That final month

Apologies to those who find these blogs hard going or inappropriate, but I need to keep on.

Mum’s death came after an awful month and in some ways it was a relief that she was free.

In the ice and snow at the start of the year, Mum had a fall and hurt herself badly. The hospital missed it at the time, but she had fractured her hip. She got frustrated by her slow recovery and lack of mobility and eventually checked herself out.

A fiercely independent woman, my Mum suffered threefold. Her remaining eyesight was failing and had been for some time, having already lost the sight in one eye before I was born. Always an artistic woman and a keen reader, Mum found it harder and harder to do the things she loved.

She had enjoyed long walks and hiking too, but over the past few years she had found it much more difficult to get around. She was only 63, but years of wrestling with an eating disorder had caught up with her.

Mum had suffered from bulimia in the Seventies, at a time when ignorance of mental health made people think such things were a weakness or a madness. Whatever you think of Princess Diana, she raised awareness of eating disorders and Mum always valued that.

You never recover from an eating disorder. Like any addiction, you learn to manage it. Mum strictly controlled her eating, never eating more than she was comfortable with. All to avoid feeling the need to throw it all up again.

She ate apart from me and Dad. Food was always an issue between the two of us. I have always wrestled with my weight. I was born with jaundice and had to have a low-fat diet. Mum kept me eating this way for years. When other kids had crisps and chocolate biscuits, I had cottage cheese and carrot sticks. Anything that makes you different at school, makes you a target and I resented her for it. So my youthful rebellion was binge eating, which lead to weight gain and so on. Mum hated having a fat son, it created a lot of tension.

But I digress. When Mum fell, the hospital tests revealed she was as malnourished as someone living in a Third World country. We knew she was underweight, but we had no idea she had all but stopped altogether. Eating apart from us as she always did, it became easy to hide it. And I had lived away from home for many years.

Mum initially resisted the doctors’ findings, claiming she was being victimised for being thin. Not helped by the fact that one of the GPs involved was quite overweight herself.

Then finally, Mum admitted she had a problem and asked for help. She rang me and pledged to get it together. She wanted to be admitted to a respite home of sorts, where trained staff would help her by teaching it was OK to eat and monitoring her meals and food intake. Such a place exists in Bristol, but they deemed she was too thin to be covered by their insurance. Something I’m still angry about.

Instead she was given two choices. Return to hospital to be monitored and fed but not closely supervised. She could have discharged herself again at anytime.

Or be sectioned and fed through a tube down her nose.

This terrified Mum. She talked about going away and hiding somewhere in the country. On April 8th 2009, some mental health workers tried to gain entry whilst Dad was at work. Mum freaked out and I happened to call in the middle of all this. I rang off and got Dad to leave work early and head home. They didn’t come back and Mum seemed to calm down.

Then on Good Friday after I’d closed the shop, I got a phone call. Dad told me Mum had taken an overdose and would like to speak to me. She came on the phone, sluggish and incoherant, and lied to me saying that Dad was making it up and asking how the shop had done that day.

It was one of our last conversations and she lied to me. After almost three decades of telling me she prized honesty above all else and making my life hell if I was caught out in even a white lie, I found this very hard.

Paramedics arrived and she refused their assistance so they left. When she finally lost consciousness, they returned and took her to hospital. She and taken 60 paracetomol, 30 cocodamol and washed it down with wine. This was the third time in my life Mum had tried to commit suicide with an overdose.

I was furious and didn’t want to go to see her. But then Dad rang to say she was getting worse.

I went down one Friday afternoon, having closed the shop early. She didn’t look anything like my Mum, and refused to acknowledge me. She kept begging the nursing staff to let her die.

I talked to her telling her about fun things of recent weeks - The Inspector Calls at the theatre, the preparation for FCBD, conversations with old friends - and then told her I forgave her, I understood and that she shouldn’t hold on.

I tried to prepare myself that Mum wouldn’t and indeed shouldn’t pull through. Her quality of life had become awful and this latest suicide attempt would make it so much worse.

Then the bastards at mental health came and assessed her, decided she need to be sectioned and put a tube down her nose to feed her.

What Mum was most afraid of came to pass.

I was furious. She wanted to die. She had got Dad to ring me and hold the phone to her ear while she begged me to let her die, to stop them keeping her. That was appaulling.

Years ago, she made me promise that if something horrible happened to her I would stop my Dad from letting them keeping her. She wanted DNR, whereas Dad is more a ‘life by any means’ guy. It felt like she was asking me to honour my promise and there was no way I could. Trust me, I looked into it.

But as the feeding tube went in and as the days went by she seemed to be improving. I tired to accept that she wasn’t getting what she wanted but that she may have some quality of life if we all pulled together.

Then on Saturday 25th April, Mum was in pain. She had had all her painkillers for the day, I was no longer allowed morphine. So the attending nurse suggested turning her as that sometimes helped.

She made Dad and my uncle Chris leave the room. Mum asked Dad to stay but the nurse insisted.

Waiting in the corridor, they heard a horrific scream and then the nurse came out. She said Mum was comfortable now.

Dad went back in and went to sit by her side. Her eyes were open but Mum was dead.

Today we had the preliminary coroner’s report.

It’s all being blamed on Mum for being frail. Her heart was enlarged ad could have gone at any time. The nurse in question has been cleared of all wrong doing.

And I just don’t know how I can accept that.