Dealing with the inevitable

It seems that the cancer which my father has already given up parts of himself to try to slow up is not going to give him much time at all. A very difficult few weeks has seen him go downhill quite quickly and he’s now back in hospital. None of us are labouring under any illusions about what’s coming – he’s going to be moved to a hospice very soon if the admin can be worked out.

This isn’t something we didn’t know was coming. The surgeon, after his op last November, told us that there was nothing more they could do for him. Kidney function that was only just above requiring dialysis meant that chemo- and radiotherapy were out, so it was only ever a matter of time.

That doesn’t necessarily make what’s happening now much easier to deal with. Perhaps the worst of it is seeing him so reduced. My father was always a big bloke – 6' 1", fairly chunkily built – but is anything but that now. I inherited my low embarrassment threshold from him; he’s always been a proud bloke, worried about his appearance and keen to retain his dignity at all times. Those things have now also been denied him.

Watching Mum’s dedication to him, and her exasperation at being able to do nothing, is extremely upsetting. She’s spending as much time as she can at his bedside but he’s only intermittently lucid and doesn’t really want anybody there. All he keeps saying, even now, is that he’s alright. Don’t worry about him. Do what you need to do. Go home.

The undirected, impotent fury I’ve felt for his cancer, and the anger with him for refusing to go to the doctor when the early signs were there over a year ago, have been replaced by a sort of flat, hollow feeling. A sense of guilt that my desire that neither he nor Mum suffer any longer than necessary feels like a wish that he’d die. I don’t, of course, want him to die. But he’s going to. And what he’s experiencing now could hardly be called living.

There have been, paradoxically, some very good things that have resulted from what’s happened these past few months. I can’t, yet, write about all of it here.  It’s certainly brought our family closer together. I have a renewed sense of love and respect for my brother, who’s carried the bulk of the everyday burden of moving people around, dealing with hospitals, finances etc., and have learned that, even more than I ever dared to believe, my mum is an enormously strong woman with an apparently infinite capacity for love, forgiveness and care.

There have even, in all this, been moments of great levity. When he was re-hospitalised a couple of weekends ago, he was initially taken to the Royal Sussex County in Brighton. It was chaos there – they’re under a Code Black at the moment, and redevelopment work on the crumbling buildings has exacerbated that. In the ward, all the usual noises of pain, misery and frustration were evident. A woman crying, the man in the next bed groaning in pain. Stark reminders that there are plenty of others in similar positions. I could clearly hear a chap, behind curtains, diagonally across from Dad’s bed. “Oh, I’ve never been in such pain,” he said to whoever was attending him. This was followed immediately by, “Ooh, I’ve been wondering where they’d got to – them’s me kippers.” I absolutely swear this happened and those were his exact words – I was so surprised to hear this that I wrote it down immediately. What? His kippers? Was he in for some kind of kipper removal procedure? Or was he using rhyming slang for slippers that I’ve simply never heard of? Even at the time we laughed about this.

We have also seen just how close, just how purely good, our friends are. Plenty of people have gone out of their way to help us, or to visit Dad, or simply to call and see how things are. This has been hugely reassuring – it really does help to feel that there’s comfort in numbers in circumstances like this because, while I realise that we’re a very long way from the first, or last, family to suffer what’s happening now, it could easily feel like we were without all that support.

(This has been written with the consent of Mum, Dad and my brother).

My father, who art in hospital

I was on a train yesterday morning when one of those public transport preachers you encounter from time to time got on. "Just five minutes of your time," he assured the carriage, before starting his efforts to save our souls with the words "The world is around 6,000 years old now." This piece of folly so startled me that I genuinely didn't take in much of the rest of what he said because I was going over in my mind ways to politely suggest to him that he may waste less of his time and better engage more of us non-believers if he didn't start with such a bizarre statement of 'fact'.

I did no such thing, of course. I did what everybody else did, what everybody else always does - I waited him out in silence before he finished up and moved to the next carriage. I do remember some of what he spouted over the next few minutes - stuff about babies not needing to be taught to lie, that we're all born into sin, that the world is full of murder, paedophiles etc. The usual mix of preaching and Daily Mail style hysteria.

Why have I brought this up now, after months without a blog entry? It's not as if there's been nothing to write about - take your pick from corruption in sport, the Russian jet, Paris, Kenya etc. There's been plenty of stuff worthy of saying at least something here. So I don't know. But this is nothing if not a personal blog, and it's personal stuff that's brought me back here. Standing on the train listening to this fellow, I wasn't doing the usual commute into work. I was actually heading south, to meet my brother and my mother, in turn to head off to Eastbourne to see my father, who's in Intensive Care in the hospital there.

My dad has just had a major operation - they've taken out a major organ, a bit of something else and the cancerous tumour that put him in there in the first place. That's why I was heading down there and not into work. What has this got to do with the preacher?

Well the surgeon who assisted the op spoke to us before we went in to see Dad, to tell us what to expect when we saw him, what had gone on in theatre etc. He was honest with us, as both Dad and we had asked him to be, and one of his questions was whether we're religious. None of my family are - my parents left my brother and me to decide these things for ourselves, neither stopping us attending church nor suggesting we should. It simply didn't come up during our youth. The surgeon, learning this, said that he wasn't either, he merely 'didn't want to close off that source of support'.

There is, on the same floor as the ICU at Eastbourne, and at the Royal Sussex County where both my parents have spent time recently, a chapel and a chaplain for people who do take comfort from their faith at times like this. Part of me envies the succour they must get from it, but this wouldn't be my blog without the words 'wind me up' in it, and the greater part of me is indeed wound up by this juxtaposition of church and medicine.

Where was God last Thursday week in Paris, when innocent people were being slaughtered in his name? Where is he for my mother who, having suffered a stroke which almost killed her in November 2013, now has to hobble to the hospital to see the very man who's cared for her at home during her own rehabilitation? This woman, so full of compassion and love for others, so completely selfless, who better exemplifies the qualities to which we're all urged to aspire in various holy texts than anybody else I know, would certainly deserve better in any world in which people get what they deserve.

They don't, though, do they? Much of the stuff I could have written about these past few months serves only to illustrate that fact all too clearly. So she sits watching over a husband she's doted on for the best part of fifty years while I contemplate if the always-empty chapel next door couldn't better be used as a bar, frankly. Watching and hearing the reactions of the other loved ones sharing both a waiting room and a waiting game with us, each with their own stories, their own hopes and tragedies unfolding in front of us, I don't think I was alone in feeling more like a pint than a prayer.