Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Dad’s was a lifetime of service to his NHS patients and, at its end, the NHS could not have repaid him more beautifully... THE SATURDAY BIG READ
smile, his eyes respond with silent delight.
He summons all his strength. “Thank you all,” he murmurs.
By Boxing Day, Dad has reached the hinterland I have been dreading.
Not you, Dad, not you in this lifedeath limbo I know so well from work.
But here he is, still warm, still breathing – if fitfully now – and yet light years beyond our reach. He lives, but he will never respond to my voice or touch again.
I will never know if he hears the words I whisper softly at his side, or feels my hand holding his.
That night, I go to check on Mum, who lies awake on her camp bed, her dying husband’s hand in hers, and offer to take her place for a while. But she cannot leave while he lives. This is her gift to my father.
Later, in the darkness, I hear her voice at my door. “Rachel,” she says simply, “he’s gone.”
I am seized by an impulse to scream or howl or beat my chest. I want to tear my hair out.
I rush downstairs to my father’s bed and clutch him, kiss him, lay my cheek upon his and cling for dear life to the warmth of his limbs, to this last sign of life that, even now, I can feel ebbing away. Desperately, I wrap his hand in mine, cocoon it within my interlocked fingers, as if somehow I will keep him here in the world with me for just a few moments longer.
Like ghosts in the night, the undertakers arrive, solemn and still in the frost on the doorstep. Mum closes the door behind them, an ignition key turns, and that is it.
All that is left of my father is an imprint of limbs in crumpled bed sheets. We trail uncertainly back to our beds, cut off from each other by the shock of our grief and curl up in the dark, stunned and reeling.
The next morning, it is hard to believe the sun still shines. For a long time, I had not wanted to surface. But, while laid beneath the duvet feeling empty, something unexpected cut through the numbness, my own sudden surge of gratitude.
Throughout it all – the major surgery, the countless chemotherapies, the transition from active to palliative care – there were too many acts of tenderness to count. Dad’s was a lifetime of service to his NHS patients and, at its end, the NHS could not have repaid him more beautifully.
The technical brilliance of his surgeon, the meticulous skill of the chemotherapy unit, were one thing.
But what sung out, over and over, were the innumerable tiny kindnesses which, knitted together, make a patient feel cherished and an NHS hospital so resoundingly humane.
There was my father’s oncologist, who called him at home on his precious day off with his children.
The exhausted nurse on his understaffed ward who took time to hold his hand. The community team who made him feel so special as they tweaked the diamorphine in his final days. Standing at the kitchen sink, I think of the doctor who gave so freely of himself, for so many decades, to his patients. His absence is too large to grasp.
Suddenly, a wren darts and whirrs through the hedge in front of me. Dad, in a flash, is there too.
“Look, Rachel! A wren!”
His heart, like mine, never failed to lift at this smallest and most jaunty of birds. The wrens will keep whirring, but he is gone.
I walk upstairs to the wardrobe in his bedroom and rummage in the sports bag for his letters.
There they are, seven brown envelopes within which, in virtually indecipherable script, it turns out he still lives after all.
Extracted by Rhian Lubin. DEAR LIFE: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss by Rachel Clarke is published by Little, Brown at £16.99. Copyright
© Rachel Clarke