ellen bell

She is still alive. He texts him regular updates, though, there isn’t much to say. Her family is keeping vigil. It is such a loving act. She won’t go alone. He was there the last few nights. The hospice had given him a meal and he had a glass of red wine and Bruce Springsteen (her favourite) was playing in the iPad. He cracks jokes via text. He can still do this. All he wants, he writes, is for her to go peacefully. She sleeps most of the time. I don’t think she eats, drinks or talks or even opens her eyes. He holds her hand throughout. Her son and daughter take turns too. They took the hospital bed and the commode away from the house a couple of days ago. He said it looked empty without them. Every step is a final one now. There is no go back, just this long waiting. A long, long goodbye.

I’d bought a pair of Nordic style gloves, knitted and with several layers of insulation but they still won’t do, my hands (to be exact my fingers) still froze. Am I being a baby? They really hurt out there. The numbing comes quickly, even as I am leaving the door, and then the stinging. My circulation is sluggish. I am getting older and it tells in my hands. The skin on the tips of my fingers crack and cut, and my nails chip. My hands hurt in this cold. I don’t do well in it. Does anybody? Some do. Like the Yorkshireman who used to work in the Health Food Shop (now defunct, the shop that is not him) who always wore shorts and rarely a coat, swearing that he never felt the cold. As my mother would have said, “Bully for you”. What can I try next in the glove department? Fur? It hardly squares with my vegan sensibilities. But needs must. And I do need. Coming into the warmth almost hurts me, the stinging certainly increases. I think of the Bronte sisters at the school in Cowan Bridge and their childblained hands. Poor loves. So little comfort. And I think of her, her eyelids shut and her face with its new mantle of an old woman soon to leave us. Poor love. May it be gentle for you.

It was a strange day. We got to the funeral too early. My fault. So we sat in the waiting room – also the room holding the toilets – and watched the comings and goings of the party attached to the funeral before us, including the undertakers managing it all. Formal, rather stiff men in black coats and jackets and striped trousers. One wore a bowler hat. We heard one fart as he peeed.

He told me that his father had died soon after sicking up some dark, viscous matter. He wondered if it had been the five bars of chocolate he’d left in his care home drawer. He mentioned this to the paramedic. No, it was it cancer. He checked anyway and yes, the drawer was empty. He didn’t push the point. Yesterday he placed a bar of Cadburys on his coffin. Will it go in fire with him?

She was under when we arrived. Her beautiful blue eyes hidden, closed-up. She appeared to be trying to pull herself out of the sleep that the two syringe drivers had put her in. Morphia, keeping her under, giving her hallucinations and anxiety. She has to have it, else the pain would be unbearable. Neither of us recognised her. She is an old woman now. Though she is not and never will be. He sits by her bed, keeping vigil. He wears white. An angel, seeing another angel on her way (and not wanting to). Poor love. Poor loves. The son too, so polite, so warm, so uncomplicatedly good. All of them. I am awe of their love. I weep for them. And shouldn’t have done.

He heard via his sister that she’d eaten something, and that she seemed to be rallying. She’s holding on. She’s not ready to go yet. How does that make him feel? Is he grateful for every moment, every second or does this seesawing take the guts out of him. He’d told himself, hammering it home, no doubt, that she was ‘slipping away’. And now she wasn’t. At least not just yet. We shall see her tomorrow. I want to see her one more time, though the journey to be present in that state of grace is not one that I relish. Winter is a hard time to wrench oneself from home and its warmth and safety. I think of those people who drowned yesterday trying to cross the channel. They must have been beyond cold. So desperate. Poor, poor loves.

He texted him and said that she was slipping away. She is still present, still engaging with her visitors but she’s not eaten or drunk anything for over a week and is slow to contribute. Will she let go? He says she is sleeping most of the time. A part of me in jealous. To slip away, to sleep, to let go. I suspect she doesn’t want to. She has much to hold on to life for – her children, her grandchildren, her sisters and her husband. But her body thinks differently. It is killing itself. And she must yield. As we all must when our time arrives. I would like to see her. There is a grace to this process. It is a hallowed space. I hope she finds the peace to slip willing. And then I wish him all the succour he needs for his life that she has left behind.

We went to see her yesterday. I went to draw the Home as well. It makes me feel a little uncomfortable the way that my need to draw orchestrates these visits. I hope she doesn’t see it as so. I hope she knows what I feel about her. It struck me how static she is. Is it being virtually chair-bound that makes her so? Her head moves, the way an owl’s does, swivelling slowly to see what is happening outside the door, or to answer a question I bat over to her from my position on the floor. She holds herself still, that is except for her hands that are forever rubbing, kneading and caressing each other. Do they hurt? Ache, perhaps. She holds them up high as she does this massaging. She smelt good. Her skin is cool and unexpectedly soft. She smelt of spring flowers and talcum powder. What is it about the smell of perfumed talcum powder that calms me? I feel it in my gut, my stomach. It’s a dry smell, it lays on the skin, it is not absorbed in the way that a scented cream would be. The calming effect is probably association. I have known women who have given me safety that have smelt the same way. I want to draw her room. It tells stories. All that stuff in boxes and bags. She is trying to shape a life from that chair. It is admirable. Admirable.

It was bitterly chilly this morning. I do my best to dress up warm and yet I still dread going out. I don’t have to. But I do. It’s both a pain and pleasure. Pain as in my fingers and toes sting with the cold of it and pleasure because I am mostly alone and the world is so quiet and still at that time in the morning. I do love it. It’s just my corporeal self that suffers. I tried to make a drawing but it was hopeless with mittens on and the wind nearly blew my sketchbook into the sea. He was quiet this morning. He slept with a cardigan on. Bless him. This flat doesn’t do well in the cold. It doesn’t heat. Heigh ho. The rain and warmer weather will return, soon enough.

I woke at 12.30am from a dream which featured one our neighboursfrom across the estate. We don’t know him very well but have, as you do, ‘passed the time of day’. In the dream he was in our home (though it was a home that was unrecognisable to me) and telling me about that fact that they always eat gluten-free bread. Where such inconsequential stuff comes from I don’t know. He also proceeeded to show me something that he had baked. It was wrapped up in tin foil and looked a little sunken – a bit like a kind of eggy-covered bread. Why my subconscious had decided to get him to show me, of all people, what he’d cooked, I don’t know. Is it all those coffee shop conversations about cooking that sparked it? After the dietary revelations, the neighbour pulled out a hat from his pocket. Would you like to touch my beaver hat? he asked. I think I yielded out of politeness but all I could think about was that someone had killed a beaver and made a hat from their fur and how appalling that was. I’d begun to climb the stairs while he was stood in the stairwell. What part of Norway do you come from? I called down to him. I’m not from Norway, he said, I think I’m Swedish. It was only when I woke that I realised the difficulty with which I’d been climbing the stairs. I was pulling myself up, dragging my legs. It was a herculean effort. Now there’s a metaphor for this current time ….

I’ve begun writing about my drawing of bleak places. I delve. I am a mole scratching its way through a tunnel of blackly grit. I don’t know where I am going. It is a warren of ideas. I burrow. Not much light yet but there is something like pleasure in this beginning. I hold to that. So much of this research so far has been full of frightening unknowns, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, I suspect. I am not brave. I am a child, a forever child, stepping out into this. So uncertain. I have no certainty in anything that I do. Grant me the courage to open myself. To at least open myself to what is and what will or is coming. Just be open and be prepared to yield. Is that enough?

I tidy a drawer, sort out a cupboard, rearrange a shelf and I feel better. Always. But it is cosmetic. I cannot order the bigger things, the life things, the humanity things that threaten to topple our (or at least mine, can I ever speak for others?) sense of the world and what it is. His reading of the article in the paper by Gordon Brown last night was a case in point. Brown wrote about the effect that a second term of Trump would do, not only to America and its citizens, but the world as a whole. It made for frightening listening. And then there are the wars that continue, day-in-day-out, the one in Ukraine, the one in Gaza, Sudan. Such conflicts are ongoing and ongoing. So many people for whom that is all they have come to know. Can normal life ever happen for them again? Do they have an idle hour to tidy a drawer? Of course, not. Survival is all they think of. And then there was the tsunami and the floods here. Endless pain and struggle and misery. And then there is her. He texted him to say that she’s gone into hospital to help manage the pain. And then possibly the hospice. I think of them both hourly. Poor loves. Poor her. Poor him. And all her family who love her so dearly. That long goodbye is endless. I know there is goodness, I see it, I feel it. And good, good selfless people. Surely that evil encapsulated in this world’s tyrants can be ameloriated and tempered by such good. Surely.