My Animal Life(73)

Afterwards we sat outside in the sun. I said, ‘Poor Mum, I can’t believe it.’ My father said, ‘Well with the Parkinson’s’—he had been diagnosed four years earlier, and his mobility had steadily declined, he had suffered mini-strokes and a mild heart attack—‘I’ve probably not got much more than a year myself.’

‘But she doesn’t have to die just because you do!’ I said, outraged. I was crying, he seemed impassive. Did he not love her enough to allow her her own existence, independent of his? Why didn’t he grieve that her life, too, was ending? All I could think was that he was revealed in that moment as horribly selfish.

But of course she was his wife. What he spoke was just a reflex thought, a measuring out of their lives, side by side. He was probably asking himself the question that is posed by all long marriages: who will grieve for whom? Who will be alone? He said, ‘We needn’t tell her yet.’

In me there was just a voice howling Mum, Mum. Whose wit and intelligence and strength had always been fatally compromised by her fearfulness. Who could not stand up for herself and so had put off every -thing she hardly dared to hope for into the future, when Dad would be dead. And now her future was shrivelling, vanishing, gone, like the food in the fridge she had saved too long for it ever to be eaten. All an illusion.

My own delusion, which became an obsession, was that I must at least make sure Mum knew how little time she had left. I thought then she could decide how to spend it, was determined she should not be cheated, by Dad and the doctors, of this last chance.

So I tried to tell her. I tried every way I could to tell her the cancer was not cured, there were spots on her liver, her time was short. She refused to hear me. She became, for her, uncharacteristically angry. ‘You could die before me, Margaret.’ To say this to her own daughter whom she loved, her anger must have been beyond bounds. I was wrong, as so often in my life, completely and utterly. If she had known how bad things were, she could not have recovered. To live she needed hope. And I, who loved her, who believed I loved her more than anyone else, so nearly, and wrongly, took that hope away. I saw it as my duty to everything I knew about her, to her dreams, to her secret individual self, to her clear, undeluded intelligence; I thought I owed it to the pact between us, two women in this family of men. I was desperate to be truthful even though every cell in my body was electric with the pain I must give her. But it was like beating a stick against resistant silence; her will not to hear had the invisible strength of rubber. In the end I had the sense to respect it. Sometimes all that you know counts for nothing, because the world has changed behind your back.

Slowly, she fought her way back to fitness. Through a long summer. She was cooking again. (I judged my father harshly for that. Now I think we should judge no one harshly; the facts of life and death are harsh enough. I dare say she wanted normality back.) She was walking to the village again, then cycling, then driving.

At first, in my mind, the sands of time were running like blinding white rain. A dementing curtain of silica, constantly in motion, distracted me from everything beyond it, crazed the real picture of my mother (who was thinner than usual, quieter than usual but herself, steadying herself, still there, still here. Who was reading again, laughing at the political sketches in the Guardian, out in her red puffa jacket, walking only a little slower than before.) For a while I couldn’t see her as she was, and enjoy her. That sibilant ‘six months’ had buried everything in dry, milling fear.

But for our own protection, fear is usually self-limiting. When for a brief period I suffered from panic attacks, it was comforting to read that the body is physically incapable of sustaining terror for more than about twenty minutes. You just have to put your head down and get through it.

The same held true on the bigger scale. After a few months of terror, I began to forget. Mum was putting on weight, looking better. Slowly and then faster, milestone followed milestone. Six months came and passed. Then a year. At some point she learned, not from me but a doctor, that there was some involvement of the liver, but I don’t know exactly how frank they were, and I don’t know how fully she accepted it. My mother was always an optimist; it was one of the lovable things about her, the many, many lovable things, for did she ever know how much I loved her? I think she did. I often told her.

Our visits relaxed into something like what they had been before, though Dad’s increasing blindness meant we could not stay in the house, since blind people need everything to be in its place, and Rosa was an active five-year-old.