As a girl, Mum was a dancer
This morning, I was sorting through my cache of hotmail e-mails that go back seventeen years. I came across this message that I sent to my brother Paul on September 2nd, 2007. At that time, our mother Doreen was residing in a residential home in Beverley and reaching the end of her life. She died just eleven days later at the age of eighty six.
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Dear Paul,
We all went over to see mum in Beverley today - me, Shirley, Ian and Frances. We had Sunday lunch in "The Rose and Crown" - it scored a measly five out of ten on my edibility gauge.
Mum was asleep when we got to her room - lying on her new bed which has sides and electronic vibration through a super-duper hospital mattress. This is for her painful bed sores and especially her painful feet. She's probably drugged up too. I doubt that she is ever out of that bed now and wonder if she will ever make it to her chair again. Her "Sunday Express" was unread like Saturday's "Daily Express". She lives in a kind of slumber - fading away with only occasional flashes of her old spirit.
As on previous visits she asked me how old she is. She had no recollection of Katie's visit in mid-August and was surprised that Shirley and I had been to France. We bought her a little souvenir in Lourdes but getting it out of the little paper bag seemed like a test in the Krypton Factor. In the end we had to get it out for her and she stared for a moment at the back of it as if not realising where the front of it was. I put a new picture on her wall of some bluebell woods and rather sweetly she said it reminded her of her childhood in Rawmarsh when she would walk to her bluebell wood past the "fever hospital".
I asked her about "When you have passed away" and she confirmed - no religion - just a simple ceremony at the crematorium. I think I am going to get in touch with the British Humanist Society who will conduct funeral ceremonies now. Maybe one of their reps might visit mum in Westwood Park and get to know her a little before the inevitable end.
She was very thirsty when we were there and seemed to appreciate the non-alcoholic drinks we plied her with. I don't think the staff have time to persuade and cajole residents to eat and drink.
It's very nearly twenty eight years since Dad died - Sept 14th 1979. If there were a heaven I would think that Mum will be meeting up with him again before this month is out. She's so weak and thin and sleepy.
Neil
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On the day that she died I was at work and what happened that day still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Apparently, the residential home phoned the school where I worked at ten in the morning. They urgently wanted to tell me that Mum was fading fast and perhaps I might like to get over to Beverley to be with her. Beverley is about an hour and twenty minutes by car from Sheffield. Mum died at around two thirty that day. However, I never got the phone message until four o'clock when I just happened to be at the school reception desk.
Judith, the lead receptionist told me she had received the phone message but I did not pick up my classroom phone when she tried my number. I said, "I am not always in my classroom. I may have been elsewhere! Why didn't you send someone to find me?" Judith apologised most profusely but it was far too late. Mum was already dead.
Afterwards, I thought of all the times I had "gone the extra mile" for that school and this seemed to be my reward - denied the opportunity to be at my mother's bedside when she died. The manager of Westwood Park residential home later told me that she had stressed to Judith that it was an important call and wondered why I hadn't phoned back.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/P1GIcrx
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