Waiting for Death.

He is sleeping again. Drifting in and out of consciousness as one walks between rooms. Around him discarded tissues lay unnoticed as his grey hand reaches for another to whip the spittle from his face that isn't there. The magazines, books phone and paper sit, unread, unwanted and unused, yet still the glasses rest on his face as if soon he will once again take up reading the pages he flicks through rather than flick through the pages he looks at.

This man of strength, this man of power no longer moves at my coming. No longer does a hand reach out to grasp mine in companionship. That vice like grip that so hounded me when young. Now, his breathing laboured, his heart slow, he rests. Waiting for the sun to go down.

This ward where he lays, this ‘green mile’ for the un-judged; No trail is waited for here, no appeal to be worked on and here only one sentence is expected. Here, though the lights are bright and the floors sparkle with a fresh clean everyday; that no keys are used to pass through the open doors to each room; here no bars cross the windows which look out over well kept gardens. Yet here, like the mile, we wait for death.

Coughing, he picks up the magazine to read, his moment of sleep forgotten, my presence also. But soon he lays it down, the words and pictures offering him no comfort. Instead he reaches for the button that calls the nurse. Nothing is wrong, his needs are small and well met; he is comfortable and well looked after. Yet the button means comfort and security and for the lonely and scared the button is a line to life.

As I leave he blindly watches me go. I no longer know how much his mind remains or his body entraps him. But I know he is scared and I know he is alone, as we all will be, at the end. I walk from the hospice and sign my name on exit. Here we can see a record of all those and the time they have spent in waiting with those soon lost. It’s a record I want to fill out; bureaucracy that seems to prove my love and my time spent… in waiting. Walking back to the station I marvel at how in this western world, where no structure aids the support of the ailing at home, we find placing them in homes of care the next choice.

I want to take my father home with me… I want to hold him in my arms and fulfil a long ago promise. I want to say goodbye in my own way: respectfully, with honour and with love.

My Father

My Father is dying...

He has been doing so for 16 years, but this week he was given a date, as it were, to work by.

Last night, as I sat around the table with my sister Kate and my Mum we remembered, over a celebratory cocktail for my Mum's birthday, the day that Kate took up smoking. She was 18. She stood outside a hospital for seven hours as my father's first cancer was removed from his neck. My mother was understandably chain smoking, and my sister asked if it helped; "No.. not really" she replied, "But go on, give it a go". That was some 16 years ago and my sister as recently given up (Well done!). Now, after three other bouts of cancer, being knocked over and dying on the road side to be recovered in the ambulance; then falling over recently and breaking his femur in several places, he is going back into hospital today for another biopsy. They are looking again at the area around his neck... they think the cancer is back, they think its malignant. And If they are right, he will be given two choices:

One. Have a massive operation which will probably entail loosing half of his jaw. If his frail 9 stone body survives that, he will be put on a course of radiotherapy which last time destroyed part of his ear and made eating a constant agony. That is option 1.

Option two... 3 - 6 months.

3-6 months. What do you do with information like that? Where do you file it? How do you make sense of what it means?

I stood in the kitchen with him last night. As we talked he held the side of his head, holding a source of the pain the radiotherapy caused: a diseased bone in his ear. He needed some pain killers so he pointed me to the cabinet. I opened it up to find 10 boxes of liquid morphine. He was to take 7.5ml four times a day. As I measured it out and handed it to him he told me how last night he took double the dose by mistake and ended up staring at the TV for 3 hours: It wasn't on. We sat back down, an action that takes some time, and chatted. Over the next few minutes I saw how the drug took the pain from his ear and the light from his eye. It was like watching a friend get high; although here there was no choice, no delight in the experience, there was only the pain subsiding and the mind melting into the back ground. Inside, my father was completely aware of this and he was ashamed. "At least" he mumbled "It stops me wanting to go for a pee every 2 mins" A slight smile flashes across his face, and I fight back the tears that he doesn't want to see.

My father was always a strong man. he had a large appetite and loved to drink and smoke (he still smokes!), now he is such a small man and his only worry about leaving this world is that he will be leaving my mother alone. 42 years together... she's terrified.