. . . and so

 

And the seasons pass, and all is change. Because that’s the way it is with seasons, with the movement of time, with the turning of the Earth, with the ageing of our bodies and the tiring of our minds also if it comes to it . . . however much we wish it were not so.

 

It’s been a while, I know. And a lot of life has happened, for me, for you, for everyone really, since I last made an entry here. And as we all know, along with life there’s life’s dark companion, the big old bad we tend not to talk about, because we are all, to one degree or another, in denial of it. Such a crude thing, a hard terminology, is death, but that’s what it is and unlikely to change, no matter how much everything else changes. Death’s the constant. And there’s been a lot of it, too, in my days, since last we spoke. More so than life, it’s been death that’s kept this blog quiet for as long as it has been . . . along with the hardships of lives coming to their end.

 

Time.

 

Passing.

 

So my parents died, and being my parents, they did it in what felt like the hardest way imaginable. The uncomfortable disfiguration of a severe, slow-crawling cancer in my mum’s case. A cancer that turned an already small, narrowly-built woman into someone who looked like a famine victim in her final years, and then began to eat into her face so that even she didn’t recognise herself when she looked in a mirror. There was pain with it too, and tiredness, the like of which most of us won’t be able to imagine. And the cruellest of death’s thieves took my dad, vascular dementia. And being dementia, it took him again and again and again each day and every day, sometimes hour by hour, a new horror striking him as he slipped further away in the wilderness of mirrors where our consciousness, where we ourselves stand, or think we stand, a hologram of Id and Ego and all the rest. It’s the place where we are as real as we believe ourselves to be, and where we lose ourselves, ghostly vapour fogging the silver of the mirror, where tarnish rusts our memories.

 

It was a hard time, looking after them, and though I had passing help, the majority of the care-giving came from me. My mum went first, her spirit finally broken as she saw her husband slipping away, his memory all but broken. But I saw him through to the hospice with her at the end, and that brave man who’d been the ogre of my childhood and then the hero of my adult life was present enough to hold her hand and find the will to say goodbye, to be there as the rise and fall of his sleeping wife’s chest came to its end and her breath went, deflating and there no more. After which it was mostly just me, looking after dad, and trying to help him cling onto who he was. I barely saw my partner through these times, much as I love her and so wished she were with me, and for the year when the pandemic was at its worst, and while that scarecrowed egotist Boris Johnson’s bring-your-own-bottle parties were being held each weekend at Downing Street, I sat with my dad as the world sweated a fever of love, loss, denial, and greedy self interest. Alone in ways I hadn’t really believed it was possible to be alone before, run ragged beyond exhaustion at the twenty-four hour a day care my dad needed. I don’t think I’ve ever known a despair so profound, nor a night so long and desperate as many of the nights I knew then.

 

In the end, his passing was every bit as hard as my mum’s had been. He forgot how to eat and drink, and so away he went, starving and dehydrating, burning up in the bed my brother and I put up for him in his living room at home. Was he there at the very end, did enough of him surface to know we were there, his two sons? We spoke to him and perhaps a flicker of something stirred. And then, toward the end of a long hard afternoon, as my brother came back into the room and said he was there too, with me, my dad let go his grip on life and went, leaving a grimacing death mask of the pain he’d been in. There, and then not.

Just a week or two before he died, my dad - all but monosyllabic and  communicating through gesture as much as anything else - surfaced enough to speak. How he did it, I don’t know. But the man I’d known for so long was there enough to say the words to me he’d never expressed so openly before: “It’s important that you understand I love you.”

 

A day later, when he’d sunk back down under the dementia, he was fighting me and trying to kill me. As I say, like my mum, being not a person to do things the easy way, the fight - on his part, I was just stopping him hurting himself - spilled onto the street and the police arrived . . . But we got him calmed down, with the help of a visit to the hospital, which sort of shocked him back to calm - and not very much longer after that his final days were upon him.

 

I do wonder if he was himself at the very end, before he finally let go, upon hearing my brother’s voice. I’d find it hard to believe if not for that earlier rising he made, when he said words I’d never heard from him but knew anyway. My partner’s dad made the point that because it’s impossible to know, I get to choose. Choose whether my dad came back for his final moments before going or not. And I should choose to believe he was there, I really should. It would make life easier, to think he was restored – that the vital part of him was there – but somehow I find it very hard to do that, however much I want to believe it. But I’ll try and remember that, through the sadness and all the rest.

 

There’s so much more I could say here, but I won’t. There have been other losses, painful and cruel in their own ways - my Uncle Ken, a character you couldn’t put into fiction because no one would believe in him, my Uncle Arthur, a different character but equally as incredible, and even Jess the cat, inherited when my mum and then my dad died. All gone. All having left, in one way or another, their mark.

 

And so there’s this, the here and now, which is to say the aftermath of all of this. I’m a changed man, both physically (hell, carrying your dad up the stairs each night to bed as he is fighting you takes it out of you) and mentally (I still leap out of bed if I’m sleeping and a car horn sounds - luckily, I don’t live in a city - thinking it’s the pressure mat sounding its horn, and telling me my dad was out of bed and needing help). I’ve probably got PTSD from it all, is the truth of the matter. 

 

But I’m learning to deal with it. Such as it is.

 

A change of season. 

 

Bringing us all a little closer to winter.