Home Thoughts Weekly

‘How many days to my birthday?’ Ma asks. I do a quick calculation. ‘Eighteen,’ I reply. ‘Eighteen days until your ninetieth birthday.’ Ma pulls a face and shakes her head. Every sentence is hard work for her now, when each breath is a struggle. ‘You’ll have to write a book about this, you know,’ she says, with one of her quick, mischievous smiles. ‘“Carry On Dying”. Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry.’ The smile fades. ‘Who knew,’ she adds wearily, ‘that dying would be such a palaver?’  It’s only eleven days since Ma was diagnosed with a high-grade, aggressive lymphoma, four days since she was overwhelmed with pain and breathing difficulties and was admitted as an emergency to hospital. Until a few weeks ago, she lived completely independently; shopping, cooking, cleaning and tending her much-loved garden. The deterioration in her health is shockingly rapid. The eight days preceding her death are a living hell, a constant battle with the ward staff to get Ma the pain relief she’s been presc

It turns out that writing a book is not the first thing I’ll do in 2024. The first thing arrives promptly, on 2nd January. It happens amongst the slew of bodies in an everyday, overcrowded, overworked A&E department. It imparts devastating news about a precious loved one. It brings a flurry of all manner of scans and tests, sucks the air from normality and distorts time. We wait for days to pass and wish they were longer. This is not particular to us: we are where all families have been and will be again, so I have no wish to remind others of their pain or dwell on ours, but this is where we are, drifting on an uncertain tide. My firstborn daughter celebrates a big birthday so, inevitably, I think back to her arrival when she brought sheer joy, utter terror and a fall of snow that seemed to symbolise how greatly my world had changed. Now, as Tom and I look after my daughter’s daughters, someone knocks on our bedroom door in the night and, shortly after, a small figure folds herse