SARAH FERGUSON:
On TV she exposes negligence and other people’s sorrow, but when her mother died suddenly with a question mark over her final hours, ABC TV’s Sarah Ferguson was utterly lost.
was devastated by her mother’s lonely death the award-winning journalist
Italked to my mother throughout the summer, floating in the ocean, head tilted back in the water, eyes skyward. On days when the swell was too strong, I drifted in the tea-tree stained water of the creek. There, where no one could hear, I spoke out loud the words and names not used since childhood. I thanked her, as I had for the first time weeks earlier, reaching forward tentatively to stroke her soft grey hair on the pillow. I talked to her in the garden where I made my first flowerbed, for her; English flowers, hollyhocks and grandmother’s bonnets, deep purple lavender. I told her how like the bed beyond her kitchen window it was. I, who have never grown anything anywhere, have made a whole bed grow riotously for you in the hard Australian sun. She smiled and made a face as if to say, “That’s a turn-up for the books, you in the garden with secateurs and twine. Now I’ve heard it all.”
I talked to her during the summer sport, the Ashes and the Open, because Marjorie was a true aficionado, with a near obsession for the Swiss tennis player. She had a similar obsession with Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan, to the point where my father would hide copies of books about him under the bed. We spent a lot of time in my childhood, she and I, watching cricket. It never seemed odd, though I realise now it might seem so. We talked seriously about the game, but the subject of those afternoons was really love, a mother’s love, imparted wordlessly at a provincial cricket ground with scorecards, a thermos and tartan rugs against the English summer cold. You might say it was an English form of love, oblique, unable to be stated, but it wasn’t. I don’t think my generation, which expresses love so easily and so often, loves any more or provides more security by declaring it in every phone call. I knew her love was there, I knew it with complete and easy certainty, as it was in countless other scenes in the landscapes we shared. “I have lived so far away for so long, I’m sorry,” I tried to say. But she wouldn’t allow it. She never said, “Don’t move so far”, or “It would make me happy if you came home”, or even that it was hard for her.
She understood and she didn’t know reproach.
She had left her own parents in Nairobi in 1959, aged 23, her mother at the open door, fierce with recrimination, imploring her daughter not to leave. She took a taxi from the house, through the game park to the airport, and boarded a plane for the long journey to England. A polite, obedient young woman who had come of age in the middle-class world of post-war England was marrying against her parents’ wishes. She lived her own life and encouraged me to do the same. She would not accept the sorrow, even as the words formed on my lips.
“Hush,” she said. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
Broken bonds
In early September, my husband, Tony, and I boarded a plane in Melbourne. A message flashed on my phone. “Can you ring me immediately. Ta
“I don’t know how to say it so I’ll just say it. Mother died.”
The bonds broke, snapping and uncoiling, like a thousand tiny ropes. I cried out. Tony tried to hold me, but I couldn’t be held. Decades of restraint unravelled. The driver heard my cries and faced forward, head slightly bowed.
No.
On a broken line, [my brother] Anthony tried to explain. “She was alone in hospital. We didn’t know she was there.”
No, no, not by herself, I sobbed.
It’s so wrong.
Anthony wasn’t in London. He was in Italy, driving through the tunnels in the Alps towards Milan airport. The signal dropped out.
Not by herself. Not alone. No. I thrashed about in the back of the taxi, like something animal.
The phone rang again.
“I don’t know much,” he said.
His children were on their way to the hospital.
Hospital staff had rung the house but much too late. My niece and nephew struggled to find their way there in the dark … Inside, a junior doctor showed them to their grandmother, who had died minutes earlier.
… My mother, their grandmother, lay in the hospital, alone, dead, having spoken her last words to a harried nurse, “I’m clammy and cold”.
Impossible sadness
As a reporter, my working life is immersed in loss. People damaged by violence and hatred, epochal suffering from wars or natural disaster, the unforgettable hardship of children, human baseness in all its forms. It leaves lines in your soul and fills me with respect for the sufferer … Who am I to write about loss when mine is so small, so ordinary?
I have come to understand that the comparison has no meaning and to stop apologising for my sadness. A mother’s love is so exquisite as to be beyond comparison; it is not measured on a scale. I lost something true, not perfect, even odd at times, but the surest thing on earth that
I have known.
The first thing I learned after we landed in London was that there was no funeral to plan. My mother’s body was being held in the hospital morgue because the cause of death was unexplained. The first question was, would we see the body there? Despite the mayhem of my career, those closest to me know I am squeamish, no good with blood, but there is something more. I fear the terrible image that would be held in vivid perpetuity in my mind’s eye. I don’t avoid the grim details of a story, but I have often protected myself from images that my eye and soul won’t bear. Uncle John had already said he didn’t want to see her in the morgue. My dearest, oldest friend, Lucy, who by chance was staying nearby, warned me not to do it. I knew I had to go. I feared the ordinary as much as the gruesome, or some whiff of functionality. It was a morgue, after all.
[My mother] had been alone. People who did not know her were with her as she neared death, then died. I read their six-word description in the hospital investigation. “Pupils dilated. Pt has passed away.”
No one held her hand or kissed her forehead, told her it was time to go. It wasn’t time nor was it gentle. It was rough and mechanical and she was alone. And as they must, they moved her away and carried on with the living.
Now she was in a morgue. Watched over by God knows whom.
My response was to run out. I couldn’t be in here. I went in and out a few times until I was able to stay alone. How unlike the living self is our dead self. I still wasn’t sure I was looking at my mother. I edged towards the head on the pillow. Then all of a sudden it was her. Somewhere in the profile, the shape of the large nose, beyond the bruising and the absence, the stone stillness, she was there. I began to form words.
“Mummy. It’s alright, sweetheart. It’s alright. Thank you, sweetheart.” I’d never spoken to her like that before. I should have, part child, part adult, childlike and motherly. I repeated the words I had found.
“Thank you, sweetheart. It’s alright now.”
I reached forward to stroke her hair, it was so soft, then I misjudged the movement and touched the skin, so cold and unyielding. Death was here. I recoiled, paused then leaned forward again, spoke the same words and stroked her hair again. “Thank you for everything,” I said as tears rolled down my face. I could have lain down next to her. If she had been at home I may have, but not in this strange resting place. I wanted her to live forever, but she didn’t.
The inquest
In December we returned to England for the inquest. Some questioned my decision to go, suggesting my mother wouldn’t want it, but she would. She would expect me to look for answers, fight against cant, hypocrisy and bureaucratic indifference. She would want me to try to make them tell the truth, to go in to bat. The coroner’s office asked Anthony and I if we wanted lawyers, we said no.
At Anthony’s house I opened the heavy grey package containing the hospital’s final report. I read their observations through the hours of careless treatment leading to my mother’s death. There were hundreds of pages, each with her name at the top, my mother’s name written by a stranger. The pages described the fall at home, an ambulance with my mother complaining she didn’t want
to go, an operation for a fractured hip and just before surgery began, they noted that an embolism, a blood clot, had occurred. The anaesthetist paused but decided to go ahead with the surgery. They knew there were no beds in ICU so they sent her to the recovery ward, which was busy and understaffed. No one called the family to say that she had suffered a lifethreatening event. Anthony was in Italy and I was in Melbourne, oblivious to her deteriorating condition. I came to the page with her last recorded words, in a nurse’s handwriting. It read, “Patient says she feels clammy and cold.” The words took my breath away. Couldn’t they see what was happening? I struggled to read on, my heart heaving. Just after midnight, the cardiac team was called, they noted the patient looked very unwell. It was 12 hours since the operation. She went into cardiac arrest three times, her eyes rolled back in her head and she died. One of the doctors wrote “rest in peace” at the bottom of his notes.
I waited until the next day then started again from the beginning, making notes as I went, using the instincts of my other self, the journalist not the daughter. The language of the report was alternately patronising and mechanical. The hospital had done its investigation, 10 pages concluding there was no alternative outcome. There were “gaps in her care”, but nothing would have made a difference.
I read the report again. This time I noticed that amongst the almost 500 pages, one critical page was missing. The page where the anaesthetist who noticed the embolism had laid out the reasons for his decisions to proceed.
The coroner came in and took her seat.
In her opening speech, the coroner indicated she had accepted the hospital’s conclusion, that despite the mistakes, there was nothing the doctors could have done that would have changed the outcome.
Witnesses came and went, some more considerate than others.
Then a small opening came. I asked a question about what was done to protect my mother against the possibility of an embolism. Their own notes showed they had ticked a box for preventative measures but no action was taken.
The doctors returned to their argument that despite those possibilities, nothing would have changed the outcome. … I spoke with all the force I could muster, slowly and deliberately.
“On the evidence,” I said, using their language, “of the inquest’s first witness, the pathologist, no one could say when the embolism occurred. It could have occurred on the operating table when it was observed.” Further to that, the hospital had conceded there were preventative measures that could have been applied and I listed them again for emphasis. I wasn’t making the case that any one of those measures would have made a difference, but they could have. “A natural-causes verdict is clearly not supported by the evidence.”
The end
And then it was the end. The high windows of the courtroom showed blackness outside. We resumed our seats. The coroner said how good it was to see so many of the family there, that it was often not the case. She congratulated us on our advocacy. Then she read an account of the death, dismissing natural causes, allowing the possibility that the failure to apply preventative measures against a life-threatening blood clot may have contributed to her death. It was a small victory, but it was a victory.
But it didn’t change the thing I wanted to change. I wanted my mother to be alive, to have another conversation with her, show her things, tell her about the children.
Before I left her house to return to Australia, I sat by myself in the sitting room for the last time, searching for something in the stillness.
I realise now how like her I am. I look like her, I sound like her. I am like her. Our lives have been lived differently, but all the good things she knew, she passed on quietly when I wasn’t looking, when I was so convinced I was independent and so utterly different. All along I was hearing what she said and taking it in. I don’t apologise for being sad anymore, but I do tell everyone to call their mother.