary Week once in every five and it is literally like being someone else, someone I really like.

Anyway, I try to convince myself that I’m busy or tired or hormonal but the truth of it is, I’m just sad. And I guess I’m learning that I have the strength to carry that sadness, which is nice, but at the same time, unfortunately, I’m not quite as strong as I hoped I was. Which is a bit of a shitter.

One of the things you can notice about people, if you look hard enough, is that those who are suffering or damaged are marked. They have an intensity, a brittleness about the edges, a burning brightness to their eyes that acts like a huge neon beacon over their heads saying, ‘Damaged Goods.’

Sometimes, I have to tell people that my dad died recently. It’s cringingly embarrassing because usually it’s part of an explanation as to why I’ve forgotten to pay a bill that arrived around that time, or pay in a cheque etc. I find it difficult to keep my voice flat. The emotion always creeps in and evinces an outpouring of kindness from strangers that is only reserved for folks they are very, very sorry for. Which is lovely but quite mortifying. I also find it really, and I mean really hard, to keep it together in the face of sympathy. No matter how hard I try to be dispassionate, they hear the emotion. I am always hugely grateful for their concern. But at the same time, it’s also difficult and embarrassing because there’s only a finite amount of time about which I can talk about it before I cry. I wouldn’t want people to stop showing sympathy though, or stop being kind. Because for all the awkwardness I feel, it’s also a wonderful and uplifting thing.

There’s very little time for sadness in modern life and even less in mine. Mum has dementia, someone has to run her financial affairs, pay the care team, make sure she’s OK. In some respects my weekly visits are a lifeline for both of us. It is wonderful to be able to talk to her about Dad. We discuss how we feel, how there was nowhere else for him to go, how illogical our sadness is when it was such a good death and when it was clearly a death he embraced. I think it helps both of us. Mum is definitely better than she was but she’s had a bit of a blip recently, which, I suppose, is another reason why I feel the responsibility a bit more keenly than I usually do, and feel sadder.

Typically, now he’s gone, it seems that my life is full of events and problems that I would have discussed with Dad. Things he would have been able to advise me about so I could have made sense of it all and it would have been OK. Interpersonal stuff. It’s a loss I would have felt badly any time in the last one and a half, possibly two, years but it seems a great deal worse now. I think it would be melodramatic and downright wrong to say I’m sinking but it’s definitely a struggle. And I’m so raw. Oh blimey I’m ridiculously raw and so easily hurt about other things. Everything makes me cry, I reckon if I was walking round with a thistle stuck up my arse I’d cry less.

Politics hasn’t helped. It’s like the loss of Dad’s goodness and humanity, the compassion and empathy in him has taken it out of the entire fucking world. This week Britain has stepped up it’s efforts to make a monumental tit of itself on the international stage. The jury who found Boris Johnson’s proroguing of Parliament illegal have been warned to wear stab vests for fear of nutters who are also pro Brexit.

And the two sides bang on at one another, the left getting all drama llama about Jo Cox so they can tell the right that they are heartless twats who don’t give a shit in a way that makes the whole thing reek of faux. The right are totally unmoved, of course, since the majority of them are heartless twats who don’t give a shit and I really don’t understand why the left felt that point had to be made, since we are all already aware.

In the middle of all this, I’m still waiting to hear someone mention the good of the people. Not ‘the will of the people,’ as decided by a ridiculous sham of a vote to decide which side’s lies were less plausible (but sadly, a vote, nonetheless) not who should be in power, not how much better we would be if x or y was in power. Likewise, I don’t want to hear politicians spouting off in the media for the benefit of sending a message to other politicians via the press, rather than because they have anything meaningful to say to us.

Wouldn’t it be great to see someone in Parliament who genuinely seems to be there to try and make life better for the British people rather than to feather their own nest? Someone who isn’t a plutocrat foisting left wing sentiments they can afford to hold onto people who can’t, or conversely, someone who isn’t a hedge fund manager, wholeheartedly buying into the vileness of the party opposing them; a party which continues to demonise the vulnerable, the disabled, the chronically sick as scroungers and weaklings, quietly passing laws to punish people for their disabilities, or chronic illness, or having dementia like my parents, as if these people are to blame for their own suffering. A party pedalling the view that anyone who is vulnerable is weak and that those who are sick somehow deserve to suffer and are not worthy of our compassion. A party that puts the view that, contrary to the tenets of the Welfare State, those less fortunate, or who have fallen on hard times are somehow stealing for us when they are given help. A party which is punishing the elderly for having savings and being careful, stamping on the fingers of everyone working or lower middle class who has dared to put a foot on the ladder. A party which is quietly dismantling the welfare state and the NHS while everyone is too distracted to notice by the circus of shite that is Brexit and all that goes therewith.

We need normal people in politics. Now. Because at the moment, for the most part, it’s just a bunch of rich, entitled pricks doing what they like. On all sides. Their wages alone put them into the top 6%, the expenses some of them charge probably put them into Fortune 500*. Only 8% of Labour MPs are working class. We need a proper mix and we need to hold them accountable, the trouble is, voting doesn’t seem to work so I really don’t know how we do that.

* That was a joke even if it does ring true.

All I know is that watching the different parties competing to out do each other over the lowest depths to which they can sink I feel like something inside me is dying. It’s like grief has taken my reality filter out and I can see every crack and fissure and smell the foetid pus below.

But then something will happen that snaps me back.

For example, today I had to explain to the lady in the building society that I’d failed in some duty of admin because the summons arrived while my dad was sick and dying, or possibly while I was on holiday just before, or maybe in the six weeks previously while I was sick as a dog with a massive temperature and road testing different varieties of antibiotics to get rid of a persistent chest infection. The minute I fess up to her, I know she’s seen the rawness. My orange neon ‘damaged goods’ sign is flashing. She nips out back and comes back with a leaflet.

What to do in a bereavement, it’s called.

‘There are numbers in the back,’ she says. ‘And your doctor can help you too.’

My doctor? Shit.

Is it that bad?

Is it that obvious?

Am I more damaged than I think?

OK so watching my father go mad was pretty horrible, but I genuinely believed that once it was over I’d bounce back. It’s happening but it’s not a bounce and I’m aware enough now that in many ways I will never be the same. I thought it would be a lot faster than this and I thought I would get over it all. I’m not and it’s going to be slow. I guess the hard thing is having to keep going, having to carry on paying the carers and doing the pathetic amount I do to keep things running – the care and gardening team do literally ALL of it but I still find my few duties tough. I probably need to look what happened to Dad squarely in the eye but if I do that right now I’m undone and I can’t be undone, because … Mum.

Or maybe I’m just humiliated that another person has seen the extent of the damage, noticed my brittle cheerfulness and angular edges. I am worried and grateful in equal measure. As I try not to well up at her compassion and kindness I remember what Dad always said,

‘And this too shall pass.’

Maybe that’s the thing that’s so hard. Grief is amorphous. It oozes about inside you like a liquid and leeches out where and when you least expect. There’s no stopping it and no answer. You just have to ride the storm and wait until you are used to it, or it goes. It’s not as if I’m the first person who’s lost a parent, or the last … It’s just … hard.

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

‘Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
‘Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
Today the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

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Tagged as author blog, author blogs, death, dementia, dementia aftermath, grief, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, off topic, sad

10 Aug 2019 · 11:53 am

More thoughts about grief …

Vimy Ridge 100 years on

This week we’ve been visiting a lot of First World War sites. On balance, this was probably less than smart, so soon after my father’s death. But in another way it was cathartic. Grief is a properly odd thing and sometimes it does you good to take a few quiet moments to have a snivel and let it out. You can’t sweep it under the carpet and pretend it’s not happening. That doesn’t help.

However, that said, it does tend to pop up in weird ways when you least expect it. Case in point, Dad. When Dad died it was the culmination of nearly fourteen years worrying about his mental health. He was calm, totally ready and for those few days before he left us, it was as if he’d come back to us. After his total loss of reason, and the psychotic stage he had returned to us a fair bit, in the home. He came out of the small boy stage and was a grown man again, struggling with his affliction in different ways.

In those weeks, he was calmer and seemed happier but looking back on it, perhaps it was because he’d decided this was the end of the road and resigned himself. I worried that he was fighting and losing. Looking back on it, I think it more likely that he was coming to terms with things and I was seeing the light and shade of his various moods as he worked through it. The thing about Dad’s death though, was that it was a really, really good one. People who loved him were with him, reassuring him and he was a man of faith, and while I’m sure he appreciated that reassurance, he probably didn’t need it.

It was a relief, for him and us, because it was the end of his suffering. It may look callous saying that but I remember waking up the morning after Dad had died and feeling sad that he had gone and that there really was no going back now and at the same time, also feeling as if an enormous weight of responsibility had been lifted from me and feeling happy for Dad (although as a Christian who believes there’s some kind of after life that might be easier for me than it is for some folks).

Now, I don’t know what I expected from the grieving process but it seems most sensible to accept it’s there and roll with the punches when it pops up. But I’ve noticed two things which might help other people.

Thing one: No matter how good the death, no matter if death was the only place to go and no matter if the death was a good one, you will feel incredibly sad. Not only that but if my own experience is anything to go by, you will feel way, way, sadder than expected.

‘But it’s your dad! Of course you’re sad!’ I hear you say. Well, yes, but I’ve spent the last eight or nine years, at least losing little pieces of my dad each day, and I’ve spent the last five years grieving for those pieces of his personality, facets of his sense of humour, things that gradually faded until I could no longer resurrect them. There was a horrible point where the jokes we used to have suddenly stopped working.

‘I don’t know why you think that’s so fucking funny,’ I remember him saying about what I’d thought was his absolute favourite joke between us. ‘Stop saying it.’

Various people have told me that, after an illness, you get the person back. I think I’m too brain fogged to get much back, my short term memory is completely shot, just yesterday I was chatting to McMini and he reminded me of something we did together, when he was a child, an event of which I have absolutely no memory. That is quite frightening because such a total and utter memory loss has never happened to me before. No matter that my diagnosis was hormones, I have some pretty deep set misgivings, in my own mind, that I have dementia, myself. That said, a friend (0lder) who suffered depression when her kids were growing up says there are huge tracts of their lives she simply can’t remember. She put it down to the medication, but it must have been stressful, and I’ve been pretty stressed for at least eight of McMini’s eleven years, maybe I it’s just that. Yeh, I’ll cling to that hope. If it isn’t, I just hope I can hold it together until Mum goes, or even better until McMini hits twenty one. That would be another eight years. Mmm … fingers and toes crossed.

What I was trying to say, after that considerable tangent, is that I haven’t got the memories back really, I still can’t remember anything much before the dementia (Dad’s) but I do have a much better conception of what he was like when he was firing on all cylinders; his cheekiness, his sense of fun, the things he loved and the things that made him laugh. I can remember his humanity, his compassion, his kindness – partly because his behaviour was the antithesis of many public figures today, not to mention the current behavioural ethos which seems to be that we should each be as big a cunt as we can be because it’s our right and we ‘shouldn’t take it’ from other people.

Which brings us to Thing Two: I guess the moral of this is simply that even if you are expecting it to be weird and trying to be open, not fret and accept the nature of the beast, grief still pops up when you don’t expect it and surprises you.

But after a death when it’s really a release and the person who died was clearly at peace and happy to do so, I guess I assumed I’d mourn less perhaps, or at least differently. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but when you’ve been losing a person for so long while they’re alive and grieving their loss has already been going on for some years I suppose I thought that the grief of the actual death would be … easier?

Or to put it another way, for all my trying to be open minded and take it as it comes, it seems I’d assumed that there’s a finite amount of grief and that I’d used up a good half of it while Dad was still alive.

I was wrong.

That’s probably worth remembering. Meanwhile, for now, for me, it’s head down, give it space whenever I can and wait. I’ll get used to it eventually.

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Tagged as an author with children, author blog, author parent, death, dementia, M T McGuire, off topic, sad, writers, writing

29 Jun 2019 · 3:57 pm

Registering a death … the difficult way

The flowers Mum did for Dad’s coffin.

It’s a month, almost exactly, since Dad died. The dust is beginning to settle, except that I seem to have a thousand letters to write. Jeepers but my Mum writes a lot of letters, or at least, she doesn’t any more, I write them for her. But she thanks everyone for everything and to be honest, I haven’t yet. There are lots of folks who couldn’t come who need to be sent a service sheet, and a godmother who only communicates by letter who hasn’t been told (my bad).

There is a partial reason, I’m slow at things I stress about, and for some reason I really stress about making calls, writing letters etc. Don’t get me wrong, I actually love writing a letter when I have the time and space to do so, but time and space … that’s not really something I know about anymore.

On the upside, I have kicked some royal bottom with the forms. Dad’s affairs were pretty simple. We’d spent every last penny of his assets on his care so all he had left was half of what was in the bank account, because although it officially came from Mum’s savings the account was a joint account. He also had a pension which I needed to sort out and his state pension. I think I managed to get onto the ‘tell us once’ register which means the information filters through to everyone, although as I understand it, it was the lady I rang at the pensions enquiry line who put the information on. HMRC rang anyway, and they’ll look into whether there’s any tax on Dad’s teacher’s pension that they would need to refund. Yes, despite being retired Dad paid tax on his pension. How does that work? It’s money he’s saved up while he’s working so it’s already taxed surely?

One of the things you have to do when someone dies is register the death. The undertakers, who were chuffing marvellous, helped us with all this, booking an appointment. They told us that when the death certificate came through they would call us. My dear brother had booked this registration for nine o’clock on the morning of the Friday after Dad died. However, as he made to leave the day before he realised that someone or something had smashed the back lights of his van. So he had to get it fixed. On the up side, the appointment with the registrar had been changed to four pm on the Friday. On the downside, he might not be down in time to register the death, he warned me, because he couldn’t come down until the parts were fitted and they weren’t arriving until Friday morning. If I was doing the trip, afternoon was a lot easier for me, a very much non morning person.

You have to register the death within five working days. In order to do so, you need a death certificate which you get from a Doctor. Clearly there are sometimes exceptions, if there’s a post-mortem etc. In our case the death certificate was sent to the lovely undertakers who were unbelievably fab. To register the death, you collect the death certificate from the undertakers and you go to a special office run by the Registration of Births Marriages and Deaths for your area. Usually it’ll be in your nearest big local administrative town. You need to make an appointment and they can get quite booked up so it’s wise to ensure that either you, or the undertakers, ring up to do that pretty sharpish after the death. You have ten minutes’ leeway to be late for your appointment. After that, you have to make another one.

In my case this was in Worthing, the Chichester end rather than the Brighton one. I had been foolish in that I’d been copied in on some of the email correspondence between my brother and the undertakers about this but didn’t really read the emails properly because I wasn’t expecting to be that closely involved. I just knew I had to pick the death certificate up from them sometime on Thursday, which I did. It was clear I might have to attend the meeting if my brother couldn’t make it in time, but until the van prang, I’d doubted that would happen.

Once collected, the certificate came in an envelope upon which someone had thoughtfully stamped the address of the registration office along with their phone numbers. I googled it and one of Dad and Mum’s carers, whose own father died suddenly a year and a half ago, explained that there was no parking at the offices, you had to park down a side road. That in mind, I decided to make sure I left myself plenty of time and set off early.

I arrived at 3.30 and drove in, confirmed there was, indeed, no parking, and drove out. I noticed the registration of births marriages and deaths sign straight away but my mental warning klaxons started to sound as I realised it was denuded of any actual lettering, and that this building was proclaiming itself the home of the Registration of Birth Marriages and Deaths merely by dint of dirt sticking to the glue where the letters had been.

‘Hmm,’ I said to myself.

I parked as close as I could and walked as briskly as someone who isn’t physically able to run anymore can to the reception. Naturally there was a queue.

‘I’m here to register a death,’ I said cheerfully when, after a few anxious minutes, it was finally my turn. It was one of those booths where the bullet proof glass is so thick you can’t hear the person behind it so you speak to them through an intercom.

The lady stared at me with a blank expression.

‘One moment,’ she said, her lips moving but the sound of her voice surprising me tinnily from a speaker a few feet to my right. Behind the bullet proof glass she turned to her colleague as if to have a private complication but naturally the mike amplified it all.

‘Registration of births marriages and deaths? That’s not here is it?’
‘No … I’m not sure where they are.’
‘Please help me, I can’t miss this appointment my dad died last Saturday and I have to register his death within five working days.’
The lady pursed her lips and weighed up this further information.
‘Ask Dave,’ said her colleague.
She turned back to me, as if I’d neither heard nor participated in the previous conversation and said.
‘I’m going to ask a colleague. Please wait here.’

She strolled to the back of the office and picked up a two-way radio.

‘Dave?’ she said.
Click, hiss, crackle.
‘Yeh?’
Click, crackle.
‘Lady here’s looking for the Resister of Births Marriages and Deaths. I heard her tinny amplified voice say.’
Crackle, crackle pop.
‘It’s moved.’
Hiss, click, crackle.
‘Yes.’
‘D’you know where it’s gone?’ I asked through the glass.
‘D’you know where it’s gone?’ the lady asked Dave.
Crackle, hiss, click, pop, crackle …
‘It’s near the law courts,’ he replied. ‘Next to the station.’
‘Thanks Dave,’ said the lady and I, in unison.

She returned to the window.

‘It’s near the law courts,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ I told her, again but I was already stepping back googling the fastest route on my phone as I went.

A quick glance at my watch showed it was quarter to four. I had to get back across town but I might make it. I’d give it my best shot anyway. First I must ring the number on the envelope and tell them I was going to be late. Except the number on the envelope was as out of date as the address.

Balls! The wrong bastard number!

Now what?

Ah yes, ring the undertakers they’ll have the number because they made the appointment. I found their number on my list of made calls, phoned them and breathlessly explained my predicament as I speed-limped back to the car. They told me not to worry, that they’d ring and say I was going to be late. They were pretty sure I’d have ten minutes’ leeway. By the time I got back to my car it was ten to four, I might make it … possibly … but I needed the name of the building I was heading to. If it came down to minutes, ‘next door to the law courts’ wasn’t going to cut the mustard. I had to know exactly where I was going.

After a mile or so, I pulled in and googled, ‘Registration of Births Marriages and Deaths, West Sussex.’ It came up with the main office number in Chichester. I dialled and then as the plastic google lady shouted instructions to get to the law courts next door to their Worthing office – which was better than nothing – I drove at a very tense 30mph towards my destination, speaking to a kindly young man as I went. He eventually managed to give me the the name of the building. It turned out it was also next to the Library, which was far more helpful as I knew exactly where that was. Yes, they would give me ten minutes’ leeway but if I was later than that, I’d have to rebook.

Stuck at an interminably long red light, I put the name of the building into google and started a new set of directions.

Worthing is absolutely infested with traffic lights, and I was the one on the end of the queue who either stops and heads up the next one, or goes through every single set on the orange. Two of them had red light cameras that I hadn’t seen until I’d gone through on amber, only ramping my anxiety levels up still further. Luckily neither of them flashed. A small mercy. At last I got to a set of pedestrian lights which were going red every thirty seconds or so as the good burgers of Worthing crossed the main road going about their business. It was mostly parents with kids from my old school heading for the library on their way home.

Roundly cursing the lights, which added another precious minute to my journey time, I finally got through and turned left, where google directed, down a tiny side alley, only to be confronted with a locked bollard blocking my way and an empty car park beyond.

Bollocks!

Now thanking the good lord for the traffic lights I’d cursed, I reversed back up the narrow alley at speed and out onto the main road, with a slight squeak of tyres, as the traffic sat backed up behind the lights.

‘Your destination is on your left,’ said the plastic google lady as I passed the side road to nowhere.

Woot.

There was a parking space too. Small but … there. I reversed in, badly and after a couple of backs and forths to at least get the wheels off the pavement. I leapt out and after checking with a passer by, parking free for an hour, double woot! I ran in.

There was a reception desk, no bullet proof glass this time. I explained why I was there, they pointed me to a doorway, I pelted through and met the registrar walking down the hall. I explained what I was there for and she explained who she was and showed me into her office, with two minutes to spare …

As I sat there, a sweaty slobbering heap, she explained she’d need to ask me some questions. Listen, if you ever have to register a death in England, there are things you need to know.

Firstly, you have to have the death certificate, of course. It’s also useful to know the name of the doctor who has signed it, they couldn’t read his writing so it took a while to work out which surgery it was, look up the names of the doctors and decide which one fitted!

You will also need the person’s date of birth, National Insurance Number, date and location of death and very importantly, you need to know where they were born. If you cock any of this stuff up, then, as I write, it’s £90 to change it. So you do want to get it right. The only one I fell down on was where Dad was born. I was pretty sure but not 100% certain so I rang Mum to check.

‘Roehampton.’
‘No that’s where you were born.’ I glanced over at the registrar. She was smiling kindly.

I remembered the name of the house Dad was born in though, and I knew that, in a complete fluke, Mum had lived there too. She might not know where Dad was born but she still knew where her old house was. Phew.

Death registered, I thanked the Registrar for staying back late on a Friday, she gave me a green form to deliver to the undertakers, without which they couldn’t bury Dad, and I headed home.

There’s nothing wipes a person out more than trying to register a death in the wrong fucking place. But it also made Dad’s death very real. It’s a strange thing, I wouldn’t have wanted him to suffer any more, indeed, I almost wanted him to die because I wanted his suffering to end and, more selfishly, I wanted my suffering to end, watching it. But on an even more selfish note, he was my Dad and so, a part of me wanted him to stay. It’s complicated and difficult to explain.

The black dot is a lark.

Driving home, I headed out of the back of Worthing and took a tiny road off the A27 that goes over the downs and into Steyning. I love that road. It’s like being on the roof of the world up there. That’s the thing about the downs, they’re quite narrow, so if you stand on top of them you can see the sea stretching away into the distance one side and the Weald the other. It was bright sun and I walked through a gate and into a field and lay in the grass for half an hour or so, looking at the blue sky, listening to the larks, letting the dust settle.

So yeh, as well as knowing your loved one’s date of birth, place of birth, date of death, place of death, national insurance number, address they died at and full name, double check by phone with the Registration of Births and Deaths for your area you’re going to the right chuffing place before you set off, alright?

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Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as death, dementia, I fucked this up so you don't have to, I stuffed, M T McGuire, off topic, registering a death

22 Jun 2019 · 12:27 pm

The end

on top of a Down for a while

So here we are … it’s official. I’m a demi-orphan. Dad died, peacefully, just before eleven am on Saturday 25th May. My brother and I were on separate sides of the M25. My mother was holding his hand. In those last two weeks I had two visits to Dad where there was so much love. He seemed way more lucid too, as if being too weak to speak very much had given him back some brain power to compute the world around him. And after he’d had the last rights he was totally content, peaceful and unafraid.

Dad stopped eating. People with Alzheimer’s do this but when it happened, in April, I was away. I returned form holiday in late April to dire stories from Mum of how thin and ill he looked. Before I visited him, I asked the lady who ran the home about it. She explained that his refusal of food was, indeed, a standard Alzheimer’s symptom. I asked her if this was the end game. She told me that it depended. Dad was frightened to try and stand, he feared he’d fall, so his rehabilitation wasn’t going so well and that meant, ‘some young whippersnapper’ (her words) did everything for him, dressed him carried him … everything. The only thing he had any control over, she explained was whether he said yes or no to food and drink.

So it was about control.

‘How long does this stage go on for?’
‘How long is a piece of string?’ she replied.

She went on to explain that, while it was hard to ascertain the exact motives, at this stage of Alzheimer’s there were three reasons people stopped eating; they’d forgotten how, it was the only thing they could control, yes or no to food, or they’d had enough.

‘It’s very difficult to say but I think your Dad falls into the third group.’

She explained that both she and the doctor who had come out to see him believed it was about leaving. That Dad had simply had enough of this life and wanted to go on to the next one. I asked what I could do and she said bring things he likes for him to eat, so I bought jelly babies, wine gums and Turkish delight for the next visit – three great favourites.

He was pretty dogged, continuing to starve himself for the next few weeks with the odd break where the temptation to eat ice cream clearly became too much for him. During that time I want to see him every week; a bad visit, a pretty good visit when we did silly waves goodbye and I left him laughing and then a completely wonderful one, where I sat next to him in the lounge and recalled stuff my brother and I had done. It was like talking to someone who was half asleep, he was very weak and couldn’t raise his head, so I angled mine down so our eyes could meet. I told him what his grandchildren were up to, my lad and the others, and he smiled and chuckled, and projected this amazing aura of love. There were points where he fell asleep and I sat back and gazed out of the window, at the downs and Cissbury ring but the love thing remained. Then he’d wake up and I’d start recalling stuff again.

I’m a bit mithered about what I’ve told you but I think I mentioned that one visit was very bad, the first after my holiday. Dad told me to go away, so I held his hand and explained that he had a daughter and it was me. He changed then and was happy to let me hold his hand but there was still no response from him. It was difficult to get the measure of this new unresponsive Dad so in the end, I got out my phone, and Gutenberg, and looked up a book he used to read my brother and I at bed time, The Fierce Bad Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. I read it to him.

Dad made no sign of enjoyment but Maurice, next to him, clearly loved it. And next to Maurice was a gentleman sitting very straight with his hands on his knees staring into space. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard or not, until that good visit, near the end, with the gaps where Dad nodded off. In one of the gaps I sat back and looked over at the fellow who was sitting straight up. He was staring straight at me and then, very slowly he raised his hand and gave me a thumbs up. I don’t know what his condition was, so I’ve no idea if he was a simple Alzheimer’s sufferer saying hi or someone who fully understood how hard that previous visit had been and was giving me encouragement. Whatever it was, it brought a bit of a lump to my throat for some reason. I gave him a big smile and a thumbs up back, then Dad woke up again and we carried on.

Five days after that visit, on the Monday, is when I got the first call for the deathbed scramble I described in my previous post. Dad got the last rites, which we knew was important to him, and I felt that I was incredibly lucky that I got to say goodbye with ADBA even if it was three days beyond that before Dad actually left us. Strangely, that feeling of connection I described with Dad didn’t actually go, it stayed there, quietly in the background.

On the Friday, I got a call from Mum saying they didn’t think Dad would last long. I confess I cried on the phone and told her that I couldn’t make it that night. I prayed, sort of, only to Dad, trying to send him love and good thoughts and explain that I’d see him the following morning. McMini hadn’t seen me for four days, then, when I’d finally returned home on the Thursday, McOther was out. He begged me to stay Friday so we could have a family evening together and go to Sussex on the Saturday morning. I’d already said goodbye to Dad so any thoughts of going to Sussex that night evaporated and I agreed.

That Friday night I got a message on the carers’ chat group. Mum had rung one of the carers, worried that Dad would die when she wasn’t there. The home were brilliant and had promised us that when he became really bad there would be someone with him round the clock. They’d also told me we could go any time. The carer said she’d reassured Mum but a little while later, at half eleven, she rang me, in tears. She and her Mum were the original carers. The team has grown over the years but to start with, back in 2012? 2013? It was just the mother and then, shortly afterwards, the two of them. She loved Dad like he was her own father, people tended to do that when they were around him for long, and she explained that she felt as if she hadn’t said her goodbyes to Dad. I told her how the home had said we were welcome to go see Dad any time and said that if there was anything she needed to say to him, to go then. I told her I’d ring the home and let them know she was coming.

A few minutes later she pinged me a text to say she and her mum were going over.

I slept fitfully that night and the next morning, received a message on the carers’ WhatsApp group at about half six. The mother and daughter team who’d gone to visit Dad the night before had stayed with him, chatting and sleeping fitfully all night. They knew it was what Mum would have done if she’d had the strength and it was an act of such complete and utter love on their part which still humbles me.

They were texting to say they were leaving. They said he was able to do a half smile when they shared funny stories, so they knew he realised they were there. By half eight while McOther was out at the shops, I got another call from the home to say Dad only had a few hours left and that someone should come. I rang Mum and told her I’d put out a call on WhatsApp and it’d be the first person who answered.

The younger of the two ladies who’d been with him all night popped up and took her in.

My brother was on his way, I left as soon as McOther came home from the shops.

When Dad died I was on the four lane bit of the M25. No stopping and the traffic though slow, was moving. Thanks to our lovely carers, Mum was sitting next to him, holding his hand. The local vicar missed him, there was some huge Christian festival which blocked all the roads for miles around and she couldn’t get there in time but she said some prayers after he’d died.

Something happened, I’m not sure if it was just after or just before I got the call about him dying, I honestly don’t recall, but the feeling of connection, of love that I’d felt the at the last visit and the Wednesday before … that was still there and I was kind of praying to him I suppose. This is difficult to explain but basically I was thinking about him really hard in the hope that I could somehow send enough love out through the ether for it to reach him and for him to know where it came from.

As I thought about Dad, and tried to send him love from afar, I had this weird kind of out-of-body. I was looking at the roof of the home he was in, like the satellite picture only it was in much higher definition, receding fast, as if I was flying upwards at speed. There was a sense of freedom and unbelievable joy. In no time, the viewpoint was high above the downs, flying along side of them towards Truleigh Hill. I could see the blue of the sky, the yellow and white of the flowers in the meadows below, I could hear the larks, drink in the sunlit green of the hills and blue of the sea. All the while, my heart was bursting with love and joy at the beauty and wonder of it all, at the sheer delight of existence, of a life well lived, of gratitude at the loveliness of the people surrounding me and the love and happiness I enjoyed, and I was filled with it, too. It was a bit like that feeling you get when you come off the best fairground ride ever and you’re thinking,

‘Blimey! That was a blast. I must do it again.’

Except it was a million times better. It was pretty fucking extraordinary. Because I was sort of feeling it as if it was me, but also feeling it with someone else; their feelings, being shown. And I may be nuts to say this, and I’m definitely laying myself open saying it in a public place but it felt as if, somehow, my efforts to connect to Dad had succeeded, as if those were his last conscious thoughts.

After it was gone, the traffic slowed more and I had to contend with the bell ends in the van behind me who were so close I couldn’t see their headlights. Clearly my decision to leave a 20 yard stopping distance, crying my eyes out as I was, my vision blurry with tears, offended them. But I was unable to stop and blurb properly because you can’t on that bit and I didn’t fancy sitting up the arse of the car in front while visually impaired! I gave them a brakes test and they backed off.

Back in Sussex, the people at the home washed and dressed my dad, and laid him out with a palm cross in his hands. Another act of humanity and love.

See you later Dad.

Back on the M25 I tried to reimagine the experience I’d just had, the connection, the joy, but I couldn’t make it feel the same. It wasn’t just because you can never quite recreate the impact of something like that a second time, but also because it didn’t feel as if it had come from me. It felt as if it had come into my mind from outside. Maybe those were my father’s last conscious thoughts.

Later, when I returned to register Dad’s death, I went to see his body. All I could think of was that bit in whichever gospel it is when the women go to look in the tomb to embalm Jesus and there’s some bloke is in there who basically says,

‘Why are you looking for him in here among the dead? Fuck off back to where he is; with the living.’

A good death then.

The connection? Still there. Quietly, in the background, giving me strength.

Death Is Nothing At All

By Henry Scott-Holland

Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.

Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.

All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again

Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/death-is-nothing-at-all-by-henry-scott-holland

This poem was read at Dad’s funeral and shortly afterwards, one of the lovely people on my mailing list sent it to me, which rather heartened me as I must be collecting a group of the right kind of people!

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Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as alzheimer's, death, dementia, M T McGuire, off topic, sad

25 May 2019 · 11:45 am

The end … probably.

This week, I don’t know where to begin. It was one of the most intense and strange experiences of my life. Let’s start with Monday.

Monday morning I went to the gym and came home with a list of bits and bobs I needed to do for my writing. As I sat down, to write, I realised I’d missed a call from Dad’s home. I rang and was put through to the nurse who was looking after him that day.

‘Your father did not eat or drink anything yesterday and he is refusing all food and drink today,’ he said. ‘I think we are close to the end.’

‘Oh bless him, poor Dad. Do you need me to come now?’ I asked.

‘You don’t need to come, but if you want to see him, you should come.’

‘I’m coming down to see him on Wednesday.’

‘He may be here on Wednesday. He is going down slowly, but today or tomorrow is better.’

‘D’you mean, Wednesday will be too late?’

‘If he carries on this way, I think so, although it is difficult to say.’

‘Has a priest seen him?’

‘Not yet, there is a number we can call, would you like us to get one?’

‘Yes please, he’s Church of England, an Anglican I’ll try and get the parish priest from his own church to come too.’

‘He won’t be alone, when they reach this stage, we always make sure is someone with them at all times.’

Go softly into the night …

I said thank you and rang off.

So here it was, the moment all of us had been dreading, yet kind of hoping for too. It looked like Dad was on his deathbed, time to scramble the troops. But this is Alzhiemer’s so there was nothing to say Dad wouldn’t start eating and drinking and be fine, indeed, in my own mind, I had this last bit pegged as the lying-in-a-bed-year.

This is where WhatsApp is a godsend. I managed to tell everyone, barring a couple of folks, with one message to our WhatsApp group. The biggie was telling Mum, though, because she was alone until midday and I wanted to be sure there was someone with her when I passed on the news.

That evening, McMini wanted to bring a friend home after school. He pushed, I said no, he told me the friend had to come because his mother had already said it was OK and left the school gates, I told him no, he kept pushing and I explained Pops was ill. Still he wanted the friend to come and I’m afraid I snapped, angry with him for not appearing to give a shit, I told him his grandfather was on his death bed, that his father was on the way home so I could go say goodbye and that I was not in a very fit state to play the part of kindly friend’s Mum, but I let him bring the friend home for a short visit.

I felt terrible for breaking it to him like that. The little lads took a long time to arrive and I discovered that McMini had hung up and then cried his eyes out, at which point he and friend had stopped and sat on a bench so friend could comfort him and friend had cried too. I felt bad but also reassured that he cared more than he’d made out.

I got hold of Mum and Dad’s parish priest and she promised to be at Dad’s bedside that evening. True to her word, she arrived shortly after Mum and gave Dad the last rites, or Extreme Unction which sounds like some kind of dangerous sport. Dad was quiet and not very responsive but incredibly peaceful when it was done.

My brother and I drove down to Sussex on the Monday evening, but it turned out that Dad had taken a little water and eaten some sweets, perhaps he was on the mend? We didn’t know.

We discussed it. What do you do in a death bed situation? Life is not the same as it was, you can’t stop the world and step out of it for a couple of weeks to sit, in vigil, by a slowly fading loved one. It’s a luxury modern life no longer affords us. There’s stuff to do and the bastards who want you to do it consider such a situation no excuse. Commerce can’t afford space for acts of compassion like that.

At five thirty a.m. on Tuesday I woke with a start to find my mother standing over me, complete with walker.

‘We have to ring the home.’

‘What? Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s five am.’

‘They said we could ring any time.’

‘On you go then.’

‘You’re the main point of contact, you have to do it.’

Sometimes I forget that my Mum has dementia too. So I rang the home. He was comfortable and had eaten a couple of sweets and had some water.

We went to see him on Tuesday. The four of us, together as a family, painfully aware that it was probably for the last time. He wasn’t hugely responsive, although I felt maybe that was the way we were dealing with it. Maybe we weren’t engaging him right, because throughout his illness, Dad has made the running, asked the questions which we answer. Always the host, asking us how we are, who our relations are, and asking after them. A polite interrogation, sometimes after those he loves, sometimes, engaging us in conversation as if he’s meeting us for the first time.

Lancing Beach near our lunch venue.

He lay there, looking at his hands, even frailer and thinner than last week, ravaged partly by his illness and partly through force of his own will. His head like a skull with thin skin stretched over it, the lesions … I thought of him as I’d known him, remembered our holidays when I was a nipper, squelching across the mud on Stiffkey salt marsh. Dad was a man who loved the sun on his skin and the squelch of the mud between his toes! I wished for a lot of things that I can’t have.

He was very peaceful. It was like sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, Dad was calm and clearly perfectly content, waiting …

We went out to lunch afterwards. It felt like this was a good and gentle death, even if it’s a slow one, and I didn’t fully hoist in how upset Mum was until she couldn’t eat anything.

Later, we tried to work out a plan of action. What to do? Was this was the first of many deathbed scrambles, or was there was only going to be the one. Eventually, we decided that he probably wasn’t going to die in the next few days. My brother decided to go home and come back at the weekend. I decided to stay until Wednesday morning because I’d agreed to meet a lovely family friend and see Dad with him.

Wednesday came, Dad was still around, said friend turned up. I shan’t name him because I haven’t asked him if I can so I’ll just call him Adba. Anyone who should know will realise exactly who that is and no-one else will be any the wiser. Anyway, Adba turned up and off we went. His mother spent the last year or so of her life in bed, in a similar state to the one Dad was in now, so when we walked in, he knew exactly what to do. He took Dad’s hand, called him by his name, said he was looking well, acted as if Dad was perfectly responsive and of course, the miracle happened. Dad was.

He couldn’t speak, but his face broke into the most delighted smile and he raised his hand and waved a jokey wiggly fingers wave. Adba waved back. I waved. We laughed, Dad smiled.

We reminisced about the Hogworts set I grew up on, Dad’s time there and the other members of staff. Dad smiled and nodded and sometimes shook his head and waved several times. Adba and I recalled funny stories to Dad about his exploits as a housemaster, and shared them with one another.

Forty minutes flew by and it was time to go. I took Dad’s hand and told him I loved him, that he was the best father anyone could ever have had, that McOther, McMini, his other grandchildren, my brother, my mum, (and pretty much Uncle Tom Cobbley and all by the time I’d finished listing everyone who wasn’t there and who’d want me to tell him while he was with it) loved him. He smiled, a wonderful huge smile, and squeezed my hand again and again as I spoke. Both of us were just filled with joy. It was one of those rare moments of connection and love without words, when even if he couldn’t speak, he didn’t need to be able to. At the end I said goodbye. Dad and I both know what kind of goodbye it was – Adba probably knew and all – but I told Dad I’d see him next week anyway, and Adba said he’d be back to see the old boy the week after, we said we’d see Dad together that time, same as this visit.

It was a near perfect farewell for me and I am eternally grateful to Adba, whose presence, and whose wisdom in engaging with Dad made it possible. Those smiles and those squeezes of the hand were wonderful. I just feel bad that we didn’t take Mum with us to share them too.

Adba and I came out of the home, only to immediately get a phone call from Mum’s carer. My uncle on Mum’s side who was coming to lunch that day, had arrived with a gargantuan nosebleed. The carer at home reckoned it would be best if she rang the pub we ate in and got them to do a takeaway, could we pick it up? Of course we could. A few seconds later we were directed to a different pub.

We duly picked up the fish and chips, they took a little while so Adba and I had half a pint of Harveys each in the garden. When we picked up the lunch we left in haste, without paying. Arriving home, it turned out that Uncle’s nose was still bleeding. He was sitting on a stool in the downstairs loo, and it looked as if someone had been murdered in there, but only after a good twenty minutes of stiff resistance.

Oh dear.

Taking in the bloodied surroundings, I began to wonder about blood loss at this point and suggested an ambulance. In the end, carer – who shared my concerns – and gardener – who was ‘mowing the lawn’ but really just checking Mum was OK – leapt into carer’s car and drove Uncle and Aunt to hospital, gardener escorting them in while carer parked. I did manage to get Aunt to eat half her fish so at least she wasn’t going to be sitting there feeling hungry as well as worried.

Off they went, leaving Adba, Mum and I finishing off the fish and chips the others hadn’t eaten. At this point I remembered we hadn’t paid for them, rang the pub and paid by credit card. I announced that I was going to be very British about the murder scene in the downstairs loo and pretend it didn’t exist while we had a chat. Adba left at half three and I went and cleared up. It took until half four. Then I deep cleaned our spare room so Uncle and Aunt could sleep there because I didn’t think either of them was in a fit state to go home. Once I’d done that, I realised I was going to have to stay Wednesday night as well because Mum already has dementia but the state of Dad has really knocked her for six and so she’s even more challenged in the memory department than usual, bless her. I didn’t want her waking up and being surprised to find her brother there and the state she was in, she might have done.

Uncle and Aunt finally got back late, I had a light supper ready. We did breakfast the next morning and then they had a follow up appointment at the hospital at 1.30. They wanted to take a taxi to the hospital rather than drive so I sorted that out for them. Finally at about 12.00 I set off for home. I arrived with half an hour to spare before I needed to be meeting McMini at small church, which he does on a Thursday. I used that half an hour buying some summer clothes that fitted my ever expanding, ever more zeppelin-like body.

It’s Friday as I write this and I’ve just received a call from my Mum to say that Dad has been given a prognosis of hours if it’s bad, a day or two if it’s good. So it’s back to Sussex again, although I need two good night’s sleep in a decent bed before I go back down there, and also, half term plus Bank Holiday Friday traffic tonight? No thanks. Not even with the Jo Whiley show, which was a wonderful tonic as I snivelled my way round the M25 on Monday.

No. The sensible course is to go tomorrow morning. By the time you read this, I will be creeping slowly round Britain’s most congested motorway. Dad may well be gone, and if he isn’t he’ll be very close. So, if you’re on the M25 tomorrow and there’s this fifty year old bag in a knackered Lotus, with the headlights on because the daylight running bulbs are bust, ear plugs in and the music on really loud, looking as if she’s got really bad hay fever, feel free to give me a wave!