The Scarf

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I thought all I had left of him was a beige cashmere M&S scarf. This scarf is soft as cat fur. It goes everywhere with me.  A gift, one Christmas, he’d left it in a flat box, slipped between two others, on my Mum’s front step. He’d left gifts for several years after I stopped seeing him. We threw all the others away – on principle, you know? But I couldn’t bring myself to part with the scarf. Then one Christmas, all through Christmas Eve and the next day, I opened and shut Mum’s front door, snagging the holly wreath, letting in a chill. But the step remained empty.

     
That was the end of 2000. Tonight, as I returned home across town through a windy drizzle, I knotted that scarf around my throat; pulled it up over my mouth. I remembered our phone conversation, a week ago.

     
It was as though no time had passed at all. The first thing he said to me, after ‘Hiya love,’ was ‘There’s a fella here I’d like you to meet. History Professor. I’ve told him all about you. He's two beds down from me.’ That’s so Dad. Twelve years of painful nothingness between us and now he wants to show off his ‘clever daughter’ to the man in the other hospital bed. It was sad hearing him in the ward. The nurse talked about him being up and about on his Zimmer frame as though that was a good thing.

     
Zimmer frame?

     
The second time we talk, he tells me ‘You always were your mother’s daughter.’ Asks me what we are doing about Mum's house. ‘We’ve got to go for probate,’ I say, not mentioning the protracted grief, trauma and health problems my sisters and I have endured since our mother's death. 'But then I think it’s best that we sell it as soon as’. ‘Very sensible,’ says Dad. ‘You want shot of that millstone.'

     
 I’m stunned by the mysteriousness of my Dad’s life: it lies behind a door I’ve never opened - I never even so much as curled my fingers around the handle. Dad gave himself another family, another wife and stepchildren, even grandchildren. How did he do all that... without me? I know virtually nothing about the last twenty years of his life or the people in it – just a few names. In my mind, my father has stayed the same man as the one he walked out as in 1991, wearing the same clothes, holding the same attitudes, and with the same mistress. He's occupied some ethereal space in the back of my mind. I've had vague images of a hump-back bridge, a quiet leafy lane and a bungalow, paintings of landscapes from our old house hanging on its salmon-coloured walls. 
     
But for my Dad, of course, life moved on. For over half my own life-span, he’s lived another life – full, not empty and containing something approximating love. The mistress became his wife, the blonde bit of stuff became his step-daughter. Then what? Holidays to the South of France? Afternoons out to stately homes, with a cream tea for afters? Cosy nights on the settee front of the box? The question mark he left for us, his three children.

     
I’m not angry with Dad. Not now. Not today. Too much time has passed, and there is so little time left. It’s funny, he sounded like my Mum on the phone – that same softening of the palette, that child-like laugh. Is that how all people sound when they’ve reached a certain age or degree of illness? And a Zimmer frame. Bloody hell! That’s a far cry from his purple Porsche blasting 120 down the motorway. Dad shouts at the doctors, and argues with the nurses about his medication. That man could argue his way out of any situation. Any parking ticket. Any hotel bill. Any extra-marital affair. My Dad, the self-made man, unmade. He falls over on the living room carpet. Is at the mercy of medication and heart monitors, bad hospital food. He loves his food, my Dad. Butter spread thick as cheese.

     
I want my Dad to be happy. Not lonely under thin white sheets. Scared. Still I wonder how he lived all that life without me. How it became normal, to make me into a memory. It’s not nice feeling erased. So of course, I erased him, or tried to. I know when I’m not wanted.

     
When something has gone, it’s gone. And if it was never there, nothing will ever, ever, make up for it. Some people understand this more than others; they’ve learned it by experience. Yet so far, a couple of phone calls to my Dad have made a difference. Everyone has such a different relationship with their parents - and some people are better at being parents than others. Some are just plain rotten. But good or bad, the relationship simple or complicated, your mother, your father – they made you what you are today. Call it biology. Call it blood. They bloody know you.

Eileen Scott

The other week, I got into a fairly intense discussion with my hairdresser about euthanasia and the NHS ( he's quite an intense hairdresser). He's French, and he told me how, when his grandfather was seriously ill recently, he went to visit him in a French hospital, where the standards made British hospitals look frighteningly archaic. The standard of hygiene over there is exceptionally high, as is the nursing care. Apparently there is no such thing as M.R.S.A over there, the hospital superbug that is ravaging our British hospitals.

This story that I read in The Mail, though of course designed to throw a hefty punch at the Labour government, is not unusual. It seems like it could be a somewhat sensational horror story, perhaps a terrible one-off, a tragic mistake.

However, when my mother was in Chester Countess Hospital, at least five women in her ward of eight had contracted M.R.S.A, at least one of whom I know to have died. And they left my Mum in that same infected ward for two days, saying there was nowhere else to put her, and then, in the end, telling us that in fact it was, perversely, the safest place for her to be, because everywhere else they could have moved her to was in fact even more risky, with an even higher count of the superbug.

This story of Eileen Scott does not shock me, the elderly woman in question contracting and finally killed by two strains of a superbug from a non-life threatening complaint for which she was admitted into hospital. Further, she was left in her own excrement for days, regularly not fed because the nurses were too busy, and was only admitted to hospital the second time because of a shoulder fracture which she suffered when two nurses tried to move her.

I remember the shocking treatment my Mum got in the Chester Countess Hospital, how run off their feet the nurses were, how little thought and care was put into my mother's healthcare and comfort. It was diabolical. If we hadn't been going in every day, and then my sister continuing to go in every day after my other sister and I had left, to attend to Mum' basic needs, I shudder to think of the state she would have been left in. It was one of the worst aspects of Mum being so poorly, knowing how badly she was being looked after, how dangerous thew hospital was in terms of M.R.S.A., other superbugs and general misconduct (Mum's pneumonia was probably caused through a nurse accidently knocking out her drip).

And yet, both patients and their families at such a time are rarely in the position or state to be strongly challenging the hospital management, and even if they did, wouldn't be likely to get far through the red tape.

So the Government are launching a campaign of 'Dignity In care' for elderly patients in hospitals and in care homes. If the Government want to implement 'dignity in care', I think perhaps not forcing sick elderly patients to sell their own homes in order to fund time in care homes might be a start.

My mother was lucky, she was deemed part of a process of 'continuing care' from the hospital, and her Nursing Home was funded. But it was only by the skin of our teeth that we got that, and I know how horrendous it would have been to see my mother's home, our home, forced to be sold, and my sister made homeless because of it, all to keep my Mum in a state which the Government and law deems 'living'. Thousands of other elderly patients are forced every day into such a situation.

There is very little respect or understanding of the elderly in our culture today, as I think there is little understanding of the deeper issues around what it means and what it takes to give dignity and choice to the 'living'. Perhaps as well as throwing a bit of money at the NHS and care home funding, the Government would do well to invest in more deep medical, and yes, I'd say spiritual or psychological investigation into what it means to be alive as opposed to just medically 'living', how it feels to be suffering from disease or illness, or to be facing death, how it feels actually being elderly. From what I have seen, the elderly, especially the sick or disabled, are largely patronised or forgotten, pushed away out of sight, often their choices and dignity taken away from them.

Ours is a superficial understanding of what it means to age, and what it means to get sick, what it means to live and what it means to die. As usual it is not just money that continuing health care for old people needs, but education, awareness, and yes, humanity. We will all be there one day, if we make it. Let's hope this new campaign shows some of that, but I won't hold my breath.

Snowdon

I'm just back from a week in North Wales to see my Mum and sister, and to explore my native country.

I began the journey at my Mum's house, staying with my sister. We visited Mum in the special nursing home the next day, the first time I had seen her there since she got transferred there from hospital last week. I thought I'd be ok with it, thought somehow that her being settled somewhere would make it easier to comprehend her situation, but it didn't. I spent the first afternoon with a dazed head that wouldn't quite attach back to my body, as I walked in and out of her bedroom, nauseous and lost.

The second visit the following day was worse somehow, my Mum has a chest infection again, which is never easy to see her in such physical distress. In the end I had to walk outside in the cold Autumn air with my sister, and rail at the whole situation. It all just felt sick, cruel that Mum is being put through all this struggle in the name of living, when it seems to me that her time has come. I have had it said to me that maybe her time hasn't quite come, maybe she is hanging on for something that we cannot comprehend. Maybe. But without two drips feeding and medicating her, she would not be here right now - it is only thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, and a philosophy that says we must have life, no matter the cost, that she hangs on.

It brings a lot up for me, seeing my Mum like this, in terms of issues such as euthanasia and a human being's free will. It seems we cannot even determine our own death anymore, we can't die with dignity or self-determination, instead we must ebb our days out in state funded nursing homes. I know it is a complex subject, but somewhere it just seems wrong, wrong to subject a person to this. I guess it is perhaps only when it happens to someone you love that you realise what an important and painful subject euthanasia is.

I guess death itself is such a complex thing. Determining at what point someone is still deemed alive or capable of life or having any quality of life is a difficult thing to assess. People don't want to be responsible for making that choice of potentially ending lives that could have maybe been lived longer or even saved. But the price is that people are forced to live on, and it seems in this culture, no one realises that that is often worse thing than dying, for the person, for their family.

As I was sitting outside the nursing home with my sister, I became aware just how kind and strong my sister was. She understood all my anger, my fear, my fear, my panic, my loss. But every day that I was unable to come and see Mum because I live so far away in Brighton, she was there, day after day, going to see her, wiping her mouth and brushing her hair, holding her hand and playing her the radio. In the face of all this seemingly impossible and boundless suffering, she told me in her own way, that there were still little acts of love she could give to our Mum, there was still dignity and humanity she could bring to the situation, and that is what she would do, to the end.

After talking with my sister outside on the front bench, I felt renewed courage, and wasn't afraid or angry anymore. No time for that, these moments are too precious. I returned to my mother's room, somewhere more at peace. It is no surprise that we resist the truth, the awful truth of sickness and dying, because it just hurts so much. The pain of having to let go, in a situation over which, ultimately, I have no control, is hard. But when I can stop resisting, stop struggling, somewhere there are moments of peace, things are just as they are, and I am back again, loving, no longer afraid.

Wednesday night, Bob arrives, on a late train, that was late. We all go to meet him at the station. Thursday is the day he and I take the train to Snowdonia to climb the biggest mountain in Wales.