Tuesday

A proper admin day today. I even started a hand-written To Do list as keeping everything in my head and/or an unruly pile on my desk/study floor was doing my head in. That and not writing. My publishing schedule has gone completely off the rails and the list of half-written draft posts and unprocessed thoughts is clogging up my screen and my head respectively. Time to de-clutter everything.

The Dog’s walk was into the village today. A visit to the pharmacy, the post office and the supermarket for us and a visit to the Vet for a weigh-in for The Dog.

We met the lady who sells coffee from a kiosk at the station on the way. She knows The Dog from way back when she was an absolute handful. The Dog recognised her and went for a cuddle. The Dog knows the routine now. Approach the human, get some attention and then return to us for a treat before she gets over-excited and starts jumping up.

“Wow!! That’s different!! I can’t believe she’s so calm now!”

“Yep, she’s a different dog now.”

“Yeah! 100%!”

I wonder if we’ll ever get used to people complimenting our dog? Probably not. The people who’ve known her since the beginning always seem to feel they’ve been paid a huge compliment when she wants to say hello to them.

The Dog is also much calmer when we’re waiting outside a shop for Lesley to come out. Just as well as she was ages in the supermarket. As we’d suspected, she’d met a friend in there and from the part of the conversation that we heard as they came out I understood what they were talking about and why Lesley had been so long.

“… the biggest problem was Dad’s palliative care nurses. Every time I went into the home and asked what was going on the nurses there told me they were waiting for the palliative care team for something. When the team lead phoned me after Dad died I told them how disgusted I was and how I wouldn’t have let my dog suffer the way he’d been treated…”

The best bits of the trip out were the compliments The Dog got from passers by while we were waiting outside the post office and the fact that The Dog has lost half a kilo.

Lesley had another run through the eulogy. She’s getting smoother now but the last two lines are still tough. But then I’d written them to have impact. There have been some updates to it over the past few days but not many of them have survived being read out loud. They’d looked OK on the page but they’d not improved the rhythm and flow and at 9 minutes it was plenty long enough for someone to read out in a situation like that.

The review continued on The Dog’s afternoon walk and then the conversation turned to text that Lesley’s sister wanted to read. It had only lasted a couple of minutes and most of that was stumbles and sobs. She was determined to get up and say something though.

“If you can talk for nine minutes then I’m sure I can manage two.” she’d said.

I don’t think she’ll make it. Especially if she’s speaking after Lesley. The emotion will have got the better of her by then. She didn’t take kindly to Lesley saying that my recommendation would be to read it out loud over and over.

“I thought what she wrote was odd. She talked about My Dad instead of Our Dad.”

It wasn’t the only thing that rankled.

“She said he gave life advice sparingly. He wasn’t like that with me!! He was constantly telling me what and what not to do or telling me I was doing things the wrong way or retelling me how to do things when I was clearly doing them the way he wanted. And whenever he gave her advice she would always do the opposite and there’d never be any comeback.”

From what I could hear myself, it also seemed to have been a peculiarly rose-tinted view of a loving father/daughter relationship. One that bore only a passing acquaintance to the one that I saw anyway. I clearly remember her phoning here in floods of tears because Dad had been letting himself into her flat and rummaging around while she was out at work. He was the reason that she left the country 30 years ago to have her family several time-zones away. She did speak to him on the phone regularly but never said much of any consequence unless it was to ask for money.

The disagreements about money got so bad that when Lesley’s mum was nearing the end and she was semi-comatose in hospital they leaned in to tell her that her youngest daughter had just come from the airport. Mum came to with a start, said “Has she!!?? Don’t give her any money!”, and sank back into unconsciousness.

When Dad was obviously nearing the end and visits from overseas increased in frequency he said to Lesley

“Don’t pay for her flight. She’ll only come back again.”

Lesley’s sister has kept her distance until the past few months. Physically and emotionally. She’s kept tight control of what we know and how much access we have. No-one is allowed to speak to her kids without her being present either. So all these proclamations of mutual love and devotion and all the bursting into tears and sobbing at the merest mention of Dad when for the previous couple of decades she’d kept him at arm’s length and only saw him when he went to see her on her home turf where she could control things better all seemed a little… fake.

It was Grief As A Performance Art.

Sadly, I think she thinks we’re buying it. But even Mum and Dad knew what she was really like. On the evening walk with The Dog, Lesley talked about a conversation she’d had with her sister at Dad’s bedside in his final hours.

“She was remembering how lovely it was to go out for coffee on Saturday afternoons with Mum.”

“REALYY!!?? In which parallel universe did that happen?!”

“I know…”

It may have happened before Lesley’s sister and her husband emigrated. Or it may have happened when Lesley’s parents flew out to visit them. Either way, it was decades ago and couldn’t have happened more than a couple of times.

Lesley summed it up nicely…

“I’m pretty sure that when Mum was thinking about her at the end she wasn’t thinking about the devoted daughter she enjoyed coffee with on a Saturday afternoon. She was more likely to be thinking about the daughter she and Dad saw in town one weekend. When she saw Mum waving at her she crossed the street and headed off the other way as fast as she could.”

Lesley’s sister caused their parents, and Lesley too for that matter, no end of angst over the years but now neither of them are around to say otherwise she can show the world how wonderful she is and how devastated she is.

It’s Grief as a Performance Art.

Bloody hell.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. The image is not of the home itself. I used AI to generate an image of a typical modern nursing home. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.