Well hello, sorry I haven’t stopped to say hi for a while, I’ve been enmeshed in the death at Christmas what if, scenario.
My mother, and, it would have to be said, probably her 101 year old sister most but all of her siblings to some degree, seemed to be, at various points, consumed by the idea that if they died at any significant date, it would spoil the day for everyone else for ever after. Whether this proceeded from a genuine concern for the welfare of others, an over inflated sense of their own importance or, most likely, a strong desire to control events and force other people to be happy whether they want to or not, is difficult to say.
Whatever the wellspring, the possibility of dying at Christmas has overwhelmed my mother for at least the last three years, so that the actual event is marked more by a sense of relief than any rejoicing or enjoyment. She is also so concerned to preserve her own health that she is constrained from doing anything whilst continually anxious that I get everything perfect, which, coupled with the five second memory results, no matter how much reassurance I am able to give, in the utter misery you might imagine. If they disinvent Christmas or turn it off before we get there you won’t hear a murmur from me.
Right now the gifts are all in the hall at my mothers, labelled and ready with large signs for visitors to help themselves. She has had the food catalogue for weeks and I’ve ordered the stuff she chose, which I tell her all the time. The gifts have been carried in and out to her chair for her inspection numerous times and moved around the hall and downstairs rooms in a frenetic fiddler’s elbow sort of way.
The fight has been fought endlessly over having carers during the holiday. She wants me to suspend all care and live in for a couple of days as I have in the past. I cannot see how I can possibly cook a dinner for my family including new baby, with her upstairs being ill. Bed days are an increasing feature of life as are mini strokes, during which she becomes catatonic and can neither move or speak. Afterwards, however, she cannot remember these have happened at all, so convincing her that they have and that we need to have extra people on the ground on the day to help if it’s a bed day has been a work of art and every power of gentle persuasion I possess. I think we may nearly be there but I am exhausted by the days when all she wants to do is scream that she won’t have strangers in her house at Christmas.
Then there are the days when she is certain she will die before Christmas, these are always followed by the twenty minute lecture on all the things I have to do upon her demise: kill her cat, give all the money to my son and make sure he buys a nice house immediately in the area she specifies, summon the auction house to value the wonderful possessions (now mostly crumbling and flaking under the onslaught of three years continuous central heating at tropical levels), give a piece of her mind to a list of recipients including: the shop who sold the chair she picked the leather off, window manufacturers, an assortment of plumbers, the makers of exploding heating pad middles, many drivers, charities that send begging letters to old ladies (I actually support this one, especially those that are impossible to turn off), and anyone else who needs their bones rattling by her to be specified at a later date. When she dies I am going to be quite busy I think and also of course, if it’s Christmas, grief stricken and sobbing in my stocking and I’m never going to enjoy Christmas again, by order.
Oh it’s tiring. I was in the chocolate shop getting some names piped on Santas when the piper told the story of her horrid grandfather, who strongly disapproving of anyone having fun, had the whit to die actually on Christmas day, to the surprise of not any single one of his many relatives, who were all of the opinion that it was just like him. We had a jolly good laugh.
Christmas for the terminally ill, poking and picking at the anticipation of death from all angles, is not nice for relatives for sure, but I’m also sure it’s not supposed to be the general theme for four years running. I begin to have sympathy for those who abandon the holiday altogether and buzz off somewhere warm. Right now it has more appeal than a carillon of bells.
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Janehohohohoh Laverick.com