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Conversations
with my Mother

Trying to die

5/3/2020

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My mother tried very hard to die. She stopped eating – everything.  To avoid nagging from me and other carers she became sly at pretending to eat, or at devising reasonable excuses why she couldn't... just yet.  With such cunning that I often doubted her dementia.  

Eventually, we all stopped pretending and watched in horror as her body consumed all its remaining fat deposits – cheeks, chin, buttocks. Her stomach  hung like a hammock from her hip bones.

Sometimes Myra became so ill I’d think she was about to succeed in her deathwish. Seeing her agony and reading terror in her sunken eyes, I’d make calls to the doctor, take her to hospital for scans and tests, insist she took the prescribed pills. She railed at being ‘prodded and poked, carted about, bothered with’.  In hospital waiting rooms this dignified woman  became shockingly rude. I felt frustrated to the point of sullen fury and worse, like a traitor for trying to sabotage her plan.
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Trying to die isn’t like trying to commit suicide – it may actually be harder, because what you are trying to do is what you least want to have happen; you dread it but there it is and it must be done, and by no one but you. 
Philip Roth
( Granta 24, May 2019)

R.I.P
SHIRLEY MYRA MILLER (née BELL)
 1934 – 2019

One afternoon I cuddled up to what was left of her and cried like a child.  She tried to cradle me like a mother. 
-  Don't cry, darling. It will be alright.
-  What if your pain is from cancer?
- Well then I’ll die from cancer.
- But you might need serious pain medication.
- No more pills.
 
Sometimes, for a few days or weeks she’d forget not to eat and drink, put on a few grams and get back to making political predictions:
 
That Boris Johnson, he’ll be next Prime Minister, mark my words.

To transgenderise Roth writing about his father: 
​

It would seem that to prevail here, to try dying and to do it, she would have to work even harder than she did in the [selling] business, where she achieved a remarkable success for a woman with her educational handicaps. Of course, here too she … eventually succeed[ed] – through … the assiduous application she gave to every job ever assigned to her. 
                                                        (ibid)
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The first anniversary

5/3/2020

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My mother achieved her wish for death on April 11, 2019.  

On the first anniversary of her death I scattered her ashes in the garden she’d made. The camellia she nursed back to life was white with waxen blooms and her sulking clematis finally flowered. She'd also insisted on transplanting lily-of-the-valley.

—  It's invasive. And it smells of old ladies.
— ​It will remind you of me then. (She'd moved in  with us at at the time.)  

Unseasonally early, the lily-of-the-valley in that patch of garden sprouted by April 11, 2020.  Myra's great-grand daughter toddled about, poking at the rows of tiny, white bells on the plant. The day was fresh and sunny, full of peace and promise.
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—   By the way, that camellia you rescued has more flowers on it this year than ever before. Whatever did you feed it?
—   TLC, love
A year on, I'm reconciled to the choices Myra made.  And I've forgiven myself  for not being as forebearing as I might have.

 I find myself standing at the Myra-bed having conversations with her:

—  You were right about that clematis – it wasn’t dead. And would you believe, the lily-of-the -valley are already full of flowers?  Fragrant little bells.
—   Myra Bells.  (Bell was her maiden name.)
—   I’m sorry I argued about making this flower bed, Mum. It’s lovely now.  A special place to stand and chat to you.
—   Hmpf.  (She wasn’t above an ‘I-told-you-so’.)
—   By the way, that camellia you rescued has more flowers on it this year than ever before. Whatever did you feed it?
—   TLC, love.  
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    Author & CO

    Sharing conversations had with our dementia-living parents.

    Dialogues sad, funny and sometimes insightful.  

    ​Bearing witness to memories made and lost.  And to the pain and frustration of being dementia kin and/or carer. 
     


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