Later life Talkback - 19

Never could say goodbye

The elderly mother of a friend of mine died the other day, just around 3 years after the death of my own mother at the age of 98. There were similarities. In both cases, despite great age and frailty, the deaths took the families by surprise.  At the final moment we were not there to say goodbye. This, I’d guess is not unusual.  

Somehow, death, even when it is expected, takes the close relatives by surprise.  And often they don’t say that last goodbye.

Does it matter?  It all depends on how you look at it.

Until two weeks before she died of bowel cancer, my mother was living at home with my father (himself aged 96 at the time).  She was needing 24 hour nursing care but refused to go into a nursing home.  Doctors, nurses, social workers, health visitors came and went, as my father and the family became increasingly distressed.  Finally, she agreed to going into a home ‘but only for convalescence, for a few weeks’.  She died a couple of weeks later, well cared for, just 7 days after we celebrated her 98^th birthday.

In many ways, the end was a good one.  Partly through constitution, partly through modern drug management, she was not in pain.  During the last 8 hours of her life she saw her husband, daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren and the youngest of her greatgrandchildren, then 6 months old. My daughter held this rounded cherub of a child over my mother’s bed, and she, now the lightest of feathers, held out her arms, her face lit with joy.

But in those last 48 hours, we made some decisions which, with hindsight, would have been different.  My sister had rung from the nursing home to say my mother suddenly looked grey and ill.  I rushed round to find her in bed, sedated but conscious. The doctor arrived in the evening and said my mother was haemorrhaging internally.  Suddenly we had to play god - should she stay in the home or be taken to hospital?  

Part of me said leave her here in this comfortable, semi-familiar place.  Another part said let’s go on trying.  She’d rallied after blood transfusions before. My sister and I finally opted for hospital, and I went with her in the ambulance and stayed till she got a bed in the ward.  From 6pm till 2.15 next morning to be precise.  There was the inevitable feeling of being stranded, ignored, as the hospital staff went about their various more urgent tasks. Members of the family came in to give me support and sandwiches.  An elderly woman marooned in a wheelchair said she had been admitted at noon. She got to a ward just before my mother.

Next day I was back in the hospital. My mother had a drip which she kept pulling out.  I told the nurse who fixed it more securely.  Later I realised it was my mother’s way of saying ‘stop it, I’ve had enough.’  Why didn’t I see it then?

I left the hospital late in the afternoon, as various members of the family visited or planned to do so.  My father was there with my sister. The last family member to see my mother alive was my son. She said to him as he was leaving, ‘Come here and let me kiss you. I’ll miss you’. That was at 9 pm.

The ‘phone rang at just after 1 am.  My mother had died, possibly in her sleep, possibly still fidgeting with the drip.  How was it that none of us was there?  

I have thought about this many times during the last 3 years, about the surprise and the timing and the misjudgement.  And the good things that happened too. I realise that we find it hard to say goodbye, so we ignore the signs. We want to wait till the very last moment, and that moment may be too late. 

I wrote some of this to my friend when I heard her mother had died. She said that her mother had been refusing food, and only with hindsight did she understand that this may have been deliberate. She too had left the home after a visit and had to be told on the telephone that her mother had died. She too had not said that final goodbye because she had been taken by surprise.

I realise that we can rarely get it right, that those deathbed scenes where people fade away in their own beds surrounded by their relatives and faithful physician are mainly make-believe, belonging to an age long past, to television costume dramas.

So what are we left with?   I offer a few reflections (you may call them platitudes).

  If you have any comments on this edition of Talkback, please email me:  helen@laterlife.com