9 July 2005
I keep wondering what the last few months would have been like if I hadn’t been a doctor.
As Mum’s illness has progressed, fast and slow at once, I have pushed for her when she’s needed me to, but also fought for respite when the treatment threatens to do more damage than the disease.
Not that there’s anything much more damaging than cancer of the pancreas, an organ so tricky it even gets its own punchline in advice to new surgeons: eat when you can, sleep when you can and don’t fuck with the pancreas . . .
‘This really is a lovely space,’ Kerry says as she steps into the room where my mother is going to die. I wheel her in behind.
We’ve seen the hospice already but not this particular room, because until yesterday, it was someone else’s haven. I don’t know if they died, or went home. I don’t want to know. Nothing matters except Mum; even the headlines about the terrorist bombings in London barely registered. We are in a bubble.
Despite all the medical equipment surrounding it, the bed has been made with a sunshine-yellow duvet cover. There’s a big window with a view of the garden, lush and full of ostentatious summer flowers. Yes, there’s a high-backed hospital chair but cushions disguise the wipeable surface. And instead of a standard issue laminate locker at the bedside, the nightstand is made of honey pine, old-fashioned but reassuring.
‘I will be very happy here,’ Mum says and as I help her out of her wheelchair, I believe her.
Kerry and I tried to talk her into hospice at home, but she said she wanted to be out of the way, so you can still start your foundation training without having to nurse me too.
It’s true that, timewise, this is the perfect storm. In twenty-four days, it’ll be Black Wednesday, the day junior doctors start their very first job in a grotesque game of paged musical bleeps. I will be one of them.
‘I’ll unpack for you, Elaine, tell me where you want me to put everything.’ Kerry unzips the suitcase. The hospice sent a list of what to bring, as though Mum was coming on holiday, albeit a holiday where you spend most of your time in pyjamas. The giant paper bag of pills sits on top, but underneath there are books and Kerry’s iPod, loaded with Mum’s Beatles and Bay City Rollers tracks.
‘Where shall we put this?’
Kerry holds up my mother’s favourite photograph, of me and Kerry as children, in our St John uniforms, gripping our gold and silver medals.
Mum smiles at the picture. The steroids have meant that from certain angles, her face has a healthy plumpness, so at times she looks better than when she only had lupus. Her spindly body tells a different story. ‘Next to me on my bedside table, please!’
I shift her empty suitcase into the bottom of the wardrobe and have a premonition of bringing it home again, much lighter without the meds that are maintaining her fragile grip on life.
At first, it’s unfamiliar, the stinging behind my eyes. But now I recognize it. Tears. I am not, have never been, a crier, not even when Dad left.
‘I could smell baking when I came in,’ I say, forcing myself to turn towards Mum and Kerry in the knowledge that I can’t cry, not in front of them. ‘What do you think it is?’
The emotional danger passes, as we speculate: carrot or chocolate cake or Victoria sponge?
‘It’s not a sponge,’ Mum corrects me, ‘it’s a Victoria sandwich. Don’t they teach you the important stuff at medical school?’
She jokes now, sometimes. I don’t remember her doing that before.
The nurse arrives to check on the medications and talk through Mum’s routine. Kerry and I head for the garden and she links arms with me.
When we first got close again, I worried she was acting for my mother’s sake, but now it feels natural. We’ve even started making love again, and it happens even more often than when we first got together as teenagers. Kerry isn’t pretending.
The closeness has created a positive feedback loop: the more we are together, the better it feels. Oxytocin, maybe.
‘I’ve been thinking . . .’ Kerry says.
I turn to look at her. When did she have her hair cut? She’s always been pretty, but today she looks beautiful.
Oxytocin or reality?
‘It’s dangerous, thinking,’ I say.
‘About your mum, and about us.’
I have no idea what is coming so I wait. And in the moment of waiting, I remember a silver envelope on the doormat, a confrontation, a fear that I’d somehow missed something important.
‘You’re different now, Tim. This disaster . . . it’s changed you.’
I search for words to puncture the seriousness I can hear in her voice. I am afraid of what she might be about to do to me; I have no reserves left.
‘Don’t interrupt,’ she says, even though I haven’t said a word. How can she read me so well when I can’t read her at all?
I bring my finger to my lips, signalling I’ll stay silent. There’s a bench next to the jasmine and she walks towards it. As I sit down beside her, I feel the warmth of the wood through the fabric of my jeans. The faint teak aroma reminds me of something . . .
India.
‘I thought perhaps we could get married.’
My body jerks. You’d have thought she’d just applied a defib, not suggested marriage. ‘Don’t joke about things like that,’ I say.
‘Not joking. I’ve researched how it could work. People can get married in hospices. It’s usually patients but if we did it here, your mum can be part of it.’
I let myself imagine standing in this garden in a suit, Kerry in a beautiful dress, her hair pinned up, decorated with flowers. Usually, I have trouble picturing things that haven’t happened but right now it’s so real: not only Kerry as a bride, but Mum in attendance, regal in her wheelchair. It’s perfect, except for one thing.
‘You don’t have to, Kerry. Not if it’s only because she’s dying.’
She takes a deep breath. ‘It’s not that. I can see you more clearly than I have since we were kids. And what I see is a good man who gets better every day.’
It takes ten days to make the arrangements.
The momentum gives the hospice a carnival atmosphere. The chef has created a menu with all Mum’s favourites, and someone’s ordered a crate of Irn Bru to celebrate her Scottish heritage.
I emailed Wilcox but, as I predicted, he can’t come back, so Kerry’s dad is stepping into the best man role.
He takes me to Moss Bros. I am such an average size that it’s no problem finding a suit to fit me. As I try it on, it hits me that statistically, half the grooms who’ve worn this could already be divorced.
‘Come on, Tim. Too late to change your mind now.’
He hustles me out to a shop in the Lanes and persuades me to buy a silk pocket square and a matching cravat. The print shows an anatomical drawing of a heart, in the deep dark red of venous blood.
The wedding is tomorrow and though we’re meant to spend tonight apart, Kerry and I are both at the hospice. The orange evening light falls onto the bed but doesn’t add any colour to Mum’s face. It’s clear from the changes she’s needed in her meds, and her expression when she thinks I’m not looking, that she’s getting sicker faster than we’d hoped.
A couple of times I even doubted she’d survive till the wedding itself. Part of me wants to sleep alongside her tonight, just in case. But if Death taps her on the shoulder, I think she’ll tell it, piss right off, I’ve come this far.
Something makes her wake up. She nods. ‘There you both are. Good. I need to talk to you, and it’s serious.’
We know her funeral plans down to the last flower. It’s hard to imagine what could be left to discuss. ‘We’re listening,’ Kerry says.
‘What you’ve done for me is above and beyond.’ Mum’s voice is soft and hoarse, but her Glaswegian accent becomes stronger when she’s tired or medicated. ‘But I must know you’re not only getting married for my sake.’
‘Mum . . .’ I start, looking to Kerry for backup.
Silence.
‘Kerry?’ Mum breaks it. ‘Look, I have always wanted to see you together, that’s no secret. But you mustn’t go through with it unless you’re quite sure Tim is the man for you. Or I promise I will haunt you forever.’
I remember what my mother said that lunchtime in Alfriston, about me being nothing without Kerry. Does she still think I don’t deserve her?
As the silence persists, dread coils through me, like smoke. ‘Mum, do you mind if we go out and talk alone, so—’
Kerry holds up her hand. ‘No, it’s all right.’ Her gaze is fixed on my mother so I can’t read her eyes at all. ‘Elaine, you know Tim and I have had our struggles. Living in the same house, you can hardly have missed the bad times.
‘We grew apart but now we’ve grown together again. Love isn’t about big dramas or declarations. It’s what we do every day for each other, the little kindnesses. We trust each other. There are no bad surprises. Only good ones, like seeing how he’s changed since you got ill.’
Mum is still frowning. ‘He is a decent boy. Mostly. But I don’t hear much passion, hen. Are you sure you’re not settling?’
Kerry shakes her head. ‘Tim and I both know from our work that nothing is ever one hundred per cent certain. What’s happened to you proves that too. But we are happier together than apart.’
And that is it, isn’t it? We love each other. I will be the best husband I can be.
My mother closes her eyes and I wonder if she’s fallen asleep. She opens them again with a jolt. ‘Is that enough?’
‘It is for me.’ Kerry reaches out her hand to take mine. ‘That is if it’s enough for Tim as well?’
I say yes.
I say yes again the next day and it’s all exactly as I imagined it – but better, because I know I am lucky it’s happening at all.
Three days later, I sit at Mum’s bedside as the lengths between her breaths grow and grow. I tell her she can leave and I don’t know if she hears me, but an hour or so after that, the wait for another breath goes on and on till I know there will never be another.
I don’t call anyone into the room for a while. Instead, I hold her hand.
‘Thank you, Mum. For believing in me, even when you shouldn’t. And fighting for me. And fighting against me when you thought I was doing the wrong thing.’
I forgive her, too, but I can’t speak those words out loud.
I forgive you for blaming me for making you ill and for Dad leaving, because I know it wasn’t all you, but the sickness, and the things your own parents did. I forgive you for being angry so often. And for pushing me harder than I would ever have pushed myself.
If she hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be the man I am, the one who is becoming better.
The funeral is already organized; all it takes is one call.
I let the tears come. I don’t have to pretend to be brave now she is no longer here.