A nurse met us in the corridor on the second visit.

‘Mum’s very poorly, very poorly,’ she said, ‘She’s drifting in and out. We’ve given her a lot of morphine. I’m sorry.’

Poorly? What did that mean? In and out - of what? Sleep? Anaesthetic? Had she had another operation? (They hadn’t told me about the first one, not properly.) Morphine? And - sorry? - had the doctors made a mistake? I didn’t know what the nurse meant. Still, no-one had told me.

We went in. Mum was propped on a pillow, asleep. Sometimes it was a relief when she was asleep. I knew then my face couldn’t betray me, let slip naive expressions of worry, sadness and - yes - the worst - the hardest to live with - the hardest to recall - horror. I would have time to compose my features before she opened her eyes; I was getting good at it.

I didn’t want to see how bad things were; I looked everywhere else instead, at the machines, the blinds, the floor, at anything, even the familiar loops of tubing, the drips and drains connecting her body to the hospital, connecting her illness to the medicine. Up until then I’d found the machines reassuring, they held her, protected and sustained her, like knitting, but - hang on - something was wrong. Where was the cannula? I was both fascinated and repelled by the cannula, the way the needle disappeared beneath her papery skin. There was a tight bandage around her forearm - and - what? - her hand was swollen, bruised. Those straps were new. They were fixed around the metal bar of the gurney, around her arm. Oh. And the other arm. Ties? No. Restraints. Her arms had been placed in restraints. There was a patch of dried blood on one of the bandages. It looked like a withered flower.

Dad and I sat there, wary of meeting each other’s eyes, not knowing what to do, how to behave, what to say.

‘I’ll get us some tea,’ Dad said, and left the room.

I could look now. I gazed at my mother’s face. She was worse than the last time I saw her. How was this possible? But yes, she had diminished further, settled more into the mattress, become fainter, less herself. I was uncomfortable, staring like that, seeing her so weak and vulnerable, so exposed. I had to look away, focus on something else. You can only take it for so long.

Sometimes there were sweets in the locker. I opened it - not this time - instead there was a notebook. Mum’s diary. This was wrong, I knew it and felt bad, but what else did I have to go on? No-one would talk to me. I flicked the pages. Guilt, guilt, at every turn, but I was compelled to read on. The first entries were light and chatty, nothing too personal, her plans for going home, to-do lists, groceries, catch-up notes, event dates, reminders.

I flicked forwards, further in - what’s this? - the handwriting changed, there were no more lists or plans, no white spaces, the pages were entirely covered with cramped, sloping content, hardly any punctuation. It looked strange, frantic, I couldn’t make sense of it.

I wish I hadn’t looked at the last pages. The writing - how to describe it? - had come unravelled. Sentences dwindled to phrases, phrases to single words. The dates were sporadic. I shook my head. No. This wasn’t Mum’s handwriting. This wasn’t her. The script was loopy, irregular, untidy, it slipped off the page. Some vowels were swollen, some had burst, the consonants were unjoined and illegible. The effort to capture something was obvious, but… the entries were just fragments.

The final mark on the final entry was a deep, squiggly black line scratched outwards, trailing faintly to nothing at the edge of the page. I was still staring at it when I heard footsteps in the corridor; I closed the notebook quickly and put it back. Dad came in with a nurse.

‘What happened to her arms?’ I said, ‘Why are they tied?’ Confusion and pain made me hostile.

Dad looked at me as if to say, ‘Shhh. Don’t ask.’

The nurse’s face set in a particular way. I’d seen that face so many times. Her eyes softened. She cocked her head to one side. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me.

‘Mum was a bit upset,’ she said. ‘She knocked over her side table and hurt herself. Spilled her flowers. She was upset. She banged herself. Her drip came out. So we… it was for her own good…’

A poem jumped into my head. We’d learned it recently at school:

‘Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.‘

Dad looked away, coughed. We knew my mother. We knew what ‘upset’ meant. She’d thrown a fit. She’d caused a fuss. She’d been a bad patient - angry - unfeminine. We were embarrassed for her, for ourselves.

I knew something else now too. I couldn’t put it into my own words, not yet, but - that line about the dying of the light - finally I understood.

Last Modified : November 19th, 2008 Filed under : obits Navigate : Previous post / Next post