I don't want to talk about it as such, just want to write. I'm sorry if it's all a load of bollocks.
She had secondary breast cancer of the liver. She was diagnosed on 1st February after a month of abdominal pain and loss of appetite. At Christmas she thought she'd just put on weight and eaten too much but she went to her doctor in the middle of January and the nurse practitioner referred her for an immediate liver and abdominal scan, which showed that she had several tumours in her liver and that her liver was occupying almost all of her abdominal cavity, thus crushing the rest of the vital organs in there and causing her pain. She was started on chemotherapy on 7th February with three weeks of taking the drugs and one week off. On Thursday she went for a check up at the hospital with my sister and sis phoned in the afternoon to say that she'd been kept in as she'd deteriorated so much since she was first diagnosed. I was at work when sis phoned and to be honest what she was saying went in one ear and out the other. All I heard were the words 'hospice', 'morphine' and 'Macmillan nurse'. DS, DP and I drove down on Friday afternoon and we went straight to the hospital. As soon as mum saw DS her face lit up, even if he was hesitant to touch her to start with as she looked very poorly. She was saying things she wouldn't normally say, things about the other women in the ward that she wouldn't normally have said, but I guess she just didn't care by that stage. We left her on Friday night very tired and obviously very poorly but she was still the same mum. My last words to her were 'I love you'.
We stayed in a hotel on Friday night and on Saturday morning I got a call on my mobile from the hospital. When the nurse first said she was calling from Barnes ward I expected her to say that mum had taken a turn for the worst and to come now or that she'd been taken to the intensive care unit. When she said that mum had passed away I didn't believe it. I was certain they'd got the wrong woman, that they'd mistaken my mum for someone else. I phoned sis and through the hysterical tears somehow managed to tell her that mum had died. Sis, her partner and I drove to the hospital, breaking several speed limits along the way. It was 7.30am and the roads were quiet.
Nothing can prepare you for how someone looks when they're dead. Mum was already turning yellow through her condition. The bedsheet was pulled up to her neck and she had a pink tulip on her pillow from the bunch that DS took for her the previous night. She was an awful purple and yellow colour, stiff, cold, clammy and just not mum. Her ears were deep purple and her cheeks were turning purple. Her lips were dark and sunken into her mouth like she disapproved of something. Sis stroked her head and I held her hand, neither of us quite believing that it had happened so quickly. We were in no doubt that mum's condition was a 'when', not an 'if', we just didn't expect it to be so quickly. When the nurse phoned to tell me she'd died I asked what had happened and the nurse said that mum had been a bit unwell in the night and when she'd gone to check on mum at 7am she found her unresponsive and started CPR, and it was decided 10 minutes later that there was nothing more they could do. Sis asked the same nurse at the hospital what she meant by mum being unwell. The nurse said that mum had gotten up to go to the toilet at about 6am and fallen, but they weren't sure if she'd fainted or tripped, but that they put her back to bed and given her some pain relief.
We're all taking comfort from the fact that mum died peacefully in her sleep, though I've got questions going round in my head asking why the nurse didn't call us when mum fell at 6am, and how someone can be up and about at 6am and dead an hour later. The berevement service at the hospital are getting the nurse on duty to phone me and hopefully answer the questions going round in my head. Mum's passing was inevitable, and she was very very ill, though I guess I didn't realise just how ill she was. Sis and I both wanted to be with her when she died, although mum has talked on several occasions about death, saying that it's an inevitability that comes to us all and that it's something we have to do alone, even if we're surrounded by our loved ones. No one can come back and tell you what it's like, what to do, what to say.
I read in the news this morning about that horrific car crash in Gloucester over the weekend and also the girl who was murdered in Goa and I think to myself that at least we got to say goodbye to mum, whereas the loved ones of some people who died over the weekend didn't get even that, coupled with knowing that they died a violent death. That's horrific and my heart goes out to people to whom that has happened.
There's a poem I want to be included on the Order of Service at mum's funeral. It's called Death Is Nothing At All, by Canon Henry Scott-Holland. It was included on my grandad's Order of Service when we buried him 14 years ago and I think it was the way mum viewed death.
Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away into the next room
I am I and you are you
Whatever we were to each other
That we are still
Call me by my old familiar name
Speak to me in the easy way you always used
Put no difference into your tone
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes we always enjoyed together
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was
Let it be spoken without effort
Without the ghost of a shadow in it
Life means all that it ever meant
It is the same as it ever was
There is absolute unbroken continuity
Why should I be out of mind
Because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you for an interval
Somewhere very near
Just around the corner
All is well.