so long, Mrs P (Die bitch, die)

Mrs P was always old to us.  She died yesterday, aged 97, leaving a daughter in her sixties who has spent most of the last 25 years looking after her.

Mrs P’s husband died about 25 years ago, her daughter’s husband about 10 years ago.  They lived half a dozen houses apart on the small crescent road.  Mrs P was her daughter, Val’s reason for living and the bain of her life.  Old forever, she suffered dementia, delusions and confusion.  Although she retained reasonable mobility, she needed help and depended on her daughter for everything.  There was never any talk of a Residential Home.  In return her daughter had little semblance of a life after her own husband died, emotion invested in alcohol and small yapping, spoiled dogs, until the hurt suffered in losing that was too great to get another.

A trip to the nearest small town would cause dizzying confusion and worry.  A drive to the nearest large city had to be plotted and planned and timed.  It would still paralyse with worry.  She shut herself in, was intimidated by invitations as far afield as next door on Christmas Day, went to bed at 7 o clock after a bottle of wine.  She went nowhere and did nothing, except tend to her mother for 25 years.

The time before last that I returned home, I opened their garden gates.  Val returned from ferrying her mother somewhere.  I smiled as the car rolled past me and down the driveway.  Mrs P smiled back, glazed, who knows where, and her daughter waved her gratitude.  Did Mrs P know who I was when she smiled?  One of the boys from next door to her Val, one of those small boys, a man, a young man, a middle-aged man now?  Who knew?  Ageless.  It all blurred.

She had a stroke a week ago but clung on with the same belligerence she lived her life.

Is she still not dead? we whispered whenever we returned. She must be, what, two hundred and thirty six now?

And if we were this amazed at her longevity, us who saw her only a handful of times in passing from year to year – long had passed the days when, passing with the dog, you would be obliged to stop and chat – then what of her poor shackled daughter?

Die bitch, die!  Give me back at least some life!

“The doctors told us they expected her to die a week ago,” Val had told us over the garden fence, red eyed, red faced, those burst and battle-weary blood vessels in her rosy cheeks splitting some more.  “But she stuck it out right to the end.”