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Early last Saturday morning I called the Ambulance and my Mother was taken into Weston Hospital. It was an “odd call” in the sense that there was not any one specific ailment to point to like say a heart attack. Possibly she had Flu, certainly a leg infection that was very painful plus she has the most awful pressure sore on her bottom. In fact it turned out that she had three separate infections but none responded to treatment.

I visited her and spoke to her on Sunday morning when she was a gibberish truth to tell but as I looked at her lying in her bed, I was taken straight back to a Hospital in Wandsworth in the late 1970′s where her Mother was just prior to her death, exact same look. When I visited again later that afternoon, she was very deeply asleep although she was apparently pretty sparky that evening when my eldest Son, his wife and my Granddaughter visited her.

The Ward she was in didn’t allow visiting until 14:30 so whilst I was going to be there at that time on the Monday, the Ward Sister called me and suggested that I might want to come in earlier, the reality being that my Mother had slipped into a coma and was not expected to survive, too many health issues combined with being 89 years old about sums it up. I asked for a Priest and he gave her the “Last Rites” and then together we said some of the “Prayers for the Dying” over her, proper formality was served.

All treatment was withdrawn because none of it was working so apart from keeping her comfortable and free from pain, the aim was to let her die with dignity. Unless you start pumping large quantities of Morphine in which they did not do with my Mother, there is no knowing how long this process takes but this was a Lady with a long list of ailments any of which would have floored most people long since made it well into her 90^th year.

An Odd Period

My eldest Son, his Wife and my Granddaughter kept a bedside vigil until Wednesday evening when she passed away at 18:20. I had sat with my Mother for about 3 hours each day in the mornings quietly reading my Bible but there is little more to be done than that. As a believer in a ‘Life After Death’, on her passing, she was not alone. Her three sisters, Babs, Winnie and Ilean would be there as too her parents Maggie and Mick Bagnell, of course my Father Frank and their son and my brother Michael plus numerous others long since passed on, all would have been there to ease her journey to the “Other Side”, she was accompanied on the journey.

The Immediate

Because my Mother’s death marks the passing of a generation, there are a number of formalities to be dealt with, Reporting the death to the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, choose an Undertaker, they are the key element in making arrangements as smooth as possible, talk to the Solicitor to line up Probate. Fortunately, it will be a simple estate be to deal with because it is really just the house with very little cash, no outstanding tax affairs and well below the Inheritance Tax threshold.

Going Forward

I will stay in Burnham and the house will go through a two stage transformation. When I moved down 6 years ago, I deliberately didn’t change much here, the objective was that my Parents could live and die in “their home surrounded with their things”. Now of course I need to change it into “My Home” and reflect my tastes. With a shortage of funds, paint, some modest flooring/furniture changes and putting up my pictures on the wall, should do the trick. When I have found a way of earning a living again, maybe in a couple of years, I will go in for more structural works involving the dreaded “Builders” but the house has potential !

Of course and for me there will be a major psychological realignment to be made, I still wake during the night listening as if I could still hear my Mother downstairs in her bedroom. There is also the strange notion that I now have freedom again, I can get a coach to London for the day, visit Bristol or spend all day cycling around the Somerset Levels taking photographs, things just not possible over these past years.

Adjustments

In a sense and to any outsider, these changes to my life being so obvious should be easy to adjust to but strangely perhaps, they are not and two examples from my previous experiences come to mind.

For many years I was a commuter cyclist in London, for various reasons I had to move to the outskirts of West London and a friend of mine told me: “As you will no longer be a commuter cyclist, you will need to adjust your thinking from just transport to riding just for pleasure.” He was absolutely right and it took a while to convert my thinking from a bike being “daily transport” to being something you used just for fun.

The other one was even odder in a sense because it concerned digital photography. At Christmas 2000, I was an early adopter of the DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) camera. Now admittedly, the memory cards to store the pictures which replaced wet film, were not just expensive but had nowhere near the capacity they have today. But stupidly, it did take me a number of years to get buried into my brain that you could take more than 36 pictures on a card ! I can remember going to an Air Show and taking 1,000 pictures across many cards and was just gob smacked when I unloaded them onto the PC.

Although it will take time to adjust, I have deliberately perhaps, left myself a number of challenges both in the house and the garden to work on which will be part of that process of transition.