‘As we don’t know if she’s in pain we have to choose whether or not to give her painkillers.’ The consultant stood outside the dying room tapping the clipboard with his pen. ‘I would err on the side of the likelihood that she is in discomfort, which we have a duty to alleviate, and begin a morphine drip.’
It had been two weeks since the consultant had said Mum would live for two to three days and finally the morphine was here. This was it. Dad had reached this point on his bed in the sitting room of the farmhouse, while Mum made scones for visitors in the kitchen. I knew what it meant: another choice to make, another box to tick to ease her along the path to death. I chose for her; I chose to bring death on a floating cloud of opiate. No more struggling for air, no fighting to cling to a life that was over; these days, hours, moments had to be gentle. An easy goodbye on the warm summer breeze of morphine.
The Macmillan nurse leant across the bed to explain to Mum about the drug; there was no response, other than for a long moment she stared again at the end of the bed. I glanced in the direction of her vision and for the faintest second I thought I saw him there, flat cap pushed back on his head at a strange angle, that funny lopsided grin. Her eyes closed and as I looked again Dad was gone, a hopeful figment of my imagination wishing he’d come for her as I’d asked him to so she wasn’t alone.
Together in that long, quiet night, as the morphine driver filled her veins with stillness and her breathing dropped to a calm and shallow movement of air, my thoughts were full of doubt and fear. The choice I’d made to let her die rather than try for life by inserting the feeding tube was beginning to torment me with a worm of recrimination that couldn’t be buried. And fear. A growing, burning sense of panic, forming itself like a white-hot ball in my stomach. On the Coast Path I thought I’d found a way to come to terms with knowing that Moth would die, to accept it as the hardest part of life. Death had become the ever-present shadow in the corner of our lives, but now I was living through the same death that was predicted for him and I realized that, as much as I thought I’d come to terms with that, there could never be a peaceful acceptance for me; I would be forcing him to fight long after he chose to lie down and let it be. My mind was running in panic through a room of fire with no exit doors.
I dozed fitfully through the night, my face on her cool, dry, unmoving hand, until woken by the faint grey light of morning. I sat back in the chair, straightening my stiff joints, putting my feet up on the bed. The blue covers, silvery in the early light, moved almost imperceptibly with her breath. Her waxy face had taken up the same translucent colour, outlined by light from the window behind. Then a mist. A mist like steam leaving a hot, wet athlete at the end of a long run. Lifting from her body in a gentle rising haze. I didn’t want to drag my eyes away, but glancing around the room I couldn’t see it anywhere else. It was just there, in the outline of her quiet stillness: a slow movement of molecules through time and air, energy from her cooling body passing into the morning, into the flat dull atmosphere of the room. I took a deep, deep breath and held it tight.
Over now, all over now.
I walked slowly back across the estate in the late afternoon as the light began to fade, making my way, as I knew I would, to the darkness of the trees. And now at last, with my fingers pushed into the composted pine needles, I knew why. I finally knew what had driven me to suggest that we should walk across cliffs and beaches, through woods and valleys, sleeping wild, living wild. I could feel it now, cold, gritty, dark. I could feel it pushed beneath my fingernails and dusty in my hair. It was the thing I’d fooled myself into thinking I could live without, the one part of me that my family had understood better than I did. I’d always known what the voice in my head was saying. It was the land, the earth, the deep humming background to my very being. I ran to it when all else fell apart. I needed the safety of being one with the land; the core of me needed that sense of complete belonging as fundamentally as the air I breathed. Without it I would never be whole. It was always the land.
I rearranged the wreaths on the grave as a cold wind blew up from the farm in the hollow below. Walking out of the churchyard, crunching the smooth, round pea gravel beneath my feet, I left them there: my family, my history, all the connections to my past. I got into the van and closed the door on the estate and my childhood, cutting the final tie. Heading south, back to Moth, to our new empty life and the strip of concrete that led to the back of the chapel.