Formidable granny who asked her son... ‘Will you get me some heroin?’
That was the request Guy Kennaway faced, as he reveals in a bleakly funny new book about caring for his 87-year-old mother
MY relationship with my mother, Susie, has had its ups and downs, and it is fair to say that age, maturity and mellowness have not entirely smoothed the troubles away. The principal charge laid against me was that I wasn’t sufficiently the son she had ordered. From time to time I have disagreed, or, as she sees it, treacherously taken the wrong side against her. And she doesn’t forget a slight. She not so much harbours grudges, as dry-docks them for a full refit so they are seaworthy whenever she needs to relaunch them.
This account might be easier to read if my mother were a kindly, apple-cheeked granny. But she is a real woman, and I will not patronise her by softening her edges. Before my father died in 1968, she remembers being ‘a bit of a mouse’.
But widowhood — with four children between nine and 15 — transformed her into an irresistible force. ‘I discovered that widows were on their own, second-class citizens,’ she says, ‘and while I think men should be the leaders, if you haven’t got a man, you have to do it yourself.’
Since then, I don’t think there has been a year when she wasn’t firing off lawyers’ letters to one opponent or another. Every time she detected an injustice, whether it was noise from our neighbours, or an arms fair in our local airbase, she went into battle. Nothing scared her, and she usually won.
Which occasionally also made her incredibly annoying.
Thirty years ago, she moved to France with her third husband, Stanley. Both were in their prime: beautiful, talented, bold and sexy. But time is a cruel companion, particularly when you spend long days in its company sunbathing, drinking and eating rich food.
By 2017, Stanley and Susie, aged in their 80s, were old and bent, with thinning hair and sun-beaten skin. Now in our 60s, we children had all started to mellow.
But my mother kept up a relentless programme of gardening, partying, travelling and, of course litigation, her favourite hobby.
THE BIG QUESTION
I WAS battling through a brief visit when my mother told me she had something important to ask, but it was privée. She likes to sprinkle a few French words around, to set her apart from expatriates who have not learnt the language.
One thing that always makes her rheumy eyes sparkle is a secret. I braced myself for trouble.
‘I have had a wonderful life,’ she told me. ‘I have lived in beautiful houses. Did I tell you the mayor asked me to enter my garden into a competition for the best floral village in the South of France?’ Then she shook her head. ‘After all that, I don’t want to live in a care home. No, Guy, I will not be put in a home.’ I sympathised with that. ‘So j’ai decidé that I shall end my life, here, with Stanley.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘What do you mean exactly?’
‘We have decided to, er, kill ourselves,’ she smiled.
I told her I was shocked. I had always thought she would go on for ever, the Queen to my Prince Charles. She barely listened.
‘But I have one little problem,’ she went on. ‘I need the right drugs to do it. Can you buy me some heroin?’
I wondered if this was a game, a plea for attention. But as time wore on, I realised she was absolutely serious.
TIME TO GO
THE subject of killing yourself by choice in old age is taboo. Doctors, clerics and politicians take it as a personal affront. But it is not a criticism of hospitals, or laws, or priests. It’s a criticism of old age, the rock-hard facts of the human body and mind falling apart. Things die. Can we not learn to do it with dignity?
Mum was determined to be in control to the end. Still, I didn’t think heroin was a good idea.
‘What about Switzerland?’ I asked.
‘It’s no good,’ Mum waved her hand impatiently. ‘You basically have to have a terminal illness.’
The principal flaw in my mother’s plan was that she was neither ill, nor particularly frail. On this most recent visit, she had told me she was landscaping the village car park and planning to write a book.
So why had she asked about killing herself? One theory I considered was that she was running out of money, and too proud to face poverty in old age.
Or she was going to doublecross Stanley and let him die to get his money and, more importantly, the last word.
Then a thought crossed my mind: if she did pull off her plan, the gendarmes might requisition my laptop and examine its search history. And what was the one thing Mum had made me promise? To Google ‘quick and painless poisons’. So that was her game: to see me banged up for murder in some hellhole Marseilles jail. Perhaps my willingness to consider Mum’s plan to blow the full-time whistle was connected to our family history. My father had died in a car crash on December 23, 1968. We children got the news on Christmas Eve. I remember wanting to move his presents, so they wouldn’t remind our mother that Daddy was dead.
We had a skiing holiday booked in the New Year, and didn’t cancel it. I approved of that. It set the marker for grieving in the Kennaway family — you just bloody well get on with life.
But I couldn’t remember much of the holiday.
FLURRY OF FUNERALS
BACK home, I couldn’t get Mum’s situation out of my mind.
Extraordinarily, virtually everyone I spoke to about it had a story to tell. Johnno, the carpenter fitting windows in the barn I was converting next to my house, had a mum who had killed herself, quite deliberately, with whiskey. William, who I sat opposite on a plane, accompanied his aunt to Dignitas. A friend’s mother threw herself out of a window, though she forgot she had been moved into a bungalow, and just got a bit muddy and scratched by the cotoneaster.
Then my girlfriend Amanda’s grandmother died. In his eulogy, her father said Granny Pat ‘was asking to die at the end’. Everyone in the congregation thought it a reasonable request, agreed she’d had a good innings.
I remembered the last funeral I’d attended, for my cousin’s 21-year-old son, who killed himself over a lost love. He too had asked for death, but none thought his request legitimate.
I knew then that I didn’t think Mum’s was, either.
TERRIBLE TWIST
ON MY next visit, I strongly suspect my mother thought I was going to turn up with a vial of hemlock. In fact I planned to take a catalogue of stairlifts — I’d decided it was too early for her and Stanley to sign off, so the only option was to move them into my barn conversion. Assisted living; and I was going to be the assister.
But then I heard news that changed my plans. Mum was ill, with ‘a blood poisoning issue that may be serious’.
On the phone, Mum sounded unusually weak — she preferred to project a confident tone, like the time she had a car accident a few years ago.
Suspended by her seat belt, she called me for help. First, though, she asked after my kids, whether they had received their birthday presents (there being a thank-you letter subtext). We spoke for at least five minutes before, slowly, it came to light that she was hanging upside down in a ditch.
This time I asked directly how she was. ‘I am ill actually,’ she said. ‘The doctor came twice. She has got so much time that she stayed for half an hour.’ She can’t be that bad, I thought, she can
still get in a swipe at our health system.
But I went straight out to France. Mum had got smaller since I last saw her. And she was crying. I know things are grim when people cry with joy at my arrival. I hugged her and felt her bones through the sagging clothes. She was standing as straight as she could, but I could see it was hurting her.
She told me she’d had E.coli. I asked about her plans for the future, but she would only say: ‘I don’t want a fuss. Cremate me and spread me on the new planting in the car park.’
‘When would you think you might get to the point?’ I asked. ‘When I am bedbound and can’t look after myself. You know. Go to the lavatory on my own.’
I watched, on Mum’s face and in her twitching hands, the unusual sight of fear. I put my arm around her, feeling love but also something more unexpected: admiration. She had a red line, a level beneath which her life was no longer worth living. She meant what she said.
What was my own red line? When a stranger walks in and says: ‘Hello, Dad’. When I don’t remember my name? Will I still have the wherewithal to knock myself off the perch? Planning will be required. And that was what my mother was engaged in.
PRECIOUS MEMORIES
I RENTED a studio apartment nearby for the summer, ready to watch — and if necessary take part in — the final act. I adopted the roles of butler, sommelier, skivvy and chauffeur. In their bent forms, I could see my future coming towards me, and I wanted to squeeze every last drop of fun from the time we all had together. Also, I liked living with people who took ten minutes to pour a glass of wine. I was 60 and careworn, but in that house, I felt young.
One morning, I arrived to find Stanley had collapsed.
‘I think he’s had a stroke,’ I said.
‘I think I have,’ he mumbled. ‘I told you I wouldn’t make it to 90.’
‘You’ve only got four days,’ Mum said. ‘Make an effort.’
She went downstairs to do the thing she found most useful in a crisis: make lists. In this case for his 90th birthday party: food, drinks, guests, placement. We muddled through, and later my daughter and son came to visit and introduced their toddler children to Mum for the first time.
As my grandson, Ezra, waddled towards her, I saw Mum’s face light up with joy. I thought, hang on, this is going to change a few things. Here was a whole new generation of Kennaways, who she hadn’t annoyed or insulted and who were delighted by her.
When I left France, four months on, Mum was waving from her balcony, very much alive and well — although I knew she had a stash of medication in her bathroom cupboard, stockpiled against that red line.
SAYING GOODBYE
SEVERAL months later, Stanley developed an infection. He flatly refused to go to hospital, sending the ambulance away empty. I was struck by the bravery of that.
I called Mum. ‘He started crying this afternoon,’ she said. ‘And he said: “I’ve just realised I’m not going to get better”.’
When my plane touched down, I had a message: from now on it was palliative care only.
Mum added: ‘Could you please pick up a large pot of Sudocrem for Stanley’s skin? Don’t ever let this happen to me.’
Stanley’s final days turned into a desperate last-ditch operation to keep him alive. My sister Jane and Mum had been at it a week before I turned up, and I was whacked after 48 hours. Everyone was losing the will to live, except Stanley.
After everything I’ve said about dying when you want, I guess we just didn’t know if he was trying to die or trying to stay alive.
Near the end, I leant forward and said: ‘I love you’. He nodded slowly and his eyes filled with tears. He told me he wanted a sleep, so I said ‘goodbye’. I wasn’t sure what tone to use, as I didn’t know if it was for a few hours or for ever. It turned out that it was for ever.
They had a quiet funeral. Afterwards I received a short email from Mum: ‘Today was beautiful in its simplicity. He’s home now and sitting on a shelf in his study.’
I didn’t quite understand until I realised she was referring to Stanley’s ashes.
‘How do you feel about your own death?’ I asked her, when we met.
‘I don’t feel like doing it now, to myself,’ she said. ‘Because now I have a cause. I absolutely refuse to go through what poor old Stanley did. And I shall fight for the right for none of us to be put through it against our will.’
Right then I felt there was plenty of time to go, before it would be her time to go.
AND MUM’S RIPOSTE
BUT Mum says: ‘Yes, I’m old — well, only 87 — and bear the bruises that go with longevity, but nevertheless I possess a mind.
‘I am a woman who always stood up against things I considered to be wrong. In this case it is so utterly reasonable. I simply want to go while the going is still good.
‘In light of the progress medicine has made, keeping a lot of us alive with a rotten quality of everyday living is senseless.
‘I am not just speaking of illness and pain. I am talking about the time to live and the time to die, on behalf of those of us who do not want to end up in a care home.
‘I have always had a campaign ahead of me, and when that stops I want to stop, too. But this is not about me. This is about another new campaign. A fight, I might say, to the death and for the death.
‘I am not prepared to give up now. Like a dog I cannot give up a bone. My wish is to go out at the top, dying as I myself will plan — but if it is the least bit of comfort to anyone, I can assure you the moment has not arrived.’