Death and Dying Part 1

A lot of it about at the moment what with the Pope, Terri Schiavo and the (presumably) mad Tamil hacking people’s limbs off with a sword in a German church who appeared briefly on the news on Sunday evening and was never heard of again.

So what do I think about dying? I don’t have much experience as I am not yet of an age when all my friends are dying. To date I have only been affected by the deaths of my parents. I was unable to brave the funeral of a friend in my thirties who died very early of breast cancer, or grieve with a local family whose child stepped off the pavement in the path of a lorry. I felt I had no words to say, either to express grief or to give comfort. My grandfather died when I was ten, but this was after a long illness resulting from a stroke, and I remember only the strangeness of the funeral and the changes in our family afterwards.

However more recently, I have thought a lot about death, but reading Taoist and Buddhist literature rather than Christian theology.

The Pope
In recent years, the pope to me had become synonymous with conservatism and being anti-women, anti-contraceptive etc. It was refreshing to see his early years as pope again and to remember that great surge of hope that a Polish Pope brought, not only to the break with Catholic tradition, but also the symbolism in the fight against communism. How difficult it is to remember quite how immovable communism seemed until 1989 and how quickly it collapsed.

Nostalgic also to see how the Pope reminded me of my father in looks. We always joked about this as a family, even to the way their English had the same heavy accent. It made us proud to be partly Polish (irony of irony as it turned out).

Terri Schiavo
The American circus which surrounded this court case and death was depressing, as was the fact that American politics and Congress got involved. The issues round her life and death are thought-provoking but rarely got discussed in a sensitive way in the press.

My parents’ deaths
Death was probably discussed quite a lot towards the end of their lives. Even earlier, my mother had often joked that if she ever had an incurable disease she would take an “Arthur Koestler” cup of cocoa. It seems that Koestler and his wife jointly committed suicide in 1983, presumably by something in their cocoa, when he was suffering from leukaemia and Parkinson's disease. I remember my mother’s “threat” being made rather earlier than this, before she was ill, so I don’t know whether Koestler himself had threatened this. My father never had a view on this but it seems unlikely they planned a suicide pact, as they argued over everything, which seemed to keep them alive. In fact we predicted that they would die within days of each other as there would be no one to argue with. We got that wrong.

We were never really sure what religion my father was (probably Uniate, an Eastern Catholic church common where he was born). He claimed he was more of a humanist seeing God in nature, but for the last rites he was happy with the Anglican church like my mother.

My father died first at over eighty (his age was not really clear because of his two sets of papers). He had a mild heart attack in his fifties, made a good recovery and retired early, so his old age was relatively comfortable until he reached 75 or so. By then heart disease had weakened him and gradually his organs were failing, leaving him very miserable and bedridden, wishing to die, but unable to. His death was a relief to all, and we were thankful that he had lived so long given his imprisonment by the Germans in the war.

My mother was diagnosed as having breast cancer in her sixties but she survived surgery and chemotherapy and recovered to live a full life for several years. She was determined my father would go first so that he was not left ill on his own, but looking after him wore her out. She managed a further five years before the secondary cancer and the beginnings of glaucoma brought her to a hospice and a calm death. It seemed that she could not bear to go blind like her mother had done. I remember that in the hospice, she was fitted with a drip-feed painkiller on her arm, which she removed because she felt that she could not think clearly enough with it, and preferred to manage the pain herself. When she felt she had had enough, she called us sisters from our various homes to her bedside, gave us all her blessing and then died the next day.