MORNING SERIAL
THIS was a world I had heard about but never really entered, and though I’d known this day might eventually come, it was always far off in some distant future. After a while I told the doctor: ‘I am fine, just fine.’
After her second husband died, though she missed him, Mum excelled at living alone. I had often marvelled at her ability to exist – and even thrive – in her own small world. She was happy and independent. Though becoming increasingly disabled, she carried on alone having witnessed the departure of many loved ones, including her second son and most of her friends. ‘I’m the last one standing,’ she’d say without self-pity or even any observable emotion. Loss had been a major theme in her life and she seemed resilient almost to the point of indifference. Perhaps her stoicism was a shield that protected her from the fear and sadness that might have destroyed a more fragile personality.
Over the previous few years I’d started to notice that things were getting tougher for her, and my brother and I had talked about how the situation might have to change. It’s hard to know when to intervene in someone else’s life. We agreed that threatening Mum’s independence would be a difficult and sad task. Would she agree to live in some kind of sheltered accommodation, or a care home? Whatever happened, it was going to be a one-way street; the end of an era and the beginning of a steeper decline, perhaps.
Life took care of it all. Suddenly decisions had to be made extremely quickly, and I was the obvious choice: the one who would scoop her up and take care of her. My brother lives several hours away and travels the world with his work, and he’s not the type of person who could give things up to look after a parent. Was I that sort of person? I wondered. And did I have a choice? My mother has always been pragmatic about her life – and about death. She would say ‘Just stick me in a home’, or ‘I’ve had my life, you must have yours.’ And she was being straight. She truly meant it. She would talk of death as something she positively welcomed.
> Scrabble in the Afternoon by Biddy Wells is published by Parthian at £8.99.
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CONTINUES TOMORROW