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 prescribed by the medical registrar and the wonderful palliative care team. My sister and I - ably assisted by our husbands and my niece - remain at her bedside throughout to protect and care for her. We do our best, but there are some sights I can never unsee, and spiteful cruelties I’ll never forgive. But those are stories for another day.
No matter how many indignities are heaped upon her, Ma’s presence remains undimmed; she’s quick, lucid, sharped-tongued and funny throughout - and is absolutely crystal clear with every medical professional who comes near her that she would welcome a release from her suffering.
She’s still Mum, who used to blaze down to our school to take on any wrong-doers on our behalf; tall, red-haired, a cracking figure in her stylish, home-made clothes, and those remarkable violet-blue eyes. She’s still Mum who doesn’t mince her words, the one who’d sigh even when my sister and I got 99% in an exam and tell us to do better next time. I stroke her arm, one morning and I’m roundly told to ‘stop touching me with your cold spider fingers!’ She’s Mum whose lightning-fast reply when asked by a member of the palliative care team if she has any religious affinity is, ‘Well, He’s not doing much for me, is He?’ And her occasionally ripe sense of humour, still has the ability to catch us off-guard. During her stay in hospital she’s had to cope with the reality that many of the nursing care assistants attending to her personal needs are young men from other countries and cultures. One afternoon, she is calmly reflecting on this fact. She looks angelic, propped up on her pillows, but suddenly the naughty smile flashes and she asks my sister and I a question so rude that it’s a good five minutes before either of us has stopped laughing long enough to tell her we’re not replying!
Then, one lunch time, just after my sister has left for a break, Ma becomes so agitated that I don’t know what to do. I call the palliative care team who arrive within seconds and do a brilliant job of making Mum comfortable and calming me down. It’s suddenly very important for me to tell them what an extraordinary woman Mum is, that she’s travelled extensively, loved Peru, has sailed down the Amazon in small boat, that she was head cook at a small private school for many years, can make any plant grow. That she has grandchildren and great-grandchildren, that she’s always had our backs… and then I’m gently interrupted by a member of the palliative care team who tells me it’s time to call anyone who needs to be there.
From the moment it became clear how very ill Mum was, we promised we wouldn’t leave her. That she wasn’t the little girl whose parents only collected two of their three younger children evacuated to Cornwall. That we wouldn’t abandon her. And so my sister and I and our husbands remain at her side through the long night. We talk about holidays, and Christmases, we laugh and we cry. We hold her hands - sorry, Mum, you couldn’t moan about my cold spider fingers then - we tell her that she’s safe. And just after sunrise, in a high room with large windows and views across to the house where she was born, Mum takes her last breath.
Some time later, we walk out of the hospital into heavy rain. ‘The world’s crying too,’ says my sister.
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| Our last photo together |
Mum chose not to have a funeral - she loathed them and asked that, instead, we celebrate her life by getting together as a family and having fun. Her direct cremation will take place early on Tuesday 12 March. We’ll be marking the occasion by sending all our love to her at 8 am.
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| Doris Lilian May Stovell March 1934 - Feb 2024 |
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