My father’s longtime girlfriend died in my arms as I struggled to place an oxygen mask on her face. One minute alive, the next taking her final breath, a sort of wheeze, her body went limp and she was gone.
She had cancer. Her friends had left the building, her daughters found her condition far too distressing to look after her, and my father rented a second apartment across the landing, the trauma room as he called it. He didn’t do sick people. I employed a nurse to care for her while I was at work and spent nights on her sofa.
At first, I couldn’t believe she was dead... and on my watch! The nurse had just left for gawd sake. She couldn’t be. I paced the room. I checked her pulse. Her skin was translucent, porcelain, all lines erased.
I called my boyfriend.
“I think Betty’s dead”
"Are you sure?"
"No. What'll I do?"
"Hold a mirror in front of her mouth"
I called her mother.
"Nora, Betty’s dead"
"What do you mean dead?" "She was alive on Tuesday!" "What did you do?"
I’m not the over-emotional type. There was no weeping or gnashing of teeth. Betty wasn’t my favourite person. A raging drunk, she reminded me too much of my mother.
I would have been about 19 when my mother died in some dingy flat in Bristol, with apple crates for furniture, though I’d been sending her money regularly. I wasn’t sorry. She wasn’t my favourite person either. I’d booked a holiday in Brazil leaving the next day, and off I went. Guiltless.
My father died on my birthday five years ago. He suffered from dementia. I looked after him for 4 years until one day while I ran to the local shop, he threw himself out the window. Into a nursing home he went and within two years he was dead.
To quote Oscar Wilde: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
I was saddened when he died, though he’d been lost to me for years. But more than that, I felt guilty that I’d allowed him to die in a nursing home. For a long time those coulda, shoulda, wouldas plagued me. I didn't have a funeral for him. His body was taken straight to the crematorium, as was his wish.
I've never attended a funeral. I try to look after people while they're alive. I leave attendance at funerals to those who become invisible when sickness comes to call on their family and friends.
Gawd, I'm self-righteous!
Do I fear death? Well, no, I don't. I fear pain, but not death...as long as it's not next week!
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