It is exactly one year since my brother Simon died in Dove House Hospice, Hull. July 19th 2022 was the hottest day of the year in England but Simon was cool in the windowless Princess Diana Suite. He had been taken there by ambulance the previous Friday and whether or not it was caused naturally or by the administration of end-of-life medication, he very soon entered a nether state of apparent unconsciousness.
Shirley and I saw him the following day and he was more or less unresponsive but when I tried to ply him with water, his lips moved and he bared his teeth. He seemed to want it. Before we left I stroked his hair as I softly sang, "Are you going to Scarborough Fair?"
The following Tuesday, having never regained consciousness, he had gone off to Scarborough Fair. A lovely nurse phoned me and explained the minute details of his passing. It was so kind and her compassion and dedication came a-humming right down the telephone line. He had died in good hands.
At death, Simon was more or less a skeleton. He hadn't eaten properly in months. He just couldn't do it and the nutritional drinks he was prescribed made little difference. He had cancer in both his trachea and his oesophagus. It is unlikely that he will ever be recorded as yet another tragic victim of tobacco smoking but when all is said and done - that is what severely shortened his life. Fifty years of smoking.
In the days that followed, Shirley and I worked like Trojans to clear his humble rented cottage. We tried to be ruthless but in the end we brought some of his stuff home and as I sit in this study typing, I still look down to my left at two boxes of rescued remnants.
I have tried several times to deal with it but most of it ends up back in the boxes. I just can't bring myself to cast it out. It's not all about Simon - it's about the rest of my birth family too. Old Bibles that belonged to my father and to my maternal great grandfather. Fading photographs - some of them in frames. Sports badges, certificates, birthday cards, Paul's rowing cap, newspaper clippings, a baton, a brass crab and so on. It's like the flotsam that washed up on the shore after my family's boat had been wrecked in a storm. Only Robin - my brother in France - and I managed to swim to the the beach.
Amongst those rescued things, I found six untitled pages of Simon's handwriting - jotted down in the summer of 1979 - the year that our father died. There were periods of Simon's life that were very difficult and that was one of them. I am not in the mood for relating the contents of that writing just now. Maybe tomorrow or maybe another day.
I put in an order for his gravestone weeks ago - following his instructions. It will be very simple - a Norman shaped slab of Yorkshire sandstone with only his name and 1956-2022 carved upon it. It will be a hundred yards from where he was born and a hundred yards from his rented cottage. I am not expecting the stone to be in place until October.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/JQAubV3
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