The banality of death

They tell you about death as dire but inevitable, a dread we all must face.

They tell you about death as bereavement and loss, as a pain to suffer and mourn.

They don’t tell you about death as an endless procession of bureaucratic tasks, turning a moment of sorrow into a litany of monotonous administrative chores.

Take arranging a funeral.

Is there going to be a service? If so, who will conduct it? Does the crematorium have a slot available (my mother had asked to be cremated) at the same time as the celebrant (he was about to go on leave)?

What style of coffin did we want (given that it was going to be burned…)? What colour of flowers? How should the press announcement be worded? How about the Order of Service booklet – which should contain what photos, to represent 94 years of life in just five images?

Then there’s the will. The lawyer was kind enough to phone me.

‘You need to contact your mother’s bank.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to contact the Department of Work and Pensions.’

‘Done.’

‘You need to make arrangements for the cremation.’

‘Done.’

Have you noticed how helpful lawyers are? How they’re happy to provide all the advice you could possibly need and more? At £280 an hour, wouldn’t you be?

But the worst bit is clearing the flat. My mother was living in sheltered accommodation, in what was in effect just a bed-sitter with its own kitchen and bathroom. But it never ceases to amaze me just how much someone can cram into a small space if they really set their mind to it.

Trolley load after trolley load of books went down to the charity shop. Great piles of clothes. Bits of bric-a-brac. And that’s without counting the items of furniture which the organisation that runs the place has decided to keep.

Or, come to that, the bits and pieces my brother and I simply couldn’t bring ourselves to part with. I came home with my car full. But not just of those objects – above all, what I had was boxes and boxes of photos and correspondence, not just my mother’s, but my father’s, even my maternal grandmother’s and grandfather’s.

Leonard, my father, amateur writer who generated another

Strangely, both my maternal grandmother and my father were keen amateur writers, as I am. I now have a box file labelled in my mother’s hand as her mother’s writings, as I have another of my father’s. My grandmother’s papers included several sealed envelopes marked ‘Before destroying these manuscripts, have a little patience, and read them. Your relative had a questing mind, and a certain literary facility.’

Well, I shall be the first to fulfil that wish since she died. I shall break the seals on those envelopes. That will be a time of some emotion. I’ll have a reminder that death is about loss and bereavement and not just about a banal and tedious bureaucratic process.

Sadly, before I can get around to that, I still have to get through some correspondence with the public authorities, a meeting with a lawyer at £280 an hour, to say nothing of dealing with any outstanding payments due for utilities, phones or, indeed, funeral services.

It’ll be a poignant moment when I can turn my attention to my grandmother’s writing. And my father’s. But oh, what a relief that will be.

Yetta Bannister, a while before she became my grandmother
An amateur writer in the making

A neat circularity: saying farewell to my mother on her birthday

On Tuesday 5 June, my mother and I did something that had become a custom we both enjoyed. We went for lunch in her favourite Oxford restaurant.

She wasn’t well, but then she hadn’t been well or even pain-free for some decades. So I stopped outside the restaurant and helped her out of the car. But from there she walked to the door, her hand on my arm but nonetheless under her own power.

At lunch, we chatted about many things. The forthcoming visit of Donald Trump to the UK. The sad prospects of Brexit. A few questions of history – her lifelong fascination. I asked her about a biography of the Duke of Wellington I was about to read: she told me she rated the author and had enjoyed that particular biography.

There were occasional gaps. It is part of family lore that her father’s birthday wasn’t the day he was born. His parents, Russian Jewish immigrants unfamiliar with the process, hadn’t registered the birth on time and gave a later date. The tale she remembered, though she couldn’t recall either the actual or the official birthday. All in all, it was a pleasant moment. What I didn’t know was that it would be the last such conversation we would have and the last lunch we’d go out to together.

Some months ago my mother’s much-loved handbag had given up the ghost. That at least solved the issue of what we would buy her for next birthday on 11 July, her 94th. I had intended to bring pictures of the various bags from which she could choose to our lunch, but had forgotten. ‘Next time,’ I thought, not realising that there would be no next time.

Just two days later, we had a message from a friend to say that she seemed to be deteriorating badly and appeared confused. And on the Friday, another friend who’d been helping her for years, took her out for her last shopping trip – the last act of her semi-independent living. Our friend phoned after that excursion to tell us it was time to come over to see her.

Well, we didn’t go at once. It was perhaps difficult for us to grasp how unwell she was becoming. But later in the evening it became inescapable. She’d fallen and an ambulance was in attendance. The paramedics took her into hospital and we travelled over to see her in her ward.

Over the next few days, she seemed to make some improvement. She was sent to an intermediate care facility. We visited her there and took her out for a stroll around the garden in a wheelchair. She did indeed seem to be improving, with odd flashes of her sometimes fiery character from the past.

‘Residents aren’t allowed to eat their lunch in the garden,’ a care assistant told us.

‘What utter rubbish,’ my mother told us, in what was very much her style.

My mother on her last garden stroll
Enjoying the company of Toffee the toy poodle 

The improvement, though, was temporary. She was back in hospital within two days, and another attempt to send her back to the intermediate care facility lasted barely twenty-four hours. On the longest day of the year, she went back to hospital finally and definitively.

We saw her on a memorable Saturday with one of our sons and his fiancée. She was delighted, full of cordiality, smiling and wishing them well on their forthcoming marriage, though only in broken sentences and a tone barely above a whisper. The couple gave her an invitation to the wedding, though no one expected she’d attend, but the gesture seemed to please her too.

Two days later, my brother and I visited her and again her pleasure was clear.

Others came to see her. Old friends. Many members of the Oxford Jewish Community who’d taken her to their hearts and did all they could for her, including the friend who’d taken her on that last shopping trip.

But then finally she slipped into unconsciousness. My brother, who lives in Paris but spent a week in Oxford so that he could visit her regularly and we could go on holiday for a few days, had the first of the calls suggesting it was time to come in and say goodbye. I had two others after our return. Finally, my wife and I, came to stay in Oxford in our turn so we could spend more time with her.

Saying goodbye was by then little more than a figure of speech. I felt it was on the last two occasions we’d seen her, with our son and his fiancée or with my brother, that we’d said farewell. But something in there soldiered on – my mother had always been immensely strong within her ill health, and that strength kept her going.

Until the 11th of July, her 94th birthday. She’d brought her life round in full circle to her birthday. There was no handbag, sadly, but there was a quiet closure. As the evening drew in, she peacefully slipped away. She had been provided with astoundingly good, profoundly gentle, humane care, so that at her end she was painless for the first time for many years.

That was precisely as she would have wanted it.

If there was anything she dreaded, it was a terrible, slow decline in a nursing home, becoming an increasing burden on others. She was spared all that, with a final illness that lasted just over a month after her independent living ended. Far too short to be a burden, but long enough us to say our farewells.

There was a neatness to the way she went, and a circularity to her dying on her birthday which would, I suspect, have pleased her. I don’t know if she was conscious of it or did it deliberately, but it felt intentional.

It’s easy to imagine her laughing, to herself and with us, and saying ‘see – I knew how to make a good exit, didn’t I?’

Sixty years ago

No wonder things are getting worse: the saints are all dying

Every generation claims, once it reaches a certain age, that the world has sadly deteriorated since its youth. 

It often seemed to me that this was just the perennial problem of the old complaining about the young. No generation gets old without finding that the next is exhibiting a deplorable loss of standards.

It’s particularly amusing in my own. I love it when people who were teenagers in the sixties, as I was, complaining about the behaviour of the young. It has a nostalgic quality. It reminds me of our elders denouncing us as long-haired layabout louts, who believed the world owed us a living and had never learned consideration for others (without wondering who was responsible for teaching us at the time we were failing to learn these invaluable lessons).

Still, there are times when I look at the news and it occurs to me that there might be a rational explanation for humanity’s gradual deterioration over time. This seems particularly clear when someone celebrated dies. Today for instance the press is full of tributes to Mike Nicholls.

“A mentor, friend, colleague. One of the best observers of life.”

“… the funniest, smartest, most generous, wisest, kindest of all… a truly good man…”

“… one of the most generous people I have ever known…” 

So far I haven’t come across anyone saying “we shall never see his like again”, but even so, it’s fairly clear that if such a man leaves the world to the rest of us ordinary mortals, the overall stock of mankind must inevitably decline in quality.

The best go here
and the average goes to hell

It’s even worse when a child dies, whether of natural or violent causes. Have you noticed how every teenager who dies was something of an angel?

“Loving to his family, cheerful to his friends, he would light up his class with his laugh and help anyone who needed it.”

“She will be missed for her kindness, her ready smile, her enthusiasm that inspired everyone she came into contact with.”

“The entire school is in shock. She was one of the most popular and kindest of people, as well as an outstanding student.”

If these are taken from us, it leaves us with just the common grind of teenagers, the kind that leads many to believe that teenagers are best drowned at birth. The ones whom the gods choose were already otherworldly even before they reached the other world; the kind who stay behind are all-too-this-worldly: noisy, truculent, angry or depressive in turns, contemplating their own deaths when their problems aren’t solved for them, contemplating death for others if anyone tries to help.

The ones who depart this vale of tears never left a dirty sock lying on their bedroom floor, or drank straight out of the milk bottle from the fridge, or finished the shampoo in the course of a shower that used up all the hot water anyway. They did their homework, got up early, wished their families well and left the house so promptly that they always got to school on time.

Late teenagers were never late.

The general picture is depressing. The best hurry off to the next world, while the one they leave behind declines still further. We stay to rot while they decompose.

At least until it’s our turn.

Too late when they're late

Death is always a shock.

Doesn’t matter how much you expect it, doesn’t matter whether it brings relief from pain or comes as a blow from the blue, when you learn about it, it’s a surprise and too soon.

When I heard of the death of an old and dear friend today, my first thought was ‘why did I delay my plan to go and see him these last few weeks?’ Useless thought. It’s too late now. And it’s a thought I’ve had twice before.

My wife points out to me that I shouldn’t be thinking that way since we saw him just three months ago, when he was still able to leave the nursing home where he died this weekend. In limpid, mild autumn sunshine, we enjoyed a wonderful lunch with him, his wife and his eldest son. It was an afternoon of gentleness and cordiality, everyone enjoyed the company of the others, he was happy that we’d made the effort to come and see him, and we were happy to see him and to see his family.

Unfortunately, as we left I thought back to the last two occasions I’d visited a friend close to death. I hadn’t gone back to see either of them as I’d planned, and they died before I returned. I promised myself that it wouldn’t happen again. And as we left the house last autumn, I told myself that I’d see him at least one more time before he went. And then I failed to do it.

Somehow, I’ve got to get over that. We exist at a frenetic pace. Most of us live far too far from our friends, from our family even, and we don’t see each other anything like often enough. And then we miss each other until it’s too late. I should blame that crazy lifestyle.

And I have to overcome my disappointment at myself. I have to remember him as he was the last day we saw him: Danielle’s right to point out that he was smiling then, and recently he was smiling much less, as decline and pain took hold. Those at least he’s free from now.

I have to console myself with that smile. I’d known him fifty years and he’d been closely enough entwined with my family to become something of a second father to me. It’s good to remember him happy.

But there is a lesson to learn: seize the moment. There may not be another one.

The grave’s a fine and private place
but none, I think, do there embrace