8.7 My Mother

This is an extract from an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

Meanwhile my mother was managing well without my father, as far as I could tell. She moved to a small modern house next to the river in the village where we’d all been brought up.
    ‘It’s the sort of house I’ve always dreamed of having,’ she said.
    It was certainly different from the large Victorian farmhouse of my childhood.
    She had a busy social life and plenty of interests, and my sister Amelia lived only a few minutes’ walk away.
    Then she had a small car accident which scared her. She decided her reactions were no longer good enough and made the brave decision to stop driving. She engaged Amelia and her partner to drive her around, do her shopping and generally take care of her.

Eight years after my father’s death, when my mother was in her late eighties, she contracted pneumonia and was not expected to live. But she did, although her strength had vanished and she needed full-time care. We tried to share this out between the five of us children but we were pretty bad at it and decided that my mother would much rather have a professional than us. As would we. So Jo and my sisters (the three who lived closest) arranged live-in carers.
    My mother said she’d had a dream in which she saw God and God had said to her ‘We nearly got you that time, didn’t we.’ It made me wonder why God had let her live as her quality of life had plummeted. Modern medicine, it seemed, kept people alive at the expense of their spiritual wellbeing. Death was inevitable and we needed to be prepared for that, not patched up and sent off to limp into the future unaided. Or perhaps I was thinking of what I would want. Perhaps my mother preferred it the way it was.
    I tried to do my bit, travelling up from Devon to stay a couple of nights every month or so but I struggled. The only way I could deal with my mother was to cut off completely from her, to divorce myself from all my own feelings and pretend she was a child. It was exhausting.
    My main feeling, I think, was fear. She knew just how to hurt and didn’t hold back from doing so. I wanted to protect myself from that.
    One morning, however, as I was on my knees cleaning out her wood-burning stove while she sat on a nearby chair keeping up a running commentary on everything I was doing wrong, I could bear it no longer and exploded.
    ‘For goodness sake,’ I shouted. ‘Just let me get on with things in my own way.’
    My mother crumpled.
    ‘Oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I’m terribly bossy.’
    It was the first time in my whole life that she’d ever apologised to me about anything. I leapt up and gave her a big hug.

Her health deteriorated and she was in and out of hospital. The brunt of the worry landed on Amelia, as well as my brother Jo and sister Cass both of whom lived in London but often stayed at my mother’s. I was desperate to help, so after my mother had been stuck in a large Kent hospital for weeks, I travelled up from Devon to visit her there.
    The place was manic and the staff so overworked they could hardly acknowledge me let alone answer any of my questions. My mother was surviving in her usual no-nonsense way, but to me she looked like a lonely child, and her brain was wandering for the first time.
    I’d gathered from my sisters – or thought I had - that they wanted to bring her home so, after a long mobile-phone conversation with Cass in a hospital corridor, I set about trying to make that happen. Perhaps I could do something helpful at last.
    During my earlier visits to Kent I’d struggled to do the right thing but either my mother or Amelia or the carer had wanted me to do things differently from what I was doing and from what the other two said. It was horribly confusing and I’d felt utterly useless.
    The staff at the hospital said that so long as my mother could sit unaided (or some such, I can’t remember exactly) and had appropriate care at home (which of course she did have) she could go. I explained this to my mother and with what I could see was a feat of unimaginable determination she managed to do whatever she had to. The hospital said they would send her home in an ambulance the next day. They gave my mother a 6-page form to fill out about her 'hospital experience'. As neither she nor I was capable of filling it out, I left it behind.

    Amelia was not at all pleased with the turn of events and, even though I could see it was because the stress was too much for her, I took it personally and felt that yet again I’d got things wrong.
    I went back to Devon the next day, knowing that my siblings had arranged two live-in carers for my mother and thinking that everything was more or less under control.

    Less than a week later however I was called back. My mother was now very poorly indeed.

To be continued