'Goodbye Mummy,’ read the headline over a photograph of Carol Thatcher, distraught with grief. As I greedily consumed the extensive press coverage of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral, I couldn’t help but think the unthinkable. ‘Oh, for goodness sake. Get over it. What are you, 12 years old?’
Because losing a parent when you yourself are quite old, when that parent had dementia and little dignity or quality of life, is sad, but it is not a tragedy. A tragedy is losing a child, as my sister has just done.
Having lost her 21-year-old son to leukaemia – he had battled the disease, on and off, from the age of four – she now, quite understandably, has a face that is old before its time, crumpled with loss and grief and regret and guilt.
Losing an ancient parent is just part of the cycle of life, the natural order of things. And, in many cases it’s a blessed, longed-for relief, given that these days we are all living longer than nature intended.
My mum is aged 93, and has been confined to a narrow bed for a decade. We had a false alarm a few weeks ago when Mum – whose spine is crumbling, who cannot speak or eat, who, it is doubtful, has any thoughts scudding across her brain, and who is in constant pain – contracted a chest infection. My grief-stricken sister, the one who has lost her son to cancer, flew to Britain from her home in Sydney.
More... Liz Jones's diary: In which there's a family crisis Margaret Thatcher proved you didn't have to dress like a man to be powerfulShe sat by Mum’s bed and waited. And waited. And waited. Doctors prescribed antibiotics for my mum, who rather miraculously stopped coughing and perked up.
In the end, my sister returned home to Australia, where her surviving son, Tom, said wryly: ‘Granny Jones is like the boy who cried “Wolf!” ’
The tragedy, the thing that crumples my face, is that while the NHS has kept my mum alive – giving her hip and knee replacements when she was in her 70s and 80s, treating her blood clots and the MRSA that they gave her in the first place – her local council wants to withdraw funding for her live-in carer and move her into a care home.
Farewell: Carol and Mark Thatcher wrote their mother a card for the flowers on her coffin but Liz Jones was not so movedLast year my mum was granted three months’ ‘end-stage’ palliative care, but that ran out in November, as she survived against all the odds. Meanwhile, the boiler in her privately rented house needs replacing, but Health and Safety wants her to move into a hospital ward while the work is carried out. This will undoubtedly distress her and finish her off. We’d rather she was spared the upheaval.
All in all, this means we need our mum to die now. Every time a sister or brother (there are six of us still; one brother died aged 60, again very sad but not a tragedy requiring hysteria, as he had largely brought the illness upon himself by smoking) calls me to say how Mum seems to be rallying, I reply: ‘Oh God. Her heart must be so strong!’ So, yes, we want her to die. It’s the living that’s the cruel part.
For me, my mum died several years ago. I used to call her every Friday after I had finished work to tell her about my week and also to ask about hers.
Funerals: Liz Jones agrees the death of a parent is sad but not tragic, as Lady Thatcher's family said farewell to her this weekI did this like clockwork, especially after my dad died following a short, if painful, illness in 2007. But my mum no longer recognises me, and long ago gave up talking (although last weekend she somehow responded to the purple tulips I placed under her nose with a whispered ‘I’m so lucky’).
As we have not been able to lay her to rest, the grief just seeps on and on like a stain.There is no celebration of her life, no finality, no coming together, no joy that she had a life full of love and fulfilment. So I imagine that I won’t be racked with wildly inappropriate sobs – though I could be proved wrong – when we do finally hold her funeral, and place her in the grave with her beloved ‘Daddy’.
(That’s if we can locate the spot in the cemetery outside Saffron Walden, just before you reach the big Tesco that my parents were always too snooty to shop in; I’ve never visited Dad’s grave because I really don’t believe he’s really there. Instead, he’s alive in my thoughts, and pops up quite a bit, disapproving, in my dreams.)
I’m not a fan of mass hysteria at funerals, believing that we should be nice to people while they are alive.
My mum has always believed she will see my dad again after she dies – so I imagine somewhere inside her mushy brain she really can’t wait.
