When I arrived at the parental house to complete my family duties I could see something had changed in the living room, but I could not work out what it was. Everything looked it's usual sort-of in order, but the room seemed to have shrunk. Whether the shrinkage was from some extra clutter or from how my parents visibly shrank from each other was hard to separate in that small space. One habit had changed. How they ate. With just the two of them they ate from trays put on their laps as they sat in comfortable chairs facing the television. I found that I could not remember when we all last sat at the table to eat. From tme being about eight years old onward the table had been an increasingly uncomfortable place to eat, but for as long as the formality outweighed the discomfort it seemed the better option. Now comfort and informality were 'in' and the television was even more the focus of the room than before.
The evening of my return dad went out to the pub. Mother's clearest sign of welcome to me was turning the television off immediately after he left. She needed to update me on what had happened with Gran and say some things about herself that she had to deny when dad was about. The following day she asked me to go with her to the allotment. Only when we were over half the mile from the house did Mother breathe more easily and explain some of the more difficult details of Gran's declining health in her last years, Facts that Gran had kept to herself, or she had shared with Alice. But Alice had withheld from Mother until it was too late for Mother to do anything make Gran's life easier in her own right.
Mother also repeated how, particularly from when Gran and Grandad had moved to the flat, Alice had started charging Gran and Grandad over the odds for doing their laundry and getting their groceries, and had over claimed for petrol money etc. It took some time before Grandad told Mother about this. But that was when Mother took those duties from Alice and did them for much more modest sums. When Mother challenged Alice about this Alice went all falsely meek and defensive about it to cover her tracks.
The way Mother spoke going up to the allotment made me wonder where I had been that last three years. 'Kept out of the loop' was the shortest answer, where the loop was an all female family network and even if I was told something I could do nothing to change it. I had seen Gran in the flat quite often. I can still picture the knots on her knuckles and the swollen joints of her fingers, which became fixed permanently at forty five degree angles to the palm of her hands due to the severity of her arthritis. Her head bent would be resting over her chest because the curvature of her spine had been allowed to go that far. Pillows supported her head at a comfortable angle to her body, In her last years Gran could no longer swallow food but with her head supported she was able to drink a little warm tea when she was fed it from a saucer every time that Mother got a lift to visit Gran and Grandad from her best gardening friend, Ted Hepenstall, and insisted that I come too. Mother's delivered them some food and collected their laundry.
Between Gran and Grandad it was hard to know who clung to who more, or why. Did Gran resist going to hospital because she knew her illnesses, or because she knew she would not return home from the hospital? There she would be assigned a social worker and they would keep her until a nursing home place was available. Or did Grandad, not the obvious model of carer that he was, fear that her leaving would be the end of their marriage? And with that all his companionship? What was clear was that after nearly sixty years of marriage they had hit the 'for worse' years and were both vehement about not giving up.
I also wondered why women, well Mother, explained their physical ailments to each other in such a colloquial and convoluted way. But then again I'd only just had my first taste of the administration of modern health care in the Leonard Cheshire Nursing Home for comparison. However brief that experience of modern health care, modern health care, along with the finances that underpinned it, felt like they were several universes away from the parochialism and lack of resources that my Mother and others explained away, and Gran apparently embraced.
Seeing Gran's body in her coffin, in the chapel on my own. was the first time I saw a dead body. Seeing it was calming. Neither the body, nor the spirit that once occupied, it were suffering. Where ever her spirit was now it was more free than it had been in her lifetime. If life=creativity and conflict then the calm of Gran's body seemed no bad thing now. I saw Grandad that day too. I was introduced to one of the neighbours who were supporting him through the early public sense of loss. Seeing him, by turns I got the double image of an old man bearing up to the loss the world had given him to learn through, and the sense of him being almost child-like in how he sought to be looked after.
The funeral went well. The church was full and the service was formal but simple. In the funeral oration the vicar revealed that however ill Gran was she had paid her membership fees to The Mothers Union. It was an organisation that she had grown up with, she had achieved a record of sorts with her formally being a member of it for seventy five years. Though in the last ten of those years they had to visit her much more than she could attend meetings. As her immobility issues advanced, so the greatest strength she had left to offer them was prayer.
Well before the end of the vicar's retelling of gran's life, the last verse and chorus of the last hymn, the final words of blessing from the vicar, and the inevitable polite words of small c consolation with friends and relatives outside the church, many of them slightly numbly expressed, my lasting reflection became how fleeting time was when we experience it 'in real time' so speak. Funerals are not just rituals where the living mark the passing of those who have died. Nor are they merely occasions for reflecting on time and change, after all television and radio was full of performers who reflected false nostalgia for a living, with no clear need to know who the audience for their words might be in future.
Funerals are safe public rituals for closing the chapters of one individuals life, enacted by those who have out-lived the person the ritual is celebrating.
To be directed to Chapter Nine please left click here.
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