Iâve spent a lifetime dreading the loss of a parent. And now itâs finally happened | Adrian ChilesRound at my mateâs house, one Saturday morning when I was 17 years old, something astounding appeared on his television. This was 3 November 1984. I know this for sure because I just looked it up. It was the day Indira Gandhi was cremated. Laid out on a sandalwood pyre, her head clearly visible, her body â her actual body â was in plain sight, as her son lit the pyre to see his mother, in the words of most newspaper reports, consigned to flames. I was aghast, horrified. But my friendâs dad said a thing that made me think again. It went something like this: âNo, I think itâs very healthy. Deathâs too hidden away in our society. I was in my 40s before I saw a dead body, and it was my fatherâs. What preparation did I have for that?â These words stuck fast in my mind. And in the blink of an eye, almost 40 years on, last week it was me finding myself with a dead body for the first time, and it was my dadâs. Where was my preparation for this moment? Iâd picked up precious little since watching Gandhiâs mortal remains disappear on that wide-eyed morning half a lifetime ago. Would this moment have been any easier if Iâd spent the intervening years in a society less inclined to hide away its dead, in a world of public, coffin-less cremations or wakes with open caskets? I donât know. I asked a couple of close friends with experience of both, one of Punjabi heritage, the other Irish. They didnât know either. Both winced at some challenging childhood memories. I tried to compute what was in front of me. I was surprised at how sure I was that the body itself was now irrelevant. His soul, his consciousness, his â how can I put it? â his himness had vanished. It wasnât him. This was reassuring insomuch as it rendered what I was looking at kind of meaningless. But thatâs not to say I will ever be able to unsee it so, again, I just donât know. I remain shocked at how shocked I am at his dying. After all, he was 86, we knew it was coming and it was a mercy to him â to all of us â that it came when it did. And though I loved him greatly, Iâm surprised and even a bit guilty about being so terribly upset. It feels not far short of self-indulgent when I share the news with those of my friends who lost parents, let alone siblings and children, way before their time. Itâs these tragedies that consume our attention, which is quite understandable, and as it should be. But I for one had slightly lost sight of the fact that standard, common or garden, had-a-good-innings-type deaths of aged parents remain bloody awful. So, if you donât mind, herewith, in no particular order, some thoughts. Just stuff thatâs occurred to me since my dad had a fall (dread phrase), fracturing his shoulder, on 20 January. He was discharged from A&E that night, and a few days later a rehabilitation bed was found for him in a rural community hospital nearly an hourâs drive away. He died there six weeks later. Hereâs a thing: in the 10 days since, Iâve typed that word died hundreds of times, yet Iâm still shocked every time I do so. Just when I was starting to get used to it, I got a text referring to my âdadâs deathâ. Iâd not seen it expressed like that. Death. Death rather than died. It floored me. Odd that. Dying, too; I flinched as I typed that above. Wow. If even the most basic nouns and verbs lie in wait, scattered on this Via Dolorosa like shards of glass, how are you supposed to negotiate any of it? This little hospital was a nice place, with kindness available to him day and night. But it slowly became clear he wouldnât be coming out of there. I suppose the thing about a deathbed is that you donât want to be on it for too long. For a while it felt as if he was stuck between a life he didnât want to live any more and a death he didnât want to die. The notion of life being thrown into reverse, into âthe whole hideous inverted childhoodâ, as Larkin put it, turns out to be devastatingly, almost farcically accurate. Of all the many indignities involved there was one that finished me off: seeing Dad reduced to drinking from a sippy cup. A sippy cup, for fuckâs sake. Enough. I just looked up that poem and couldnât even get past its title. I canât even type the title here. I may well never read it again. As the end rushed towards us, I realised that there are two types of people in the world. There are those who are familiar with dying and death, and there are those who arenât. In the former group are doctors and nurses, emergency service workers, clerics, undertakers and so on. These people, and thank God for them, know what to expect and what to do. In the vast majority are the rest of us, who are woefully â mercifully? â short of âhand-onâ experience of the dead. And still less of the process of dying, of the hours, minutes and moments before the end comes. Initially, alone with him, I veered wildly between fear, gratitude, horror, grief, patience and impatience. I sat, stood or paced around. I did a Wordle, read a Jack Reacher novel, ate a scotch egg. Everything felt a bit wrong. Once the rest of the family were there it felt better. All the above still applied but now a little laughter found its way into the room. And so the moments passed. And then it happened. All my life Iâd worried about my dad dying. Other close family too, obviously, but mainly my dad. Iâve no idea why. Here I was, around half a century after I first started worrying about this very thing happening. And it had happened. I couldnât, and canât, get my head around much at all. About the only thing I am sure of is that 50 years of worrying about it was properly pointless. Because imagining â letâs call it pre-feeling â this pain turned out to be no preparation at all for the real thing. Peter John Chiles. Source link Posted: 2024-03-20 16:59:09 |
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