Chapter Fifteen: The Death Rattle
After a long drive home, I carry my reclaimed childhood items into my house.
Everything still feels like its part of her life, not mine. Piles of books and clothes and my dragon figurines, sticky with the sheen of a dead woman’s soul.
I’m so tired and sad and stressed and grieving that I see shadows moving in the corner of my eye. Sometimes they rush past like animals. Sometimes they stand where walls meet, tall and silent.
‘I hope that’s not you, Mum,’ I mutter as another shadow glimpses past.
I pull her tablet from my bag. It’s a recent model that probably wasn’t cheap.
The games installed are exactly what I expected. Word games, some search and find games, simple puzzlers.
Most were last been played at the start of March, before the cancer made her brain too jumbled.
It’s creepy, pawing through the apps. I feel the ghost of her fingertips on the screen.
A couple of the games are paused mid-level. I absolutely fuck up her considerable run in some word-building game.
‘Oh shit,’ I panic as a tower of letters scrolls down, ‘Mum, help, I’m going to ruin your game. Please don’t haunt me, Mum.’
Game Over. Score: 198944.
There’s an Asda app installed.
The last order is just a couple of days before she died. She must have had T do that one for her.
I scroll back to last December, when she was first admitted to hospital. Orders from then onwards tend to be around the forty quid mark. Anything before then is…wow, at least £180.
How did she spend that much a week at Asda? She’d been barely eating for years!
Every week as far back as the app will let me scroll – ten months – mum ordered a crate of zero alcohol Guiness for The Man Who Is Not My Father (after the stroke, he didn’t drink), and upwards of £100 of alcohol just for herself.
One 1l bottle of vodka. At least three bottles of that rancid merlot T and I diluted with lemonade the night of Mum’s death. Eighteen bottles of Leffes beer.
That is 90 units of alcohol a week, before considering the odd week when she’d order two vodkas. The recommended weekly amount for a woman is 14 – and that’s assuming she’s a healthy weight.
She was ordering from Tesco every week too.
A 70cl – sometimes 1l - bottle of Whiskey, a bottle of cherry brandy liqueur and a bottle of Tequila rose. And stacks of Gold Label, of which she was having between one and four cans a night.
So my mother was drinking between 190 and 240+ units of alcohol every week for at least a few years.
At least 25 units per day that I know of – that’s three standard bottles of wine, or nearly one 70cl bottle of vodka, or seventeen cans of Carlsberg.
And on top of that, she’d been getting alcohol delivered on UberEats.
At the house, I’d seen a bottle of avocat, a few of Magnum tonic wine, pallets of Carlsberg and Carling, and that knock-off Baileys she’d so enjoyed near the end.
I spent a year in my twenties drinking a bottle of wine every single night rather than get therapy after being raped. And I mean, I felt like absolute shit all the time.
How did mum drink more than three times what I was during the worst stage of my life, for the years that she was? When she was emaciated, too? She must have been absolutely smashed constantly.
The shadows plaguing her all her life were stifling, dark. After pushing away her own family and making that man her world, there was nothing else but drink to keep those shadows away.
They caught up, at the end. The ones she saw at the end of her bed. In the corners.
They always catch up.
I woke at half seven to a feeling a dread hanging in my chest. At first I thought it was heartburn.
It may have been partially the latter; I’d hazarded a glass of mum’s wine before I passed out. It was like choking down engine fluid.
The sombre nightsitter was still there when I wandered in to the living room. He looked up from his phone, nodded ever so slightly, looked back down.
Mum’s eyes were closed, mouth hanging slightly open. The space between her nose and top lip was long and hid her top teeth from view. She looked like a much older woman.
Her right hand was solid, tight around her teddy bear and scrunched up against her chin. I tried to ease the fingers open, but it was as if the right side of her body was made of stone. When I lifted her shoulder, her body came with it stiff as a board.
But she was still alive. A pulse was there, in the cold skin of her neck. Faint, like the tapping of drizzle on a window.
Perfume wafted in. Zoe, hair still slightly damp from her shower, smiled at me. She reached down for Mum’s left hand, rubbed it gently. My mother’s complexion was so pale against Zoe’s dark skin, it was only a shade away from printer paper.
‘Is it happening?’ I asked.
‘Soon.’
The sombre man stood up, ready to help Zoe with the morning changing before he could leave.
While I went into the kitchen to get a basin of warm water, I shot off a text into the group chat.
‘It’s going to be today, guys.’
For a woman dying of cancer, Mum had had more comebacks than Take That. There was a good few times all of us thought “right, this is it. Get your last goodbyes in” only for her to sit up on the side of the bed, or ask for something to eat.
But this time, there was no doubt. She wasn’t going to open her eyes properly again, she wasn’t going to talk again. She could barely move her fingers.
The previous couple of months had been intense. To go from no contact for more than a decade, to finding out my mother had terminal cancer, to her finally deciding to reply to my text, to seeing her alive, to seeing her dying, to…about to see her dead.
Speedrunning trauma. Griefmaxxing.
The sombre man came to say goodbye. He shook my hand.
‘God has a plan,’ he said softly, ‘always have faith in him.’
He stopped at the living room door to look on the dying woman, then his shadow left the house forever.
T arrived before lunch time. She settled in the living room, chatting to Zoe. I think we all knew it was a case of waiting, now.
The house was calm. No York Mix Radio played at ear-deafening levels, no “ALEXA, WHAT TIME IS IT?” being screamed every ten minutes. Mum wasn’t demanding my attention at all any more. I had no idea what to do with myself.
When J texted to let us know he was on his way, I perched at Mum’s bedside and gripped her stiff left hand.
‘J’s coming, Mum.’
Her eyelids flickered at his name. Her mouth twitched at the corner. Her eyes appeared as slips of white, eyelids fluttering, and her fingers tightened around mine.
They were freezing cold. Shockingly so. She could have just pulled them from the freezer.
I’d noticed Zoe lifting the blanket and looking at Mum’s feet now and again. An experienced palliative carer, she’d death many times before. I knew she was checking Mum’s feet for the indications of the impending end.
The dinosaur hot water bottle. I’d forgotten all about it. Mum loved having that thing warming the bottom of the bed.
‘Where’s the dinosaur?’ I asked. Zoe nodded towards the table. It was sat next to Toby, the other teddy bear Mum had asked J to bring downstairs the previous week.
‘I still think it’s a rhino,’ T muttered as I took it to the kitchen.
I had to steel myself when I brought it back, freshly full of hot water. When I lifted the bottom of the duvet, I saw my mother’s cold feet propped up on folded pajama bottoms.
The toes were blue.
And I mean, blue. Like the berries. Or cornflowers. Or bluejay feathers.
The soles of her feet were mottled. A patchwork of purpley-red veins. It reminded me of Nintendo 64 lava textures. I’ve seen the pattern in Dodongo’s cavern.
I put the hot water bottle beside her legs, where she liked it. I had no idea if she could even feel her legs at this point. I had no idea if she could even feel anything.
Zoe was watching me from the armchair. When I looked up, she smiled at me.
Just after lunch time, the visiting day carer was once again that heavy-handed Eve. After she settled into the armchair to give Zoe a short break, I sat at Mum’s bedside again and held her hand.
T popped her head in.
‘J will be here shortly. And when he’s here, I need to have a word with you about…’ she glanced at the bed, then lowered her voice, ‘…what happens next.’
Now the end was well within sight, the painfully slow drudge towards it was becoming maddening. I felt like I was being driven towards a horizon-hogging guillotene in a golf cart.
I brought the hand not holding the teddy to my face. The fingers loosened from a fist, and when I pressed them against my cheek the slip of white under her eyelids flickered.
For the millionth time in the previous two months, I started crying.
I was doing so quite contendedly when Eve piped up behind me.
‘Do not cry,’ she said, as she had the day before. ‘It makes no difference. There is nothing you can do.’
Oh. My. God.
The door creaked open, Zoe came in with some fresh sheets which she placed on the table, gently pressing my shoulder as she passed.
The tears wouldn’t stop, so I stood in search of tissues.
‘Stop it,’ Eve said. ‘Stop crying. You shouldn’t cry. There is no point.’
I stared at her in shock.
‘Erm,’ I spat, holding myself back, ‘Don’t tell me how to grieve the death of my own mother.’
‘But it happens to everyone. I feel your pain. Do not cry, there is no point.’
‘Okay, you need to shut up,’ I half-shouted.
What I wanted to say was ‘Get the fuck out of this house and never come back, you relentless moron’.
I understand being a carer is an incredibly difficult job, and the carers provided by that company can’t have been paid more than minimum wage.
And yet, there are many jobs that pay minimum wage and don’t require you to have a basic grasp of empathy. I’ve had those jobs myself. And yet even when I worked the phones at a takeaway way back when, I would never have told a customer ‘don’t bother ordering, hunger is something that happens to anyone.’
‘Do not say that again,’ I repeated, louder.
She shrugged at me.
I have never in my life come so close to punching someone. I actually felt the pulse up my right arm as it tensed, ready to fly.
Zoe rushed between us.
‘We’ll do the comfort change now,’ she said, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder.
I stormed off into the kitchen, where I slammed six After Eights barely remembering to take the wrappers off.
In the afternoon, J walked in to visit his mother for what he was very well aware would be the last time.
‘If it’s okay,’ I told him, ‘and if you want to, I think if you forgive her, and tell her what you forgive her for, it will help her pass away. She’s been holding on for you.’
‘Right,’ J said, nodding resolutely. ‘Okay. Right.’
Such a strong, gentle giant. After how she treated him when she met The Man Who Is Not My Father, she was lucky to have him show up at all. I am constantly blown away by the empathy and kindness of the older brother I was successfully manipulated into not wanting to know.
‘We’ll give you as long as you need,’ T said, as we left the room. J perched himself on the footstool, and took Mum’s hand.
‘Hiya, Mum,’ he said softly but cheerfully as I closed the door.
T and I retreated to the kitchen. Zoe was washing up. She smiled at us.
‘Right,’ T said. ‘Are you ready for this chat?’
We agreed on no funeral. After all, we would be the only ones there.
There woudl be a direct cremation. Her ashes would be scattered at Whitby.
I glanced at the kitchen table while we talked. There lay the DNR form, signed by myself and the local GP. I’d been in turmoil about signing that.
‘And we’ll have to remember to turn off the hot water as soon as she goes,’ T added breezily, ‘She’ll be fuming to know we’ve had it on 24/7 the past couple of weeks.’
I laughed but a small part of me did actually think the ghost of Mum would go straight to the boiler controls.
J wandered in to the kitchen about twenty minutes later, his eyes red and watery but expression stoic.
‘I told her I forgive her,’ he said, voice firm. ‘I wouldn’t lie to her. I meant every single word I said.’
The Mum he knew took him from his abusive, alcoholic dad when he was only six. The Mum he knew went without food so she could feed him. The Mum he knew knitted him clothes, bought him gifts, did what she could to keep a roof over his head.
The mum she turned into failed him.
That mum let The Man Who Is Not My Father drunkenly beat him up.
That mum abandoned him, leaving him homeless as a teen.
And yet J saw that loving Mum at the very end, when she was so happy to see him. The woman who loved J – and all of us – had been in there all along.
I stared at him as he chatted with T. I have never felt so proud of someone in my life. And I barely know him. I barely know my own brother.
Shortly after J left Mum’s soul became light.
Her breathing changed. Regular, but wheezing shallow breaths through a drooped top lip and wide open mouth. Her eyes, previously slips of white, closed fully.
She would be free in a few hours.
Eve was dropped off in the late afternoon for Zoe’s break. I made myself scarce in case she told me not to cry again.
Zoe and T chatted in the kitchen while I messed with my laptop in the dining room. Countless browser tabs peeked above the search bar, each titled with some of end of life symptom.
There was a horrendous, deep rattle sound from the next room.
The ‘death rattle’?
Panicking, I bundled in to the living room.
The carer had fallen asleep. She was snoring. Loudly.
I froze in place, one foot mid-step. I looked over at Mum – she was becoming quite white, but breathing gently.
Then over at Eve: she was slumped with her chin on her chest, snoring like a draining sink.
Slowly, I reversed from the room and tiptoed across the foyer into the kitchen. Zoe and T were in deep conversation when I butted in:
‘Erm, the carer is asleep.’
‘You what?’ T asked, looking shocked.
‘Girls, I swear she’s passed out. I heard a big snore and I thought it was the death rattle, I was about to come running in here to let you know this is it, mum’s dying right now, but it’s Eve.’
I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh.
‘You’re joking,’ T spluttered.
‘I don’t know what to do! Do I wake her?’
The three of us tried very hard to keep our laughter contained.
The snoring was apparent. It was almost comical.
Five minutes later, Eve appeared at the door. She waved for Zoe, who followed her in to the living room, and Eve knocked the door to.
I immediately perched beside the fridge to eavesdrop.
‘We shouldn’t…’ T said, while slowly gravitating towards my listening point.
‘I can’t quite hear…’ I muttered. ‘I think she’s worried I saw her sleeping…which I did.’
We both listened, curled around the fridge corner like a Laurel and Hardy sketch.
‘No,’ T said resolutely after a while, ‘I’m going to take the initiative and see what’s going on.’
Off she stomped across the hallway to the living room.
‘Is everything alright?’ She asked brightly.
We all pretended we hadn’t seen Eve sleeping. To be honest, even after my run-ins with her I didn’t want her to get fired. But I did open all the windows and the patio door to get a bit of airflow in the stuffy room until she left.
I filled the hot water bottle again.
When I lifted the blanket at the bottom of the bed, Mum’s legs were yellow. Freezing cold, mottled. They looked like the legs of a corpse.
That was too much for me. I trudged up the stairs, leaving Zoe and T to keep an eye on her.
Mum’s bed was covered in the RNLI-branded teddy bears.
I laid on her side of the bed, on top of the duvet, and using the teddies as a pillow.
‘Oh, Mum,’ I muttered, crying. ‘You really are a pillock.’
I heard T come up a while after. She peeked in at the doorway, paused a minute, and left me to sleep.
I dreamt about one of my darling pet rats giving birth to stillborns. I was frantically rubbing their cold bodies, putting them infront of the woodpanel fanheater my seven-year-old brother and I ate breakfast at every school morning. I cried over the little pink bodies.
I was scrolling on my phone when T came up, around 8pm.
‘Hiya,’ she said gently. ‘Zoe thinks your mum’s breathing pattern has changed. It’s near.’
‘I think she would love it if you sang to her,’ T offered, after we’d silently watched Mum for a while.
Something caught in my throat. It was odd, like the words got stuck there and retreated.
‘When they…’ I managed, before choking on tears.
Mum’s eyelids flickered. They didn’t open at all, but they flickered. She could hear me, she knew who I was, she knew I was there.
‘When they begin, the beguine…’
Again, that eyelid flicker.
Again I choked on my tears and emotions.
I closed my eyes. Imagined being on a stage infront of hundreds. I saw their faces; expecting, judging, and yet the thought of them was less intimidating than singing infront of my aunt and dying mother.
‘When they begin….the begine. It brings back the sound of music so tender….’
I remembered my opera training easily. I leant back on the footstool, lifted my chin, controlled my diaphragm. My vibrato bounced from the corners of the room.
I swayed, tapped my foot, held her cold hand and rubbed my thumb in rhythm against the sharp nubs of her knuckles.
It was the most important performance of my life.
She couldn’t smile any more. She couldn’t even open her eyes. But her fingers – her fingers gripped mine as hard as they could.
So don’t let them begin the beguine, make them play
Till the stars that were there before return above you.
Till you whisper to me once more
Darling, I love you.
And we’ll suddenly know, what rapture we’re in
When they begin, the beguine.
I sobbed into her chest. It felt so bony. Her ribs were like a xylophone un-played.
She was twitching, her fingers curled hard around mine. Even this was more than the affection I had received from her since I was a little girl.
She used to grip my hand so tightly while we walked through town, her other hand pushing D’s pushchair. Her shining nails would press softly into my palm.
And there was a time – a little after I told her what The Man Who Is Not My Father did to me – that hand holding mine stopped being so strong. It stopped gripping mine.
We were walking on the cobblestones of The Shambles, amongst the oldest breaths of York, and I noticed her hand was limp in mine. I gripped it hard in my little fingers, but hers were loose and cold.
Until now, that was the last time she held my hand.
‘Do you think we should put the radio on for her?’ T asked. ‘Since she always had it on.’
I put the Alexa under Mum’s bed so she’d be able to hear it. Micheal Bublé and Taylor Swift made an odd swan song.
Every time I tried to leave Mum to go get some water or go for a wee, her fingers tightened around mine. And each time I came back, sometimes clutching a bottle of water so I could settle myself down, her cold fingers gripped me like a survivor to a raft.
Until the evening came along, and her fingers weakened. They became limp.
The clock read just past ten PM. The overnight carer was late.
‘Do we think we’ll need the carer?’ I asked.
‘Hmm,’ T mumbled. ‘I might call them and say –‘
A loud knock on the door. T bundled away.
‘I’m sorry I’m late.’
‘That’s fine, but,’
‘I didn’t have time to change.’
‘Yes, but,’
‘So I’ll come in and change now.’
‘Well yes, but the thing is,’
In the woman barged, through the foyer and to the small toilet off just kitchen. T watched her, then turned her flustered and confused face to Zoe and I.
‘She’s gone to get changed!’ She hissed.
‘Oh my god,’ I choked on laughter. ‘I really think we should’nt have a stranger here while it’s happening…’
‘It’s going to be very soon,’ Zoe whispered, struggling not to smile.
‘You’ve let her go to the effort of changing, just to kick her out?’ I whispered.
‘Well she wouldn’t let me finish!’ T threw her palms up. ‘She just barged in!’
I could barely talk from laughing. Mum’s cold fingers twitched in mine. Her breath was quick, soft.
‘What would be awful,’ I whispered, ‘is if Mum doesn’t die tonight and you have to call the carers tomorrow and be like, you know how I told you to fuck off last night…’
Zoe bent over laughing, T was chuckling with tears in her eyes.
‘You know what,’ she snapped, ‘it would bloody well be like your Mum to faff about like that!’
‘She needs to hurry up or you’re gonna miss the bus!’ I sobbed.
In my mind’s eye, I saw them in that moment – T and Mum, bundled into a little bathroom fogged with hairspray, their mum backcombing hair in the mirror. Their dad banging on the door, “shine on, are you three done in there yet?”
Makeup swapped between sisters, shirts brushed down, Mum fumbling for earrings with her long painted nails.
“Karen, we’ve got to go!” T, twenty years old and carefully prodding her rolled hair with a comb, “We’re going to miss the bus!”
“Yeah just a minute,” Mum curling that one finicky false eyelash, spraying herself down with Anais Anais.
“Hurry up! We’ll miss the bus!”
I thought I could smell the Anais Anais for a moment. I realised, it was a whiff of Zoe’s perfume. She’d moved a little closer to me, watching Mum’s face with genuine care and gentleness.
‘I’ll get her to go, then,’ T said resolutely. ‘Right. Okay.’
T did a full 360 degree turn, chaotically searching for direction, psyched herself up and walked to the kitchen. We heard words exchanged, then the sound of the carer calling her supervisor and speaking tersely.
Then she handed the phone to T.
‘Hiya, yeah…we don’t think it’s going to be necessary…yeah, well my sister is dying right now, so…’
She could not get off the phone.
‘Yes, okay, I’ll be sure to, but at the moment I need to…’
It was getting hilariously tense. Mum’s breaths were harsh, her lungs sucking in air but chest barely moving. Her index finger barely twitched in my palm.
In the hallway, T opened the door and coaxed the carer out of the house while still on her phone.
‘Yeah, sorry about that…but I need to go right now…yes, I will…’
I dipped down close so Mum could hear, and started to sing her favorite song. The only part I know.
Did you ever know that you’re my hero?
You’re everything I would like to be.
I can fly higher than an eagle,
When you are the wind beneath my wings.
T bumbled in to the room and stood at the end of the bed, her breath frantic with emotional exhaustion.
The whole thing was like a 1960’s comedy sketch, Absolutely chaotic, absolutely ridiculous; Mum would have been crying laughing.
Her breathing choked in her throat. Barely a whisper.
My hand still tightly wrapped around hers, I stroked her hair and forehead as I sang. Her fingers wrapped around Billy were the color of forget-me-nots, right down past the wrist.
It was time.
Tears streamed down my face. I could barely see her through them.
Did you ever know that youre my hero?
You’re everything I would like to be.
I can fly higher than an eagle..
The final breath left her body. I paused, watching her chest stiffen.
‘Cos you are the wind beneath my wings.
Yes you are the wind beneath my wings.
I choked out the last two lines as her face relaxed fully.
A moment. A silence resolute. A full-stop. A final bar line.
I heard T whisper something.
‘Yes,’ Zoe whispered. ‘She’s gone.’
I put my forehead down onto the blue fingers, and sobbed harder than I have in my entire life.
Mum. My beautiful mother, who knitted her children jumpers, kept her long nails carefully painted, caused mischief on nights out, wore bright makeup and stylish clothes, laughed with such abandon, painted and knitted and sang, and made everyone in the room turn to look at her as she came in; finally died many years after she’d first disappeared.
The Mum that had sometimes peeked out from those layers of mud, the one who made me eggy bread when I was depressed, treated my brother and I to video games, complained about being texted to bring us up a cup of tea but did it anyway, cried with pride when she watched me singing, and secretly kept every single trinket and gift and token associated with her children over all these years, rose up as the mud fell from her glow.
Up the light went, through the ceiling, the roof, the air above, and onwards. To a place we don’t understand.
Mum went home.
Thank you for reading.