Trying to gain perspective about a parent might be beyond all of us; it’s certainly beyond me. Today at least, this is what I think.
Your generation had a view of residential care because there were memories of the workhouse, with its associations of shame and privation. Did that mean you shouldn’t have spent your final years in one? Well, you lived to be a hundred – mainly, I think, because you were stubborn. From ninety onwards you told anyone who would listen that you were ready to go, but you weren’t, not really. By the time you died you were like a tiny new hatched bird in an abandoned nest. Your skin was translucent, etched with blue veins and your skeleton was contorted. When we visited, you seldom opened your rheumy eyes and, for over a year our, ever-briefer, visits were made only out of duty because the person you had been could not be found. Sometimes I would oil your scalp and remove some of the cradle-cap but your hair was so sparse and loose-rooted in the end I even gave that up.
In the almost ten years you spent in ‘the home’ you diminished in every way as you edged towards a vanishing point. Your final years were about accelerated physical decline as your body began to close down. We had a couple of death-bed vigils before you died. Care-home staff were convinced your time had come and we said out good-byes and told you it was fine to let go if that was what you wanted. If you heard us it made you more determined than ever to hang on because that’s what you did. We didn’t really believe it when they called a third time. They spoke in code anyway, saying you seemed to be very weak. I said we’d visit in the morning and then after the call, began to think about what ‘very weak’ might really mean and why they’d called at night to tell us you were ‘very weak’ when you always were. I called back and asked did they mean you were dying and they didn’t say no. Before we could get in the car a third call told us you were gone. They say that with old age a person’s true nature shows again, having been hidden more or less successfully, since childhood. Perhaps it’s true and perhaps people die as they’ve lived – I’ve heard that too. In your final years you were variously demented, paranoid, funny, tearful, manipulative and absent. You could be as nasty and suspicious as any bigot and could round on anyone but I don’t believe this was your true nature any more than I believe that you were a saint.
Something happened to you soon after we celebrated your ninetieth birthday. We did it well, at the Golf Club, and all the family came. You seemed a little lost on the night though, as if it was all too much for you. After that, you began to wilt like a plant in a drought. Did you look ahead and really frighten yourself? You’d always said you would never ask to come and live with us and would never want to be a burden but, suddenly, you no longer wanted to be independent. The Who hoped they’d die before they got old but, understandably, changed their minds as the years rolled by. So did you. You decided you needed a carer and then that you needed a full-time carer. To buttress your case you swung the lead. You developed imagined maladies which required emergency hospital admission or a doctor’s home visit to do ‘an internal’ because ‘there was something terribly wrong’ – except, of course, there wasn’t. Once you left the bedroom phone off the hook, mistook the noise for the kitchen smoke alarm and climbed up on a stool to cut the wires. Of course it didn’t stop the noise but it did bring the fire brigade. I drove a hundred miles one evening when you had been rushed into hospital but you were discharged the next day with a diagnosis of constipation. When I reminded you of this later you denied it had ever happened.
We managed to get you into a care home nearby and you settled in, or seemed to. But, when you had not long moved in I got a desperate phone call. You couldn’t explain you whispered, real fear in your voice, but I had to come at once because ‘they’ were trying to kill you. I calmed you down and raced there. When I walked in you were quite your old self, cheerful, pleased and surprised to see me. You made no mention of the phone call, then or later. Then there were the voices in the wall, keeping you awake day and night and trying to drive you insane…or was it the intercom you never managed to master. You were grateful that I took over your finances but, at the same time, knew I was stealing all your money, except for what was being stolen by the care home staff. Month by month different carers were identified as saints or liars and thieves and the fall from grace could be sudden and unexpected. You’d been a labour voter in your younger days but the daily drip-feed of bile from the Daily Mail turned you, over time, into an impoverished tory with no time or sympathy for the poor ‘living the life of Riley on benefits’.
You’d coped most of your life, on your own or with a partner you had no time for. You saw off three husbands, though the first, my father, died of TB, and for you the others were make-weights. One proved violent and the other, just out of his depth. You did fall in love again. He was working away from home and I still remember his calling on you one day though I didn’t know why. When you were still aware and able to talk to me, right out of the blue you cried as you remembered him offering to leave his wife and family. You refused to break up his marriage. You knew what it was like to be abandoned and wouldn’t put your happiness before hers.
You were born in 1914, the youngest but one of five sisters and one brother. I used to think the brother, seldom talked of or met in my childhood, had got out of that tight, matriarchal clan as soon as possible simply to survive but there seems a good chance he was told to go because of something he did. Your mother was formidable. Married to a fisherman who was briefly a skipper but a drunk for far longer; she kicked him out and raised the girls and lone boy alone. She worked at anything she could, from bar work to taking in washing. It’s hard now, if not impossible, to understand what life was like in the twenties and thirties and how that shaped attitudes. Respectable women didn’t work, except during the first and second wars when the men were busy killing, being killed or just enduring the boredom and terror of it all. Men worked and provided and controlled the flow of money into the house, or, in the case of too many fishermen, into the pub. The family knew poverty and fear and those girls were brought up to have an eye to the main chance and find the best husband they could – those attitudes didn’t end with Jane Austen and weren’t restricted to the middle classes. You did well at school and were a monitor, teaching other children but you had to leave at fourteen to look after the baby of an unmarried sister who went out to work.
You worked as a ‘Persil’ rep, travelling to promote the whitest whites. You made team leader and wore a long leather coat, reminiscent of the SS. You never forgot the hospitality of the Glasgow poor, inviting you in and offering a cup of tea in a jam jar. You never forgot the coldness of those with money either.
During the war, and after when money was short, you worked on the buses, five feet of formidable conductress seeing off drunks of an evening or rising early in the dark for the morning shift.
My abiding memory of you is not the sad husk motionless in your bedworld but your coming home on a dark winter’s evening in your conductress uniform, hitching your skirt and warming your frozen behind in front of the fire, “Oh that’s lovely” you would say and we would know we were safe because of it and because of you. We didn’t always feel safe though. Sometimes you would come home tired and bitter and rant at the two children you were bringing up alone. ‘Ungrateful’, ‘selfish’ and ‘worked my fingers to the bone’ screamed at us for what seemed no reason, terrified we two boys.
I think you spent most of your life being afraid and hiding it. In your prime you rode a bike to work but, afraid of turning a corner, would dismount and pretend to look in a shop window, then walk the bike across the road and remount. You were sure, always, that the world was watching you, scrutinising your cycling prowess or some other aspect of your life. You even considered trying to pass off the second wife of one of your sons as the first one – one brunette and one blonde but worth a try in your mind. The idea that no-one cared didn’t occur to you. Perhaps you knew best; your four weird sisters would have delighted in picking over the bones. Attack one and you attacked all but there was no need since, in various combinations, they were always falling out with each other.
You were generous with what you had, with what others had too, come to that but you had worked hard most of your life and the disappointment of two marriages to men who failed to provide for you (and us) must have been acute. Having overcome your grief when my father died you found another man and then another to provide for you and your kids, only to find yourself driven back to work as money ran short. I think you were an extraordinary woman, of your time and living well beyond it. You were fierce in your belief in your children and lived through them. It was because of you that we were the first in our extended family to go to university. You thought more of yourself than you should have and far, far more of us than you ever should. And you could laugh, at the world and at yourself. You lived a tough life bravely, for courage is not not being afraid, it’s being afraid and carrying on – and you certainly did carry on!
