Bryony Gordon We’re on a mental health rollercoaster
Boris Johnson’s biographer, Sonia Purnell stayed away from her mother’s care home. Now, she wishes she hadn’t obeyed the rules
‘This is the last time,” my mother Jean told me, during a visit to her care home across the park from where I live, on the afternoon of March 3. She repeated herself several times, with all the force she could muster. At 91, and suffering from dementia, it had been a while since she had been capable of full conversation, so this determination to make a point was unusual.
Otherwise, all was normal. Even sitting up in bed, in her nightdress, surrounded by her own artwork of seascapes and flowers, she still bore traces of the elegant beauty she had once been. I reassured her that, work permitting, I would be back the next day, smiling as I waved goodbye from her bedroom door.
Yet I was shaken by what she had said and asked her favourite carer whether I had reason to worry. Back home, I continued to feel unsettled despite being assured that there had been no change in her condition.
Coronavirus still seemed a distant threat – there had only been one death in Britain. The Prime Minister was boasting of shaking everyone’s hands in hospital. And yet, the case numbers were mounting and reports of Italy’s soaring death toll – particularly among the elderly – were playing on my mind. I knew Mum would be vulnerable if it spread here. I was determined to make sure I saw her the next morning.
But then I woke up with a sore throat and a dilemma. Should I fulfil my promise but potentially expose her, and the other elderly residents, to whatever I had? A sore throat was not officially listed as a Covid symptom – but how could I be sure? Her words rang in my head, but in all conscience, how could I take the risk?
And yet, it was not as if there was someone else who could go in my place. Mum had moved away from her friends to be near me, and tragically both my sisters died too young from cancer and my father passed away a decade ago. I was all she had. How could I let her down?
After going through all the arguments for and against, I eventually stayed home and put my trust in Mum’s carers. She would, I thought, at least be safe there – and safer without me. After all, it would only be a few days before my sore throat went.
It was. But by then, now mid-march, with the death toll beginning to rise rapidly in Britain, the care home had banned all visitors except in extreme circumstances. The reasons were clear and sensible: to minimise the risk of infection.
We now know that the Government had changed its advice on March 12 from it being “very unlikely” that residents of care homes would be infected by Covid to new guidance on how to deal with an outbreak if one occurred. The rest of us were, back then, in the dark. It was clear, though, that closed doors were now between me and my mother, a full week before the country as a whole went into lockdown. Did my now very real instincts of impending disaster count as “extreme circumstances”? How did my desire to see my mum differ from thousands of others who were in the same boat? What if we all demanded access to our relatives and made the situation worse? I would have to put off my visit again.
Of course, I had no idea then that hospitals were discharging patients
Mum had died alone and unnoticed. I was informed (incredibly, by email) afterwards
– sometimes showing symptoms of the virus – into care homes like my mother’s without testing them first. Far from being safe, she could not have been in more danger. Neither were the staff, who were caring for her so kindly, able to get tested, even though many of them travelled to work on Covid-filled trains and buses. My trust in the system was already silently being traduced.
Dutifully staying at home under lockdown, I called every day for an update on Mum’s progress. Over time, I waited longer and longer for the phone to be picked up and the responses became shorter and more hurried.
“Jean is OK”; “she is stable”; “she is smiling” were typical reports. I could not speak to her directly, as she had long since given up talking on the phone. I still thought she was safe and that her care needs could never be met in my narrow London townhouse, so bringing her out was never an option, even if she had been allowed to leave.
In any case, my family and I were beginning to show mild Covid symptoms ourselves, after my son returned from university almost certainly having contracted it.
By April, the home had banned visits under any circumstances. Only afterwards was I told by a local official that in the first fortnight of that month it had lost nearly a quarter of its residents to the virus. No one revealed anything at the time. It must have been mayhem in there. But even in my ignorance, my nights were increasingly sleepless with dread.
And then in the third week of April, the call came. After developing a cough and fever, my mum had tested positive. I remember the nurse’s deadpan voice, and a thump so hard in my stomach that I gasped for breath.
The next two weeks were a rollercoaster of emotions.
The tablet computers provided for calls with relatives did not work, so I had to find a carer prepared to dress in full PPE to hold up her own phone to my mother for a brief video chat, so she could at least see me. I lifted up my cat for her, too – and ever a felinelover, she smiled in approval.
Although seemingly calm, I fretted about whether she was frightened by everyone wearing masks. “I try to smile at her with my eyes,” the sympathetic carer told me. “I hope it helps.”
Then things deteriorated rapidly. News came that so many of her neighbours had died, they were closing down her now-empty floor for a deep clean, and she was to be moved to an entirely Covid-positive floor. Two doctors phoned to warn that Mum was “unlikely to recover” but it was impossible to say when the end would come.
On the morning of May 7, a carer looked in on Jean at 9.30am. She returned at 10am to find my mother had died alone and unnoticed. I was informed – incredibly, by email – shortly afterwards. That visit on March 3 was indeed, as Mum had predicted, my last.
I find it hard to describe the pain.
The hole left by not seeing her before her parting. The funeral, limited by pandemic rules to 10 congregants and 20 minutes. Scant celebration of a life in which she lovingly nursed her husband, my war hero father, through decades of suffering from head injuries so severe he could not survive without intense medication.
I had repeatedly checked every instinct to go to see her for what I thought was the greater good.
Imagine, then, my feelings when Boris Johnson endorsed his chief adviser Dominic Cummings’s decision to drive 260 miles under lockdown to his father’s farm in Durham with a wife possibly showing Covid symptoms, and then to take a trip out to Barnard Castle.
Cummings was merely following his instincts, we were told by way of excuse. Johnson could apparently see no wrong in what the Durham Constabulary described this week as a breach of the rules designed to save lives. Apparently in the tussle between personal and national, our leaders believe only fools privilege the greater good.
Or at least that is how it feels to me. And perhaps to tens of thousands of others who have lost loved ones without seeing them, comforting them or even, in some cases, attending their funerals.
My tweet expressing my shock at Cummings’s behaviour was read nearly two million times and drew 150,000 supportive responses, many of whom told me about their own harrowing experiences. It made me feel part of a larger community – but it has not dampened the flickers of doubt and guilt. How dare Cummings suggest that he more than others was driven by his love of his family? As if I am in some way deficient in the way I loved, and love, mine.