JACK REVISITED

This didn't draw that much attention to itself three years ago, and I don't suppose that it will now, either, but, seeing as it is halloween night, and there's not really any other night upon which it works, here's "another chance to read" a short story called "Jack" which first appeared in this blog on a dark, cold and lonely evening way, way back in October 2010...

http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/jack.html

THE TROUBLE IS...

I know that I can sometimes be "over-sensitive" when it comes to certain things, especially when they're just "a bit of fun" that nobody else is particularly all that fussed about, but I am struggling with the content of this particular ad campaign and I have been for quite some time now whenever it pops up between the programmes...

Set in revolutionary France, a beautifully photographed baying mob of peasants burst into a Chocolatiers shop where, under the floorboards, two aristocrats are hiding and eating bowls of breakfast cereal. Sadly, one of them cannot resist the chocolatey goodness of the cereal and the crunch of his biting into this delightful foodstuff betrays them and they are discovered.

So far, so "amusing"...

However, as we cut back to the pack shot, and the jolly voiceover, we see the shadow as the blade of a guillotine sweeps down and, presumably, deals swift revolutionary "justice" to the unfortunate aristos, which is, unfortunately, where this particular campaign rather loses me.

I'm sure that it's no more distasteful than any other ad campaign that you might care to think of and it does not, at least, involve anybody who appears to be terminally vacuous creating obviously made-up words for yoghurt as they smugly recline in a ballgown, or the strangely pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo of anti-ageing creams, or indeed the frankly bonkers notions behind the advertising of what is, essentially, a chemical smell, in all of those perfume and after shave advertisements.

Neither indeed does it make any bizarre claims about what your hair looking a certain way can do for your life and how portentously people seem to find ways to talk about its importance to their daily lives. Nor does it try to portray what obviously not-real "women" talk about whenever two or three of them are gathered together, or give hopelessly impossible aspirations about life or body image to the emotionally vulnerable like a lot of advertising appears to do.

What it does do, however, and for "comedy effect" is have the poor unfortunates who are enjoying the product in question taken off and executed at the end of this tiny little movie, because, despite the genuine horrors of that particularly bloody Revolution (and let's be honest here, aren't they all...?), you can clearly see the guillotine blade sweep down at the end of the advertisement during what used to be called the "pack shot"...

Not, I'd have thought, the most affirming endorsement for the product I'd have thought...

Then there's the slightly distasteful sensation of using public execution for its comedy value which, I know, I know, I ought not to be taking quite so seriously, even though I do sometimes think that the eager and ambitious young things who work in advertising really ought to get some sensitivity training and perhaps take lessons in restraint and about what is an acceptable thing about which to make fun of...

But then...

Perhaps it is just me that worries about such things...

After all, the mighty social powerhouse that is known around these parts as Fizzbok have now decided that it's "okay" for people to be able to view genuine footage of actual decapitations, having once quite rightly decided that this was something utterly deplorable and ought to be condemned outright.

Their argument appears to be based upon the principle that "people" ought to be able to express their disgust by having a good old gawp at the footage and then, like fascinated rubberneckers at the scene of an horrific car crash, then tell everyone how "appalled" they are, presumably by leaving a tasteless comment or choosing not to hit the "like" button...

But then... You know what teenagers are like... so such things are more than likely to have been "trending" once that became a news story and, not for the first time today, perhaps I've found another load of candidates for sensitivity training courses...

And then there's the other slightly worrying possible outcome of this ridiculous policy rethink, because nobody ever, ever tried to do something after seeing it on a screen did they...? All of those campaigns against violence on television were fundamentally flawed because no child ever thumped another after watching a superhero punch someone in a film did they...?

Sadly, unfortunately, they did... Just as they've tried to "fly" off garage roofs, so I now expect thousands of YouTube videos of the executions of hamsters and budgies and mice to start appearing, and, on top of all that wretched animal suffering, which is bad enough in itself, as well as the indignity and suffering of the victims being shown in those original videos,  they'll also no doubt be yet another campaign of "moral outrage" from our "much-loved" guardians in both the press and parliament, all of which could be avoided if someone at FizzBok went for some much-needed sensitivity training...

Mark my words: The world truly is going to hell in a tumbril...

Extract from an article on the BBC News Website, 23rd of October 2013:

FACEBOOK MAKES U-TURN OVER DECAPITATION VIDEO CLIP

"First, when we review content that is reported to us, we will take a more holistic look at the context surrounding a violent image or video, and will remove content that celebrates violence," it said.

"Second, we will consider whether the person posting the content is sharing it responsibly, such as accompanying the video or image with a warning and sharing it with an age-appropriate audience.

"Based on these enhanced standards, we have re-examined recent reports of graphic content and have concluded that this content improperly and irresponsibly glorifies violence. For this reason, we have removed it."

The announcement follows a series of flip-flops by the company.

On May 1, when questioned about death clips being shared on the site, the firm told the BBC that its users had the right to depict the "world in which we live".

"We will remove instances of these videos that are reported to us while we evaluate our policy and approach to this type of content," it declared.However, less than two hours after the BBC published an interview with one of the firm's safety advisers - who raised concerns about the harm this could cause teenagers - it announced a change of tack.

The company promised at the time to announce its decision when the review was completed.

But at the start of this week the BBC was contacted by one of the social network's members who had complained about a clip uploaded on 16 October, which the company was refusing to take down.

"The video shows a woman having her head cut off by a man in a mask," the user wrote.

"She is alive when this happens. Looking at the comments a load of people have reported this to Facebook and had the same reply."

An Australian police force was among those who had complained. It said it had been told by Facebook's moderators that the video "did not violate our community standard on graphic violence".

When questioned, a spokeswoman for Facebook confirmed that the ban had indeed been dropped and that the company had introduced a new rule: such material could be posted and shared on the site so long as the original post did not celebrate or encourage the actions depicted.

Full article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24635498

GRANDAD'S GRAND DESIGNS (PHOTOBLOG)

In the 1950s, my grandfather had the first of the two houses which he had built in his lifetime constructed at Green Lane in Hyde, Cheshire. This house was called "The Hawthorns" and they lived there until it was sold in 1974 when I was about ten years old.

My grandparents then moved into a flat in John Grundy House for nearly two years whilst the second house he built, a split-level retirement bungalow, was being built elsewhere in Hyde, but sadly, so far at least, I've not yet found any of the pictures he may have taken during that build, which he completed in 1976, and where he lived with my grandmother until his death in 1980.

My grandmother remained in that house until she sold it and moved into a retirement apartment in Stockport in 1989.

These pictures, taken as that original build of "The Hawthorns" progressed, resurfaced recently as we were going through mum's possessions after she died, and I hope you find them as fascinating as I do.

ANOTHER LOST WEEKEND

The first weekend after my mother's funeral was not spent, as you might have expected, in going through her stuff and sorting it all out, but was instead spent in the Lake District.

This was a break we'd booked several weeks earlier in the anticipation that we might be in need of a bit of a breath of fresh air, given that, at that time, our schedule of daily hospital visiting looked as if it might be pretty endless.

Ah well, you live, you learn.

The Beloved was intensely worried that I might suffer a catastrophic "slump" after the continuous rigours of having to "keep going" over the last couple of weeks, as well as during the long months leading up to this, and we really considered that cancellation of our 48 hour getaway might have been the best option, but I maintained that fresh air and some different scenery might help to give us a little perspective and so, late on Friday afternoon, we threw a couple of bags in the car and headed north, after stopping briefly to drop off the plates we'd borrowed from the church in our futile attempt to find another home for the mountains of leftover food from after the funeral.

We then had a few surprise meetings with familiar faces from the funeral as we stopped at mum's local Tesco, because when you are part of a community like she was, you do kind of run into people. This has made me realise how out of touch I have become in recent years and may yet prove to be the touchstone in my recuperation from my own isolation. Indeed, I may have to reconsider my position on "joining things..."

Out of great hardship, some good may yet come.

The traffic getting out of Manchester on that Friday evening was dreadful, and it was three hours after leaving the house before we arrived at, er, Preston, but after that it got easier and, despite a wobbly moment when we hit a storm on that dark stretch of motorway just after the South Lakes exit as you head on up towards Penrith, and another freaky time negotiating the roadworks on the road towards Keswick, we arrived pretty much at the time we'd said we would, dropped our bags off in the room at the B&B, and headed off to the pub whilst they were still serving food.

After that we sauntered back and watched TV in the room until Ken Russell's self-indulgence in "Tommy" finally sent us to sleep.

Ah yes. We wild types. Hanging around in the pub until nine o'clock and indulging ourselves by having that second pint, just because we could...

After the "breakfast" part of the overnight B&B experience we did as we always do when in those parts and, whilst admiring the autumn colour and marvelling at the height and speed of flow of the river, strolled into Keswick to mooch around the shops, have a look around the market, and have a coffee in "Temporary Measure", our very favourite little coffee shop.

After that, we returned with our goodies and got into the car and spent some time trying to park in Ambleside before heading over to Zeffirelli's for a latish lunch, because we're nothing if not creatures of both habit and loyalty.

We were both strangely weary, though, perhaps because we've been through a lot recently, and so, after more retail therapy, we returned to Keswick for a bit of a doze and it was only the prospect of the "Lite Bites" menu in the pub that made us venture out into the rain once again where, shockingly, I had another two-pint evening...

Doctor Dougie would be appalled at my profligacy with my weekly quota, but there you go. I kind of think that it evens out, given how much I've had to avoid the stuff in recent months just in case the phone should ring...

After an extra hour in bed, Sunday brought another excellent breakfast and another sad departure, as well as the beginnings of what might turn out to be the storm of the year. I'd already read that it was the anniversary of the "Royal Charter" disaster, and the coincidental follow-up rescue one hundred years and a day later, so perhaps we all ought to expect a bit of wild weather over the last weekend in October.

We returned to "Temporary Measure" and went to Booths for some foodstuffs before heading south for a moody mooch around the Lakeland shop and a failed attempt at finding the Dodo exhibition in Kendal, before joining the motorway and heading home again, arriving just before the heavens opened and all the power went off for a few hours.

So, almost exactly 48 hours after we left the house, we arrived back there, convinced that the entire adventure had passed in the blink of an eye, and then I even got to do one of those "safely home" phone calls that my mother always insisted upon, although this time to my sister who had survived an interesting weekend herself, and told me that our spontaneous "family group hug" in the church during the service had been the talk of the neighbourhood, which brought a slight tear to the eye...

You might, of course, think that spending a weekend in the Lakes just to go shopping is a bit of a waste, when there's all that walking and climbing to be done, but, do you know what, I think that it did the world of good...

WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND

Family memories have, rather naturally I suppose, been tumbling out of us during this past couple of weeks. From the unpleasant to the bizarre, and the happy and the sad, they've been pouring out to a degree that I think has even surprised us, given how "complicated" the various relationships within the family have managed to get over the past couple of decades.

There have been a few surprises along the way, too, chiefly discovered from sorting through the "stuff" that my mother left behind in the drawers and behind the doors of the various bits of furniture in her last home. All those "Teaching English as a Foreign Language" notes and exercises; All those snapshots from outings and holidays which I'd forgotten her even going on; Those menus from cruise ships; All those old Christmas cards so carefully put away for not looking at ever again.

Then there were the more chronologically distant objects, the ones from generations once or even twice removed. Like the little keepsake box which my Grandmother set aside containing a sprig of heather from my mother's bouquet, and a napkin from some long forgotten Golden Wedding in 1949, or those little autograph books with scribbles made nearly a hundred years ago now by people I never knew.

Then there were my Grandfather's holiday diaries which will hopefully finally make sense out of some of those boxes of slides from holidays on cruise ships which were inexplicably filed away only by the name of the ship leaving me with just a lot of puzzling landscape views of places which really could have been anywhere.

I have rarely thought about my Grandparents in recent years. They've been gone a long time and most of the memories were not, to be honest, all that fond, but they've resurfaced over the past couple of weeks and I've actually found them far more interesting than I, at least, ever thought I would, as we have thought about the life of their only daughter and what, if anything, it all meant.

Some might say that none of us ever really get to know what any of it means, just as we can never wholly know another person no matter how close to them we are, and some will even tell you that all of our lives means nothing much at all...

One of those people might even have been me, as I've pontificated from time to time, but as I've never really been much of a one for researching "family history" finding all of that stuff quite so fascinating has rather come as something of a surprise.

But what we leave behind sometimes defines us in ways that we ourselves might never understand. We might think ourselves to be the loveliest human being who ever lived, but there's probably more than one person out there who remembers us as being a bit of an old git, even if it's just the cashier who you were grumpy with on a wet Monday morning, a wretched moment which you've perhaps regretted ever since whenever it comes to mind.

So, after we've gone, what is it that remains of us?

What are the footprints in the sand that a life leaves behind it?

Sometimes I think that it might even surprise the most cynical of us to find out how much someone can be still touching the lives of others so long after breathing their last.

There are always those memories, of course, stored in the minds of those who once met us, and they will last for as long as those lives are being lived, and those memories can be passed on through the generations, but there's always a diminishing sense of what the actual person was really like, even in this age where every tiny event is photographed and recorded far more than it ever used to be. Unlike those pre-technological generations, we can record voices, take movies and photographs, and have the most intimate thoughts of even the most lowly of us, which is something that we still can't know for certain about even those giants of history; A king like Henry VIII might have been the most notable figure of his age, but we can not say for certain what really looked or sounded like, but we can for just about anyone nowadays, although those "saved messages" on answering services do tend to vanish after just thirty days...

Pictures in photograph albums seem to be getting a little bit old-fashioned now, but they can still trigger the strongest of memories although there comes with that the occasional surprise. In the middle of my grandmother's box of photographs, we found this photograph of a respectable looking gentleman reading the daily newspapers of a long-forgotten ordinary day in the life and we're not exactly sure who he was, although it's a fair bet that he was actually one or other of our great-grandparents, there's nothing written on the back of the picture to confirm this and we'll have to dig a little bit deeper into the archives to find out for sure.

He might, of course, just be a random gentleman sitting on a bench and reading the papers, but it's quite interesting nevertheless, and put us in mind of a Graham Greene novel for no particularly good reason.

Sometimes it's just the stuff which we leave behind that most defines us to others, even though, of course, most of it really is just "stuff" that may mean a lot to us, but might actually mean very little to those tasked with getting rid of it after you've gone.

We did feel very guilty about recycling the cards sent to both my grandmother and mother after the funerals of their respective spouses, our grandfather and father, especially as they had been so lovingly retained for all those years, but, in the end they were just the stuff and clutter and sympathetic signatures of lost generations which couldn't really mean all that much to us, although, of course, we kept the letters.

And when it comes to what's been left behind, tucked inside a drawer, tied with a ribbon, were the love letters written all those years ago between my mum and dad, and it was a very difficult decision to decide quite what to do with those more intimate thoughts written before either of us was even a twinkle.

I think they've been preserved, and I hope that they'll be treasured. Reading them might just help us to understand them better, too, and pass their memory on again to at least one more generation, even if it seems as if it's perhaps not quite right to actually read such intimate thoughts that they shared between them so very long ago.

At least not yet...

THINKING TIME

I'm in a curious position of having too much time to think and not enough time to think and finding that I can't think and wanting to think about other things all at the same time...

Where do those oh-so familiar roads actually go to...?

Why can't I remember anything...?

So tired...

The weariness is a peculiar thing to me. I mean, I know that I was exhausted after several months of worry and hospital visiting, but when that was over it was replaced by the weariness connected with "having to do stuff" and the weariness of running around "actually dealing with stuff" and, of course, the weariness which comes from not sleeping, but that's nothing to the leaden-footed weariness that can suddenly strike you down out of the blue from actually grieving...

That's perhaps the most exhausting of all...

Meanwhile, when I took the Beloved to the station so that she could get back to work after her sterling services over the past few days in keeping me on my feet and on top of the whole ruddy administration of this bereavement thing, I realised that I was actually properly alone for the first time since the proverbial "it" had happened and that was a very odd feeling, especially as some work-related problems had cropped up in my absence and I had to go and deal with them before stirring myself for the long trek back to mum's flat once again to meet with my sister and head off to meet the solicitor...

But the tiredness itself can be exhausting.

I lie awake thinking that I really want to sleep and then look ahead to the next seven days and wonder whether there'll ever be any time to sleep at all, what with all that we've still got to do, and how little it seems that we've done already.

I'll have to get back to work, but there's still so many appointments to be made, so much paperwork to fill in, so many phone calls to make, as well as the thousand and one other little things to do involving the living of your own life, so it looks as if the only day I'll get to sleep during is the one day upon which I definitely mustn't sleep.

And even when I am back at my desk, the messages and phone calls come in dragging me away again to sign for things like releasing remains for scattering, or taking oaths of something or other, or just juggling the fallout from the latest calamity to befall those carefully made plans of ours.

Even the relaxing break we've booked for ourselves, that much needed "breath of fresh air" in a landscape far away enough to help give us some perspective will require me to get up early for breakfast after probably not sleeping all that well in an unfamiliar bed.

Sleep, my old friend, I do remember you.

Will you not come and pay me a visit sometime...?

SATURDAY MORNING, ONE WEEK AGO

I woke very early on the first Saturday after my mother died, that strange weekend which sat after her passing but before the funeral, and, because it had understandably been a very busy week, I decided that I would spend a couple of the wee small hours scanning some of the photographs that my sister and I had been looking through because the Minister had suggested that it might be nice to have one or two of them displayed on the screen in the church on the day of the funeral.

Of course, as "little jobs" go, this took rather longer than I had anticipated and it was also very difficult to reduce a life down to a couple of dozen pictures, but I hoped that the twenty or so I did eventually choose might serve, and I also hoped that she might have approved of at least some of the choices.

I selected a few of her growing up, when she was obviously quite a little glamour-boots, a selection from her wedding and family life, a cluster of holiday snaps, and a small selection of ones from her life in the church, which I hoped would seem appealing to those attending the service and cover the most important aspects of her life.

After that, as also requested by the Minister, I tried my best to "compose" a few lines which might have seemed appropriate, but, perhaps surprisingly to anyone who things of me as a minor-league word-wrangler, I did rather struggle with that, and instead just emailed a few important nuggets with the hope that he'd be able to conjure up the "right" words using those as a guide, alongside any other morsels he'd plucked from our conversations and with members of his congregation, and also from the thoughts which my sister also forwarded on to him.

And so, for the rest of the world, life went on, and more and more of the tiny steps which needed to be taken on the journey to the inevitable memorial service were completed and, in the best traditions of that wartime which my mother and all of her generation went through, we kept calm and carried on.

Despite extreme provocation from the fates because, interestingly, since I'd left my sister at mum's flat on the Friday evening, she'd managed to have a car accident which was, mercifully, not a serious one, and didn't leave us having to deal with a double tragedy, but it was rather the icing on the cake of a particularly dreadful week for my family...

STRANGE DAYS INDEED

These past few days really have been strange days indeed as my sister and I, with a little help from our friends, have been sorting through the many and varied things with which my mother chose to surround herself throughout the last decade of her life in that little flat she used to live in.

Many of the things that were so important to her, thousands of photographic memories from her own adventures as well as those of her parents and even generations before that, and little keepsakes from long-forgotten "big nights out" were carefully preserved and, perhaps, forgotten about and placed in drawers packed full of such things that might not have meant much to anyone else, but gave her comfort and security as the light began to fade.

Some of the things have been easily disposed of. The dozens of sympathy cards sent after my grandfather died, carefully saved by first my grandmother, and then retained by my mother have had to be let go. Fleeting greetings from people we never knew and mostly now long-gone themselves which once meant so much but which now mean little to those who survive, and, in the end, after some debate, they were reluctantly recycled.

The photographs were more tricky. Looking through them was, of course, a job that needed doing in preparation for the services that needed to be held, and the many pictures of my mother's life, stretching across eight decades or more, have become endlessly fascinating and confusing in almost equal measure.

There are spectacularly beautiful and interesting images from times long ago which continue to fascinate me. The vehicles, the clothing and the landscapes from those lost worlds will no doubt inspire further words to pour out from me as the months go by, even though many of the faces and the occasions will remain a mystery. So many pictures taken at long-forgotten weddings of people I never knew and never will, but each of them fascinating in their own way and worthy of further research.

Going through the family albums has been more difficult. A thousand memories of views seen on holidays we never went on can be confusing, but the ones including actual people themselves, in scenes sometimes featuring ourselves, can be both intriguing and heart-rending at the same time, but seeing those pictures of mum in better days is already helping to make those final, gruelling months seem less significant than they had been, and the softer, happier images are starting already to blur the memories of those savage last days which seemed likely to be so deeply etched into my soul just a week ago.

Now the beautiful, glamorous version of my mother is starting to replace the broken figure we saw so much of during the past year or so, and that's a good thing to discover, although that in itself can bring its own heartbreak as the tragedy that each of us faces as we get older and our dreams begin to fade along with our bodies becomes so starkly apparent.

We have, of course, had to go through the rather more heartbreaking tasks of sorting out clothes and shoes, and deciding about what should be done with them all, but the fact that we were able to attempt this sad task together was a good thing and brought moments of jollity to the sadness when some of the more alarming outfits of yesteryear resurfaced.

Most peculiar, Mama...

Other thoughts and memories drift fleetingly by. The fact that, during that long decade called the 1990s which I spent alone in the world, the only person that I could always rely on to send me a birthday card, or to buy me a Christmas present was my mother has been a sharp reminder that I need to let go of the more brutal recollections of more recent times.

After all, when only one person seems to actually give a damn about whether you live or die, it's not really all that nice a thing to do to ignore and belittle their worry and just plod on with believing that you're best coping with everything by yourself, and just keep on going, but that's just how I was.

And that peculiar feeling that I got the other day, that strange moment when I stopped short and remembered that there was once a time when only one person seemed to care whether I got a hot meal or a cup of tea, has been in interesting memory to have resurface at a time like this.

Strange days indeed...

NEWSPAPER NOTICES & ORDER OF SERVICE

Manchester Evening News, 22/10/13

Stockport Express, 23/10/13
(a.k.a. Holmes)

PHOTOBLOG - MY MUM

The Church Minister suggested that we choose a few photographs to be displayed upon a screen at the Church before* the funeral. These are the ones I selected, and I hope that the people who knew her approved of the choices.

*actually, as it turned out, during...

A HAPPIER DAY

Mum's funeral is going to be held at 2.00pm today and it was only after all of the arrangements had been made that I remembered that today is also the anniversary of the day that my father passed away.

This is a picture of them both taken on a far happier day nearly sixty years ago.

WORK SENT FLOWERS

We arrived home on the Thursday evening, after a long day of meetings with the solicitor and the church minister ticking boxes and moving the machinery ever-so-slightly forward again to find a huge cardboard box sitting on the doorstep which surprised me because I never, ever get unexpected parcels of any kind (well, not for a very long time anyway...).

It contained a special delivery of flowers from my workplace which was a lovely thought and very much appreciated.

Even a cynical old goat like me can sometimes be brought up short by the general kindness of people and the past few days have certainly opened me up to the realisation of that because everyone whom we have telephoned to deal with another facet of the complexity of the mountains of paperwork and forms which seem to have appeared lately has been terribly kind and understanding whenever you explain what it is that you are calling about.

I now appear to have acquired some "special duties" in the eyes of the legal profession by being made the executor of my mother's estate, even though I am one of those people who really, really despises having to deal with any paperwork of any kind whatsoever, as I was reminded that same evening when I opened the mail and found that I'd forgotten to deal with some vital piece of paper involving the transfer of my pension.

Or something...

Considering that I have been finding several hours a week to visit mum in hospital over the past few months, finding a couple of hours a week to sit down and scan documents and compose the odd letter or email shouldn't be the most taxing of tasks, but I know that my mind will automatically reset itself to "panic mode" whenever it has to be done, perhaps because of the general fear of getting something "wrong" or forgetting something "vital" which seems to trouble me whenever I have a form to fill in and a pen in my hand.

The wee small hours have currently become the time when I rattle out the various emails in response to the kind words and thoughts, as well as the more mundane matters. It seems to be the time of day when I am both the most focussed, but also, ironically, the widest awake. I suspect that my emails being timed at 5.15am or some other Godawful time might bewilder some, but it appears to be working, even if it is to the detriment of other, more enjoyable, writings.

It also helps to take my mind off the thing that has woken me up in the first place, of course...

LIFE'S EPILOGUE

Until you have to deal with it yourself, you'll never believe how simply exhausting the process of dying can be...

Setting aside those long, dark nights where you lie awake thinking of all of the things that you're going to have to do, which immediately follow all of those other long, dark nights when you were worrying about what was going to happen, you then find yourself running around making telephone calls and booking appointments and dealing with very understanding and sympathetic administrators as you have to collect this certificate so you can make that appointment with the Registrar so that you can finally give that paperwork to the Undertaker and make another appointment with the Solicitor whilst trying to arrange a meeting with the Minister to talk about the actual Service of Thanksgiving which may (or may not) immediately follow the interment and fielding calls from the carers and arranging for the emergency call equipment to be collected and what are we going to do about all of the other equipment and do we need to contact an Estate Agent...?

And that's just day one, and you still haven't had a moment to make all those personal calls to friends that you know that you really should be doing. then there's that constant, terrible feeling that you might have done something "wrongly" or forgotten about something vitally important altogether...

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, you suddenly think about Electricity companies, and Water Boards, and Pension Providers, and Her Majesty's Government, all of whom also need to be notified, and everyone seems to be talking about "additional expenses" at a time when you're still trying to get around to freezing the one bank account that actually has any "spare" cash in it.

Mum always prided herself upon being organised and spent years telling us that we'd only have to "make one phone call" which was, of course, essentially true, but the snowball effect of that one phone call, coupled with the fact that my "social calendar" for the following week rapidly filled up with various meetings and appointments, basically chewed up the rest of that week.

And in the middle of all this activity and practicality and just "carrying on", all of which I begin to suspect were devised by some devious administrative master-planner to help you get through the whole dreadful business, where is the time for quiet reflection and grieving for your loss...? For just taking a moment and remembering why it is that you're doing all this and who it is that you're doing it for...?

That, it seems, is what the darkest hours, just before the dawn were designed for. Those times when you're left alone with your own thoughts and remember the person-shaped hole that has so suddenly appeared in your life, those brutal few hours when it all washes over you again and you do your very best to keep your upper lip as stiff as possible and try not to get simply overwhelmed by everything.

Like I said...

Exhausting.

"MY MUM DIED"

“My mum died”

Three little words which say so much and yet say absolutely nothing at all to anyone who didn’t know her.

But, the morning after it happened, I found myself unable to sleep in those darkest hours just before the dawn breaks, and, as ever, I was drawn to the keyboard in order to try and make some sense of the incomprehensible, because I simply didn’t know what else to do.

I mean, there really is so much that needs to be done but I really didn’t know quite where to begin, but the list that was compiling itself in my mind was keeping me awake when I ought to have been grieving and getting used to the idea that the events which unfolded in front of my eyes in that hospital room yesterday evening actually occurred.

So here I sat.

As the sun rose on that first dawn of the rest of our lives, I’d already typed out what was probably the final chapter of the ongoing saga of her last illness which I’d been putting down in words to help me to make sense of it, and I was still wondering whether I should even have done that, if I’m being totally honest.

Is it too personal…? Too raw…? Too soon…?

I don’t know how “other people” cope with such events, I just know that this is how I’m choosing to cope with it, even though I’m really not sure that I should. But then, that’s the problem. Even though I’ve managed to reach the grand old age of forty-nine, I still don’t seem to know anything very much about anything, other than the slightly alarming fact that I’m going to have to get used to being an orphan at this stupidly late age.

Days like these, eh...? Days like these...

The world was already a very different place for me that day, but the world in general is also a very different world these days to what it once was. I decided to try and explain to the world what was going on and why I’d fallen so suddenly silent, so I posted a picture which I had hoped would self-explanatory onto Facebook, and I posted those three little words onto Twitter because I thought that I ought to.

But now I wonder…

Is that the “right” thing to do? Is there any “dignity” in doing such a thing? I mean, I always use written words to best explain how I’m feeling (“It’s cheaper than therapy!” the Beloved says) but there are times when it seems inappropriate or perhaps even slightly crass to do so.

I just don’t know any more.

I still need to process what her life and all of its experiences and hopes and dreams and disappointments and what they added up to actually meant, and how best to reflect upon them. I hope that she was happy, although I suspect for quite a lot of the time, certainly in recent years, she wasn’t, which seems to be a bit of a shame, especially, I suppose if you’d ever known her when she was that little princess so full of hope and potential to do the great things that life, inevitably, took away from her.

Few of the people who might read such things as I tend to pour out ever knew my mother, and not many of them even know me, but surely, for the unfeeling universe, the simplest explanation is usually the best and some kind of explanation of a sudden disappearance from the world is occasionally necessary, even if there’s no reason to embellish it with the kind of self-serving “look at me everyone!” nonsenses which you sometimes see on those websites.

It is, after all, just a simple statement of the very sad facts which are currently ripping my soul apart whenever I remember and have to think about them too much. How other people choose to read them, or put their own interpretations upon them should not, for the moment at least, be my concern.

The people who needed to know, and “shouldn’t find out that way” will already know, or else they most probably won’t be people who read my humble outpourings anyway, and I need to find my own way through this bewildering maze of difficulties and emotions in the best way I can and, perhaps, in the only way I know how to.

Whether it’s right or wrong to do so, I suppose, I’ll just have to let other people decide. Perhaps I am just a crass imbecile who doesn’t understand the subtleties of life but, you know, at the time of writing them, it was only just over twelve hours since my mum died, and wasn’t yet sure how or what to think about that, so pardon me if my methodology seems a little strange to you, but, well…

My mum died.

TRANSITIONS

(A few random thoughts which occurred to me as we sat on a hospital ward watching and waiting for the inevitable end...)

Looking at her now
It's hard to believe
But once upon a time

There was a princess.

A life unravelling

A life unfolding

A life...

Ending.

All those people
Still alive
Living their lives

So damned strange.

All those plans
All those thoughts
All those dreams

They come to this.

The strange transition
From something living
To something you place

Under a stone.

The air in a room
Seems thicker somehow
From all those intakes of breath

And walking on eggshells.

But my little world
It already seems
So much smaller today

Diminished.

Afterwards everyone it seems

Has a story to tell

About their own lives and when

It happened to them.

LONG, DARK NIGHT... (13)

MONDAY, OCTOBER 14th, 2013

I did not sleep well. In fact, for once, perhaps the "long, dark night" was mine and not my mother's, but only briefly, because my night's "sleep" was lousy. I woke up utterly shattered but unable to get back to sleep in the "wee small hours" fretting about various things after having decided that I would be better to return to working from home for at least today, given that I had already been summoned to a discussion with a doctor during afternoon visiting today to discuss the best approach to making mum "comfortable" in the face of several aspects of her body breaking down in conflicting ways.

Meanwhile, I think that the exhaustion and the anxiety are starting to catch up with me... I don't feel capable of thinking any longer and I appear to be coming out with sympathetic breathing difficulties and a lack of appetite which can only be down to how things currently are...

Sometimes, perhaps when I'm working or watching a bit of telly, just for a moment, I actually manage to forget, but then I remember again and that somehow seems far worse. The thing is that I don't know how to do this any more, it seems to have been going on forever, but somehow you don't want it to stop because of what stopping will actually mean. I find that, for once, I want to have a conversation about it all with my mother but, well, that seems impossible now...

The call came around noon. It was the perhaps scarily ebullient Ward Sister from Sunday evening asking when I would be available to talk to a doctor. I said "When do you want me there?" and she replied "Now, preferably" pointing out that mum had "got worse" during the morning. With a few abstract mutterings about whether or not it's easy to find a parking space at the hospital at "this time of day" I pretty much dropped everything - not even waiting for the file that I was sending to finish uploading - and drove over there, not really knowing whether mum had already gone and wondering whether, if that was the case, they were not able to say so over the phone.

Sitting in the car park half an hour or so later, I found myself taking deep breaths and trying to find the courage to go in, whilst procrastinating furiously by sending a couple of Text Messages to let certain people know what was happening, and fumbling for change for the parking meters. Then, there was nothing else to do but to head inside and see what awaited me.

I managed to stand in the doorway of mum's room - bed number 23 - and she seemed to be still breathing with an oxygen mask on and the loud, endless hiss of the gases which would provide the soundtrack to the entire afternoon. Before I could ask whether it was okay to go in, though, the doctor whisked me away to the "Relatives Room" for a talk about mum and how she'd "bounced back" from the internal bleeding she'd had a couple of weeks ago, but how she now had two conflicting conditions as she had suffered heart failure "a some point" over the weekend and that fluid would build up in her lungs if they thinned her blood enough to treat that, which were conditions that they probably couldn't cure, and that it might be best to stop doing the invasive blood and other  tests and essentially "withdraw treatment" and make mum as "comfortable" as they could and use "pathways" drugs to manage her pain and distress levels over the "next few days..." although, perhaps thankfully, it never actually came to that.

He probably said a lot else, too, but I didn't take a lot of it in, as I was starting to get pretty upset, so he left me alone to gather my thoughts and I made one of those telephone calls that nobody ever wants to have to make. Mine was to my sister, although I struggled to get the words out and we ended up communicating by Mutually Supportive Text Messages for much of the rest of the exchange.

As I was sitting there, another doctor popped her head around the door, seeking out a different set of relatives, which only goes to show that, even in the middle of your own personal crises, life goes on, and other people can find themselves in much the same boat.

Happily, my Beloved joined me shortly after I went to mum's bedside, and we were able to support each other through that long, final afternoon. The staff were lovely and very supportive - offering cups of tea and saying it was okay for us to go and have a sandwich in the cafe -  as we mostly just sat there watching mum sleeping very deeply whilst wearing that oxygen mask, and noticing that her breathing got increasingly a little more shallow as time passed by. Mostly, of course, we were there in case she suddenly woke up and needed someone to be there, but otherwise it was just the faintly surreal experience of watching someone sleep for several hours.

At about 4.40pm, she seemed to be fighting for breath and the doctor returned for another chat, suggesting that he might want to switch mum onto just a nasal tube for her oxygen, but, as the Ward Sister went off shift about an hour after that,  she explained how the pathway drug system would work if required and explained that she disagreed about the oxygen situation and they had discussed it and decided to leave things be.

Mum's Church Minister arrived at about 5.30pm and we gave him a few minutes to talk to mum privately before having a little chat with him ourselves about my sister's situation and whether mum might hang on another day to give her the time to get here, but that wasn't to be.

Instead, after the beloved had returned from a hunt for the sandwiches which she thought we might need over the course of the potentially long night ahead, I returned to the bedside where, since the nurses had turned mum over at about 6.00pm, her breathing had become much worse and, despite her eyes being open, she didn't seem to see me.

But I talked to her, and told her that everything was alright, and a hundred and one other things that I'm struggling to remember now and, at about 6.20pm on the 14th of October, 2013, she appeared, peacefully and without ever waking up, to just stop breathing, and I stroked her hair for a couple of minutes before trying to find a nurse who did, indeed, confirm what I already knew.

I got the Beloved to make the call to my sister because I was struggling to get any words out again, and didn't want to leave mum "alone" if that's not too weird an idea, but the staff told us to take as long as we liked to talk and be there, which I did, until, emerging from the room and making a significant nod towards one of the members of staff that we'd mostly been dealing with, they finally felt that they could intrude upon our privacy and began the process of whatever it is that they do, and I failed to successfully answer many of their important, sensitive questions.

In the end, because there was little else to do, we left with what I'm still hoping didn't seem like indecent haste, and I went home to make just one phone call - again to my sister - before deciding that I was really so very tired that I needed to at least try to sleep.

LONG, DARK NIGHT... (12)

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13th, 2013

Sometimes Sunday afternoon is all about sitting in a car park and trying not to weep.

It began innocuously enough with a failed attempt at fitting the extra nick-nacks to a wardrobe when I found out that the whatnots which we'd driven all the way to the flatpack furniture store to get yesterday were the wrong whatnots, and so we braved the rains and the storms and queued up again to get what were hopefully the correct doohickeys this time.

So far, so Sunday...

We returned home to grab a bite to eat and then, sighing deeply with the kind of sigh born out of reluctance that only someone going through a similar experience could possibly understand, we headed once again to the hospital for afternoon visiting.

I arrived and was immediately mugged by the invisible man in that one of my pound coins for the parking machine seemed to be pulled from my hand as I tried to put it into the coin slot, and vanished into mid air, never to be found. Not by me at any rate, despite looking around for it everywhere. This was strangeness indeed, and did at least give me something else to think about as we trudged wearily up to the ward again.

The staff were very concerned about how pale my mother was, and that she wasn't eating again, and informed me that a doctor was on the way as they took mum's blood pressure and temperature for the thousandth time. When we got in the room ourselves, trying to avoid the "wandering old man" who seemed displeased that he was being denied access to these "infection control" rooms, mum was now on an oxygen tube but sleeping mostly, and trying to talk but not really succeeding. Chats with the nurses maintained the sense that mum was "very poorly" and attempts to put a nebuliser face mask on mum's mouth and nose were having limited success because she kept on removing it, so much so that the nurse told me how to switch it off if mum removed it again and she wasn't in the room.

Eventually, however, after the usual calls for assistance with her ablutions, mum dozed off again and seemed calm enough for us to leave again, with me getting quite emotional and wondering whether this would be the last time, which is how I ended up in that car park, and making a phone call to my sister in order to just try and hold things together.

We returned in the evening after the doctor had been "again" and my conversation with a very upbeat Ward Sister informed me that mum was "very poorly" when I followed her out of mum's room and tried to get her to give me as frank an answer as she could.

It had been, she said, a difficult afternoon for my mum.

Another junior doctor came to mum's bedside and we had a very frank discussion about her prospects, with the proviso that any decisions about how to manage her condition would have to be passed up the chain of responsibility to the consultant.

Basically, though, they are struggling to find any veins to put intravenous lines into, and have to consider using "sub-cut" canulas which don't sound pleasant, but mum's arms now swell up whenever they try to put a line in. Mum is also struggling to swallow, and the fluids that they need to put in to stop the kidneys from failing put extra pressure on mum's failing heart and lungs, so they're rather stuck with trying to decide which of her now many conditions to treat and how best to make mum "comfortable" as it appears that the inevitable is fast approaching...

I was able to make mum smile briefly, though, in one of her rare moments of wakefulness, when, overhearing another - possibly dementia - patient screaming at the staff repeatedly to "Go away!" I was able to say to mum "You see? You're still not the patient who's the most trouble on this ward..." before she dozed off again.

Thankfully, she isn't awake for most of the stuff going on around her and, whilst the staff checked that they definitely had all of my emergency numbers, we discussed the fact that the consultant would be seeing mum on Monday morning and that a doctor "would be made available" for me to talk to during afternoon visiting that afternoon to discuss the best ways to make mum "comfortable..."

Euphemisms aside, we really are starting to believe that this might be "it" and I conveyed my thoughts upon this to my sister when I got home, but I didn't have the "stiff whisky" that one of the nurses suggested that I ought to have, simply because there was still a chance that I may have to drive to the hospital at any time following the dreaded ring of a telephone...