Email from Dad: 2015
Darling Daughter,
I am asking you if you would consider taking on the role of Power of Attorney for me? I’m debating whether to ask Cornelia or not. My inclination is to say no, simply because she becomes so emotional quite easily and reliability is the key here!
Anyway, perhaps you would care to cogitate on this? Yes, it’s a bit of a responsibility, or rather could be, but in all probability won’t involve loads of work.
What is important to me is that someone looks after my music. By that I mean someone who knows about the whole body of work, understands the industry and the people in it. Right now, I feel like you are the only one who may be able to shoulder this.
I hope all’s well with you, and it will be lovely to hear from you…
Loads and loads of love,
DADADADAD
* * *
Before Dad passed, everything in his house had already moved on. The spare bedrooms, stuffed from noxious hoarding, had been cleared. His car had been sold. A man sat in his dining chair, used his garden tools, and, who knows, lay a head on his pillowcases.
After he died, I got a mug, some jumpers, photos, toy bricks and trains, and a scarf. Secretly, took some poetry books.
* * *
Doctors predicted that Dad would recover from renal cancer. I accompanied him to the nephrectomy assessment.
“How far can you walk at any one time, sir?”
“Twelve miles. Can I have a sandwich?”
“And daily tasks?”
“I even do the ironing.”
The room was silent at the untruth.
I caught the eyes of the medical staff, confirming that Dad’s cognitive capacity was depleting.
Most of us will one day be in a room not entirely making sense. People will see we don’t entirely make sense though none will say it, out of delicate manners. During cognitive decline, we may still participate in the world, interacting, making judgements, voting, driving, spending money; a world without this would be Orwellian.
I visited Dad in critical care after surgery. Post-op delirium was severe. He believed he had been kidnapped, taken by train and held by criminals in Paris. If I tried to correct or reassure him, he told me to shut up and take this seriously. He questioned if I’d been brainwashed by the gang.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“You must tell the people in charge of this place to get me out.”
“OK, Dad. I’ll tell them.”
* * *
Email from Dad: 2005
Darling Daughter,
Daddy has met a lovely lady, Cornelia. We are going to get married. I know this comes out of the blue, but when you meet someone this special, it’s impossible to wait! She’s a little ill at the moment with some stomach issues, but as soon as she’s better, I can’t wait to introduce her.
The wedding will be celebrated at London Zoo. Food is prepared from home-grown ingredients, including fish from the aquarium, milk from the goats, and meat from freshly killed ostriches and buffalo (you can choose your own) and transport is by camel. If you have a lot of luggage, the elephants can provide trunks, and dress will be penguin outfits.
Okay?
DADADADA xxxxxxxxxxxx
* * *
For Cornelia, most people are morons, ignorant and malicious. As a child, I read a story about a teacher called Dame Slap who seemed pretty much the same person.
“Do not come over this morning. I have people here cleaning the floor. Come at 3 pm tomorrow and bring a BLT sandwich.”
“What on earth were you thinking, giving a pasta salad to your father?”
“He should never eat honey. Poison to his condition. I give him fish and chips – low sugar.”
Cornelia seemed to have many contacts. She went nowhere yet had 4000 followers on social media, perhaps gained through inscrutable means.
The only person I knew she interacted with was a gardener, Mateus, who hung around the house and whom Dad fired due to “shoddy work” and prowling nature. Cornelia’s inclinations differed. Gardener became a more frequent yet partially-visible presence. Face sour and congealed in texture, unblinking.
* * *
I was a mid-teen when I went into Dad’s room to talk about his extramarital liaisons. There had been one too many and Mum couldn’t bear it anymore. Reconciliation efforts were obliterated, the house was for sale, this part of our lives was closing. I sat on the green corduroy sofa and Dad knelt on the floor. He apologised for chronic dishonesty. My mother was the most beautiful, intelligent, refined woman he’d ever known, and yet and yet. He made disastrous decisions; he was so sorry.
* * *
Email from Cornelia, 2010
Hello!
Thanks for the photos – your dad is such a proud Grandfather! Your baby is gorgeous and seems to grow by the hour… How are you managing after the C-Section?
I wanted to ask you what we can get apart from a railway – a must for this grandson. Please give me some clues!!! So disappointed I can’t come – passport office is still dealing with backlogs.
Give my love to everyone and a hug to your baby boy!
XXXXXX
* * *
“To outrule dementia,” a lawyer told me, “the bar is ludicrously low. You need to remember your name. If you forget everything else, they’ll likely conclude you’re OK.”
Dad wrote once: “They have assured me I don’t have dementure.”
“Dementure.” So smug on the page. Ha I’m here but you can’t prove it through a spelling mistake.
July 2021: Cornelia agreed on signs of dementia. Dad mixed up words. He ate mashed potato with his hands. The violin concerto he was composing had three solo violins. He was admitted to hospital and stuffed with drugs for weeks. He spoke in riddles and slithered against all diagnoses. Cornelia conducted online research and tried to put him into a psychiatric institution, which I blocked using my Power of Attorney. He was discharged and she weaned him off antipsychotics, which seemed a good idea.
Cornelia compulsively, chronically ordered online products – the house was breathless beneath the hoarding. She accumulated mounds of dementia books. Cookbooks, natural treatment guides, exercise manuals, “living-with” companions, medical compendiums.
Cornelia:
The doctors are just stupid. They literally know nothing and don’t care. I’ve told them so. I’m reading a book, Contented Dementia. His behaviour sounds like developing dementia. Apparently many people in hospital with dementia think that they are at the station, on a ship, etc because they see strangers around.
Me:
At least this makes sense. We can work at helping him through this.
* * *
They say we visualise how time unrolls through the year. It may be vertically, as if a typed page, or it may be horizontally, like a cassette. When I visualise the calendar months, they move left to right from January to December; I look left to months past, and right for the future. Yet when I look back over the months in which Dad was already dead, he is not gone. There is no absence. He isn’t in the ground, as though the dying hasn’t happened. Somehow, my memory can’t cater for it.
* * *
Over the years of calamitous marriage, Cornelia was hospitalised several times for untitled conditions. She complained of stomach aches, intestinal blockage, and stopped eating. No test nor scan known to medicine could identify a cause. Mental health issues were suggested, but all hell broke loose.
“Completely stupid doctors have no fucking clue. It’s totally obvious what’s wrong and they can’t see it. Pathetic. And I don’t trust those Africans. They are known for poisoning.”
Auto diagnosis, auto prescription, auto identification of treatment.
On the first occasion, a couple of years into marriage, exasperated by the incompetent specialists, she sought treatment overseas. Dad protested vehemently yet ineffectively. Post-operation, she lay motionless in a darkened room, seven hours away by plane, barely eating. Dad, then in his sixties, was working on a symphony score. He dithered, felt old and unable. Eventually he went, found her in the black hole, scooped her up and home.
“I was days from death,” she said.
On her return, it was discovered that her gallbladder and spleen were gone, despite scans showing these organs to be intact. She weighed 39 kgs. I noticed a hunk of flesh missing between her nostrils.
The second time, early 2021, I received word that Cornelia was in hospital in a coma. She had lost consciousness having organised a mystery operation. A male friend had accompanied her. Dad was home in bed preparing for kidney removal, void of hope and courage.
The following day, nurses called to inform Dad a man had visited the hospital with presents and flowers, claiming to be Cornelia’s brother. They did not allow entry. Dad made a password.
The third time, Dad was making a recovery with one kidney and the news his cancer had spread. It was manageable and slow. Dad digested it with serenity: “I’ve had a good life. How lucky it’s treatable.”
Cornelia’s phantom pains returned, and she refused all food and assistance.
Dad was months from death, unbeknownst to all. He crawled upstairs with dishes of avocado and berries, begging her to eat. She rejected everything, amid her blanket of anti-inflammatories, laxatives, herbal supplements. Dad sat desperate as she whispered, “Two more days and I will die.”
Doctors came. Tests were clear. Mental health teams knocked. Dad yelled blue murder at them all for being ineffectual. Eventually, he answered the door to police officers and an ambulance. They sectioned her, took her away, and Dad sat at his table quaking. He vetoed welfare assistants and began speaking in extreme attitudes; racial slurs, misogynist insults, abusive bellowings. He wet the bed, ate cold pork pies, smoked and demanded 50 packs of sparkling water.
It was the house of madness.
Six weeks later Cornelia returned, smiling, with a handbagful of antidepressants and a new diet. She weighed 45 kilos instead of 36. Dad took to his bed and barely rose again.
* * *
June, 2023. Dad had been gone for three months before I dreamt of him. In my dream, I visited his house and it had already changed. Work had been done and rooms were reconfigured. The gardener was pottering in the kitchen. I wandered around, invisible, looking for something familiar. Remembering his room, I ran towards the doors and burst them open and there it all was, stationary as a photograph. Silent piano, green corduroy sofa, leather-topped desk, tall windows, woven waste-paper baskets.
It was his old room, from where I grew up. It smelt of cigarette ash but in a nice way. So still and empty.
* * *
There was a pond in my childhood home, at the bottom of which lived a mystery fish known as The Tench. Other fish had names – Freddie and Frank, Wilfred and Eileen – bought in garden centres, served in plastic bags, configurations of orange, white, red, with stripes and blotches. They flashed through the pond all day, busy and bright. But The Tench was a very private animal, deep and invisible.
Fish should never be emptied abruptly into new water; they can suffer cardiac arrest from new climate shock. We’d habituate them to new water, setting the bag on the pond surface, slowly allowing the waters to mix. People would laugh when I told them this.
Wilfred and Eileen were chic fish with silvery transparency, hazy reds and blues and misty fins like angel wings. Wilfred fell sick. Leaning to one side, he paddled helplessly in the thick water. He slowed, stared, strained. We took him upstairs in a bowl, set it under a dripping tap. New water dripped in and old water dripped out. It was a fish drip, over which we vigilled as cloud-like Wilfred sculled, panting for life, eyes loose and vast. Eventually, Mum led me to bed in my light pyjamas: a small ghost, head bowed and anxious.
Around 1 am, there was drastic deterioration. Dad resorted to a risky trick. A rare yet knowledgeable drinker, he fetched his brandy bottle and, through a thin straw, dropped a pinprick of cognac. The chances were low. But a fleck of eau de vie slipped into Wilfred’s gasp. Dad said there was a shudder, a gyration of sorts, followed by stillness. Instead of relinquishing and floating to the surface, Wilfred got a grip, sped twice about the bowl, cured. Mum said that it was 3 am when Dad came to bed, “absolutely knackered”.
Weeks later, I discovered Frank floating at the pond’s surface; a sudden death about which I was devastated. Mum helped me craft a coffin from folded paper which we lined with a blue velvet offcut. Frank was buried beneath the gooseberry bushes. As I wept, Dad told me of the great burnished pond in the sky. This beautiful stretch of water was a utopia for all fish who had lived in our world. A vast golden fish would appear and swim among them, tenderly opening and closing his magnificent mouth, and he was the God Fish.
* * *
We couldn’t see the cancer or the dementia. But when you know a person properly, you see their character diminish. Dad’s humour waned and eventually withdrew. Everyone knew Dad was funny, conversational, extrovert. Even in his most monstrous moods, he could flutter humour.
Good days with Dad would be lying on his bed watching TV. He would put something generically daytime on – a tabloid game show, a house search – and we’d watch, somewhat mindlessly, and Dad would make silly jokes. He’d chuckle as people fumbled their way through their own inadequacies – bad taste, naivete, intransigence.
Clever people are the funniest, absurdly funny people are very clever, and the funniest are those who can retell the absurdities of themselves. Yet, there is weakness in this recognition of fallibility. Cornelia was poor in humour and incapable of self-abasement, but it made her the strongest in the end.
Whatever it was that drew them together was ruinous. All focus was on physical weaknesses, age-related, common and odious in nature. Was Dad an illness project? Comedy had kept Dad alive. Once subtracted, it left a fretful man, consumed by self, beaten by worry.
* * *
Spring 2022: Dad took me for a walk to see the woodland primroses. He was unsteady but determined.
He said: “I’ve heard that you meddle in my treatment. Let it be clear from now on Cornelia is the only one who may make any decisions about my care. You were not helpful. You no longer have power of attorney.
“Dad… she wanted to put you in a psychiatric unit. I couldn’t let her.”
“Ridiculous,” he said. “They’d never have taken me.”
“But I stopped her doing it.”
He looked desperate then. Bewildered, startled.
“I… I don’t know who to believe,” he said.
* * *
Messages with Cornelia – May, 2022
Cornelia:
“As you know, we’ve updated our wills and prepared LPAs. We were going to do this ages ago anyway. We had a private assessment and believe that Dad doesn’t have dementia. Which I suspected all this time. If anything, he may have mild cognitive impairment.”
Me:
“Will they do any more brain scans to check everything?”
Cornelia:
“What’s your point? Scans are used to differentiate between different (19) types of dementia and confirm diagnosis. Not vice versa. Dad may have a bigger risk of dementia but there’s no treatment or cure if you catch it early.”
* * *
Colourless November, 2022: A doctor with muscles and high morale, asked about DNR. Nobody knows what DNR means until they must. At the same time, it’s an easy acronym to decipher. He described the indignity of resuscitation and low chances of success. When DNR is raised, you have little choice but to scrawl along an over-photocopied line of dots. By this time, Cornelia had all rights to such decisions; her name was signed before I even replied.
Dad started calling out the names. “George…. GEORGE.”
* * *
Deep winter, 2022. I drove every three days to the hospital. The degradation was offensively fast. On the overheated, scuffed ward, Dad would call out names in long, psalm-like notes. I didn’t know to whom the names belonged.
“James,” he would call. “James…. JAMES.”
“John,” he would continue. “John… JOHN.”
Once I talked of my new cherry tree. He started calling out, “Cherry Tree. CHERRY TREE.” He’d call and call – must have driven other patients mad – until his voice would shatter. He’d cry defeated bleats, battling to convey something I couldn’t understand. Then he’d be open-mouthed and still-eyed, like a fish longing for escaping movement and air. All that was comprehensible was the aloneness of the experience of dying. Nobody comes with you when you’re doing it. Nobody does it with you.
Sometimes he would cry out, “MUMMY.”
* * *
December brought Dad home on palliative care, too weak to survive treatment for slow, treatable cancer. A cat was introduced to the house. Cornelia wanted a cat. It was a designer breed: rare, desirable, indifferent. It swelled fast, from kitten to creature. Dad hated cats because they prey on fragility, attacking birds and butterflies who work hard in the garden. Cat stalked about his bedroom, antagonising the ardent old dog, as Dad diminished in a hospital bed. Cat would pad over bedclothes, up on Dad’s shoulder, over his head as he whined protests.
* * *
While he lay dying, those dark, protracted weeks, where winter spread like a creeping sludge, the TV would be on, and I’d sit beside him. The jokes and wryness were gone; nothing left to say. We waited as time eked out what remained. When carers washed him, he’d roar with discontent. I understood. Little dignity is reserved during moments where existence is abandoning you.
Cornelia helped change and clean him. I forget she did that. He was well-dressed in expensive, pressed pyjamas and she brought a hairdresser. She did some things which are good. Nothing in this pageant fits.
My son would play with the old dog in the foggy garden. Once, a vast man emerged from the darkness with secateurs, curdle faced. “I am the gardener,” he said.
* * *
“Those carers are morons,” Cornelia said. “They don’t speak English properly and they’re lazy.”
“The doctors are incompetent. They don’t know anything about medicine.”
“The cleaner has been sacked. She was a pain and too fat. Couldn’t even clean a window.”
“Nurses are bitches. One tried to make me drink dairy. I’m suing them.”
* * *
March, 2023: Dad left on a Spring day. I arrived a few hours after, went to talk to him. He lay in his bed. His strong hand had retained warmth, and I held it. The room was so still, though the winds and flowerheads chirped around his garden. I spoke to his unhearing ears and sat alone. I saw my father wiped of life. I saw it.
“He was so brave,” I said to Cornelia.
“You obviously didn’t know him,” she replied. “He was terrified.”
Fuck off you bitch. Don’t tell me bravery means acting without fear. I thought and didn’t say.
Bereavement is being stranded.
Dad, did I fail?
Dad?
DAD?
* * *
Cornelia emailed the will two days following his death. She’d been made director of Dad’s company five months before he died. All was left to her. I was erased and will never know the whole truth, hear the exchanges between them. I can’t know if he died in complete mefiance of me.
There is a distinct before and after.
The before is Wilfred and Eileen, the coherent emails, belly-laughs at the TV, insomniac composing, and the music.
The after is the gardener sitting in his chair as Dad lay dying, selling Dad’s car and using the lawnmower bare-chested in the garden. It is Cornelia believing she could be trustworthy guardian to a vast catalogue of music. My solution is to stay in the before.
* * *
Mr Big Pants music promoter spoke at Dad’s funeral and tried to be funny. Some of his speech was taken from the Guardian obituary written by a quiet and skillful music specialist, present in the congregation. Mr Big Pants called Dad a “Grumpy Old Bugger” and took the piss out of an occasion Dad’s speech overran at a Very Important Concert that Mr. Big Pants had so masterfully organised lest we forget. He made jabs at another composer whom Dad hated, but who was still alive. Mr Big Pants was audible throughout the wake, for him a schmooze event. As soon as he left, he wrote a social media post tagging each important person he’d grinned at.
A friend dropped Cornelia home after the funeral, saw the gardener’s car parked outside.
* * *
Cornelia dug me up a purple geranium.
“Are you sure it’s OK?” I said, to be polite.
“It shouldn’t have been growing here.”
Her foot stamped down on the garden fork, striking the teeth deep into the soil, and swooped back to the surface bringing out the entire plant in one swift action. No time to waste. What on earth was that stupid plant doing there anyway.
They’re hardy, geraniums, and I’m not talking about the succulent-stalked variety. This wandering kind is slender-stemmed, with violet saucer-shaped flowers, witty as piccolos. I planted the geranium at the bottom of my garden in a space ready for a vivacious plant that adores being alive. I put it there and tried to talk to Dad in that place.
* * *
Mr Big Pants and Cornelia were hanging out. Pictures were shared online of them looking through Dad’s manuscripts, as though he were an historical figure. I could almost hear them twitter as though they’d landed a charity shop curiosity. Dad’s handwritten scores were posted: Fine, slender tails, pencil-drawn on the stave, as familiar as my doll, or our old corduroy sofa, or the scratchy wool of my parents’ sweaters. They were private, those notes, predating the millennium and the falling-apart.
* * *
Messages with Cornelia: May 2023
I’m launching an exciting project and you must tell nobody. It’s a festival of screen music in Dad’s name. I will get major sponsorship and create a massive annual event. I’d like you to think of titles. Here are my ideas:
- Cinematic Crescendo London
- Reel Rhythms Festival
- London Silver Screen Symphony
- Harmony & Frames London
The list was AI generated.
“What about something simple like, “London Screen Music Festival?” I suggested.
“Not very interesting,” she replied.
* * *
Months passed in groups of murky weeks. Amorphous. I cannot remember the weather, news, professional and domestic tasks, meals, financial demands, conversations with colleagues, or the stages of leaves and branches. These weeks are blocks between which you lie, pressed like a stem. I got neck ache because movement was such a strain. Stasis.
My son and I were banned from Dad’s house because we were threats.
I spent some time on social media watching Cornelia live buoyantly: trips to sunny places, Cat’s antics, social commentary.
“You know who the real morons are in this area? People in Tesco.”
I discovered the gardener’s name was not Mateus.
* * *
If you look on Google Maps, you can go right up to Dad’s front door and see shapes, shadows and outlines through the windows; plant leaves, the large model ship, bannisters. His car is still parked outside. Image data is from March 2018, the camelia bush is flashing scarlet. Perhaps he was there, composing, examining his garden, secretly smoking, not knowing that his home was being committed to a photo that would be posthumously, publicly available.
* * *
Dad’s cause of death was stated as renal cancer. Cornelia snapped, as the undertakers made their way towards the house, that they don’t perform a post-mortem if the patient is on palliative care.
Cause of death. Cause of death. No cause of death.
* * *
Now that silence has cloaked, I picture Dad only in the cold deep ground and wonder why that doesn’t seem peaceful. Why does it feel as though we’ve abandoned him there where he can’t get out? Who said that the body is just a case, not tantamount to the person? I had a dad with a stout body and glasses and prominent calf muscles and skin that reddened easily and fingers strong from a life of piano and wavy hair like the sun. He did funny voices. He knew the Latin appellation for every plant. Where has it gone? Into the freezing earth. Is that the best place? Is there no other way? Please could we find another way because I’m not sure it’s very nice down there.
