a strange sad day

As days go, Saturday was a long one and a strange one. My mother lives 120 miles away and she has been taken into hospital again. I haven’t seen her in quite a while so on Saturday we had an early start and a long drive to a hospital in a strange town. The staff allowed the visit even though it was not visiting hours and so I got to hold her hand for a couple of hours while watching her struggling to breathe. She suffers with COPD and has frequent attacks where breathing becomes a real problem. So she is taken into hospital and given oxygen on a more or less full time basis. She panics of course as is understandable and becomes dependent on the hissing mask that covers her face. She doesn’t even eat as that would involve taking off the mask. I hold her hand and try to impart small talk, but I am not good at that and so I begin to feel guilt that I am not able to be there for her apart from short visits. When I do visit her at home, I rarely stay long as when she is at home she persists in smoking, the habit that has made her ill in the first place. Each cigarette makes her worse and I hate to watch her killing herself. Never being the most rational of beings, she claims that smoking is the only pleasure she has, and cannot see the irony in what she says. She is getting thinner and weaker and her will to live seems to be diminishing, and it seems that there is nothing that anyone can do for her. That is hard to deal with and so I came away leaving her gasping noisily for breath, aware that any visit could be the last one. She refuses to contemplate a nursing home though I suspect that pretty soon that she will have no choice in the matter.

Leaving the hospital we then travelled south to Dorchester on Thames, arriving in plenty of time for a pub meal before an evening concert. On my bucket list was The Tallis Scholars, a choral ensemble that specialises in Renaissance music. And so I spent Saturday evening in a church. More accurately it was a mediaeval abbey, which I must say had the most amazing acoustics, and was packed with others who sat transfixed by the most wonderful sounds that you can imagine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4VoKso5ERI

I sat transfixed and thought a lot about my Mother and what the future might or might not hold. Lives are short in relative terms and some at least are not very happy ones. She has had a rough life. She was born on a farm in Canada at a time when life was very hard. The family was large and she and her twin sister were given away as the parents couldn’t manage to keep them. They were shipped back to the UK and looked after by relatives. She was pregnant by the time she was 16 and so married and had me. We lived in a council house that was basic to say the least, with no heating and no indoor facilities. I fell ill with TB and was taken away from home for 5 years. Later my brother died in a traffic accident, my father lost a leg in another and then he died. While her twin sister travelled and prospered, she stayed where she was and didn’t. She lost much of her eyesight and now her lungs have deteriorated to the point where she wants it all to end.
I feel helpless and very sad for her.

Eventually got home at about 3am tired and emotionally drained.