Mum with Paul and the Richard family.Photos from RM Vaughan
The following is the fourth instalment in a five-part, first-person series about what to expect when a parent is dying.
If there's a common theme so far in writing about the death of my mother, it's along the lines of, forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for occasional bad or inappropriate behaviour when your parent is dying because you are, naturally, a little out of your mind.
But that doesn't mean anything goes. There are always rules, even for horrible and life-altering events. And that brings us to the hardest lesson of this series – to forgive yourself, you also have to behave yourself.
By "behave yourself" I do not mean censure yourself. If you try to contain all the traumas roiling inside you, you'll make yourself very, very unwell. By "behave yourself" I mean that even at your most excessively grief-stricken, remember to be mindful of others. You'll be surprised how entitled you feel to freak out and become a hateful monster.
A big part of grief is anger, the outraged kind – why is this happening to my Mom, why am I going through this now, everything is so unfair, everything bad happens to me. Yes, the emotions coursing through your already stressed mind are that juvenile. Grief thrives on a base and primal anger that is frighteningly easy to slide into, and terribly difficult to step away from and examine critically – and even more difficult to apologize for later.
So, establish some boundaries and outlets. Be as messy and inconsolable and even foolish as you like. Say idiotic things, speak in broken fragments and embrace the inherent chaotic state of the situation. But don't be a jerk. Don't be hurtful to others, especially your family members and especially not the hospital workers.
There is a huge difference between telling people what you need or what you think is best and berating people. And, if your parent is dying in a hospital, remember that you are surrounded by families going through exactly the same thing – they don't need to hear you barking like Donald Trump.
As for your family, they will forgive you for mentally leaving the room now and then, for being inattentive to simple things, but they will never forgive you for lashing out at them. This entire event, the death of your shared parent, will be as emblazoned in their memories as it will your own.
Outlets for your sulky behaviour are easy enough to find. Go into a room, close the door, and break something, anything disposable. Then step on the broken pieces. Or, watch a crappy television show (by yourself) and talk back to the television. Write a long list of all the things that are infuriating you and then ritually burn it (I know that sounds witchy-flakey, but it works). Do anything that provides moments of mental and physical rest.
You can find solace in the strangest places. I found mine cleaning out my parent's house.
Cleaning out my mother's tiny bungalow before she was actually dead might seem callous: A too practical, cold-hearted response to the fact she was never going to live in her home again, an action against the slim, pathetic hope for a miracle cure, a stay of the inevitable. And I admit that part of me wanted to be away from the situation of her death so badly that I began to clean out her home hoping that, once she did die, I could make a quick and clean exit.
But that was merely the first, fight-or-flight response. Once I began the actual work, began to pick away at the mountain of belongings, the cleaning and clearing of her home took on a ritualistic aspect – I was not throwing away my mother's history, her life in objects, I was sorting it and preserving the important items, the ones that would remind me and my family (especially the younger members) who my mother was for decades to come. I became my mother's personal archivist, which made me feel useful, and thus less powerless, and thus less prone to vocalize whatever ill-considered thoughts, whatever acidic bon mots, popped into my fraught head.
Yes, I complained about the limitless piles of things, and felt like I had assigned myself an impossible task, but that time allowed me to look at the whole of my mother's life as it was recorded in everything, from souvenirs of 1950s vacations to cat litter. I filled one entire industrial-size rubber tub with photographs alone.
When I went to visit her in the hospital in the evenings, I would bring her a handful of photographs I had found and ask her to name the (mostly long gone) people in them, and that of course led her to tell stories, to remember that her life had been very full and populated with people she loved.
The Clash famously sang "anger can be power," and they were right. Take the unavoidable rage that comes with grief and make it useful, not destructive.