I was twelve years old
when my grandmother died. My father woke me up, early that morning, and told
me, “
Your Gran has gone to Heaven.”
I was confused, no one
had told me she was that ill, they certainly hadn’t told me she was dying. I
thought that her decreasing health and physical ability was because of her
great age, she had seemed so impossibly old to me back then. It was much later
that I’d find out what had happened to her.
She was the only
grandparent I knew. My father’s parents had died before I was born and so had
my mother’s father. My gran, my mother’s mother, was the only grandparent I
had. Other children at school had both sets of grandparents and would talk
about them endlessly. I just had Gran, a woman who seemed so much older than
the grandparents of those other kids at school. She was an old, small,
white-haired woman, like a character out of children’s literature.
When I was nine, Gran
came to live with us for a while. With hindsight I realise she wasn’t well, but
no one told me at the time. She would sit in the armchair next to the fire in
our sitting room and tell me stories of her life. Stories of her growing up in
Scotland, her time “in service” in London, running a household in wartime
Kendal, Cumbria. She was full of stories and I loved listening to them.
During that time, she
was admitted to one of Liverpool’s hospitals. We visited her one Sunday
afternoon to find that she had been moved off the main ward and was now in a
side room. She told us that the ward’s sister had moved her into there when it
became empty. At the time it just seemed like a nice gesture; now I know
differently. As a senior staff nurse, working on a busy hospital ward, I’d move
a very ill or terminally ill patient into a side room to give them some quiet
and privacy.
From our home she moved
into a newly built bungalow, near to my Uncle Lance and Aunty Sheila, her
youngest son and his wife, in the suburbs of Derby. We would drive over there
every Saturday to visit her. The bungalow was small, made from cream-colored
concrete and perched on the side of a shallow hill. Being a new build, the
garden was untended and raw. It was divided into two by a stone-paved path that
cut through its middle. On either side of it were two strips of open soil,
which were made up of large clumps of red/brown clay, many of them as large
rocks. I wasn’t allowed onto this clay soil because it would stain anything
that touched it bright red. Our dog, Candy, a little terrier with a love of new
and different smells, wouldn’t venture onto this clay garden either, yet
normally she’d spend as much time as possible sniffing out the smells on a new
patch of ground. My gran had loved gardening, she and my mother would spend
afternoon after afternoon tending to our garden. While she lived at that
bungalow, the garden was left untended, just two open strips of clay where even
weeds didn’t seem to want to grow.
It was in this bungalow
that she died.
I wasn’t allowed to go
to her funeral, my mother believed funerals were no place for children, so I
was left at home in the care of a neighbour. This, along with not being told
she was ill, made accepting my gran’s death so difficult for me. It wasn’t as
if she was dead, never to be seen again, she just wasn’t there, missing from my
life. It wasn’t until I was into my teens that I was able to make the
connection that she was actually dead. For my mother, though, the loss of her
own mother was something that she found so difficult to accept, it was so hard
on her. She spent weeks and weeks off work after Gran’s funeral. I would often
find her, alone in the house, silently crying to herself. I now realise her
grief had become depression, but back then I was not a perceptive child.
It was only as an
adult, after I had trained as a nurse, that I began to find out what had
happened with my gran; it was only then that my mother told me what she had
found out after Gran’s death. My grandmother had stomach cancer. When she had
been admitted to hospital in Liverpool, it had been for “exploratory surgery.”
This was long before CT and MIR scans, and cancer tumours do not show up well
on x-rays, so people would have surgery as a way of diagnosing where and how
big/advanced their tumour was. When my Gran had had her exploratory surgery,
they had found that the cancer was extremely advanced and had spread to other
organs in her abdomen, meaning there was nothing that could be done; certainly
surgery was useless, so they simply sewed her back up again.
I wasn’t the only one
who didn’t know how ill she was, no one knew. My gran wasn’t told that her
cancer was as advanced as it was; she certainly wasn’t told it was terminal.
The decision was made by her doctors that she wouldn’t be able to cope with the
knowledge that she was dying and therefore she wasn’t told. Fortunately, this
doesn’t happen now, no doctor will take that God-like decision, but it still
happened in my lifetime. It also meant that neither my gran nor her family had
any chance to prepare for her death.
When my mother was told
that her cancer was terminal, thirty years after my gran’s death, she decided
not to tell anyone else. But she was able to make that decision for herself and
she took it for very personal but still practical reasons. It was also a very
different time. I was an adult and a trained and experienced nurse. I had been
quietly watching my mother’s health decline and I had been preparing myself. I
also had Martin in my life, my partner, whom I could talk to about this and he
knew what I was going through. Then I found out her cancer was terminal, though
by accident. My mother was prescribed new medication, a hormonal treatment, and
I recognised it as a medication used in palliative care, designed to shrink a
tumour to reduce the symptoms from it, but it didn’t treat or remove the
tumour. It was then that I knew she hadn’t told anyone her cancer was terminal.
I was in a difficult position but I was an adult and had someone I could talk
to. And when she was in the hospice, at the end of her life, I had the chance to
say goodbye to her and we both knew it was goodbye.
I work as a district
nurse now and I look after people, in their own homes, who are at the end of
their lives. I don’t have the input that palliative care nurses have; my role
is very much providing the nursing care people need at the very end of their
lives. This has given me an insight into how a death can and does affect the
loved ones and family of someone dying.
My own experience,
personal and professional, has shown me what a large and life-changing event a
loved one’s death can be. But I am also a writer and my computer-like mind
stores all this away to be used in my writing. Death is such a life-changing
event that I cannot but write about it. But I want to write about people’s
personal experience of it. I don’t want to write sensationalist or sentimental
prose about the death of a loved one, I want to write about the real progress
and events of it all and the way these deaths affect people.
That all said, I have
just published a story, Five Days, about a child losing his mother to
cancer. This child, a boy called Byron, isn’t told that his mother has cancer
and that she is dying from it. It is her decision and she doesn’t let anyone
else tell him what is happening. She is trying to protect him, but her actions
leave Byron confused and isolated, he feels excluded from what is happening.
Though not directly
based on my own experience, I did tap into my experience as a child when I was
writing this; I also used my experiences as a nurse too, especially when I was
told not to tell a patient’s child that their parent was dying. I wanted to
explore a child’s-eye view of terminal illness. It wasn’t an easy story to
write, but so often I like to challenge myself with what I write, I want to
explore difficult subjects from the point of view of characters being affected
by them.
This wasn’t the easiest
story to write, I had to keep returning to the fact that the story is seen
through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy without the insights that an adult
character could bring to this story, but I did find it a rewarding thing to
write. I had written about something important to me.
I am very grateful to
my writers’ group, Newham Writers’ Workshop, who gave me such helpful feedback
on each chapter of this story. Writing can be such an isolated practice, and so
often I don’t know if a piece of writing works or not, but getting feedback
from my writers’ group has been invaluable and I have learnt so much from it.
In her will, my gran
left me her rocking chair. It was an item of furniture that I had loved sitting
in as a child, the sheer originality of it attracting me; all the chairs in my
parents’ home stayed solidly in place, none of them rocked. As a child I would
always head straight towards that chair. When I moved into the first real home
of my own, my own flat, I finally had space for it and it sat in my sitting
room for years. It now sits in our bedroom, in a corner almost made for it.
Happy reading,
Drew
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