Curtain Closes
I've been saying I'll write this, about my grandmother, about euthanasia and about why I became a celebrant. I finally got it out. Please don't hate me.
My grandmother, Mary, was a breast cancer survivor. She had a complete mastectomy on one side. When she drank whisky, which was often, she would occasionally pop her bra, pull out the “boob” (it was green), put it on the table and say “that’s better.” Then she’d say, “I save a fortune on deodorant since they removed all my lymph nodes, I only sweat on one side.” She always made light of it, brazened it out, she was as tough as old boots and very funny too. But I could see that it hurt her to do it, it hurt her in a place that she would never show to anybody.
It frightened her, being so ill. The details were kept from me, I don’t even know if she had chemo, but I could see that she was frightened, still, all those years later. She was ashamed too. She was always regarded as something of a beauty in her youth, and she loved herself an army officer, and even as an old lady I could tell it hurt her to have had the mastectomy. I could see behind her tough, old face. I could see it maybe even more clearly when she made a joke to cover her feelings.
When she was dying, I went to see her in the hospital. I worked in old people’s homes, and I knew when I got there that she was dying. I sat with her through the night, reading her stories from the Reader’s Digest, which she loved. I held her hand. I told her she was going to be a great grandmother again. She didn’t speak to me, she was beyond speech, but there was one moment that she opened her eyes wide and looked at me. Really looked at me, an intense, questioning look. I can still see it.
I like to think that she knew it was me. I like to think that she knew I was there. Or at least that she knew somebody was there. Or at least that maybe she felt less alone, or less frightened, because she had somebody holding her hand. I don’t know, to this day, I don’t know, if she knew I was there.
When people are dying, they do a thing that I used to think was called “chain smoking” from my work in old people’s homes. Its proper name is Cheyne Stokes breathing. The breath, instead of being steady, comes and goes in a cyclical pattern, gradually becoming shallower, and shallower, and then stopping. Then there’s a gasp, and the person starts breathing normally again. It is usually a sign that death is close.
Apart from the chain smoking, my grandmother, Mary, appeared to be mostly in a peaceful sleep until the small hours of the morning. Then it became obvious that she was uncomfortable, she tried to move in her sleep, she moaned. I did what I could to make her comfortable, and asked the nurses to shift her position. I moistened her mouth with one of those glycerine things they give you. I held her hand and reassured her. I asked the doctor to give her extra morphine. He did. She was still struggling. She was still in pain. I can still see her eyes scrunching up. I can still hear her.
I called the doctor back in at what must have been four or five a.m. She was obviously in pain, still. I asked the doctor to give her more morphine. He said, “I can give your grandmother another dose of morphine and it will kill her pain. If I do that, she will die in hours instead of days.” Just flat out and plainly, like that.
When you have a “Dr” in front of your name, as I do, doctors speak plainly to you because they assume you are a medical doctor. Usually this is helpful, as you get the information faster and they tell you the truth. Sometimes, it takes my breath a bit. When my younger son was very sick, and had been rushed into hospital, I shook the doctor’s hand on arrival, all business like, and said “I’m Dr Black, the child’s mother, how is he?” The Dr said, “he’s very poorly but we are doing our best.” Which, by the look on his face, I understood to be Dr code for, “he might die.” So sometimes you really don’t want the doctor to tell you it in that way. But I was grateful to have it, at my grandmother’s death bed.
I thought of her in her younger days, laughing, sitting in her deck chair in the garden, trying to get me to cut the grass for a 50p, and always drinking her whisky (every day, but “never before 5pm, darling, I don’t want to become an old lush.”)
I thought of her taking up smoking weed in her 80s, and sitting on the back step of her house with her, lighting up a fat one. I was 20, and my grandmother had a better drug dealer than me. I thought about the essay I had written in my philosophy course about the difference between killing and letting die, about euthanasia and unintended consequences.
I got a first for that essay. It all seemed so clever, so dry, so intellectual then. I imagined a husband who cut the strings on his wife’s parachute to inherit her fortune, versus a husband who intended to cut the strings on his wife’s parachute, but found them already cut, and said nothing. The evil uncle who drowns his nephew, versus the evil uncle who fails to save his drowning nephew.
I had even pulled apart the “doctrine of double effect,” which is often invoked in the euthanasia debates. It is the doctrine which allows actions such as “bombing a city” even if innocent people will die, because that is a foreseen but unintended consequence. None of it was of any use to me, there was nothing of value in that when it came to what I would say to that doctor that night.
He can kill her pain, but it will kill her in hours instead of days.
I thought of my family of origin too. I thought of her sons, all of whom knew she was dying, but none of whom could be bothered to be at her bedside. But most of all, I thought of my grandmother laughing. She put her tongue in her cheek and laughed wickedly, almost a cackle. She was so full of mischief and fun, full of energy and full of life and was the first member of my family to know I was a lesbian.
I visited her with my girlfriend, when we were twenty. I introduced my girlfriend as my “friend” and behaved as friends. We weren’t out to her as lesbians at all. We all three laughed all night, drinking whisky and setting the world to rights. It got to time to turn in, and my grandmother said “do you two want extra pillows for the bed?”
My grandmother had three bedrooms in her house. The main one (her bedroom) a twin, and a double. She had offered us the double. I must have stood there with my mouth hanging open, because she said, “look, I was divorced in 1952, there’s nothing you two can teach ME about sexual tolerance. Now do you want any extra pillows or not?” She just made it normal and OK, and that was how she was.
The Alzheimer’s had taken all of that from her. It took her ability to drive, her ability to live independently, her ability to speak, her ability even to hug. It took everything that she was. She almost died before she died. I thought of what the funny, warm, lovely woman I remembered would make of that ghost, that scrawny, moaning ghost with the clammy, cold hands, dying in pain in a hospital room. I thought of what my grandmother would have wanted me to do.
Selfishly, I thought too of what I could stand. I knew I could not stay there for days, not without help, and there was no help. I knew that I could not walk away and leave her there dying in pain either. I couldn’t bear to think of her suffering out her last, when she always medicated her pain with whisky. I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t bear it. And all the rationalisation, intellectualisation, thinking, reasoning went out the window, because I knew what she would have done, I knew what I would want somebody to do for me, and I knew what I could bear, and what I could not.
All that went through my mind, all at once, and then I nodded my head at the doctor and he nodded his head back, and he gave her the morphine.
I don’t know how long I sat with her in that room. Maybe another hour. Maybe another two or three. It is all the same in the dark, when death is so close you can touch it. I sang her songs that she sang to me in my childhood, and I combed her hair. I hummed the tunes that she hummed in her kitchen. I told her the secret ingredients for all the recipes that she whispered in my ear when I was a kid, when I stood on the stool and she let me stir her gigantic pots and pans, and I told her thank you for always letting me lick the spoon. I brushed her hair, ever so gently. I stroked her hand. I kissed her face. I held her hand. I read her stories. I told her “I love you” like a charm, like a prayer, like if I meant it enough it would be stronger than death.
She didn’t regain consciousness. The breathless pauses in between the chain smoking got longer and longer. Her hands, then her arms and her face, became whiter and colder, a thing I had not imagined was possible. And then, as dawn was breaking, the chain smoking got shallower and shallower, and without even a hint of drama, she just didn’t take the next breath. I found myself waiting, as I had hundreds of times that night, for the next breath. I only realised her next breath was not coming when I realised that I had been holding my own breath in anticipation.
My grandmother was dead.
Even then the tears didn’t come. I sat with my grandmother’s body, I took off her oxygen mask, and I kissed her, I brushed her hair back behind her ears, made it tidy again, and I still don’t know why, I tucked the sheets around her like she was a little child. I must have sat in that quiet room, loving her, for maybe an hour. I didn’t want to get up, or leave. I felt as if it would make it real, somehow, that she was dead. I sat with her body, and I felt as if she was only sleeping, as if she would wake up somehow, stick her tongue in her cheek, say “fooled you!” and ask me if I wanted lemon curd or marmalade with my toast and tea.
After an hour or so, I went to tell the nurses. I didn’t want to. I knew that it would start the grim machinery of death. The washing of her body. The doing up of the bra that she would never again unpop to plop her fake boob out on the table, and the laying in the casket. The undertakers. And I knew that my family would do what they always do at funerals and make it awful. I couldn’t have imagined how awful at the time, they buried her in a cake box, nobody gave a eulogy, and they didn’t even bother with a wake. But I knew it would be awful. I didn’t want it to start. I wanted to stay in that room with her, in the morning sunlight. I wanted the peace. I want to say “intimacy,” but it feels like a weird word. I wanted my grandmother back.
I called my family and told them she was dead, that I had been with her when she died, and then I walked to the train station and went home.
The dignity of her death, compared with the absolute horror show that was her funeral, stayed with me for all these years. It was part of my motivation to become a funeral celebrant. I wanted to help other people get it right. As part of my study, I rewrote a funeral service for my grandmother, the one she would have wanted. I had laid her husband, Dennis, to rest in Australia years ago. In doing so, I had broken the curse that haunted four generations of my family, and it was time to lay my grandmother to rest as well.
My course tutor, Star, who I am proud to call a friend, supported my decision to do that difficult and emotional task and walked me through it. When I read the finished service out to her, I don’t know how, but she made it feel as if it were a real funeral. As if I had, by some kind of alchemy, reached back through the years and laid my grandmother to rest. I felt myself channelling the witch whose name I bear. I felt my power, and I felt my grandmother’s presence ever so close to me. I feel it in my kitchen, I can almost hear her whisper the secret ingredient in my ear, and I can feel her ever so close to me now. I hope she’d be proud. I hope she might even give me that tiny nod and say, “you’ll do, kid,” like she used to when I was her best girl and cut her grass, and saved the daisies to bring to her in exchange for my fifty pence piece.
So I’ll leave you with the closing section of the funeral that I wrote. I hope I did her justice.
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Ending to Mary’s Funeral
Alzheimer’s is long and difficult illness, that took Mary’s memory, her independence, and finally her life. In times like these, grief has a different aspect.
Intermingled with the great grief and sadness at losing a beloved mother and grandmother, there may be other feelings, even relief that her long suffering has come to an end. Our fourth reading addresses this.
God’s Garden, Anonymous
God saw you were tired
When a cure was not to be
So He wrapped his arms around you
and whispered "come to me"
You didn't deserve what you went through
So He gave you rest
God's garden must be beautiful
He only takes the best
And When I saw you sleeping
So peaceful and free from pain
I could not wish you back
To suffer that again
Mary was a woman who had always been full of life, independence, silliness, a woman you didn’t cross, but who was nevertheless full of joy, love, and self-sacrifice, In her final illness, she started to lose those aspects of herself one by one.
The cruel illness that is Alzheimer’s took her ability to drive, her ability to live independently, in the end, even her ability to recognise her grandchildren. Mary, who stood for no nonsense, and would brook not a moment of self-pity, would have given us very short shrift for crying over her.
She would have wanted a hugely expensive, dramatic funeral, probably with eight black horses and purple plumes, a golden coffin, and crowds lining the streets, but then she’d have wanted us to take a breath, and carry on.
She would not want us to weep about her long illness, but rather celebrate her long and extraordinary life, her unconventionality, her love, and her self sacrifice, and most of all, the memories we made with her, that will live long after she has gone.
Final Reading
Before we move to the committal we will hear our final reading. It’s from a book called “No Matter What.” It is about two foxes, a parent (large) and a child (small).
Small is feeling “grim and dark,” and asks Large some big questions about love, life and death. We will hear the interchange between Large and Small about whether, after we die, love still goes on. It will be read by Mary’s great grandsons, xxxx and xxxx.
An extract from No Matter What by Debbi Gliori
“Does love wear out” said Small, “does it break or bend? Can you fix it, stick it, does it mend?”
“Oh help,” said Large “I’m not that clever. I just know I’ll love you forever”.
Small said: “But what about when you’re dead and gone – would you love me then, does love go on?”
Large held Small snug as they looked out at the night, at the moon in the dark and the stars shining bright.
“Small, look at the stars – how they shine and glow. Yet some of those stars died a long time ago. Still they shine in the evening skies… love, like starlight, never dies”.
Celebrant:
Thank you, it isn’t an easy thing to do, to read in public, and you read beautifully. If Mary were here, I think she would be clapping, so we will give the boys the warmest round of applause we can muster, and whilst we do so, clap for Mary, her limitless resilience, her love for her family, and her almost incredible ability to be dealt lemons, real and metaphorical, and to turn them into lemonade.
[Celebrant leads applause]
Introduce Committal
We now move to the closing part of the ceremony. Family and friends, the time has now come for us to say our final farewells to Mary. Will all who are able please be upstanding, as we join together, putting aside personal differences and difficulties, to surround Mary with love.
Committal Words
Here, in this last act, in sorrow but without fear, in love and appreciation, we commit Mary’s body to be cremated. We promise never to forget Mary or the love we shared with her. We promise to let the light of her star shine and glow in our lives, even until we can say that her star died “a long time ago.”
Curtain Closes
I like the way you write very much. I had a rush of emotion and reminiscence of my Dad’s last days reading it. I agree that your decision was undoubtedly the right one because it centred her need, not yours or anyone else’s.
I've no doubt you made the right decision (with your grandmother and in becoming a celebrant). I've sat with people while they died and in one case in particular I'd have taken the option to ease her death, had there been one, even though it would also have hastened it.
Should I have such things as loved ones left when I'm dying, they'll know me well enough to do whatever they can to save any harvestable organs first and then let me go.
Naturally I will come back from the grave and wreak terrible revenge on all concerned in an attempt to reclaim my lost organs, but I know you and zombies, so I won't say any more about that.