The last parent and death

I accepted my dad’s death really well. I was prepared for it and, to be fair, we had thirty four years to get used to the idea. This might have made it harder because they cured his first death (a heart attack at 40), several others that followed and that could have made it hard to accept that all death couldn’t be cured. However, this wasn’t a problem for me. I was able to say goodbye and grieve normally, go straight back to work and get on with my life with hardly a tear shed. Then, one day, I had left some music at home and decided to pop and get it during a break from teaching. I got in the car and a man was reading from his memoires on radio 4. He was talking about his elderly mother and said something like, “It shouldn’t have been a surprise because as soon as one parent dies you are unconsciously waiting for the next to go.” It floored me. I sat in the car sobbing so hard I had to pull over and ran out of time to get my music.

This fear of losing your second parent seems to be instinctive. People I have spoken to, sheepishly confess to having felt like that. The man in the memoire confessed to feeling some relief when his mother finally died because he could let go of that worry. It’s not something we really like to talk about. It feels too much like wishing death upon your parent. I know lots of people whose mother ended up with dementia following their father’s death and the guilt they feel is enormous. On the day of the evening my dad died I was at a friend’s funeral. (I know; it’s been a shit couple of years). Someone I hadn’t seen for a while, who knew my parents, asked me how they were and I had to tell her that Dad was dying. “Oh,” she said, “Keep an eye on your mum, won’t you? I’ve just had to put mine in a home,” and then she mouthed the word “dementia” at me. I stubbornly refused to accept that my mum wasn’t a candidate for a long and happy widowhood. She had plans, was going to travel, really get going with her art. 

The other day, novelist Marianne Keyes posted on Twitter about this subject. Her dad died recently and she wrote: 

The replies that followed were lovely. People said how normal this was and how thirteen years later  they still do this.

I wanted to give comfort but couldn’t. Sometimes the second parent does die soon after the first. Maybe if I had been more open to the idea it wouldn’t have been quite so difficult.

Weird Sort of Rub on the Arm - another blog about death.

I've given you all a break over Christmas but now that we are full of cheese and mince pies and we are thinking about New Year I'm going back to my death series.  As a child, I thought New Year was the day that all the celebrities died.  It never occurred to me that they were just listing 12 months of deaths and so I thought of it as celebrity death day.  I thought about things like death, as a child and thought that being a celebrity would be quite useful because at least you’d know you were going to die at New Year. Maybe that was unusual.

After I wrote about some of the things I found difficult at Christmas this year  ( https://juliaofalltrades.blogspot.com/2018/12/christmas-and-death.html ) people seemed surprised.
"If only I'd known," they said and threatened me with hugs, or because I'm not a huggy sort of person a 'weird sort of rub on the arm'.
I was surprised that they were surprised.   These are things I knew happened to the bereaved, even before I lost someone.  They are normal things.

It was nice, though: to know that people care because you don't always know.

Then this weird thing happened.  I got messages wishing me a Merry Christmas that came with the caveat that the person sending the message knew that I wouldn't.  They said things like, "I know this year is going to be difficult but have as good a Christmas as you possibly can."  Had I brought this on myself by talking about the normal aspects of grief at Christmas? Had I given everyone the impression that there could be no happiness in my life now that my parents had died?

Honestly, I had a nice Christmas.  Any difficulties were in the build up and nothing could have been as bad as last year when I thought I was the only person who knew my mother was dying.  In our death denying society, this was harder and so the blogs I'm going to write are my attempt to encourage you to think about and talk about death but today I just want to give anyone who is grieving, permission to be happy.  Grieving is a roller coaster.

Christmas Cards and Death

I’m not a fan of Christmas cards. A few years ago, I stopped writing them and I was happier. It also means that  I received less, ending the need for cardboard tree shaped card holder or a washing line and tiny plastic red and green card pegs. Then my parents died and I became the oldest. I felt it was my responsibility to keep in contact. So I bought a pack of cards. I remember Mum sitting down in the evenings in the run up to Christmas with simmering frustration that even a glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream couldn’t soothe.

When I die if I find myself being forced to write Christmas cards then I will know I’m in hell. 

I’m trying.

It’s a minefield of social etiquette. What do you write? Should you acknowledge the death? Is it alright to celebrate in a happy way when you are mostly sad? The Victorians had the perfect card for the occasion. 

Cards have been arriving at Mum and Dad’s house. Some to me from people who don’t realise I haven’t lived at home for thirtyish years and some for my sister, who is living there. The other day there was a card to Mum and Dad. My sister hadn’t opened it. My instinct of being the oldest one who had to deal with these things kicked in. “I’m going to have to send a card back and break the news,” I said.  We opened the card.

“Can you read that name?” I asked my sister. 

We looked at it from several angles. We tipped our heads, turned the card round, and squinted. We tried several names out but none of them seemed to fit and none sounded like anyone we knew.

I thought this was a funny story but now I’ve written it down it just seems sad.we laughed though.  It’s probably the way I’ve written it, which may be because this blog is brought to you by one extremely tired music teacher: a music teacher who is so tired she tried to kiss a parent yesterday. 

The choir had just finished their last gig of the year. We sang in the High Street to a few of our parents. It was lovely; no pressure; just being outside bringing some festive cheer but as soon as they had finished I suddenly felt all my energy go. The children lined up and the parents said goodbye, feeling very excited about their last afternoon of freedom. The parent standing next to me puckered up and said to her child, “Gis us a kiss then,” and so I nearly did. I had to apologise. “I’m sorry, you didn’t mean me. I’m just so tired.” I think she saw the funny side. 

Christmas and Death

There’s no good time to die but I really hope I don’t go at Christmas time.

My Nan died on New Year’s Eve and the Long Suffering Husband’s mum watched the millennium fireworks from her hospital bed, shortly before her death. New Year has therefore always been a miserable time for my family. I would hate to forever ruin Christmas for my loved ones with an untimely death.

Christmas, being a time for reflection, is particularly hard when you have lost someone. Standing in the men’s jumper section of Marks and Spencer with tears in your eyes or opening your cookbook to have your mum’s recipe for a Christmas sauce fall out can fell you, like a tree cut at the knees. You realise that you’ll never again be able to buy a salmon pink jumper that is truly appreciated or call up to check if there really is that  much brandy in the recipe and you feel lost. Your frame of reference for life has gone. When both parents have died nothing can quite prepare you for how much you feel like a little lost girl again. You thought you were a fully fledged adult but you couldn’t have been more wrong.

The run up to Christmas is such a busy time and we place enormous pressure on ourselves to make it perfect, or at least, better than last year. Each year carries special memories that get woven into each other, traditions that simply have to be observed and pressure for the people trying to hold it all together. The recently bereaved can find all of this a little overwhelming.

This year, I have found these things particularly hard.
1. Being too busy. There is not enough time for reflection and just being with my own thoughts. I
think this is part of the healing process. My counsellor warned against it but I didn’t listen. “I’m an
all or nothing kind of girl,” I told her.
2. Cooking. Apart from the factor of the first point, this is the season of parties and ‘bring a plate of food.’ My go-to Mum’s Lemon Drizzle doesn’t seem the best thing to bring anymore. Appetite can take a while to come back after a bereavement and Christmas is all about food. “Have you ordered the turkey or are we having something different this year?” the LSH asks hopefully. It is tempting to suggest beans on toast.
3. Chocolates. ‘‘Tis the season of the Quality Street tin on the sideboard. I can’t quite explain why this and the Radio Times Christmas edition makes me feel so sad. Also, when you are too busy (see point 1) they become your most important food group. Last night, I had time to cook a proper meal (lamb hotpot), unwrapped the lamb stock cube and popped it into my mouth. Lamb stock cubes and caramel swirls do not taste the same.

4. People. People are wrapped up in their own busyness and can, without meaning, trample all over your feelings. People take a lot of my energy and because of point one I don’t have any spare.
5. Old people’s homes. As as musician it is traditional to take children to care homes to torture old folk with their singing. It never occurred to me that staring into the eyes of dying old ladies would be so triggering. Oh, and their pianos are terrible.
6. Churches. Musicians spend a lot of time in church at Christmas. It is particularly challenging to co-ordinate a church service with all the music for a whole school, with people who are too wrapped up with their own problems to give you much of a hand, in the church where your parents funerals were. It’s impossible to just look at the ceiling fighting back tears when your choir is standing where your mum’s coffin was only seven months ago when they are looking expectantly for direction and encouragement.

Our school Christmas church service is the thing I find most stressful and so if you see me and I don’t talk to you, or worse still snap at you please forgive me and remember that I ate a lamb stock cube last night thinking it was a chocolate.

Dogs and Death

One of the few times I remember publicly crying about a death was when I was 11 and my gerbil had died.

I stood in a classroom and balled my eyes out in front of a bemused RE teacher ( whose name I can’t remember but who had a very progressive attitude to spirituality and a PhD in theology from Cambridge). I was embarrassed.
“I don’t cry!” I told him. “I didn’t even cry at my grandad’s funeral and that was sad, especially when we drove past where he worked and everyone was standing there waving hankies.”
He nodded quietly and said with his silky smooth chocolate voice that would have made him an excellent vicar if only he wasn’t gay in the seventies, “It’s why we have pets. Just wait until you have a dog.”

He went on to tell me his theory about how the end of a pet’s life and particularly  a dog’s, enables us to think about death in a way that is impossible when another human dies. He said that we are much more honest about our feelings because a pet’s death doesn’t make us question our own mortality.
“It’s normal to be sad. You are going to miss your hamster,” he said
I bit my lip, trying not to scream ‘gerbil’ at him but said, “I was going to miss my grandad too but I didn’t cry like this.”

He just nodded wisely and said, “Yes and wait until you lose a dog. You’ll cry more than you do when your parents die. You won’t be able to think about being sad at all then because you’ll realise that you’re next and crying will feel selfish.”

He was right. A few years later, when my Dad was recovering from his first by-pass surgery, I sat in
the middle of the busy road we lived on, bathed in the beautiful blue light of a police car, cradling
the dog in my lap, sobbing my eyes out. I refused to let the vet take him until he was cold.

We can accept that pets are going to die, we can even let them go early, saying that it’s cruel to let them suffer.

Dogs can tune into their owner’s feelings. The beautiful black Labrador in our lives became nursemaid for seven months, fussing and fretting and not leaving Mum’s side. She also grew to the size of a coffee table, as she ate all the food mum slipped her. For a while after, she looked sad.

As a dog walker, you make fleeting connections with other owners. My dog has a fascination for old men in caps and so over the years I have become nodding acquaintances with several old men with dogs. When they die, their dogs come running up to me for strokes and reassurances and their wives can’t understand what is going on until I tell them my dog’s name. It seems that my dog was as popular with them.

Generally, I prefer to walk on my own and not talk to anyone. One of the reasons we chose the  woodland burial at the cemetery was that we like to wall our dogs there. If you do see people you
don’t talk because they are dealing with their own grief. Now that we have another reason to go it has
become a favourite walk.

Dogs have no respect for our human conventions of honouring death. How could they?  They don’t understand that the conveniently placed stone or carefully planted tree isn’t a place to cock their leg. Digging dogs don’t understand that it’s not a great place to find bones. I’ve seen dog owners shouting at their confused mutts for all these things.

It’s not the animal’s fault. That’s why I was so upset the other day. It had to be my fault.  It was the first time I’d cried in the cemetery: usually, holding it together in public. My dog is ten years old and has never caught anything. He can’t catch a ball, a fly, the hedgehog in the garden or even the small aircraft that flies above, doing loop-the-loops on a Saturday morning but not for want of trying.
The established woodland area has become like a nature reserve and sometimes the dog will chase a squirrel to the edge of a tree, or jump as a bird flies past his nose. This time, he saw a rabbit and took chase. Normally rabbits are much too fast and are gone before he has any idea what he is doing. This rabbit decide to run round him in circles and he caught it, shook it like he would his favourite hedgehog toy and stood with it in his mouth looking very pleased with himself.  It all happened so fast. I shouted at him to “leave it”, which is a command he knows but he didn’t want to. He wanted to bring it with him. I shouted again, realising that I was too squeamish to try and take it off him.  He looked at me and smiled, rabbit still firmly wedged in his jaws. He saw that I wasn’t happy but didn’t want to give up his prize. He looked around for somewhere to leave it. He saw an old headstone amongst the trees. Someone had left a vase of silk flowers next to it. He walked over and carefully laid the perfect, dead bunny next to the flowers and came back to me, expecting a treat. I put him on the lead and walked a little way before I found myself staring at mum’s grave with  tears in my eyes.
It made me remember the RE teacher and his insistence that dogs and god were both there to help us deal with grief and that it was no coincidence that they are the same word spelt backwards. Mum always said that religion was a comfort for people who are too weak to get through things on their own, which now that I need a dog, seems a little harsh.

This blog is brought to you by a very tired music teacher in the run up to Christmas.  I'm so tired that this morning I thought I saw a thousand Santas running around as I played a defective bass clarinet.  I apologise if this current set of blogs are too morbid for the time of year but I did promise I would try to talk about death.  Apparently, it's going to be good for all of us.

Let’s talk about death

Let’s talk about , death baby.

Let’s talk about you and me,

Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be.

Let’s talk about death.

Let’s talk about death.

Yo Pep, I don’t think they’re gonna play this on the radio.

Why not, everyone dies.

Strange weather for the time of year, don’t you think?

Taboo subjects are difficult to write about but  Salt ‘n’ Peppa managed so I’ll have another go tomorrow.

Moving On

Now that I’ve finished reading the Brexit report and I’m fixed (so that the constant videos of the last moments of my mum’s life aren’t playing behind my eyes) it’s time to ‘move on’ and so I’m going to write some blogs that deal with uncomfortable truths about death, bereavement and grief. Today’s blog is about support.

After I’d written the fixed blog people told me their stories and said that it had been helpful to read. Other people had told me that they’d sent it to friends who were struggling with grief, or madness.
I was surprised by all of this, as I thought my experience was pretty unique. Obviously, I hadn’t given the details of those final images but my descriptions of how I acted with PTSD resonated with many people.

When life is difficult for someone the people around them want to help. It is hard to know how to help and even harder to know if you are able to.

The truth is that there are no rules. A psychological study has shown that there is no right thing to say https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2018.1509341  Things that helped me might not help someone else but I’m going to tell you  just in case those things are universal.

On Thursday I’m taking some friends out for dinner who were very supportive. We are going to celebrate my being fixed with sparkles, bubbles and food. Looking back, I realise how lucky I am, to have so many friends and family who care and did exactly the right thing for me. And also how lucky I am that there were so many others who tried to help and failed. I think of the Long Suffering Husband who failed at least 30% of the time but never gave up.

Most of the time, for me, when people failed it was because they were trying too hard. They wanted my pain to stop. They couldn’t understand it but thought they could. As soon as someone jumped to a conclusion I was lost. “I know exactly how you’re feeling,” they’d say and inside I would be    screaming. I think that whatever someone is going through it is totally unique and no one ever really  knows what it’s like to be inside their head.

“It’s because..” was another conversation starter that would make me curl up inside. This was terrible on two fronts. The first was that they were usually wrong but the second and more terrifying was the fear that they might get it right. When you are at your lowest and really struggling with something then the last thing you want is to be noticed.

“You should...” Oh help! This was the worst. Even if the advice that followed was good advice I generally couldn’t have heard it because it was framed in arrogance and judgement. There were bits of advice that were funny, like “You should eat more bananas.” (I’m still not sure why) and others that still hurt when I think of them now, like being told it’s time to move on.

I titled the blog ’moving’on because this is probably the least helpful thing, ever (in my opinion). In  an age where growth mindset is all the rage, resilience is taught as something you can have just by saying,  “get on with it,” and that anyone who can’t get over something is a snowflake (stupid term because snowflakes are amazing), this phrase is going to be said more often. The truth is that a person can’t always move on. I couldn’t and I am a pretty resilient person who has suddenly become a bit freaked out because the things she's always said are suddenly trendy.  Until the video images stopped playing behind my eyes there was no way of moving on. I was stuck. And even now, I am still bereaved. My parents have still died within 18 months of each other, I have still dealt with things no squeamish person should ever have to deal with and I feel forever changed. I have good days and bad days. This is normal. (I’m telling myself as much as I’m telling anyone else).

So, if people failed because they were trying too hard then would it be better that they didn’t try at all? No. No. Absolutely not. I have more respect for people who tried and got it wrong (even if I was hurt by their trying) than those who just didn’t bother. The loneliness of dealing with these issues is indescribable.

The connection between people is hard when you are struggling.  It's even harder if you are struggling with something that society doesn't like to talk about.  Death is still a big taboo, as is mental health and menopause.  Doing all three things together makes you a very difficult person to be around and you know it. 

The people who were really supportive for me didn't care about any of that.  They didn't need to talk about those things.  They just let me know that they were there.  They would swim alongside me, or invite me for coffee, or send me a text to ask how I was and be happy with my answer of 'OK'.  They talked about other things and didn't get cross if I zoned out.  They didn't hug me (that might be a personal thing).  They didn't give up. They told me their stories without assuming that mine was the same.  This, I think, is important.  Other people's experiences help you work out what you might need.  The more I heard about people's experience of grief the more I realised that I was in a different place.  A conversation with a chap in a coffee shop, however, who had been a soldier and told me about his PTSD did make me feel much less alone as did the story a dog walker told me about their mother who had never been the same after nursing their grandmother through cancer.  We should talk more about death. 

One of the things that really kept me going through the early darkest days was that every morning I would get up to a message from a friend that contained a gif of the Pope doing something strange.  It made me laugh and if someone can make you laugh when everything seems pointless then they are doing really well.

585 pages

I’ve been quiet again. Don’t panic, though I am still fixed. Apart from being a musician in the run up to Christmas I have been busy reading the 585 pages of the draft Brexit agreement.

“You are sad!” said my friend believing that I was going to be the only person to actually read it.
The truth is that while I have read every single word I can’t claim to understand it. It took me all this time to read because there was so much to look up. I didn’t even know where the South Sandwich Islands were or if there were any North Sandwich Islands (near the Falkland and I don’t think there are).

Then there was the legal language, which did get easier as it went on but all this ‘party of the first part’, ‘notwithstanding’ and ‘by way of derogation’ takes a while to tune into. Even when you are tuned in they throw foreign words in like pari-passu, which just means doing stuff at the same time on a equal footing. Oh, I’ve just seen why they used it: 585 pages of unintelligible words are quicker to write than 2000 pages that we can understand. I also have a problem reading anything financial. My brain feels like it’s going to explode as soon as there is any talk of amortising or non-amortising loans and as my brain has had a lot to cope with recently, I thought I should take it easy.

For a long while I got stuck on the conundrum of why they had left page 301 blank. I have no answers to this that don’t make me sound like a mad conspiracy theorist.

“What do you think?" is the questions I get asked when I tell people I have read it. Mostly, my answer is that I don’t know, so I’m going to use the rest of this post to try and work out what I think.
 
I’m going to number my thoughts but only because I like a list and it’s easier to read.

1. The draft Brexit agreement probably isn’t the first thing you should read after recovering from a
panic disorder that was rooted in your inability to control anything. It has left me with a feeling that we are in an antebellum age, where the slightest thing could tip us into war.

2. This is a draft and still has to be agreed. If it has taken me this long to read it, I can be fairly certain that my MP won’t have time and so when asked to vote on it he won’t be doing so fully informed.

3. Any break up is tricky but this is like a divorce between 27 people who have thousands
of children and one cat. How do you decide who gets the cat?

4. This document doesn’t actually say anything very much. It doesn’t say who is going to get the cat, just how everyone is going to behave while we try to decide who that cat will live with.

5.  There are deadlines for agreeing most things, which is very sensible. Most of these dates are
between 2020 and 2027, which almost certainly means that if the agreements haven’t gone well the fallout will be the problem of a different government.

6. OLAF isn’t a snowman.

7. There are several things that we would like to still use that belong to the EU. Some of those things they won’t let us use (like the Galileo satellite system - which is alright by me because I love a map!) and some things they will charge us for during the transition period  (like OLAF who deals with
international fraud and Tom who controls anything nuclear - more on Olaf and Tom later). The draft agreement doesn’t say how much these things will cost but does say we will get the bill in 2020. (Again: problem for next government)

8.  I’m still cross that the public was ever asked to vote on something that was too complicated to
deliver. There is an analogy doing the rounds on social media where someone has a cake and wants to get their eggs back out of it. I confess that I am someone who preferred cake to eggs but most of my anger comes because it’s cruel to show someone a cake and tell them that they can have the eggs.

9. I belong to the gym and  know that if I only swam 3 times a week it would cost me more. We don’t know how much of the EU we are going to use and how much that’s going to cost us because that is still to be agreed but it won’t be free and I suspect it will be more than three swims a week.

10. Much of the draft agreement refers to laws that are already in place and says what we will stick to or can ignore (and I was often confused about which way round that was)  but without the original articles in front of me I had no idea what we might still have to do or not have to do.

11. The draft agreement has worked hard to protect the Northern Ireland boarder but loads of people won’t like it because if we can’t agree we stay in a customs union indefinitely.

12. Actually, it might not be indefinitely (I’m not sure if I’m the only one to have read this) but it says : "If the application of this protocol leads to serious economic societal or environmental difficulties liable to persist, or to diversion of trade, the EU or the United Kingdom may unilaterally take appropriate measures."

13. Fish: I have sympathy for the fishing industry and can completely understand why they want Brexit.  The EU helped to destroy the small fishing industry but did help to replenish fish stock with quotas. 

14. Fish: Agreeing anything about fish is going to be difficult and so the deadline date for agreement is 20XX.  I'm assuming that gives us 82 years to agree, which I don't think is very optimistic.

15. Fish: We have agreed to stick to quotas on two types of fish, neither of which I've ever heard of.

16. Lawyers qualifications will be recognised in the EU.  I shouldn't have been surprised that this was one of the first things in the document written by lawyers.

17. There is a lot of information about protecting the pensions of people who work at the EU.  This confused me but I think they are OK.

18. I think we are always going to need OLAF and Tom. Tom owns our nuclear power stations and controls the radioactive material for scanners and cancer treatments.  We might have given OLAF most of his data but he now owns that data.

19.  The agreement does state that we will be able to 'control our boarders' and that we intend to develop a points based immigration system.  If you voted for Brexit to keep Polish people from coming to England unless they have skills we can't provide here (which could be being prepared to work for small amounts of money) then you have got what you wanted.

20.  There is something about people who have been working in the EU and their rights to access UK benefits.  I think it means that if you've worked in the EU then you will have to pay for NHS treatment (although I'm not sure).

Having read it and now listed my thoughts I'm still none the wiser about whether I think it's good or not.  Generally, people like me, who are in the middle will be roughly alright whatever happens but I do worry about the people on the edges.  Any change affects them the most.