Letter to Jay 15/1/2003

One day in the summer of 1991, my mother rang and requested me to arrange for her to execute a Power of Attorney. When I asked he reason for this, she said that she felt that she was about to "lose her mind". I arranged for a lawyer to do as she had requested, and a week or so after that my father called me over to their bungalow. It was immediately clear to me that something was seriously wrong with my mother. She was convinced that she had no money left - and that she was now in a very real sense "worthless", although I quickly discovered that this was very far from the case. She also told me that she had had a "vision", as a result of which she was no longer to eat or drink, and within a week she had deteriorated sufficiently to become an emergency admission to the psychiatric unit at Southlands hospital. She was very reluctant to go, and I had to insist that she did. My father drove her to the unit, left her there, and fled, without apparently even talking to the staff. He never saw her alive again. Her condition continued to deteriorate, and by Christmas she had aged so much that it seemed to me as though I was in the presence of my grandmother. Although a young doctor was to take a personal interest in her case, the drugs he prescribed were so strong as to cause physical complications, and the treatment had to be suspended. She died of a massive heart attack early in January 1992, and although the hospital rang me, I did not get there in time to see her alive.

During her illness, my mother had been unable or unwilling to acknowledge me: she would often tell me that I was a very good likeness, but that I was not the "real" Neil. Her last words to me - two days before she died - were "I wish you'd shut up and go home". I pointed out that I had driven some way to visit her, but she was adamant, and I left. Although there were some moments of incidental humour that helped to keep me sane, it was the slow but inexorable draining of my mental and physical resources that finally took its toll. My father was also suffering from depression at the time, and was receiving treatment in a private clinic. A family friend who had gone through a similar experience had warned me that I could not be expected to cope - even at some distance - with two people in the state my parents were in. By the time my mother died, I was becoming very frightened about both my lack of sleep and the way I was feeling, yet there appeared to be nothing I could do about it. So her actual death came as a considerable relief to me. I was fully aware that the doctors had done as much for her as they could, and that she was still suffering badly. Yet more important was the sense that I now only had one distressed parent to cope with.

My father's reaction to her death was "So that's that, then". I was in tears, but he seemed not to be the least engaged in the unfolding course of events. Her funeral appeared to make little impression on him, and he never spoke of her again, except obliquely: "she was a friend of your mother's", he once remarked of someone I'd mentioned. He survived her by more than five years, most of which he spent in hospitals or nursing homes. Although I stored his furniture for him, in the hope that he might one day feel able to have a place of his own, he passed the time just sitting and staring. Although he was never unpleasant, he would only talk to me reluctantly, and would often try to ignore me completely. He treated his brother, Ronald, much the same, even though they had always been very close. I came to dread my visits to him. When he eventually died from pneumonia, I felt even more of the relief than I had with my mother, for a considerable burden had been lifted from my life.

For some time after the death of my parents, I had tried hard to deal with the negative feelings that I had largely suppressed yet continued to experience towards them, I had attempted to rationalise the situation I faced, and to look back to the times when they had been well and happy people. Yet I was so very conscious that I had not grieved for them as I should have done. From time to time, some of the hidden resentment would come to the surface, and I would, quite literally, look back in anger. Although I was sustained by my Christian faith in facing this pain, I sensed that in some deep and irremediable way, all was not well. Yet I should have realised that where there is a need for healing, God will always recognise this, and provide the means for it to occur. The right people will be in the right place at the right time. For it was my friendship with Gisela that was to become the means of my own deliverance: in my ministry for her while she was dying of cancer, and in the terrible yet tremendous reaction that I experienced at her death, the healing of my own hurt was finally to be accomplished. Some time later, I realised that not only was it the working out of something that I had desperately wanted to do for both my parents, but that through it I had been enabled to find myself at peace with them.

When ill and dying, my parents had rejected both me and my faith, but Gisela had prayed to the Lord to work through me to help her, and I was ready to do my part in responding to her petition. When she died, I experienced the most intense feelings of joy and loss: they alternated so quickly and overcame me so suddenly that it was often hard for me to distinguish the source or reason for my tears. We had known each other for just under six years, yet had never lived together or shared much more than the joint observance of our Christian faith and a weekly meal. She had asked for a burial, and when we came to throw our roses on to the coffin as it lay there in the earth between the cold December showers, I was quite literally - and for the very first time in my life - shaking with grief.

Gisela's family had asked me to suggest some words for her headstone, and I decided on "The Lord careth for the strangers" (Psalm 146 v9). She had left me no instructions for her funeral service, so I was free to create something that would reflect our life together. Following a discussion with Fr Roger, I decided to have a Requiem Mass, which would celebrate our shared sacramental relationships both in this world and the next, and for the first reading I selected a favourite passage from Isaiah, not then fully realising how relevant it - as well as her epitaph - might be to my own life and healing:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the LORD for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. (Isaiah 55:8-13)

Neil Macdonald