17th November 2020

Dear bro,

‘tis a right bugger, this, cos we spoke of immediacy and I know (from bitter experience) that stuff not written at the time, becomes diluted, weakened, paled, when one tries to write it up later. Perhaps a bit like an artist trying to capture a landscape on a particularly stormy day – the difference between being out there with flapping canvas and escaping brushes, raw cheeks, blurring eyes and numbing hands, and painting from memory in studio warmth and comfort, safe home with tea, must be enormous. So I know this is the time to write, yet here I am, wordless in the face of death, hands in pockets rather than on pen or keyboard (although not right now, obviously!), unable to know what to say. 

Here’s a flavour though. 

There’s a calm, if one has got things right (pain relief etc), that pervades the house and settles on all who enter. We have become a waiting room, with a collection of Sally’s favourite music playing on a long loop (Nashville to Beetles, Abba to Adele, Benedetti to Cat, The Poozies to The Proclaimers). As that poem says (that I read at Mum’s funeral) All is well, and all will be well, we are just in the next room – I precis and take liberties, but you get the gist.

In this no-man’s land, tenses become muddled – she is, she was, she does, she used to, remember when, what’s next. Memories emerge alongside gentle humour, sadness and happiness, mourning and celebration.

Our days are simple, rhythmic, loosened from any time constraints, diaries, expectations, deadlines – except of course the ultimate deadline.  Immense tenderness and care in the gentle washing and turning processes. Mundanities like mouthcare become a way to show love. Listening to breathing regularity and depth becomes addictive in the absence of anything else that can be done. Breathing IS, after all, the difference between life and death.

A beginning anyway. Beginnings and endings. This waiting room has more than one door: Sally’s demise heralds a new phase for Tim – a freedom he hasn’t known for two decades – and a new chapter in my life too.

I’m needed, so I’ll send this as is xxxxx’

~~~

That, dear Sally, was an email I sent to my brother in response to his request that I write about my experience as a carer, ‘in the moment’, before time and distance eroded the detail and soothed the rawness.

That, my dear friend, was written the day before you died.

~~~

It all began (as many things do in rural Scotland) because of a chance meeting in the co-op. ‘Tim and Sally might need a bit of help’, said Bruce whilst selecting the chunk of root ginger I’d had my eye on, ‘and you used to be a nurse, didn’t you?’

I called by your blue-roofed house the next day, was met by the intense blue gaze of a man whom I surmised was yearning for the sea and, after an eternal infernal wait, attempting small talk with said man, whose brain awash with tide times and wind directions couldn’t master such banality, you rolled through from bedroom to living room and said hello.

That week I helped out for a few hours each day, to let Tim go surfing (correct surmisation!) while you bombed around in your wheelchair and I attempted – not always successfully – to stop you falling out. You were testing me: my patience, my humour, my attentiveness, my intelligence, my compassion. They were all tested and graded, and I must have passed because within a few weeks I was working for you pretty much full time. 

Within the year I was living in.

~~~

Two years. More. I’m tired. I’ve lost sight of my own life. I long for home. I consider leaving – practice saying it, explaining, apologising. Then I look at you and know I can do no such thing. For we have gelled, you and I. We have lived a bit of life together by now. We have danced dangerously swaying dances, and sung raucous songs with the music ramped up high, and giggled childishly at our very own jokes, and sworn crossly at our very own frustrations. We have become so much more than patient and carer. More, even, than friends who do lunch, or colleagues who share offices. We have become – though I hesitate to use a word normally more physically/sexually associated – intimate.

But that’s accurate. What’s not intimate about helping you to wash and dress and go to the loo? What’s not physical about scooping you up from the floor when you have yet again upturned whilst trying to reach for something impossibly far off and far down?

And of course the other reason I can’t leave is that I’ve left it too late. The opening scene of Enduring Love (Ian McEwan) pops into my head. I know I must hang on to the hot air balloon as it floats skywards, to look after you all the way, even though, once you are safely delivered, the drop back to earth will hurt me, possibly break various bits of me.

Pain or not, it’s no longer a choice. We’re in this together (until the fat lady sings, I would add, but you are bone thin by now, and no one’s singing operas around here).

~~~

And so it was. We cared for every inch of you, every inch of the way,your husband Tim and I. (He, of course, had been caring for you with his utmost patience, his scientific attention to detail, his gentlest good humour, his vast intelligence and his all encompassing compassion, for the full two decades of your illness, whilst I only swanned in for your last hurrah.) We watched your breaths until you no longer needed the very stuff of life. We kept you safe until you were gone. Free.

~~~

Now, one week later, I’m home and dry. Everything is fine. All present and correct. My home and my life have waited patiently for me. All is well and all will be well. I feel I can truly give myself a pat on the back, as others have done, for sticking by you til the end. I did that. I didn’t flake, or wander off, or let the side down in any way. And now I’m free to pick up the threads of my life once more, live it to the full, enjoy the luxury of ‘what’s next’, which you don’t have (or not in this life anyway). I’ve had a lovely relaxing week of walking the beaches, reading, pottering, sleeping and yes, binge watching a TV drama. 

So what I cannot understand, one week on, is why tears are filling, spilling, rolling. Why now? Why today? I mean I’ve had what I call ‘the daily weep’ one expects after a death, a loss. But today is torrential and unabating. Even when I’m ostensibly busy, washing up, listening to a radio play, baking*, knitting, talking on the phone – generally ‘otherwise engaged, thank you very much’ – the damn things fill and spill and roll endlessly on. What the flip is going on?

[*You’d laugh – I’ve just pulled a tray of entirely black biccies out of my oven – dammit!]

When the tears just refused to ‘dry up for gawdsake’ I went for a walk through the dark night air, ‘ostensibly’ to post a letter, and the night air breathed into me and transformed tears into words and I found myself turning back (only twenty yards from the postbox, so close!) and running home with words filling and spilling and rolling through my mind, some lost to the wet fields and the deep ditches and the indigo sky and the rising moon, and the running hares and the flying geese, but some, thankfully, making it back here to this page.

Tears, it seems, are rarely saying nothing.