Loss, ageing and coping with absence

My late mother would have turned 75 today: it is not a number of any specific significance but it has caused me to reflect

Today, 14 October, would have been my mother’s 75th birthday. It is only a symbolic age, I suppose, beyond the threescore years and ten cited by the Psalms, well beyond statutory retirement and a marker of nothing in particular. Those above pensionable age now regard “old age” as beginning just before 75, apparently, but for Ma it was not to be: she died in April 2020, Covid-19 a proximate cause but she had terminal cancer which was gathering pace and strength, the end drawing closer and closer.

I wrote about Ma at length a couple of years ago, partly because I had mentioned her in my writing from time to time but mostly because I wanted at least to try to pay tribute to a genuinely remarkable woman to whom my debt is incalculable: she was clever, funny, generous, dynamic, inspiring and, although she sometimes tried to hide it, motivated by a deep well of compassion and kindness. Of course she could be impossible and stubborn and intolerant and unyielding, and she knew that, and she knew that I knew that. We were instinctively able to aggravate each other, sometimes intentionally, sometimes without meaning to, though as we got older I think we both found it easier to avoid doing so.

What follows is not intended to have any great moral lesson or guidance for humanity in general. It may be slightly self-indulgent, and I freely confess to a degree of catharsis which, because I’m a writer, comes out in the form of prose which I choose to make publicly available. I note with equal force that some readers may find it interesting, relevant or even helpful, and at the same time absolutely no-one is obliged to read it (the only person who would have been under any kind of obligation like that would have been Ma). So read on, or duck out, it is entirely your choice. Here you will find nothing on politics, or the constitution, or global strategy and security, or history and historiography, or art and culture, except as much as accretes in passing. This is, to borrow Marwood’s phrase, “just thoughts, really”.

I was 42 when Ma died, and that is a perfectly respectable and normal age to lose a parent. (My father died in November 2017, so I am now technically an orphan, though my brilliant and beloved stepmother and stepfather are both still very much with us, so I claim no sympathy on that score.) Ma’s view, which I suppose I share, is that a parent has fulfilled a basic function if he or she sees a child to adulthood, and that thereafter you are into bonus territory, but I’m certainly aware that I am privileged to have hit my fifth decade before any parental loss. For them to go in relatively quick succession—within two-and-a-half years of each other—was not what I would have chosen, but hardly in itself an emotional hammer-blow.

Ma had turned 70 six months before she died, an occasion we celebrated quietly but contentedly with a meal at a lovely seafood restaurant in South Shields and some fizz at home thereafter before she, as usual, turned in for the night at some absurdly early hour. It was characteristic of our relationship, I suppose, and of her style of parenting that I had ordered drinks at the bar before we went to our table, passing a couple of inconsequential pleasantries with the girl serving me; when I brought the drinks over and sat down, Ma looked at me and said “I sometimes forget, you’re actually quite charming”. Typically, there was a lot to think about in those few words.

She was already ill at that stage, dying, in fact, of relatively rare spindle cell sarcoma. (Christopher Hitchens, when terminally ill, would always respond to the inevitable question “How are you?” with “Dying; but so are you”.) Her remaining span was not certain, but it was increasingly clear that it was not long, a fact she seemed to me to treat generally with equanimity. Her very firm view was that she had little to complain about, having enjoyed her life in the main: she and my stepfather Steve had had something like 40 years of what seemed an overwhelmingly happy time of it (they set the bar impossibly high in those terms, one I have only rarely been able to reach even with my fingertips); her career had been satisfying, rewarding and successful, dealing with children plagued by all sorts of challenges; and her life in retirement, which from my point of view was too much a slave to routine, suited her very well, a gentle existence of Steve, the dogs, walking and reading.

That contentment is important, because it meant that when the end was obviously becoming imminent, she was able to feel, I think and hope, that it was not unfair, that she was not being cheated of anything except a continuation of that happy existence. Certainly there was nothing undone that she wanted to do, no bucket list as far as I’m aware: while she would have loved to go back to New York, which she adored, or perhaps Amsterdam, she was not motivated by wanderlust or curiosity in that sense; she was a very good and accomplished writer but had no sense that there was a great outpouring of work yet to be made; professionally she had retired and closed that chapter of her life with satisfaction but no regret. She would leave me, insofar as you “leave” someone in their 40s, healthy, employed, reasonably happy and living a settled life, and that was important to her.

The flipside, in terms of why Ma was not angry or grief-stricken or terrified of the approaching end, was that she had a deep, visceral horror or a squalid and protracted death. She did not want to be an invalid, and more than anything she did not want to lose her mental faculties—however much she may have joked about being scatter-brained or forgetful, she never did suffer any cognitive impairment—and any kind of significantly limited existence, whether physically or mentally, would not have been acceptable.

Her last couple of days were spent in St Benedict’s Hospice in Sunderland. They were brilliant, and could not have done more. It was, of course, during lockdown and so visiting had physical and regulatory challenges: indeed, Ma had contracted Covid-19 shortly before during a stay in hospital. Well done NHS. I came up from London once it was obvious that we were moving very quickly towards the end, and my stepfather and I arranged roughly to stay with her in shifts for, well, for however long it would take. Ma was in good spirits, all things considered, though I find it hard to imagine what it must be like entering a room you know you will likely never leave. She was tired, short of breath because of the virus and the spreading cancer, and spent a lot of time sleeping. That was fine: to sleep was to be at peace and calm, not to be in pain or distress.

On Wednesday 29 April, I took the afternoon shift. The doctors told us it would not be long, days, maybe that day. A nice young palliative care physician, of whom I’m afraid I can remember almost nothing, let alone his name, explained that, when the time came, Ma’s breathing would get shallower, perhaps laboured for a bit, then stop, and that would be that. If it happened—or rather, if I were the person present when it happened—I should press the call button, and the nurse and doctor would come, and they would deal with everything after that.

I think Ma and I exchanged a few words that afternoon, while she was briefly awake, or maybe I’m misremembering. We had certainly talked the previous day, and she was perfectly lucid and compos mentis, quite aware of her surroundings, of what was happening, of what would happen. Strangely there was not a great deal to say, which I suppose is a good sign: neither of us was preoccupied with thoughts unexpressed, information unimparted. I had told her, I hope not inadequately, that I loved her. But she was mainly sleeping, and I sat by her bed, read a little bit, but conscious that I was waiting. It was good that she hadn’t had to go through too much pain, that there had been no great personal indignities, that she was still herself.

It was 2.00 pm or so, thinking back, that I became aware that Ma’s breathing was, as advertised, becoming more shallow, fainter. Of course, you know what it’s like: the moment you start to focus on something, you became hyperaware of it and hypersensitive to change or irregularity. Is that shallowness? Is that fading? Is that a pattern, or will it pass? But, no, it was definitely fading, and then, a few minutes later, she seemed to stop breathing. I say “seemed to”; obviously she did, but I’m awkwardly aware that I had to listen and look intently for a few minutes. We talk about doing something by instinct as being “like breathing”, and that’s a reminder of how unconscious a process it is (though anyone who has had any serious respiratory problems will know, as I did from childhood asthma, just how horrible and agonising it is when you are made aware of every intake and exhalation). Once I was sure, well, that was that. She had died, as we’d known she was about to, it had been exactly as I’d been warned it would be, la commedia è finita.

I kissed her forehead, told her a final time—when she could no longer hear, of course—that I loved her and said good-bye, then I pressed the button to let the staff know. They were absolutely brilliant, quiet, efficient and understanding; they checked she was actually gone, which for me would have been a slightly embarrassing mistake, then began the long preparations for the next stage of Ma’s journey, or that of her shell, the part she no longer needed. I’m deeply, almost deliberately, unsentimental about remains, which is not to say I think everyone should be: treat death however you wish, in whatever way makes it easiest for you to cope with and absorb the unavoidable. As far as my nearest and dearest are concerned, I attach almost no importance at all to what is left behind in corporeal terms: Ma was cremated (there was no funeral because of lockdown) and I think the ashes are still with my stepfather, but it doesn’t weigh on my mind.

I don’t mean that to sound callous or provocative, so let me try to explain. I’m an atheist, though not at all a militant one provided I am generally left alone to get on with it, and I don’t believe in an afterlife, spirits, ghosts, worlds beyond this one. My view is that this life is all we get, however long or short it may be, and that does not dishearten me, despite what some people think. It makes me think we should take each day as it comes, be grateful for it, take as much from it as we can and try not to put things off, or assume that we can fulfil hopes or achieve things at some point in the future. There may be no future, so we might as well be ready for the comedy to end at any moment. I really do find that liberating. But I hope I’m not dogmatic about any of this: it’s what I think, it’s my conclusion about life derived from everything I’ve seen and experienced, and I have no evidence to the contrary. But I know lots of people who have deep religious faith, who are certain about existence beyond this one, and some who are more doubtful but think there is something more than this physical reality around us. That’s fine, I’m no evangelist. By the time any of has proof, it will be too late to do anything with it.

None of this means that I see death, least of all the deaths of those close to me, as something which you consign to the past, from which you just dust yourself down and move on. The loss of someone whom you love is a seismic, wrenching experience, and although we tend to think of death as the principal form of loss, it also applies to any separation which is total: the end of a romantic relationship, the breakdown of a familial bond, the disintegration of a friendship. I have thought a great deal about this, and I edge towards the feeling that if that rupture is total—if you have no contact with the other person, if they are completely absent from your life—then for you it is not so very different from a bereavement. That a former partner or estranged relative or erstwhile friend still lives, still occupies space in the world and exists in his or her own world, that is not necessarily any consolation to the person from whom the contact has been removed. The phrase “dead to me” is not simply symbolic.

The dead are dead, then, they have no independent existence, no agency. But memory is a powerful force, and I believe firmly that they way we remember our loved ones, the recollections we have, the physical images and artefacts, certainly, but with much greater potency their continued presence in our minds, is hugely important. In that sense the dead do have immortality, and can influence us. It can be a malign, minatory version of “What would Jesus do?”, our imagining of how the dead would react to circumstances they never saw. Used in anger that can be a vicious, fearsome weapon: what would your father think? If your mother could see you now! She’d be so disappointed (that horrible, corrosive sensation of having let down someone you love).

Equally it can inspire us. There is a school of thought that we should achieve for ourselves and for our own sake, and certainly the idea of conforming to the supposed preferences of someone who has gone should not overpower our own wishes or interests. But we can memorialise our loved ones in healthy, productive ways. We can do things which are good and noble and beneficial in honour of the departed. This may be especially true for those who have religious faith; but I remember, as a teenager studying history, reading Sir Geoffrey Elton’s seminal and revolutionary 1955 volume England Under The Tudors and noticing that Elton, a German-born Jew whose family had fled Czechoslovakia only months before the Second World War, made the dedication of his work patri matrique, “to my father and my mother”. His parents were still alive when he first published the book (his father, the eminent ancient historian Professor Victor Ehrenberg, died in 1976 and his mother, Eva, in 1964), but that unobtrusive act of filial devotion seemed telling.

Having lost both parents, I have sometimes been asked for advice by friends who have subsequently been bereaved. I give any advice on personal matters reluctantly and always with the enormous caveat that I can only use my own experience as a basis, and emotionally we all react differently to situations, even if there are broadly consistent themes. One thing I do believe to be generally true, and certainly of which I thing people should be aware after bereavement, is that grief is not linear. You don’t start with a notional score of, say, 100 on a chart of pain and distress at the moment of death, and gradually see it decline in an orderly way to whatever figure you regard as manageable. That may be a general direction of travel; after all, we know from simple observation that we mostly recover from the trauma of bereavement. But there are spikes, there are peaks and troughs.

Manifestations of grief and loss are, of course, shaped by circumstance. Accordingly, one of the things I miss, one instinct which still, after four and a half years, not abated fully, is being able simply to text Ma. Not with any great, significant, profound thoughts, but as a maintenance of communication, the preservation of a connecting thread. Although she was largely mystified by technology and had no real grasp of its intricacies, she was practical enough to embrace text messages and emails, and would initiate and respond to conversations naturally and easily. It was a good medium for us, as I don’t like the telephone very much, and ringing her made the dogs go mad and bark furiously. And, for all that people like to frown on text messaging, it’s enormously flexible: it can be a conversation, not very different from one on the phone, but it can be a way to share observations, thoughts, photographs, or links to newspaper articles, websites, television programmes, YouTube clips.

I still do that. I still see something and think “Ha, that would interest/amuse/entertain Ma, I must send it to her”, and sometimes my phone can be out of my pocket and in my hand before I realise that there is no recipient any more. It happened to me only on Saturday, seeing a book in a shop on Chiswick High Road which she might have liked: I’ll let her know while it’s in my mind, before I forget, I thought, although the forgetting had, for just a second, been of a much greater order. That ease of contact, and the immediacy it sometimes has, perhaps makes bereavement more acute that it was once. If you lose someone with whom your main contact was, for example, a weekly or fortnightly letter, I think superficially that is a loss of which you are less keenly aware.

None of this should be interpreted as excessively or anxiety-inducingly mournful. In any meaningful sense, I am “over” the death of my parents, and a distance or more than four years, having been as fully realised a human being as I will ever be when they died, that is as it should be. I was unutterably sad when each of them died, it affected me profoundly (and still does), and I took a few days off work on both occasions, with understanding employers. But I was not rendered unable to function, nor was I pole-axed by grief. I would suggest, without judging those for whom it is different, that it should not be an incapacitating blow to lose a parent once you are fully into adulthood (unless it is in an unusually shocking or unexpected way), because experiencing the death of our parents is part of the normal pattern of life.

(By contrast, I cannot comprehend how people manage the loss of a child. It is a tragedy to have befallen mercifully few but not, unfortunately, none of my friends, and that stark, cruel inversion of the natural order is something I find incomprehensibly horrifying.)

That is not to say I don’t miss my parents: I do, and I doubt a day goes past without them being in mind in some way, however fleeting. In part I think this is a factor of ageing: I was shocked to realise a little while ago that when Ma was the age I am now, I was at university (for the first time). She was 46, the age I’m shortly casting off, when we went on holiday to Jerusalem together, an odd but profoundly important and meaningful trip. I realise it is a function of my particular and peculiar self-perception, but that seems very weird (yet, obviously, is both true and, in the broader scheme of things, unsurprising and unremarkable). It’s probably natural, once you reach an age at which assessing your status and progress becomes a regular occurrence, to draw comparisons with others, and your parents, the two halves of your genetic whole, are the most obvious comparators.

I said I would offer no lessons or guidance, nor do I claim any universal insight. I observe, I suppose, that one integral component of loss and grief is the removal of communication, the severing of sometimes very casual channels of contact. These sit lightly while the other person is alive and it is only their absence, that most permanent of absences, which illustrates how important they were. Truly, as Joni tells us, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. And that may not go away, ever; it may fade, and it may intrude more forcefully at times, whether on anniversaries and significant occasions, or just as part of the warp and weft of our everyday lives. But it needn’t be a source of sadness alone. As I said, I have no belief whatever in an afterlife or a spirit world, but I do think memory is a powerful and important thing; and remembrance, not merely in the staid, ritualised sense of Armistice Day or even a Yahrzeit, but in form of everyday recollections, binds us tightly and with love to those who have gone.

When I originally wrote about Ma a couple of years ago, I went to Graham Greene for my title, to The End of the Affair. He is one of my most beloved authors, and of course he did believe, though his relationship with the Roman Catholicism he had embraced in his early 20s was a complex and difficult one. It is the the context of religion and of God that Sarah and Bendrix, the lovers of the titular affair, are speaking, as they confront the necessity of ending their relationship. But I think what Sarah says is true for unbelievers too, and I had no hesitation in reaching for it then, and now.

You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other.