Dear Daniel and Olivia,
It was in the early afternoon of Thursday 29th November 2018 that your grandad, my dad, passed away. He had been at the care home for only a week and a half. You won't remember going there to see him, but you visited him in room 14 a couple of days before he went.
A couple of weeks later, and late in the evening of Monday 17th December 2018, the day of his funeral, your nan, my mum, passed away too.
It was a grey day, that Thursday. I had spent the those final days with him in his room, watching him slowly shut down, no longer eating or drinking or responding. I had read up on what happens to people and he was showing all the
signs. I don't know if he could hear me at the end but I'm sure he knew I
had been there. I knew the time was coming when it did: I held his hand
and spoke to him as he took his last breath.
For the first few days after he died, I kept recalling those last
moments in my mind. How he looked, how he sounded and felt to the touch. That will never leave me. Some time after it happened, I had to leave dad for a while, and when I returned to him the sun had broken through and shone into the room and on to him, as if God were receiving dad himself. Indeed, if I were a religious person, I would have said it was heavenly.
Mum was very sick herself soon after that, and was admitted to hospital. I remember getting the call again, which would be the last of its kind from the nursing home, about her admission and when I got to A&E, she was a shivering, near-death wreck of a human being. I had never seen her so poorly. The doctors told us that it would be unlikely that she'd return to the nursing home, given how frail she was and the problem she had: lung aspiration. We began to prepare for the worst, my sister and I.
Not long after going to a ward, she had been moved to one of the side rooms, a sign we didn't take well at all. The team had almost written her off but miraculously, after a few days of fluids and antibiotics, she perked up and was well enough to be discharged. She was one tough old girl, my mum.
That spelled the beginning of the end though. In the last days leading up to her death, she stopped eating or taking any fluid, and was unresponsive. All the same signs as my dad, but mum had other underlying problems. Her body simply couldn't recover this time around. My sister, who had been pivotal in keeping mum alive and comfortable, was there with her at the end. By the time I arrived at the nursing home, after having had a call from her around 9.30pm that Monday evening, mum had already gone.
She had no notion of course of what was going on. No idea that dad passed away. I did tell mum though, the day after dad died. We wanted her to attend the service, but when the time came she was too poorly to be able to. We wonder now whether she did actual process and understand what we were saying, and what was going on. Some little moment of clarity and capacity, even so far into her dementia, that triggered the end for her, and she gave up, and her body started shutting down. The certificate might say aspiration pneumonia but the contributing factor, besides dementia, could have been a broken heart.
At least neither of them were alone when it happened. This was perhaps our biggest fear, and one that many people I'm sure experience with relatives or friends in a care or nursing home nearing the end: the real and true worry that a loved one might pass away in the middle of the night, alone, and with the potential for not being checked on or found for what could be several hours. This meant that saying Goodbye to them each time I had to leave was draining.
It's funny though, that this is just life, and life goes on. Even in those darkest moments, there was always the TV or radio playing somewhere, and Mariah Carey or Andy Williams or Wham! or Slade and everyone else playing their merry tunes. It's the most wonderful time of the year, afterall.
What I wonder now is whether I've grieved, or grieved enough, or not at all properly. I dived headlong into the formalities: you have to collect a certificate from the GP, register the death, make plans with the funeral directors, contact firms and authorities... I wanted to keep busy, but perhaps I haven't allowed myself time to process it all and let it sink in. It did catch up with me one evening though, when I was looking through photos on my phone - mostly of the kids of course, but dotted here and there with recent photos of mum and dad...
They are at least together now, somewhere, somehow, at peace, no more
pain or suffering.
Dan, you will remember them I'm sure, and how we use to go to grandad's house, where you could run and jump and have fun and do what all kids do without us worrying about disturbing people. We won't be seeing grandad anymore though, or calling him on the phone every evening like we did before. You did enjoy saying Hello and telling him what you'd been up to. We won't be going to nana's house either, the place where nan stayed with other people who used to love seeing you, and where you brought joy and a smile to their faces when you went.
Oli, you are far too young to know any of this, but everyone says you have your grandmother's eyes: the legacy she has left lives on in you, my dear little sweetheart. I have lots of photos of you with your grandparents, and even though nan perhaps couldn't quite express or even understand it in the way your grandad did, they loved you and your brother dearly and perhaps they felt that their lives were fulfilled by having had the chance to be with you both before the end.
