A double bereavement ‘I said goodbye via an ipad’

Colette Austin My mother contracted coronavirus in her care home on March 31, and was admitted to hospital. She perked up a little after receiving oxygen, but none of the family was able to visit her. My brother was in quarantine after returning from a walking holiday abroad, and I was isolating because my younger son had had mild Covid symptoms the week before. When my brother went to the hospital to speak to a doctor, he was asked, politely and indirectly, not to come in, as the hospital was clearly overrun, and short of PPE at the time.

A few days later, we got a call to say things weren’t going very well. A nurse kindly arranged for myself and my siblings to have a conference call to speak to her. We had problems with Facetime video, so they held an ipad by her head so she could hear us. I’m not sure we realised at first it would be goodbye, so we began by saying supportive things. But we could hear her laboured breathing on the other end of the phone.

It dawned on us that this could be goodbye. We started telling her how much we loved her, and that we knew she loved us. My mother was a Catholic, so I told her that the priest had been to bless her, and that it was OK to let go. She died with no family there. The hospital told us that she had passed peacefully – but we don’t know that. I’d read a quote from doctors who had seen people gasping for air “like fish out of water” at the end. Was our mum’s doctor telling the truth, or was he just absorbing the sight of my mother’s death?

The funeral was a quick 15-minute service that felt a bit like a conveyor belt. We could see families waiting for their turn.

My father-inlaw had also been hospitalised with Covid, one day before my mother. Just hours later, we learned he passed the same day.

I’m aware that there are people, especially parents, who have made much bigger sacrifices than me. But when Boris Johnson gave his speech, I burst into tears. The Prime Minister seems utterly tone deaf to what people have been going through; to all the heartrending sacrifices people have been making, and to all the memorable life moments missed.