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Eight
Apart from the pain, one obstacle remained to Jane's
peace of
mind. Richard was the first to sense the undercurrent of anxiety
beneath her outward calm, and he helped to bring it out into the
open. She told him of her anger over some of the things her
father had said and done as much as ten years earlier, when she
was still a child. Richard urged her to have it out with Victor
But how could she, without making him feel guilty? This wasn't
what she wanted to leave him with when she was gone. Her love
for Victor made her suppress these bitter, angry memories, but
Richard realised she needed to get them out to be completely a'
peace.
"My next task," he wrote to Joan, "is to try to get
them talking
really honestly with each other. This may well be impossible.
cannot afford to take the risk."
Yet when he mentioned it to Victor, delicately at
first, ready
to pull back at the first hint of trouble, he found that his father
was more than willing to talk to Jane about some of their pas
disagreements. He felt none of the guilt, he said somewhat ag
gressively, that Richard expected him to wallow in. They had
been honest disagreements, and he had sought to act fairly by
Jane. "Maybe you've read too much Freud, but I didn't do any
thing I need to feel guilty about, so I don't."
"Bullshit," Richard exploded. Then he added more
gently,
"Dad, one always feels guilty about people one loves."
Richard's intervention worked. Victor agreed
that it was time
to clear up past differences, and their talk stimulated him to ex-
amine his memories—and his conscience. He remembered when
Jane was fifteen and he had taken her on a trip round the
world. They had flown from Tokyo to San Francisco, seen the
sights of the city, then returned to the airport for a flight to
Washington, D.C. Jane's physical exhaustion soon translated it-
self into one of her "off" moods. At first she was silent, but he
would not let her remain so, for he thought he recognised the
warning signals. He tried to get her to talk again by involving her
in the preparations for the departure, asking questions she would
have to answer; but she became angrily uncommunicative, only
grunting in reply and deliberately averting her face in a way
that seemed calculated to attract the attention of the other
travellers.
It made him squirm. She had displayed these moods
before: in
Israel, after a tour of the battlefronts of the 1067 war which had
been fought a couple of months before; in India, after walking
through streets which had become homes for the poor, the ill,
the hungry; in Hong Kong, where they lost their way in what
looked like an anthill teeming with millions of frantic human
beings. But she had usually managed to keep her feelings to her-
self. Now she was making a public spectacle of them and show-
ing that very lack of self-control he had hoped the trip might
cure. When she was in this kind of state, there was no reaching
her; but he had to make her realise what she was doing to him
and to herself, how she was destroying the good their trip had
done, how she must learn to live with herself, with others. At
that moment nothing seemed more important to Victor than to
shock Jane out of the state of sullen rebellion she had sunk into,
a state so characteristic of her behaviour before they set out on
the trip.
Inside the airplane, Jane appeared to be having some
difficulty
with her seat belt. "Here, let me help you," Victor said, as
he reached over her.
"Can't you leave me alone." She almost shouted.
That did it. He snapped: "If you insist on behaving like this,
Jane, you'll never make any friends. You'll go through life on
your own. And if you make any, you'll never keep them."
She looked at him without a word, then turned her face to
the window. Watching out of the corner of his eye, Victor saw
a solitary tear roll down her cheek.
They didn't speak of the incident, but after they
got back to
England, Jane told her mother about it, and Rosemary attacked
him furiously. "What a terrible thing to say! She's insecure
enough as it is. She'll never forget it. She'll never forgive you."
And she never did. It was one of the things, Richard said to
his father, that remained to be sorted out. But Jane would not
mention it herself.
Victor looked for ways to raise the subject. Several
times he
was on the point of speaking to her, then each time drew back.
At last he said, without any preliminaries: "About that day in
San Francisco . . ."
Immediately she knew what he was talking about, and
tried to
make it easy for him to go on: "Yes, Dad, I suppose we were
both pretty beastly."
At once he was on the defensive again. "Well, Jane,
I didn't
mean to be beastly. I thought I was trying to help you." He
went on to explain his motives. He really had been concerned
about her future, how she would be able to make friends, build
a life of her own.
Jane didn't pull her punches. "That hurt a lot, Dad.
It still
hurts. I'm angry whenever I think of it."
"I'm sorry, Jane. What else can I say?"
But an apology was the last thing she wanted. "Well,
do you
still think you were right? "
Now he knew what else he could say. He spoke of the
friends
she had made at the university, of the young men she had loved
and who loved her in return, of the children who became de-
voted to her when she taught them. "Of course I know I was
wrong. But I didn't know it then."
That seemed to be all Jane required by way of an
admission.
She didn't want to make him feel guilty, and she even helped a
little by talking of her own prickly behaviour as a teenager. "I
know I must have tried your patience."
In the days that followed, they spoke of other incidents
and
problems left over from those times. The human misery Jane had
witnessed in Asia had strengthened her radical tendencies, and
on her return to England she became increasingly active in the
political movements of the late sixties, flirting with Communist
and Maoist ideas. At home she would put all the passion of a six-
teen-year-old into political arguments with her father which
usually started calmly enough but rarely ended without acri-
mony. He thought he was paying her a compliment by treating
her as his intellectual equal, answering each argument with a
counter-argument of his own and requiring her to back her
assertions with evidence. At least that's what he told Rosemary
when she pleaded with him to go easy on Jane. But he could
easily produce the evidence to support his own arguments, and
he gave no quarter when Jane faltered in debate.
Jane's arguments were what one would expect from an ideal-
istic teenager—passionate, intense, earnest. He pursued every re-
mark she made in the heat of the moment to its logical conclu-
sion and proved its absurdity, to his own satisfaction. When Jane
spoke of injustice and suffering and pain in a world that Victor
too knew to be far from perfect, he sometimes recalled his own
youthful dreams of righting the world and tried to tell her he
understood what she felt; she would grow out of it as he had
done, because things were not as simple as they seemed. In
reply she would rage and storm at him for betraying his own
ideals and would swear to stand by hers, come what may. His
aim was to convince her that some of her ideas were impractical
and, while conceding that a few might be right, to show her she
was going the wrong way about gaining support for them. Her
aim was to demonstrate to him that the world was in a mess and
that he was one of the people responsible for it. She didn't care
whether he thought her ideas were feasible; she knew they were.
She wouldn't be argued out of them, as he had argued himself
out of his own ideas when he was her age. She wouldn't betray
her ideals as he had betrayed his. He was trying to remake her
in his own image, but she would not allow it, never, whatever
the bribe—and she threw the round-the-world trip back in his
face.
Richard, two years her senior, was then at Harvard,
deeply in-
volved in the Vietnam War opposition and student protest
movements. His relations with Victor remained good, perhaps
because he was away from home, and he too advised his father
to go easy on Jane. "Let her win some of the arguments," he
wrote. "She is insecure. She needs to think she is right."
But it was too late. Jane no longer talked about politics with
her father, and if he tried to raise the subject, she wouldn't re-
spond. When they spoke of other things, it was clear that there
was a barrier between them. The old intimacy and the new pas-
sion of their recent debates had gone out of their relationship.
Both were on their best behaviour—or tried to be, because they
knew that further argument might completely destroy a rela-
tionship already gravely damaged, and they wanted to avoid
that. The stand-off continued for more than a year.
Their relationship began to grow warmer again only
when
Jane left home to go to the university. It took her another year
to become disillusioned with student politics, and then with poli-
tics generally, but she never changed her view of the world,
never lost the feeling that injustice was the condition in which
most of mankind lived, never shed the burden of guilt she had
acquired when she saw the real world during that trip with her
father.
Since then, they had never talked about their old
disagree-
ments, or acknowledged that either might have been at fault.
When Victor now spoke of it, at Richard's urging, the anger
Jane showed at the recollection of their quarrels was so quick he
wondered whether he might have done better to have kept silent.
She had forgiven him easily, graciously, for the San Francisco
incident, but she was still bitter about the way he had brow-
beaten her intellectually when he should have known she was
not mature enough to compete with him in a political argument.
What had hurt Jane most of all was Victor's opinion of her mo-
tives. Her recollection of their arguments differed from his. She
felt that he had accused her of favouring violent solutions for the
world's ills, of caring more for her theories and political pre-
conceptions than for the people whose cause she claimed to
espouse. He had questioned her honesty, ridiculed her values.
Victor was appalled at the picture she had carried in her mind
all these years. He could see now why their reconciliation had
never seemed complete, why it had lacked the depth and warmth
he longed for. Had he really been so insensitive? At first he
thought of assuring her that it had not been his intention to treat
her in this way, that she must have misunderstood him. But
would that be true, and was it even relevant? More important
was that he now knew her values had been right, that she had
been honest and sincere, and that he could assure her of this
without the slightest qualm.
Victor didn't limit himself to empty assurances.
He talked to
her of that day in India when she came back to their plush hotel
so sickened by the poverty she had seen in the streets that she
couldn't get a morsel of food down.
"But you made me eat, don't you remember?" she interrupted
him.
"What I remember is our discussion. You were so upset
that
you wouldn't go out into the street for several days and then,
when you did go, you were so angry when you came back that
we had another row."
She had returned to the hotel in a fury and treated
him to a
detailed description of the poverty and misery she had seen that
day. She followed it up with a scorching attack on a capitalist
system that allowed things like that to happen. She didn't at-
tempt to analyse the system or propose a cure for its ills. "You're
the political expert," she mocked.
Then she listened sceptically as he propounded his
solution—a
world in which the United States, Russia and China would join
forces with Europe and Japan to help the rest of humanity gain
a tolerable standard of living. International cooperation between
the advanced countries to help those less generously endowed
would take the place of the arms race, and a golden age would
bring to the whole of mankind the benefits individual nations
and civilizations had sometimes enjoyed during their own golden
ages.
"Rubbish," she exploded. "Did you ever stop to think
of
the slaves during the golden age of Rome? Or of the disease
and hunger and poverty of the common people during the
Renaissance?"
"They didn't have modern technology," Victor replied
feebly.
"You mean like the technology they're using in Vietnam?"
Jane scoffed.
He spoke of swords being turned into ploughshares,
while she
accused him of mouthing platitudes. Why, she asked, if he really
cared about the people they had seen in the streets and villages
of India, had he not written about the problems of the under-
developed countries? That wasn't his area, Victor countered.
"But who knows, perhaps I will. Yes, I think
I should."
She relented. "Is it a promise?"
"Yes."
It was Jane who reminded him, as they reminisced
at Dairy
Cottage about this conversation they had ten years ago, of the
promise he had made to her, and he reminded her, in turn, of
some of the articles he had written on the subject since then. "I
don't think I would have written them if it hadn't been for you.
I'm glad, now, that you went for me." It was out of character
for Victor to speak in this way; he wasn't usually contrite. But
he didn't want her to think he was just saying this because he
knew she was dying. "I really mean it, Jane."
"Did you mean it about the golden age?"
"Of course I did."
"You haven't written about that"
The time hadn't come for it yet, he told her. No
one would
take him seriously if he did. Sooner or later . . .
"That's what you said in New Delhi, Dad. You told
me things
•were moving in that direction, that it would happen in a dozen
or two years, and if not, then in a score or two. Don't you
remember?"
"No."
"And there was something else you said, Dad." She
was de-
liberately trying to jog his memory.
"What, Jane?"
"You said, 'I may not live to see it, but you will.'
"
There was an awkward pause before Victor answered: "No,
I don't remember that, either."
"Well, it doesn't look like I'll outlive you now,
does it? "
His distress must have shown on his face.
"Don't worry Dad, I think I can take it. And
if I can, then
you can, too. I've had plenty of time to get used to it. That's
what I was thinking about most of the time in the hospital. That's
when it was hard. That's when I couldn't talk to you."
"It's all right, Jane, it's all right now," he repeated
mechani-
cally, as one does to a child who has been hurt. "It's all right."
"It was hard on you, too, I know." She wasn't apologising so
much as explaining. But with those few words she wiped away
the hurt and anguish he still felt when he remembered the weeks
of rejection.
It was true that he hadn't felt guilty, as he told
Richard. It was
also true that, as Richard had feared, there was a risk in making
Jane and Victor speak about the past because now he did feel
guilty about it. But it was a guilt he could live with. It was only
because she had been able to talk to him that he could sit by her
bed silently, look into her eyes without averting his own, and
discuss the other thing that needed to be talked about when a
person is dying—death itself.
He said he doubted whether many people would have
reacted
to what Dr. Sullivan had told her the way she had. "I know I
wouldn't." How was it she was able to accept it without protest,
so quietly, so naturally?
"Because it is natural," she replied.
Victor didn't think it was, not for someone her age,
but he
stopped himself from saying so aloud. Instead, he asked: "What
do you mean, 'natural'?"
"There are two ways you can look at it, I suppose.
In a geo-
graphical sense, and a historical one."
"You do have a philosophy, then?"
"I don't know if you'd call it that. I used to think
when I was
in the hospital, in the geographical sense, look at me lying in this
bed, in this precise place on earth—me, Jane, in a city of seven
million—and every day, every hour, every minute maybe, some-
body is dying here in London. And London's in England—fifty
million people, all of whom are going to die, sooner or later.
And England is only a tiny part of the world, with four billion
people, which means that there must be millions dying all the
time, all over the world, thousands at this very moment. In this
geographical sense, what am I but a speck? What's the earth but
a speck? Why should my dying be so unacceptable and so difficult
to bear. Why should it be so much more unacceptable than theirs?
What's so special about me?"
"And the historical?" Victor prompted.
"Well, look at the world and how long it's lasted,
not just
civilization, but humankind. Look at the millions and billions
who've come before us and died, year after year, century after
century, for thousands and thousands of years—and all the bil-
lions who'll come after us, and will die. Obviously, this is some-
thing that is happening, that has to happen, so why not accept
it? Why resent it? Why fight it? It has to be. It is. And that's all
there is to it."
"It's logical enough. But the fact is that I am afraid
of death,
and you aren't."
"I was afraid all right, at first. But I've had plenty
of time
to think of it. All these months. I knew my chances were pretty
low. There were times when I said to myself, I'd rather die
quickly, now, than go on like this. And there were times when
I was prepared to try anything, put up with the worst that the
chemotherapy or radiation could do—the vomiting, the convul-
sions, mv hair falling out, anything, so long as there was a
chance. The fear was worst at night. In the daytime, with people
around me, it was easy to be calm. At night, when everybody
had gone, when I was alone, I'd be so exhausted that I longed
to sleep, to forget. But I couldn't. As soon as I tried to sleep,
the fear got too big. The only thing I could think of was all
these cancer cells whizzing around my body, or worse still, find-
ing new places to grow, spreading inside my body, dividing,
growing, taking over. Eating away at the healthy parts."
It was the first time Jane had spoken to him so directly about
dying, and she had done it, he now realised, only after he had
told her of his own fears. It was almost as if she was trying to
help him overcome his apprehension. She wasn't succeeding, but
he was determined not to reveal that. He dredged up another
memory he had long suppressed.
"I think I know how you felt. Do you remember when
the
doctor first told me I had angina? I came home and we sat on
the terrace as the sun was going down, and it took me some
time before I could bring myself to tell you and Mum what he
had said, and you were both so kind and loving and reassuring.
I just sat there and couldn't say anything much."
"You took it pretty well, Dad. I remember all right.
Perhaps
that's where I get it from."
Did she really think he took it well, or was she
still trying to
help him? Perhaps that was how it had looked to her. But to him
the doctor's verdict was like a sentence of death, the threat of a
heart attack that could come out of nowhere at any moment. He
had faced the thought of death much as one might look directly
at the blazing sun for a moment, and then averted his eyes from
it. It blinded him. It wasn't something
he could contemplate.
Feel, yes; think about, no. But what he felt was the sense of non-
existence, a vast emptiness, an abyss of nothingness. That's
what's called ego-chill, he thought to himself as he shuddered
with fright—and put it out of his mind.
Only now, at Jane's prompting, was he beginning to
think of
it again, reluctantly, for one thought led to another, and some-
times he would find himself reliving his wartime nightmares.
Jane's questions showed that she knew what was going
through
his mind, and she tried to get him to talk of his experiences in the
war. He knew she was trying to help, but he could not respond.
He wasn't ready yet.
During this week friends from London came to sit
by her bed,
talk about old times, hold her hand, and cook her favourite vege-
tarian dishes. They knew what Dr. Sullivan had said, but Jane's
calm acceptance of it and her obvious happiness at having them
there made these days good.
She was anxious that everyone she cared for should
have some-
thing of hers to remember her by—something that would please
them and be useful. She began to match possessions and friends.
Books, pots, household treasures, all the things she had chosen with
care and bought from her earnings or received as gifts, would now
become part of the lives of the people she loved. Sometimes she
asked Rosemary to buy a special present when she had nothing
appropriate to give someone. With Rosemary's -help, she made
lists of who should get what. "It's giving you such a lot to do,"
she apologised. "This is something I really ought to do for my-
self." But in this time of easy understanding and communication,
Rosemary was able to reply, "It's simpler to do it all now, while
you're here with us. If I leave it until you've gone I may not be
able to cope—it'll hurt much more then."
They sometimes cried together about the inevitable
parting.
Rosemary would tell Jane of the many reasons why she would
never forget her, remind her of the memories that would keep
her alive. Jane had been an important part of all our lives; how
could she cease to matter to us? Love wouldn't end when her
body died; in that sense she wouldn't be dead, she'd still be
around. How could the things we'd learned from Jane ever be
forgotten? She would leave so much behind her, not only mem-
ories but things made with her hands, practical things that could
be used and enjoyed, beautiful things that could be looked at.
"Yet it is so hard to lose you," Rosemary told her.
"There's
a poem by a Russian woman, Anna Akhmatova, whose husband
and son were both carried off to the prison camps: 'This must be
happening to someone else. I could not have borne it.' That's just
how I feel. But I have to bear it and I know I will."
Jane and Rosemary had talked of death in the early
days of
her illness as something inevitable but impossible to imagine.
Rosemary had told her then of a dream she'd had. "It was ex-
traordinarily happy, and very vivid. I was dead and had been
buried under the path by the front door—not the place I'd have
chosen. It was just sunshine and warmth on the stones and I was
there. It was a very happy dream." Then Rosemary had still been
able to say to her with a laugh: "When I die, please walk care-
fully over that bit of path, just in case!" Now she couldn't make
that joke. She knew Jane would never tread that path and would
be the first to die.
But when Jane talked of death it was realistically,
of some-
thing soon to take place.
"
When I die," she said suddenly, "I don't want to
be buried."
Her voice was unemotional; she might have been discussing a
haircut or a choice of dress. The disposal of her body seemed a
small matter. "I've always had a horror of being buried alive,"
she went on. "It was one of my nightmares. Will you fix it so
I'm cremated?"
"Of course. Lots of people have fears like that.
It's very com-
mon. Shall we scatter your ashes in the garden?"
"Mmm. Over the pond, too, and by the stream." She
leaned
back on the pillow and closed her eyes. They could both hear
the rustle of the stream in the quiet evening.
She began to tire more easily. A system of signals
was ar-
ranged between Jane and her family: One buzz on the intercom
meant she needed something; two buzzes indicated she was tired
and wanted to have a visitor tactfully taken away. The buzzer
was carefully hidden under the covers so no one's feelings would
be hurt. Whoever answered the call was not to let on that they
had come in reply to a summons, but to make it appear they'd
just dropped in. However, she never used the two-buzz signal.
As the pain increased, the possibility of Jane's getting up be-
came more remote. Soon she couldn't visit the bathroom next
door without help. The next day, when she asked Rosemary to
help her, she could barely put one foot in front of the other. She
had to force her legs to make the steps. Her feet splayed out un-
der the weight of a body unable to obey the mind's signals. To
sit down on the toilet seat was an additional misery. She crouched
on the lavatory with Rosemary struggling to hold her upright
and cried: "What am I doing to you?"
Rosemary half-carried her tortured body back to the
bed that
seemed to give so little comfort. She knew now that Jane should
never attempt to get out of her bed again—she should struggle no
longer. She phoned Dr. Sullivan, and barely twenty minutes later
he was in Jane's room. "We'll get help for you," he said. "You
needn't try to manage alone." The district nurses were on their
way. They would make her bed, wash her, lend her a bedpan.
To the rest of us, he said, "She should go into the hospice as
soon as possible. I'll see if we can get the paperwork done
quickly." The decision was made; there was no more discussion.
It was obviously the only thing to be done. "The cancer is mov-
ing so fast we can hardly keep up," Dr. Sullivan said. The
hospice had more applications than it could cope with, and for
every patient it admitted, several were turned away. But he
knew that Jane's youth, the rapid deterioration of her condition,
and the intensity of her pain would all give her priority.
Rosemary had no more arguments. It was gradually becoming
clear to her that it would be impossible, even with full-time
nursing help, to look after Jane at Dairy Cottage. She clung to
the hope that, after a week or two of treatment in the hospice,
her daughter would come home again. When the time of death
was near, she must be surrounded by her family's love.
"She keeps complaining about her feet," Rosemary told the
doctor. "Sometimes she says they're hot, sometimes cold. Then
she'll ask us to rub them. And she'll say, 1 can't feel—are they
hot or cold?' "
He met her eyes sadly. "It's the beginning of paralysis.
There's
nothing I can do about it."
Jane was finally trapped by her disease. Trapped
and helpless.
She lay in bed by the window barely moving, her head turned
towards the bird table, her eyes following the movement of the
birds. When she lay still, the pain didn't bother her much and
she was calm and relaxed.
When Dr. Murray, the consultant in charge of the
hospice,
heard the facts of Jane's case from Dr. Sullivan, his answer was
instantaneous. She was in terrible pain and needed help immedi-
ately; he knew the hospice could provide that help. She could
be admitted straight away.
Adjusting to their diminishing expectation that Jane
might
still have some life worth living left to her, Victor and Richard
went to inspect the hospice.
Jane and her mother waited peacefully for the men
to return-
it wasn't really waiting, just a
shared time together. They
watched the restless activity round the bird table outside the
window as birds settled, fed nervously, then fluttered away. The
weak constantly gave way to the strong, to return when their
chance came again.
They didn't talk much, just a few words here and
there.
"You know, I really am happy, Mum," she said. "I'm in pain,
but it doesn't matter. I'm happy, do believe that."
The house was very quiet.
Victor and Richard burst in with a rush.
Their exuberance
was so intense it was as if everything in the peaceful room
jumped. "The hospice is a marvellous place, Jane," Victor said.
"Just wait until you see it. It's not a bit like
a hospital, more like
an ordinary house."
Richard put in, "The doctor is really a terrific
man and the
nurses are superb. They all talked to us—really talked with us
and not at us"
"They're getting a single room ready for you," Victor
went
on happily. "There's a bird table outside the window. What's
more, there's a visitors' room so we can even stay the night."
Jane and Rosemary exchanged looks that said, There they go
again, so easily carried away. Aloud, Jane said: "I think it's time
for my medicine." She could still joke at her own expense.
"Judging by the sound of my voice, it's past time!"
When she was alone with Victor, Rosemary asked what the
hospice was really like; but his enthusiasm was sincere. "The
man in charge is sure he can get her pain under control, although
it may take a little time. He wanted to know all about Jane—1
described how the hospital doctors wouldn't let us tell her she
was going to die and he was completely on our side. I'm ab-
solutely convinced we're doing the right thing. They would
have admitted her this evening if we wanted, but if we wait un-
til tomorrow she can go straight into a room of her own." He
handed her some papers. "Here's a list of things we should take."
Rosemary ran her eye down the list. " 'We'll be waiting to
welcome you,' they say. That's a good beginning." She read
on aloud: " 'Nightgown, brush, comb, hand-mirror, etc. Day
clothes'—well, she won't need them. Nor will she need note-
paper and pen, slippers, dressing gown . . ." She stopped again.
"They were most insistent that we should bring those things,"
he said. "They try very hard to make the patients feel at home.
It's warm and comfortable. There's a lot of modern equipment
to make things easier for the staff . . ."
More machines?" Rosemary shivered, remembering the
huge,
mysterious monsters she'd often watched being pushed down the
hospital corridors. She'd found it impossible to guess whether
their purpose was to clean the hospital or perform some opera-
tion on the patients.
"No machines. If the patients need treatment or therapy,
they're taken to the hospital next door. But the hospice is quite
separate, it really does look like a home—curtains, carpets, pic-
tures." He told her it had been built to a modern design, with
the comfort of the patients as top priority. Only twelve of the
twenty-five beds were in use. The funds were not available to
staff the others.
Victor had informed himself about the hospice background
with his usual thoroughness before deciding to entrust his daugh-
ter to it. This hospice had been established with private funds,
some donated by the National Society for Cancer Relief and the
rest raised locally. But once built, it had been handed over to
the government-funded National Health Service to be run as
part of the system open to all who need medical attention, free
of cost. We were fortunate to live relatively close to it. There
were only about half a dozen such units in the United Kingdom,
and Dairy Cottage was just outside its official catchment area;
but Dr. Murray was free to stretch a point when he felt the situ-
ation demanded it, in spite of red tape. Private hospices like St.
Christopher's are completely independent and usually separate
from hospitals, but the units funded by the National Society for
Cancer Relief are built on the grounds of already established hos-
pitals, can use the full range of their services, and are always in
a position to return a patient to the main part of the hospital if
further palliative treatment should be required. Although the
area health authority which takes over a completed hospice is
responsible for staffing, administration and running costs, it
manages the hospice in keeping with an operational policy pre-
viously agreed upon between the National Society for Cancer
Relief and the local authority. In this way the specially trained
hospice doctor who is in charge retains the autonomy he needs
to run his establishment on principles which may sometimes seem
at odds with generally accepted notions of what a hospital is for.
Victor's explanations satisfied Rosemary, and she
had managed
to relax a little when a new problem presented itself.
Late in the evening Jane needed the bedpan. In happier times,
the pan the district nurses had brought would have amused the
family considerably. It was a large, upright model, with gothic
lettering round the rim solemnly proclaiming that the patient
would be more comfortable if the rim was covered with warm
flannel. Modern bedpans can be slipped under a recumbent pa-
tient, but not this one: Jane had to sit upright. It took a joint
effort by Rosemary and Victor to lift her into position. Every
movement hurt her. She sat on it awkwardly as they both held
her up, one on each side, the pain showing in her face. They
waited. "I can't pee, Mum. It won't come." She struggled on,
but in the end she had to give up and we laid her down in bed
again. Then, driven by her discomfort and a growing fear that
she would never be rid of all the liquid pressing inside her, we
tried again. This time Victor wedged his back against hers so
that she could lean on him and not depend on her own diminish-
ing strength to sit upright. He wanted desperately to help her
and at the same time was afraid that every movement he made
could hurt.
She cried out with pain and frustration and quickly
begged to
be laid down again.
It was now that Rosemary realised fully how utterly
impossi-
ble it would be to look after her. How could we nurse her when
every touch on her body caused pain? How could we even move
her, untrained as we were?
The immediate need was to get relief from the pressure
in
Jane's bladder, and to free her mind of the fear that she'd never
manage to pass water—a fear that was rapidly developing into
panic.
Dr. Sullivan was out that evening, going to three
meetings
one after the other. Jane pulled herself together again. "Let's
have one more try," she insisted. Miraculously, it worked. Tired
out, we began to settle for the night.
Jane's fingers were too weak to press the buzzer. All day her
only pleasurable physical contact had been the feeling of a hand
beneath her own. Whoever sat with her would slip a strong,
healthy hand under her weak fingers to give her the human
touch she longed for.
Rosemary made up a bed for herself in her daughter's
room.
Jane was given her late night dose of medicines and sleeping
pills. Exhausted, they settled down to sleep.
Victor's voice came out of the darkness, his head round the
door. "Are you asleep, Jane?"
"I was, almost."
"The doctor's here, he wants to know if you're all
right?"
"Fantastic man!" she murmured, still half asleep.
"Tell him I'm
all right."
A few minutes later Victor was back. "He says he'll
sleep
better for knowing that."
"I think I will, too," she said.
The next morning the pain was worse. A district nurse
ar-
rived early intending to give her a thorough wash, but could
only sponge her face. When she heard of Jane's latest difficulty,
the nurse was reassuring. "Don't worry about the waterworks,
dear. They'll give you a catheter—they slide a little tube into you
and you won't have to bother any more. The liquid will )ust
drain out, it won't hurt at all."
Punctually at nine Dr. Sullivan arrived to give Jane
an injec-
tion to enable her to endure the journey. He brought a bottle of
medicine to top up the injection. "One or two spoonfuls as often
as you need it."
There was no sense of haste about his visit. He sat
beside Jane
and she gave him a goodbye present. She tried to thank him—so
did we—but there were no words to convey what his help had
meant to us.
Rosemary needed reassurance about the hospice. "You
do
want to go there, don't you?" she asked. "We're not forcing you
into something you don't want to do?" She leaned low over
Jane's bed to hear her answer; it obviously hurt her to talk now.
"It seems the only thing to do. I can't go on like this . . •"
The weak voice trailed away into silence.
It was already past nine, the time the ambulance
had been ex-
pected. We were beginning to feel anxious, but Jane remained
calm. Her face was composed and her manner detached as she
lay unmoving, asking nothing except an occasional spoonful of
the medicine. Time passed slowly. As tension in the family rose,
Jane gave the appearance of being in a world apart. She was ob-
viously in pain, but she didn't complain or express anxiety about
what lay ahead. She was unable or unwilling to be distracted by
conversation. She lay silent, staring upwards.
At last a car door banged at the top of the path
and Richard
came running in from the garden. "They're here!"
As the ambulance men carried her gently out of the house
wrapped in a red blanket, up the steep path, the younger man
fumbling at what was obviously a new job to him, the birds
were still singing, but she gave no sign of hearing them now. It
was just a week since she had walked down this path on her re-
turn from the hospital.
What does a father think when his twenty-five-year-old
daughter is being carried off to a home for the dying? This
father thought, with a shudder, that she would never see her
home again—and that she would be much better off at the
hospice than at home. What does a mother think? This mother
thought that the most terrible moment of all had come, and she
was overcome by a sense of failure—conviction that she had
failed to preserve the child she had given life to and nurtured
for so many years.
The ambulance journey was a nightmare. With every
jolt,
every grimace, it was as if a knife was being driven into Jane,
deeper every time. The younger man drove very slowly, very
carefully. The older man stood up in the back with us, watch-
ing Jane's face, repeatedly telling the driver to go more gently,
trying to make bright conversation to distract her, while his
eyes reflected the pain and desperation communicated at every
jolt.
In contrast to our small world of pain, outside was
pleasant,
easy country, the kind of scenery Jane would have loved when
she was well. Freshly cut fields of hay were scattered between
fir plantations and small villages lay in the hollows. Sheets
of
white daisies reached over the grassy slopes each side of the road.
We passed an ancient cottage with an old cart wheel attached to
the chimney stack. Here in this cottage, Rosemary thought, peo-
pie had grown old and died over a long period of time, genera-
tion after generation. Jane would never grow old . . .
At first we tried to behave as if there was no need for hurry,
but the injection was wearing off. The ambulance man decided
to drive faster, yet the pain was now so intense that the re-
mainder of the journey was a torture to Jane. When at last we
reached the hospice, the older attendant told us, "We'll just go
and see what's happening," and disappeared. Jane spoke into the
silence that followed. "Just another bloody hospital after all,"
she said clearly.
The two men returning swiftly from their reconnaissance
had
an answer for her. "You've got it all laid on here, Jane." The
older attendant's voice was free of tension at last. "You must be
someone special. Your bed is made up, the doors are all open,
you go straight in—no messing about at all!" She tried to smile
back at him.
We were outside a small, low building, modern in
design but
unpretentious. This was in a far corner of what was a general
hospital area, on the edge of the countryside, and very quiet.
The only vehicles that travelled the little road were those com-
ing to the hospice. Nearby were huts built during World War II
and since converted for general use as clinics and offices, with
signs showing their function. But in the hospice, all the patients
windows looked out over a view of green fields and trees. It was
as if the hospice were quite separate, an oasis of calm which gave
no hint of the busy hospital life.
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