May you live in interesting times

I’m taking a break from all my talk of death today because the world has gone mad and it would be wrong in a regular blog not to note it. The Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” seems to have been visited upon us.

Yesterday, in parliament, they voted to reject Theresa May’s deal to exit the EU. I’m not surprised. Most won’t have read it to realise that it didn’t rule out negotiating anything new but was an agreement of how to behave while they negotiated. Or maybe they did and had absolutely no confidence in our being able to negotiate. The reasons for voting against it were varied. Some didn’t like the guarantee not to tear Ireland apart in the process, some don’t want Brexit at all, some want a harder Brexit, some want a softer Brexit. But this is all very confusing to those of us that argued that we should at least decide what Brexit means before triggering Article 50. Mrs May told us that Brexit means Brexit. Therefore, there are opportunistic MPs who can now see that she might have made a complete pig’s ear of it and can see their chance to get their grubby little mitts on the power. There are some who are calling for a general election and others who want a people’s vote (however that might be different from any other kind of vote I’m not sure but maybe a dog’s vote would be more sensible at this point). A people’s vote could be on whether to accept the deal and if the people choose to accept it when parliament has rejected it then parliament will have to vote again and we could be stuck in a perpetual loop of disagreement until Brexit Day, which on the positive side is only two months away, when we will be out without any kind of deal (not because anyone is being mean to us but because that’s the agreement we signed). Theresa May had called this vote in parliament The Meaninful Vote but just before the MPs voted Michael Gove suggested that if they rejected it then there could be renegotiations and so it really was a meaningless vote. Forgive me for being sceptical but I can’t believe anyone is capable of renegotiating something in two months that they have worked on for nearly three years.

The Long Suffering Husband’s solution is to wake up in the shower (Bobby Ewing style) and find out that the last few years hadn’t happened. This was briefly appealing to me, as my last few years have
been pretty awful but then the thought of doing them again is worse.

I suspect that this means that we will be leaving the EU without a deal (no wonder Rees Mogg,the disaster capitalist, was drinking champagne. I’m reminded of Caroline Ahern asking Debbie McGee what first attracted her to the billionaire Paul Daniels) because if I were the EU I wouldn’t renegotiate or put anything on hold. You have to let your children learn from their mistakes.

Meanwhile, Nick Gibb, the education secretary, has been sitting round with his mates and decided that all children should be able to read music by the time they leave primary school. This  announcement in The Times last Sunday made me snort my tea (hot water actually but it’s not as poetic) through my nose.
“What kind of music,” I ranted at the LSH, “I mean, treble clef, bass clef, do they have to be able to read ledger lines, accurate rhythms? What about drum music, or guitar tab, or chord charts?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” he confessed and so I carried on muttering to myself.
Only about 17% of the population self report as being able to read music well or to a professional standard and 50% say they have no idea at all. This is a task similar to getting the whole country literate in 1847. To do this he is going to give the music hubs a little less than they’ve had to use to pay the pension contributions that became their responsibility last year with no emphasis on training or supporting schools or teachers (the people that have to deliver this ideal)

Maybe I shouldn’t worry though because to go with his announcement a little video became the DfE pinned tweet. It had sound to it and the sound didn’t match the music, with at least three major errors that I could spot (started in bass clef, in a different key and a rhythm inaccuracy). It did make me
laugh but maybe not for the right reasons.

These are interesting times and I’m not really enjoying them.

Medics and Death

Before, I wrote about how we, the general public, are reluctant to accept the fact that a body can’t live forever. It makes sense; we know nothing but I somehow assumed that the medical profession might have a better handle on the concept. Then I found that if they have then they are keeping it a secret.

In art (and that includes reality TV shows), when someone is told that they have a condition that will end their life they ask, “How long have I got,” and are given honest answers. They are allowed to make choices. In real life, even doctors don’t want to talk about it. Mum’s consultant said, “Well, I really wouldn’t like to say.” And that was the truth. He knew. I’m certain of that but he didn’t want to say. He had already failed and he didn’t want to talk about it. Who can blame him? Well, we can. We do. Mum did but I often wonder if that’s fair. A doctor’s job is to keep someone alive but as nobody can live forever it’s an impossible job.

The Long Suffering Husband came back from his MOT quite stressed. “If I die it was a woman with a white van, who lives in the next town,” he told me. When he calmed down he explained that he had been talking to a woman while he was waiting. The LSH can talk to anyone, is a really good listener and as he has lived with me for a while is quite used to talking about death. So, this lady was talking about the death of her husband. He had died quite suddenly from a heart condition that the GP hadn’t diagnosed. In fact, the GP had treated his symptoms as an irritating cough (mainly because those were his symptoms) but the lady told the LSH that she hadn’t been able to forgive the doctor. “I wanted to bake some biscotti for him to say thank you and lace it with arsenic.” The LSH struggled to swallow the piece of biscotti that was in his mouth but tried to listen politely as she told him that her friends had talked her out of murder but she was yet to be convinced her GP wasn’t solely responsible for her husband’s death. There are no guarantees that even if the cough had been properly diagnosed
  death wouldn’t have occurred anyway. We expect a lot from our doctors.

After all, bodies are complicated; so complicated that one doctor can’t know everything about a human and so for our medical care we are divided into our constituent parts. When we get to the stage where we are dying it takes a doctor who knows about the whole body to really understand what is going on. Doctors who choose to work in palliative care are seen as weirdos by other doctors.
Why would they want to work in a field where they fail all the time? In our society, preserving life has become the highest goal for doctors.

I read somewhere that trainee doctors have to spend a certain amount of time delivering babies but there is no requirement at all to witness or help someone through death. It is unlikely that a doctor will get through their training without witnessing a death because people die and sick people do it more often than healthy people. However, training doctors to share information with their patients
and relatives and be appropriately compassionate should be essential.

I think there are similarities between birth and death. Those who work in palliative care are a bit like death midwives. One of the reasons that birth has got so much better is that women are informed about the process. When I was pregnant I read every book going. I wanted to know everything that could happen and so I was prepared for the worst and hoping for the best. Not everyone does this and some people prefer the surprise.

The thing about birth is that no one really knows how the foetus is experiencing it, so the birth guides are for the people who are here before: the mothers. With death, the big unknown, and the thing that freaks us out most is that we can never know what’s next. You can write a guidebook for the person that’s dying but you can’t say what (if anything happens after). I’d like to think there is a book like
this that you get as soon as you’ve died. “Welcome to the afterlife: a guide by Heather R Furr.”

We do know that if you can eliminate fear from birth the experience is much easier. I assume the same is true for death. This won’t be easy because, unlike lambs, we are hard wired to cling onto life, regardless.

After my dad died I started to read everything I could about death. I think this was part of my grieving process, as books are always my solution. I discovered that people are beginning to want to get informed about death. Death Cafés are springing up, where people can talk about it  over cake and palliative care teams are beginning to suggest that doctors should know more about death. So, when Mum was diagnosed I was reading a book called ‘With The End In Mind’ by Dr Kathryn Mannix. It’s a book by a palliative care doctor full of case histories that should lead you to the conclusion that death isn’t that bad, we should embrace it, talk about it and plan for it. It’s a great book but it
shouldn’t be the only one. It was a fantastic book for me when I was in the ‘merely curious’ phase but  I would have liked a more practical handbook to help through the difficult times.

I can’t tell you whether death isn’t that bad for most people. The two I have witnessed in the last two years were pretty awful. I suspect that this was because the medics involved weren’t prepared to accept and plan for the deaths. Dad knew he was dying and accepted it with grace. He had been in heart failure for the last five years and knew that he had reached the end. He wasn’t, however, prepared for how long and painful that end phase would be. “If you had a pet dog and it couldn’t eat, barely sipped at it’s water bowl without being sick, couldn’t go in the garden for a pee then you’d take it to the vet,” he said frequently. The GP, however, thought that someone had to be bed ridden to be dying and suggested that bringing a palliative care team in was premature. By the time they were involved and his nurse came back from her holiday it was all too little too late,

With Mum it was different. She had been stopped from properly thinking about it by the consultant’s  refusal to talk about and and the oncologist’s upbeat, positive manner. “I can’t say,” he said
cheerfully, “But in cancer we never talk about more than five years.” Why would you plan for death if you thought you had five years? Those of us who were caring for her, however, would have liked an honest handbook. We would have liked to have been prepared for what was to come. We would have liked the medics to be honest with us and themselves. It  would have been so much better to  have been told rather than hearing the words “possible catastrophic bleed.”, whispered behind you, although even that was better than if I hadn’t been prepared for it at all. It would have been better for them to have forced the issue when my sister suggested buttercup syrup, rather than just cryptically saying, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” It would have been better if the doctor who came out (without the drugs we needed) hadn’t taken us to one side and whispered, “She’s dying,” at us with a shocked look on his face. It would have been better if I hadn’t felt I had to say, “No shit Sherlock, do you 

Talking about Death

It's wrong to say we don't talk about death.  The things we think society doesn't discuss are actually talked about much more often than we care to admit.  Every novel is about death, every TV programme about murder, every song about relationships ending and every Woman's Hour episode about the menopause. Yet, when we come to face these things; for real; with no metaphors; in our every day lives; we think no one has spoken about them.  In truth, we just haven't listened.  But these discussions are pimped and pouffed and made to seem interesting. They don't follow real time and they gloss over some of the difficult bits.  We don't then, read these metaphors of difficult things and consider how they might relate to our own death, break up or menopause.  If you are planning your break up while in a healthy relationship or considering your menopause in your twenties then you might become quite depressed.  Only thinking about death every day until you die could leave little room in your brain for nice things. 

However, once you get into the situation where you have to think about death it can be very difficult to have real and honest conversations about it. As a society, we haven't really come to terms with the fact that we all die.  When you take art out of the equation death is talked about as something that can be defeated.  If only you fight hard enough.  Just this week the news reported that all school children are going to be taught how to do cardiac massage because then no one will die.  TV programmes set in hospitals always stop at the point someone's life has been saved.  You never follow them to see whether it might have been better for them to die.  You never consider their constant pain or mental anguish or their difficulties with work or applying for universal credit.

The truth is that medicine hasn't found a way of stopping the body wearing out.  When we say that we are living longer we are talking statistics not fact.  We haven't actually lengthened the time a body can last.  When I was a teenager I remember being told that the oldest living person had just died at the age of 120 (making everybody rush to eat Sushi because they were Japanese) but nearly forty years later the oldest living person is 117.  Living  along time in a body that is wearing out might not be a blessing.  A 111 year old man in Poland is reported to have asked, "How long can this go on for?" every day of the last month of his life. 

We used to know this.  Influenza was termed the old man's friend because it was a swift and relatively painless way to die.  Now, we vaccinate all elderly people against this and complain that there isn't enough money for care. 

I can tell that you are bristling now.  "What is she suggesting?"  The very thought that we allow people to die is horrific.  We are so caught up in the idea that we can cure death we can't entertain the idea of facing it.

All I'm suggesting is that we take a little time to think about it.  Being honest about the fact that you can't live forever, understanding what happens as your body breaks down and making informed decisions about what you are prepared to live with can only be good for our society. 

That's enough for today. Although I warn you, there will be more next time. 

The address book and death

Even though my next few blogs are going to talk about death, I want them to be overwhelmingly positive...and funny.  I'd like you to be able to laugh at the ridiculous way we handle death and not think that I'm having some kind of breakdown.  Honestly, the breakdown has been done.  I did that, had fantastic therapy https://juliaofalltrades.blogspot.com/2018/11/fixed.html and can now talk about these things.  Today, I'm going to talk about address books.

As the oldest surviving member of a family I now feel the pressure to keep in touch.  I remember my mum saying something similar about Auntie Daisy, who we hardly ever saw before her parent's death and never saw after.   I tried to write Christmas cards but never posted them because keeping in touch isn't something I'm good at.  In my enthusiasm for maintaining connections with the living, I bought an address book.  I was thinking that I should fill it, so that even if I don't use it then it could sit in the bureau, waiting for my children to find when I die, so that they can flip through it and wonder who is still alive and would like to be contacted.  Then they could repeat the cycle and buy an address book of their own to fill with long lost friends and relatives, who may, or may not still be living.

With any address book, there comes a time when you have to decide whether to remove people.  In my Mum's book there are some people who are crossed out and re-entered several times with different addresses and a few who are crossed out and not re-entered.  I wondered if these people had died or were just not people she wanted to stay in contact with.  The problem with someone being dead is that you can't ask them.  Well, you can but they don't answer and if they do then you are certainly having a breakdown. 

Because we all die...sorry if that was a shock.....I'll start again with that thought in a moment.  Yes, that's the one thing we are all going to do and as you get older more people that you know will have done it. When I was about ten I read Frances Cornford's poem, Recollection, and thought how nice it was.  The author was proud that she knew someone that had died and it seemed to me a lovely way of looking at death.  When you are a child, people you know dying is a strange, rare and peculiar thing.  As you get older, it's normal, except that we pretend it's not.  Anyway, back to the original thought.

Because we all die there will be dead people in your address book.  It then becomes a choice whether to remove them or leave them there.  These days, we don't really have address books.  Who am I kidding?  We have hundreds of them.  Every phone has a list as does every social media account.  I was looking through my Facebook friends and noticed how many dead people were there. You don't remove the deceased from your social media and they can't remove you.  For some reason it feels too final.  I can imagine that if I live long enough and write enough blogs about death then at some point I will be friends with more dead people than living ones because the living ones will remove me.

When people fall out in films they say, "You're dead to me."  This is a weird expression because when someone has died then you do everything you can to not forget them.  If you have argued with someone then you want to forget them.  You wouldn't keep your enemies in your address book or as Facebook Friends. 

A few months ago, my daughter's boyfriend of six years, decided that he didn't want to be with her anymore and that she should move out of their shared rented home.  It was a complete shock to us (and her) as we had just come back from a holiday together where they seemed to be making plans for the rest of their life (house purchase, engagement, babies).  In his mind, though, they had been drifting apart for a long time and this had absolutely nothing to do with the young pretty girl that had recently started work in his office who he is now in a serious relationship with. This event led me to privately calling him The Shit, or Serial Shit because he has a history of breaking up with girls in a bad way. (Serial Shit =SS: remember those initials because if I ever write about memories of when they were together he will appear as SS)   The shock of them breaking up felt like a death to me.  We had welcomed him into our family albeit with reservations that he still had to prove that he was good enough for our precious daughter. Despite my private nickname for him I sent him a nice message and hoped that he was happy. He replied and I assumed that we hadn't fallen out but that his status as a family member was extinct.  I decided to treat his status in my address books as a late friend.   When they were together, he read my blogs and always hoped to be in one. What a shame, he'll never know that he's finally made it, as he decided that I am no longer to be kept in his address book.  I can see why, the dead never pop up on your Facebook timeline to criticise your life, except in Facebook memories, which can be a total shock.

This morning my Dad seemed to be questioning my reluctance to go back to work after a long Christmas break.  Thanks Dad for continuing to remind me that I really do like my job and it will be good to stop eating cheese and get back to normal.