Blessings of morphine and thought bubbles saying: ‘I don’t belong here’

IT was her. And yet not her. She looked so tiny under that blue hospital blanket. I wondered what went on in my mother’s heavily sedated mind? What was she thinking, really thinking, slumped in that bed... with tubes sprouting out of her... with a plastic bag sticking out of the side of her... with 10 feet of her intestines cut out of her by the doctors... with liquid food being pumped in through her nose?

My mother’s thought bubble must have read: “I don’t belong here.” (I imagined my poor mother screaming those words until she was out of breath.)

Or: “How much more dignity do you want me to lose?”

As night fell in her room, she seemed to be literally disappearing into the darkness, into the night, into the past (her future appeared indeterminate.) I wondered, selfishly perhaps, if the woman I loved wasn’t even the woman I loved any more. I wondered was it some sort of salve for the guilt of rarely being there for my parents — because I was always away interviewing someone ‘important’ for the Sunday Independent — that I was in the hospital visiting my mother at all?

Everything appeared changed in her, in life, once she had gone into that bed in St James’s Hospital. I went in there last week for a walk around on my lunch break from the Sunday Independent, and the memories, good and bad flooded back. (I know: what kind of neurotic oddball goes for a walk around a hospital on his lunch break? I found it cathartic.)

I remembered seeing the woman I loved asleep on a pillow marked ‘Do Not Remove’. Her mobile phone, however, had been removed — stolen, the day before, by some junkie troglodyte who probably sold it to finance his or her next fix while my mother slept, uneasily.

I remembered the night in St James’s when my mother’s breathing was getting shallower and a priest arrived.

The priest said he would pray for her. Then he left as silently as he arrived.

Her spirit seemed elsewhere. Her hair was like a bird’s nest too. It was one of the blessings of morphine that she was out cold because had my profoundly fashionable mother been able to see what she looked like under that already unflattering hospital light — with her unwashed hair, no make-up — she would have expired from shock where she lay. Mercifully, she wasn’t awake.

Was she lost in a reverie? Dreaming she was at home in Henley Park watching X Factor? Dreaming she was young and beautiful in glamorous evening gowns out on the town with my father again?

Or possibly dreaming that she was dead — and free of all the pain and suffering and indignity.

Even when she woke the following day, she never seemed to fully see or feel our gaze. This was not necessarily a bad thing. We, her family, were terrified maybe to look in her eye in case she recognised our fear of losing her, in case she glimpsed the chaos of emotions inside all of us, because Maureen had been through so much. And yet she never complained.

Actually, she did. My father told her that he knew she was getting better when she started giving out about everything again. But it was a long process for her to get better. (And the terrible irony was just as she got better my father became terminally ill and ended up a year later in the cancer ward of the same hospital as his wife.)

Two days after she had the operation that cut out part of her intestines, the doctors returned and said that poison was leaking into her blood from the gangrene of her bowel and it could kill her if she wasn’t operated on. My little sister Marina and I protested that she was too weak to have another operation and that she could die on the operating table. The doctors told us that there was no alternative. I had to sign a consent form for the operation. (I thought of the notes that my mother used to write for me to get me off school when I was a young brat as I did this.)

Marina was bawling crying as Maureen was wheeled away to theatre. It was a grim irony. My mother used to sing in the theatre (the theatre Royal) every night of her young life; and now in her old age she seemed to be going to the theatre every night, too. There was an old Soviet saying popular at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror that suffering destroys the insignificant and hardens the strong. Be that as it may, I was sick of watching mum dragged off in the night to the mystic Gulag possibly never to return, and sick of hearing the doctors say how strong she was and how she could go through just about anything.

After all she had been through, Maureen Egan deserved a deep, lasting spell of peace. But not at the pearly gates of Heaven (where she is now with my dad) ... at the marble counter of the Shelbourne Hotel where she could enjoy liquids, in a nice glass — and not through a tube in her nose.

Vodka and tonic, please.