I wake up and I’m in a very dark room. A phone is ringing. I need to pick it up.
I know this room well, but I cannot work out where the phone is. I’m in that disorientation of sleep which makes it impossible to carry out simple tasks. I try to force myself to understand where things are, how to answer a phone, but I have to make several circuits of the room before I can do this simple task. Are voices easier or harder to hear in pitch darkness?
I’m in my parents’ house, in the sitting room. The phone is next to my father’s chair, beside the grandfather clock. I have been asleep on their sofa, an original G-plan number that I’ve regularly used as a bed for my entire life. It is embracing and comfortable as usual, but now I am off the sofa and standing in the dark, in my underpants, holding the phone.
I’m not sure how long the phone has been ringing. There are others asleep in the flat, my mother and my brother, somewhere in this ocean of inky blackness. It crosses my mind that because I took so long to answer the phone, they may also be awake. This bothers me slightly in the fraction of a second before I speak into the phone, not because I worry that they might have been woken, but because I want to keep this moment to myself. It is my job. I am selfish that way.
I am pleased it is me that gets to answer the phone. I am showing my maturity. I can manage this situation, I am the calm one, the eldest son. I have waited twenty-five years for this moment and I know what the call is about, even before the woman at the other end speaks. Even through my confusion as I stumble around the room I know why the phone is ringing. Somewhere, at the other end of this phone line, there are people who have been awake, who didn’t lie down sometime around midnight and fall into a deep slumber. Their job demands that they remain awake through the night. The people at the other end of the line are guarding my father, watching over him during the night. I imagine the building: most of the hospital is in darkness, people sleep fitfully. Throughout there are pockets of light in which nurses and porters sit quietly at their desks, monitoring alarms and filling out forms. It’s like an aeroplane during the night, I think. My sister is already flying over from Canada and our other brother is on his way from Sweden. I know about these long flights through the dark night, the small pockets of light, the mind left free to drift and churn. It can be a hard journey to make alone. Many years before, when my first child was small, I would break into unexpected sobs in the dark watches of the night, sleepless under my thin airline blanket.
I know exactly where this call is being made from. I had been in the hospital the previous day.
My brother had summoned me back from the coast, a strange urgency entering his voice when I dithered at home — please come now. I caught the bus from the seaside, giving myself two hours to think about things. When we get to the town I’m right at the front of the bus upstairs and I take a picture, looking down at the nondescript scene. Nothing I haven’t seen ten thousand times, this town doesn’t change, but I want a reminder of how it used to be.
This town is never going to be the same again, I think. I get off the bus and phone my brother at the hospital. Please come straight up, he says, pleading rather than polite.
I know this town very well and I cut through streets that still sometimes appear in my dreams. I cross the common grassland and get to the hospital which sits on a ridge overlooking the town. The Kent and Sussex, a strange name for a hospital. We always thought we were purely Kent, but it turned out we lived on the border with Sussex. For a few years as teenagers we drank at a pub called the Sussex where the county border had once run through the building, leaving only a tiny bar, the Kent bar, in Kent.
I know what I’m doing. I’m a man with a mission. In my bag I have a slim book, a Guide to Humanist Funerals. I’ve had it for years, since the day dad phoned me up and told me he’d been to a friend’s funeral and liked it. A Humanist funeral he said. Could you find out how they work. It was the sort of request you can’t turn down. I found the Humanists on the web and ordered a copy of their guide, tucking it away secretively, filled with pride at my selected role, the trusted one. I will know what to do when the time comes, I often thought over the years. And then the time came.
When I get there, my father is a mixture of agitation and semi-concious calm, propped up in bed and breathing with difficulty. His hands are blotchy, he has the skin of an old old man but still a large frame. I’ve visited him many times in hospital over the years, but this time it’s different. My mother tells me, matter of fact, that my sister won’t get here before he dies. She will be here tomorrow, but she won’t make it in time. It’s a way of telling me that she knows and accepts that these are the final hours. These things cannot be said in so many words. I look at her face, it hasn’t changed. Although she is French she has the classic English poise of somebody who has come through the war. Nothing can unsettle her, there is no revelation to be had at this moment.
I can’t ask what he’s dying of, but I assume she knows the details.
My dad groans and grumbles. At one point he opens his eyes and stares straight at me. ‘How long have you been here?’ he asks with his ususal thick skinned belligerence. I hold his hand.
My brother and I are released for a while, we go for a beer in a pub across the road from the hospital. We have one, then another. I’m sure we’d like to have more, to stay here for hours swapping stories and jokes, making each other laugh. But we can’t, we feel responsible. Our mother remains in the hospital. Dad’s dying over there, I want to announce to the bar. It occurs to me that they must get a lot of our kind in here. I know this town so well. This is a pub that I once ran into the front wall of, driving a car without a licence, knocking the window through the wall. We joke about it now, about the landlord who chased me down the road.
We got beer, dad got morphine. After that we left the hospital. I wanted to stay, but nobody encouraged me. I thought you sat vigil for the dying, but not here. My mother is calm and level, she wants us to go back to the house so we do. They’ve been married for fifty years, it’s her call, I won’t interfere. I’ve been waiting for this day for many of those years, since he almost died on the way to work. As he grew older it seemed harder and harder to imagine how he would ever manage to actually die, for although he was ill and getting worse, he remained a big man, solid in his opinions and hearty.
I realise now that I cannot remember my father before his first illness. My mother always claimed that after he was ill he became childlike, that he became easily upset over minor issues. I have no memory of him before that. To me this was his personality. Self-centered but generous. Fractious but sociable.
We drive back down to the house from the hospital. I’ve spent a lot of time in that hospital over the years. When I was a boy my best friend was knocked down by a car and I visited him here regularly as he made a slow recovery. You become familar with your locality, although I haven’t lived here for over twenty years, I know every yard of the roads.
I have no idea what we ate or what we did that last evening but at some point I was left alone in the front room to sleep.
Standing in the darkness after the call I stare at the clock until I can make the time out. It is three twenty. I know and don’t know what this means, but it is time for action and action is always good. I walk through to my mother’s room. I haven’t woken my mother in the night since, once, ill as a child I stumbled vomiting and spinning into her room for help. I reach down and place a hand on her shoulder. She seems very small and insignificant, alone in the bed. I shake her gently. Mum, I say softly. Mum. She starts and opens her eyes. It was the hospital who phoned. I tell her the news, which is non-specific. They say Dad has deteriorated, we should go up to see him now. I know what this means, but I’m not taking it in. I think I believe he will recover, that he’ll be home again soon, as before. Each winter for years he’s told me that this is it, that the season’s illness will be his last. I can’t believe it’s finally come.
I feel a niggling need for urgency, but I am not going to hurry anyone.
I wake my brother. He moves quickly and silently around the house. We are all hushed and calm in the dark house. We get dressed and leave the house, getting into the car. I drive. I marvel at how simple this is, how we move as a single body from place to place, wrapped against the winter cold. It’s Tunbridge Wells, a town with its own mythology, we’re all disgusted here. Dad has lived here for nearly fifty years, but has never become one of us. He has held himself aloof, retaining in part the exiled Lithuanian jew that he was born.
We are at the hospital in moments, driving straight in and parking right outside the entrance to a modern wing. You can park here at four in the morning, something that is nearly impossible during the daytime, even if a loved on is dying on the premises. The doors are not locked, we walk in, bunched, like a group of hit men on a job. We know where he is, down this corridor, around this corner, past the desk, there is a small room on the right with four beds. It’s a strange place, a sort of antechamber to hospital, or home, for people who could go either way. Or for people who aren’t expected to go either way. Earlier, as we had dithered around a death, a woman opposite slumbered sunken so deep and motionless that I wondered whether she had left this world. A family came and talked to her, proving, I imagine, that she still had life in her. They left unceremoniously and she still never moved except maybe to closer to the end. Opposite, a young man took a journey in the other direction, picked up in a jaunty mood by wife and daughter, he was back with the living before nightfall.
Now, in the depths of the night, we were returning to spend more time with him, maybe for his final hours. Deterioration, he word spoke of a final wordless descent into the abyss. But that night as we sweep imperiously past the desk, sure of our right and our destination, a nursing sister detaches herself swiftly from the desk and efficiently heads us off, as if fearing we will get past and discover the situation for ourselves.
‘He has passed.’
We weren’t expecting this although it was what we were expecting. The movie continues with a slight edit. Now we are not one bonded unit. We move around the final corner in fragments. Somebody hangs back, somebody has to go first. I am eager, as ever, to engage, to interrogate the situation. There is no pausing. There he is, propped up as when we left him and looking serene. We look at him for a bit. My memory is hazy, what did we do. I imagine we hugged in our winter coats, then we walked over to him. I remember kissing the top of his head. He was still warm. So it was true, he had only just died. They drew the curtains around us. I took some pictures. I had this idea that you sit with the dead, keeping watch through the night, but my mother wouldn’t let me do that. Come on home she said. She is eager to leave now. After a short while we retreat into the cold night.
When we get home that last morning my mother lies down on the sofa where I had been sleeping. We talk quietly and calmly, as if afraid to summon up any feelings. My brother lies down on dad’s big reclining chair. They go to sleep so I sit in the kitchen, trying to work out what will happen next. I wander around the house and take a lot of photographs, my dad’s chair, his place at the table, pictures of pictures.
At about five o’clock I write a short note on Facebook. ‘My lovely dad died this morning.’ Was that a correct thing to do? I thought about it for a while, but the word had to be passed out, it seemed quite natural. He would have appreciated it, I know.
