One Equal Light

Martin Sharman
April 2002
Preface: excerpts from Margaret’ diary
7 Nov 2001 An ache in my back, similar to those I get when I’ve done a lot of digging, caused me to go to the doc,
who said ‘stretched ligament’. Jenny massaged me from then on. It was jolly painful, and especially when walking
or bending, so I couldn’t drive for a few days.
10 Nov 2001 I cried off the last palaeography class because of this.
26 Nov 2001 Just as I was ready to go to the palaeography course at UEA I ran bang smack into the edge of the
kitchen door, which made me lose my balance and crash backwards, hitting the base of my skull on the table edge. I
lay there thinking, ‘Am I all right?’ with an emerging headache. Thought that if I missed the class I would only sit
at home wondering if I had given myself a brain tumour, so took a couple of paracetamol and forged ahead.
30 Nov 2001 Having all the week had a very sore back bottom rib on the left hand side, which must have been the
result of last Monday’s fall (but what did I hit?), I went to see Dr Rolls, who told me, after a lot of prodding, that it
was probably only badly bruised.
17 Dec 2001 Jenny still massaging my back and now my shoulders, which she pronounces very tense. The back still
aches, and will probably go on doing so for some time.
Jan 1 2002 I have been suffering from sundry aches in the back, first from falling in early December, then in digging
Whisky’s grave [the vet had put her cat to sleep on 4 Dec], and Jen has been giving me agonising massages.
9 Jan 2002 Woke up and couldn’t turn over! Every time I managed to my right side went into a painful spasm, so I
just lay in bed until Jen came to see why I wasn’t up. She made me stay in bed all morning, and called the doctor.
He came at lunch time (Dr Noble) and found the offending spot, on the lowest rib. I must have strained it (or
whatever) by yesterday’s efforts with the day-bed. Admittedly I was removing tacks at an awkward angle, bent
almost double. I had already had one intimation that I shouldn’t do such a thing, when a bruise appeared rather
higher up on the same side, but this time I thought I had sat with my upper half reasonably straight. Got up after
lunch, but didn’t go to choir in the evening.
19 Jan BFWG lunch at the same pub as last year. Much too much food – or is this my altered metabolism? (I now
have orange juice and fruit and tea for breakfast, a light lunch, and less in the evening than of yore.) I had to leave
half of an immense plate of soup, then half of another immense plate of lamb casserole. Both very nice but too
much. I drank a lot of water and didn’t have any coffee!
10 Feb 2002 we went walking, but after half an hour I had to plead fatigue; perhaps not fatigue exactly, for by the
time we got home I had a really searing pain on the top of my right shoulder. I had been pulling up long grass under
the fir trees in the garden, which I suppose accounted for it. I tried to get a doctor’s appointment the following
Thursday, as I was still in pain (Jenny had been massaging it), but there was nothing, except for emergencies and
cancellations. Next day I went to the clinic in person, and managed to get a cancellation with Roger Timms, not my
favourite doctor. He said the shoulder was swollen, and gave me an anti-inflammatory drug, which worked.
25 Feb. Haven’t kept this up this month, partly because I haven’t been feeling very well. Very thirsty, tummy
always slightly yukky, no appetite, no get-up-and-go. It has been easier to sit and read.
19 Feb. I had booked in to see a doctor about 10 days ago. Dr Rolls heard all about [my symptoms], and especially
the tremendous thirst I have been having, and has booked me in for a blood test. If this is negative he says come
back all the same and we will find out what is wrong.
21 Feb. Upholstery. I found it very tiring, mainly because I had to stand most of the time.
30 Feb. Went to the BFWG lunch at City College. I had skate wing for the first time in my life, I think, and it was
delicious. By refusing the tons of veggies I managed to lick the platter clean too.
5 March Went to the doctor. On ringing the reception to get test results I had been told they were ‘satisfactory’, but
no. The doctor said ‘There is a problem.’ Which is the liver. I have to go to the James Paget sometime next week
for more specific tests. He says there are literally hundreds of things that might be causing it, ha ha. But it isn’t
hepatitis, which would cause fever etc.
16 March. Jenny rang again. She is obviously concerned about me. She had told me to get Milk Thistle tablets
which are good for livers, so I bought some, and tried to swallow one today. They are large tablets, and I gagged on
the first one, ending up vomiting into my lap! Not very auspicious.
17 March. I tried the alternative way of taking Milk Thistle at lunchtime – breaking the tablets open into hot water
for a ‘tea’ – filthy. Couldn’t drink the stuff. So I shall have to try going back to swallowing the things whole.
 One Equal Light

A day or two before I left for Australia Jen called me to say that she was leaving Runham for the
Middle East, and that she was anxious because of mum’s poor health. She was tired, she said,
and wasn’t eating much. I phoned mum. “Jen says you haven’t been eating well,” I said. “Oh!
When Jen was here she would give me such huge platefuls. It quite took away my appetite to
see all that food. It’s better now, I can cook much smaller meals.” “But how are you feeling in
general?” I asked. “Well, I don’t have much energy,” she admitted. “When I look out of the
window I can see 3 things that need doing in the garden, but after I’m half way through the first I
have to come back inside to sit down”. Well, you are 77, I thought to myself, and many people
your age haven’t anything like your energy. “Perhaps you’re overdoing it a bit. Maybe you
should just take it a bit easier for a while,” I said.
I asked her about her diet. “I manage OK. I don’t eat much during the day, but I cook myself
something in the evening. But when I’ve cooked myself a meal I have to sit down and wait till I
get enough energy to eat it”. Her fatigue came abruptly into focus. This wasn’t just being 77.
After a pause she went on, “I’m always thirsty. I just don’t seem to be able to get enough to
drink. My mouth’s always so dry. But milk makes me sick – I put some in my tea the other day
and it made me physically sick. So I can’t eat cereals for breakfast, which is really a pity. I just
have fruit and fruit juice.” When I asked, she said that all fatty foods made her ill.
I asked her whether she had seen a doctor. “Yes,” she said, “and they’ve done some tests, but I
haven’t had the results yet. The doctor said I looked a bit jaundiced.” None of this sounded
good, and I told Dominique I thought it might be hepatitis, but I couldn’t imagine how she might
have caught it, or, far worse, it could be secondary liver cancer. Although she had had no sign of
cancer for the 6 years since her surgery, I was worried. Cancer of the breast often spreads to the
liver if it is not stopped in its early stages. I called Tom and asked whether he and Sara would
kindly keep an eye on mum. It would make me feel better to know that someone was aware that
she was not well and might need a doctor.
When I got back from Australia on 23rd March, I phoned her again. She told me that Sara,
worried because she and Tom were going off for a week, had come round to see her the previous
Thursday and had been horrified by how yellow she looked. Sara immediately asked Dr Timms
to come and see her. When he got there “his jaw dropped”, according to mum. Not only was she
emaciated and yellow, but her ankles were swollen. She was due to have an ultrasound scan the
next day, and Timms would ask a consultant, Dr Jamieson, to look at the result.
“When the results were ready”, she said, “Dr Jamieson told me that the scan showed no
obstruction, but that there were 3 small shadows on the liver that he was not sure about”. He said
that the results of the tests showed that it was not hepatitis. He wanted to do more tests to
confirm any diagnosis. My heart sank. I was now sure that mum had liver cancer and that the
jaundice was because a tumour was blocking her bile or gall duct. Jamieson asked mum whether
she might not prefer to be in hospital. She said yes, and so they found her a bed. “I feel much
better being here,” she told me. “Some of the food’s edible. I don’t need much, and I try to avoid
the fatty things. I can drink orange juice and eat the fruit, that’s OK”. They planned to scan her
again the following day, so that, according to Jamieson, “when we know what it is, we can start
to make you feel better”.
I reached Norwich from The Hague on the evening of Thursday 28th March. I waited outside the
terminal for Ant, who had flown in from Spain, to collect me. It was a lovely evening, but a
biting wind made me glad of my jacket. When mum’s car appeared, Jen was driving. They both
got out of the car and we hugged. I put my suitcase in the boot and Ant climbed into the back
seat. I got into the passenger seat and Jen drove off.
 One Equal Light

To start with, we avoided the main topic. Mel had managed to contact Jenny in Jordan, and she
had reached the UK before Ant. They had both been there for a couple of days. Then after a
while I asked, “How’s mum?” Ant replied, “not very well, she’s very jaundiced.” “Is it cancer?”
“Yes, it is.” As we left Norwich on the road to Acle, Jenny fulminated against mum’s doctor for
not detecting the cancer earlier. “We could have started the treatment earlier. She complained of
a pain in her side and even asked him if it could be cancer. He said no, and told her that if it
were cancer she would feel much worse.” She was outraged. “Not only that, but she had a
check-up for the breast cancer just two months ago, and they gave her the all clear! They should
have seen it then, at least!”
I was doubtful. “The doctor may really not have had much to go on. With liver cancer the
tumour is present long before the person feels ill, and early symptoms are often vague. Mum
said she felt tired, and had little appetite, and had a pain in her side, but all those things could
have other causes”.
Jenny went on, “Yes, but the specialist she saw first, Jamieson, isn’t even a cancer specialist.
He’s a consultant in gastro-enterology. Mum didn’t see an oncologist – Dr Ostrowski – until
yesterday. He said he intended to start chemotherapy. It won’t get rid of the cancer but he says it
will stop it from getting worse. But he wouldn’t start till next Wednesday. I don’t understand –
surely every day will make a difference?” Perhaps the delay meant that Ostrowski really felt that
chemotherapy would be a waste of effort. Feeling grim, I said nothing.
Jen told me she was going to find a way of curing her, either with holistic treatment such as the
Issels treatment or alternative medicine. She had sent me the URL for the Issels clinic, and now
she asked me what I thought of it. She sounded so hopeful. I felt cruel as I admitted that I had
no enthusiasm for it. It didn’t convince me that it would be helpful. I told her that as far as I
knew, no treatment – chemotherapy, radiotherapy, alternate medicine – makes any difference to
the length of time that patients survive after such a late diagnosis. Surgery is generally
impossible with metastatic cancer, which is what mum’s certainly must be. I said that most
people did not live more than 3 months after the diagnosis, and only 6% lived for a year, and
only if the cancer was discovered a lot earlier than mum’s seems to have been. Jenny wanted to
hear none of this.
Ant sat in the back, listening intently but saying nothing. I could feel his tension. As we got
close to Acle he asked Jenny to drop him off at Runham. He would fix us some supper, he said.
When we I left my suitcase in the house, and Jen and I went on to see mum at the James Paget
hospital in Gorlestone.
Maureen was coming out of the entrance to the hospital, having just seen mum. She had tears in
her eyes, and we hugged one another and said how sorry we were to see each other in such sad
circumstances. I had not yet seen mum, but it did nothing to improve my own dismal mood to
see Maureen like this. She had been a nursing sister, and surely had a good understanding of
mum’s likely future.
Visiting hours were over, and people were pouring out of the hospital. Jen led me against the
current through crowded passages, up a flight of stairs and along more corridors – now largely
deserted – to Ward 6. A notice on the door, perhaps more ominous than intended, said “Palliative
Care”. The ward was a long hall with small open side wards on one side, like a comb with stubby
teeth. The side wards, each of 8 beds, were alternately for men and women. They were
otherwise indistinguishable one from another, all equally full of people sitting up in bed with
numb bemused faces, people lying in pain or asleep, sitting beside the bed reading or staring
apathetically at the passers-by. Stray patients shuffled about in pyjamas. Nurses bustled up and
down the long hall carrying medicine or pans or syringes, or consulted notes at the central desk.
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Boisterous Norfolk voices made up most of the din, but in each bay of beds a television set was
pouring out drivel from some dismal glittery game show, and somewhere close to our destination
an strident buzzer was going off every 8 seconds.
Mum was sitting up in bed behind a curtain. The confusion outside was still just as loud, but at
least the curtain shut out the visual turmoil and gave her a meagre privacy. Her face was
jaundiced and thin, and she seemed both pleased and frightened to see me. Now all her children
were here. Things were clearly not hopeful. She stared at me for a long moment, perhaps almost
saying something about my beard, then saying nothing. She looked much worse than I had
imagined. Her eyes were still as beautiful as ever, but the flesh around them was dark and had
shrunk back into the sockets. Her cheeks were thin and drawn tight over the bones of her skull,
giving her a rather frightening appearance. Her hair was cut short, and seemed much whiter and
thinner than the last time I had seen her. She looked desperately ill.
Under the blanket her abdomen was huge. I had seen this once before; my friend Luc had
suffered the same bloated belly in the last months of his life. When the liver starts to fail it can’t
make enough protein to keep the membranes in the gut doing their job, and fluid leaks through to
fill the abdominal cavity. It’s called ascites, and it is a symptom of end-stage liver disease. The
blanket was disordered on the bed, and her feet were sticking out from below. Perhaps she had
taken the weight of the blanket off them deliberately, because they looked horribly painful. The
skin seemed stretched to splitting, so much her feet and ankles had swollen. Her ankles were
speckled with pinpoint-sized dots of red and blue and purple. Outside the curtain, someone
switched the buzzer off. “Oh, mum” I said, and she smiled ruefully at me. She showed me a
bandage around her right biceps and below it a huge dark purple bruise in the crook of her arm
where a nurse had taken blood. She seemed both appalled and offended by this mutilation. As
she tugged at the sleeve of her nightdress, her hands looked frail, the skin fragile and yellow-
brown between darker age spots, the knuckles much larger than the thin bones of her fingers.
It was hard for her to talk. Her mouth was dry and her lips would not slide easily over her teeth.
As hard as she tried to speak clearly, the words came out slightly slurred. I got the impression
that she was not in complete control of her tongue. She started to hiccough. “These dammned
hiccoughs” she complained, “they keep…” and she was interrupted by another violent spasm
from her abdomen.
Above her bed, a whiteboard was printed with the words “Patient”, “Named nurse” and
“Mobility”. In the space next to the first word, “Margaret Sharman” was written in with a broad
felt-tip pen. “Sam” was jotted against “Named nurse” and mum’s mobility was judged
“independent”, which seemed to me poignant – and wholly relative. The bed was narrow. The
chair beside it was covered in tough-looking Atlantic-grey plastic, almost buried under mum’s
dressing gown and a towel. It looked uncomfortably firm. Jenny sat on the bed, and I stood in
the corner of the curtain. At my eye-height, there was a hole in the worn material and by sticking
my eye close I could see a short section of the corridor that ran the length of the ward.
Beyond the curtain, from beside a bed on the other side of the bay, came evidence that one of the
other patients was very much in control of her tongue, but less so of her brain. A constant stream
of commentary bubbled out of her between occasional breaks for long gurgling coughs. She
commented mainly on the activities of the woman in the bed next to mum’s. Gladys, it seems,
was not fully aware of where she was or what she was doing, and kept getting undressed or
wandering around aimlessly. The nurses called everybody by their first names and spoke to them
as though to a favourite pet or a rather dull but loveable child. “Wut dew yew think yewr dooin’
Gladys, yew’v bin the best part of sum tyme standin’ thea?” The TV gibbered and squawked

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insistently in the background. It what respect was this circus palliative? Mum’s distress and the
contained confusion on the other side of the curtain gave me a nightmarish feeling of panic.
The buzzer was again going off every 8 seconds. Mum wasn’t receiving any attention. She
wouldn’t see the oncologist for almost a week. There seemed little reason for her to stay in
hospital. This wasn’t a place for tenderness or closeness, just a workshop for the mechanics of
illness. It would be impossible to say anything here that was intimate or intelligent or
unconnected with her illness. I escaped from the curtain and found someone who I took to be the
head nurse. “If Margaret wants to go home,” she said, “she could go home with you tomorrow
morning, after her medication, and be back on Tuesday”. She had to take two pills. For reasons
that needed no illustration other than the ambient muddle, it would take until midday to bring
them up from the dispensary. When we asked mum if she wanted to spend the weekend at home,
she said yes. Now her children were with her, the balance of fright had shifted, and home would
be a more reassuring place than this cacophonous madhouse.
When we said our goodbyes, mum seemed almost relieved. Jen and I walked back dismally to
the car-park and drove home to a meal that Ant had cooked. On the way back I said, “I don’t
think mum has long to live – at best two or three weeks, certainly not months”. Jenny disagreed
fiercely and talked about various alternative remedies that she had discovered. She had found a
clinic in Florida that had remarkable results. I said nothing, but a vision of trying to organise an
air ambulance to fly this desperately ill woman to America flashed through my mind. At home, I
told Ant and Jen that we were in for difficult times. We would certainly get on each other’s
nerves – especially Jen and me – and we should try to remember that disagreements should not
mean long-term quarrels. We should focus on being a family. After supper, Jen worked on her
computer to try to find sites on alternative cancer treatment. She discovered a place in Bedford
or Buckinghamshire that seemed to hold out hope. In the privacy of the kitchen, Ant and I
discussed mum’s state, and agreed that there was in fact no hope left. It was just a matter of
maintaining some quality in the remainder of her days and, when the time came, helping her to
preserve a little dignity. Ant and Jen went to bed early. I sat up working on a paper I was to give
in Dublin the following Monday.
I slept in the sunroom on the fold-down couch. There being no curtains, I woke with the birds on
Friday. I made myself the first of what would stretch over the next few days into numberless
cups of tea. Then I started the washing up and realised that the floor felt sticky. I swept it and
wiped some of it down, then began to clean the work surfaces and the cupboard doors. After
about an hour I jumped when I turned and saw Ant standing at the door, watching me. He had
come in silently and just stood there waiting for me to see him. We had breakfast and then
worked on the kitchen energetically but in a rather haphazard way, washing down the outside of
the fridge, hoovering up dust under the radiator, sweeping down black ancient cobwebs from the
ceiling, cleaning the windowsill. Jen came in, had breakfast, and went off to get mum. We
finished most of the surfaces in the kitchen and I hoovered the carpet in the hall and swept most
of the cobwebs from there and the downstairs toilet. It was lunchtime by the time mum and Jen
returned.
When mum stepped out of the car I was shocked by how yellow she was. The bright light of that
beautiful day was less merciful than the hospital lights had been. Her face shone canary yellow
stained slightly by ochre. Her eyes were smudged and the flesh of her face more sunken still.
She looked drained and walked uncertainly. I was surprised and saddened by the slow difficult
movements of this vigorous woman. Each step was that of an old lady, unsure and unsteady.
Jenny hovered at her elbow as she manoeuvred up the front step and into the house. The last
time I had seen her, she had walked into the house as though the step were not there. Watching
her difficult progress in the few metres from the car, Ant and I quickly placed the chair that she
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had so recently upholstered near the front door, so she could sit down and rest. She barely
glanced at it, and turned to the kitchen. Jenny asked whether she would like her walking stick
and she took one without a ferrule. It skidded slightly on the tiles. After a pace or two, I asked
her whether she might not prefer the one with a rubber ferrule, which she took. She walked into
the sunroom and sat down on one of the chairs beside the breakfast table. We brought another
chair up so that she could lift her legs onto it. That was difficult, but she did it on her own. She
never used the walking stick again.
Her feet and ankles seemed yet more swollen, if that were possible, than they had been the day
before. The sun had warmed the conservatory, and was still shining in, but she felt cold and we
gave her a blanket to keep warm. Jenny prepared some orange juice with some odd concoction of
milk thistle and vitamin C, or something, which mum drank obediently. She smiled around,
pleased to be home, and pleased at all the attention from her children.
She was sitting next to the table at which she did most of her work on the family history. It was
covered with stacks of papers, carefully arranged index cards, pencils and pens, boxes of letters,
books and the usual organised clutter that she generated when she worked. We would eat on that
table, beside her. As Ant prepared the meal, mum reluctantly instructed me as I cleared her work
away. “Where does this go? It’s a file of bills addressed to John Johnson.” “In the drawer on
Yaxham.” She rather resented my busy activity. Perhaps she should be the one to take the
initiative, or she didn’t like her son tidying her affairs, or perhaps this clearing away boded ill, a
life packed unceremoniously into drawers. Maybe she was just wondering how she would find
everything again. But soon it was done and we had lunch. Mum had some juice and watched us
– I can’t remember what we ate.
She sat in the sunroom for most of the day. Although she had little energy, she was willing to
talk to us, but didn’t start any conversation herself. Her willingness to talk was somewhat
frustrated by the difficulty she had in speaking. She kept passing her tongue along her dry lips or
touching them with her frail fingers. We talked mainly about Africa. I told her of my first
memories of her, and we reminisced about travelling across vast tracts of bush, the wet season
and the dry, the dusty roads stretching out forever. She smiled a lot and seemed to enjoy the talk
and the warmth of the sun. She sipped water, and sometimes Jen gave her some more of her
odd-looking orange juice mix. It was indeed a lovely day. I reminded her of how sometimes she
would drive in convoy with John, him always ahead making a plume of red dust with the big
Peugeot 303 station wagon, and us behind, hammering over ochre corrugations and swerving
past potholes in the little Aronde Simca, the dust rising around us. He would drive like a fiend,
taking huge risks, mum steadily losing ground as she tackled the difficult roads more prudently.
I reminded her how she would tell me “he’ll only get there 5 or 10 minutes before us, just
enough time to order my beer”. She liked that story and said “Yes, and it was true”.
During the afternoon she complained about her swollen ankles and lay down on the couch.
Getting out of the chair and onto the couch was hard work. She seemed even weaker than she
had that morning with her expedition into the house. After a while she fell asleep, lying on her
left side, a blanket pulled up over her shoulder. I felt very jittery and full of nervous energy. I
had to get out into the air, and went for a run up to the playground and around past the phone box
back to the house, then went into the kitchen and began to clean things again. Later Ant and I
went shopping, to get food and things to help clean the house.
In the late afternoon mum went into the sitting room to watch TV. Maureen and Kathy came to
visit her, and they sat and chatted a little. In the kitchen, Jen and I discussed her illness. “I feel
so guilty,” she said, “if only I’d reacted earlier, I could have told the doctor that I thought it was
cancer, and we could have started to cure her earlier.” “I really don’t think it would have made

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any difference,” I said, “because by the time anyone realised that there was anything wrong, it
was already too late to do much. I don’t think that starting chemotherapy a week or a month
earlier would change the outcome by any significant amount. You certainly shouldn’t blame
yourself.”
Later, in the early evening, her visitors left and we joined mum in the TV room. I asked her to
look at my speech, and she read it without any comment. It was about why we should value
biodiversity, but I had called it “the monster in the middle”, which I belatedly realised was less
than sensitive.
Mum had some soup while we had a spicy meal that Ant had prepared. She said she would have
loved to share our meal, since it seemed so tasty, but she had no appetite at all. She had some
juice but almost none of her soup. After the meal I asked her whether she would like us to make
her a bed downstairs in the office, and she looked at us in that doubtful, pleased way that she had
when someone was offering her something that she wanted but thought might be too much
trouble. Ant and I took the sunroom couch through into the dining room and made up the bed
there. We were all tired, but talked a while in the kitchen. Jen was still focused on finding an
alternative to chemotherapy. I knew she was dying, and said that it was important that mum
should realise that she was dying so that she could face the idea of death and prepare herself for
it. Ant agreed. Jen definitely didn’t. We went to bed early. I slept in the bookroom.
On Saturday morning, Ant and I were up and about early again. We cleared up the sunroom and
re-organised it so that it was less cluttered with furniture and easier to move around in. We
replaced the table over the wooden chest that held the family letters, thus clearing a central space
for mum’s chair and for us three to sit around near her. Jen went into the office to be with mum
as soon as she realised that she was awake. When mum summoned the energy she got up and
came into the sunroom to sit in her upholstered chair. She was clearly less comfortable and
weaker than she had been the day before. Her face was darker, with more ochre and little of
yesterday’s bright yellow. The skin around her eyes was more sunken still, and she closed and
opened them more slowly. She seemed less willing to talk, and her words were more slurred than
before. She sometimes pulled back her lips over her teeth in a caricature of a smile, as someone
might do to unstick a piece of lettuce, but the movement was slow and unhappy. Her gums were
dark and had shrunk back from her teeth.
Her attention seemed to have narrowed down from the previous day when she had been
interested in almost any topic of conversation. Now discussion of her past, however filled with
light, seemed to interest her less, and most of her attention was focused on her increasing
discomfort.
I asked her whether she would like Ant and me to move her own bed down from her bedroom
into the office. Not only would she be more comfortable in her own bed, but we could do a
better job of preparing the room to make it less makeshift. She seemed indifferent to the
proposal, but we did it anyway. First, while she was in the sitting room, we moved the couch
back into the sunroom, moved the computer from the office into the book room, cleared the
papers from the dining table in her office and pushed it back to make more space for the bed.
Then up in the pale light and powder smell of her abandoned bedroom we dismantled her bed
and took the sections downstairs to her old office, new bedroom. We brought in some daffodils
from her wood and arranged her bedside table with things she would need.
Maureen had kindly offered to come to the house while the three siblings went into Norwich to
buy various things. Jen wanted to get a juicer, I wanted a UK SIM card for my mobile phone,
some spares for Jen’s bike and an intercom between mum’s new office and Jen’s room, vertically
above, and Ant wanted I can’t remember what.
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On the way in, Jen and I had a fierce argument. Jen wanted to find ways to save mum, at least
for a few months. “Why did the doctors postpone her chemotherapy until next Wednesday? It
might make all the difference!” she fumed. I disagreed with her. In my view mum was dying, and
had remaining to her at best a week or two, and nothing the doctors did at this point would make
any difference. We had to focus on what was happening, and prepare her and ourselves for her
imminent death. “No! We mustn’t give up! There are plenty of people who have recovered!” I
sighed, and started to say, “look, it’s better to be realistic…” Jen cut me off. “Don’t push me,
Mart. Don’t push me! I know she’s dying! I can’t face that! Don’t make me! Don’t take away
that tiny bit of hope I have!” I was taken aback by her vehemence. I replied “OK, but that
means that there will be some topics that we cannot discuss.” “Fine”. And that was that. But we
were left with a messy situation in which I could talk only with Ant about what was happening,
and prepare for mum’s death only with him. This lack of candour – and the need to talk about
things behind Jenny’s back – upset me and I said nothing more.
In Norwich we split up and went our separate ways. I bought a SIM card for my mobile phone
so that I could have a UK phone number and not pay international prices for local calls. Then I
bought cycle oil and inner tubes for Jen’s bike and a bell for my own, and found an intercom
system – just a simple one for a doorbell, but that would let mum wake Jen and talk to her. We
met up again in Ottakar’s bookshop where we found books of recipes for fat-free cooking, and
Jen and I bought a dozen or so books on cassette tape for mum when she returned to hospital. We
went to Jarrold’s to buy a juicer and stopped off at Sainsbury’s to buy groceries. We rushed
about, but it still took until the early afternoon before we got back to Runham.
Maureen and mum had chatted a bit in the sunroom but mum had spent most of the morning
asleep in her new bedroom. Jen spent most of the rest of the afternoon with mum, who seemed
much more drowsy, drifting between consciousness and a light sleep.
At one point when she was asleep I tiptoed in and watched her sleeping. She was on her back
and her face lay on the pillow slightly turned to the left. Although her face was completely
unlike the lively, if ageing face that I was so used to, she was beautiful. Her bones lay close
under the skin but her face seemed almost luminous, so peaceful and at rest. Looking at her
brought back strongly the photo of her when she had just married dad. In that picture she is
facing the camera, smiling with great vibrancy and radiance. This peaceful dying face before me
seemed to enclose in its tissue-paper skin every smile, every tear that the young woman of the
photo would one day experience. I wished that I could take a photo of her, she was so
unbearably beautiful. And then I must have made a slight sound, because she woke and looked
up at me. There was no moment of confusion, just a gentle look and an immediate, tired, painful
smile.
Throughout this long day she never seemed befuddled, but sometimes seemed to have trouble
focusing on one train of thought. Her mood was at least superficially calm, or perhaps resigned,
or perhaps just exhausted, but sometimes she seemed frightened. At one point she told me she
was fed up with feeling so ill. “I know I have to get worse before I can get better, but I just want
to get on with the chemotherapy and get it over with” she said. A couple of phrases, painfully
worked out, spoken with as much care and deliberation as possible, a whole mountain negotiated
by trial and error.
At some later moment I tried to talk with her about what was happening to her but she veered off
any discussion of death. She said would cancel her holiday in Spain with Andante, but keep the
ticket so she could visit Ant and spend some quiet time there. There was not much I could say
on this topic, so I said “mmm”. I told her that the daffodils looked lovely in her wood, bright

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yellow and white in the spring sunshine, and she smiled. From where she lay she could just see
the bright flowers on the magnolia that she had planted.
At some point I said, “I keep thinking of that beautiful Buddhist idea of Nirvana – they talk
about the ‘silver dewdrop sliding into the shining sea’”. My voice caught as I said it, and I could
barely finish the phrase. She said, “I never heard that before”, and I replied “it’s lovely, isn’t it?”
and it was her turn to say “mmm”. She didn’t think it was lovely – or at any rate, not in good
taste in her present context. There was no way I was going to get close to discussing her
approaching death with her. In the kitchen, the washing machine was washing yet another load of
sheets.
That day she could not eat much, and although she could drink water, she could not even keep
down soup. Her hiccoughs were still tormenting her. By the evening, her speech was so slurred
and indistinct that it was not always easy to understand what she said.
On Sunday morning while it was still cold I cleaned Jen’s bike and pumped up the tyres. When
it was all clean and adjusted, I took it out for a short ride. Everything worked as it should. I had
achieved something. The universe was not entirely inimical. The huge Norfolk sky filled the
world with blue and the cold air swept across the immense flat land.
Mum stayed in bed all that morning. She could drink water, but not soup, and was very weak.
Her face was drawn and haggard and had none of the peaceful beauty that she had had the day
before. She had had a bad night, having to run – as best she could – to the toilet every hour and a
half. Each time she thought she was about to be hit with terrible diarrhoea, but each time little or
nothing happened. I made some feeble joke about how trekking from her bed to the toilet was as
strenuous as a safari to Africa, and she smiled, and at one point told us she was off to Africa as
she struggled out of bed for the toilet. Sometime that day she asked me to fix the toilet seat,
which was loose on its fixings. Here was another task within my competence. I knelt in front of
the toilet bowl with a sense of purpose and achievement. Out in the sunny back yard, damp
sheets billowed in the cold Norfolk wind.
Once when I crept into the bedroom I found her sitting on the edge of the bed, her stringy yellow
back to me. Jenny was kneeling behind her, hands touching her ribs. Mum was sitting erect, but
her head was slumped forward. I seemed to have fallen through a trapdoor. As Jen glanced over
her shoulder at me, I was already hastily turning out of the room to avoid the sight, to avoid the
reality. My revulsion to seeing my mother naked – not to mention the thought of touching her –
would make it very difficult for me to help in any intimate physical way. Jenny’s relationship
with her mother had always been different from mine. I had always known it, but now I felt it in
my gut. Another unpleasant discovery.
In the afternoon mum told Jen that she wanted a bath. She would have to get upstairs. All three
of us were alarmed, but she was determined. We prepared the angle chair on the landing with a
couple of large pillows, and placed Stan’s great carver chair near the top of the stairs so that she
could rest. But almost before all the preparations were ready, she was climbing the stairs.
One at a time, she lifted her swollen right leg until it could slide over the tread of the next step.
One at a time, she steadied herself and pulled the left leg up after. She made it all the way to the
landing without a pause, then sat down to rest.
After a few minutes she said grimly “well…” and levered herself to her feet again. She tackled
the final few stairs in the same way, and continued without a pause to the bathroom. Jen helped
her with the bath and then left her alone for 10 minutes or so.

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Ant and I discussed how to get her down the stairs again. We decided to carry her down if
necessary and planned how it would work. We removed the corner chair and took the portraits
off the wall to make sure that we did not cannon into them. Finally came the moment that Ant
and I had been dreading. We need not have worried. Just as she had surmounted the stairs by a
triumph of will and courage, so she managed the far more difficult descent. I went in front of her
so that she could put a hand on my shoulder. She got to the bottom without a pause.
Triumph it might have been, but it was also a terrible effort that quite wore her out. She paid for
her adventure for the remainder of the day. Later, Maureen came round and sat with her quietly
for a while, but neither had much to say.
As she was leaving, I talked to Maureen in the driveway. I said I thought mum’s awareness was
unimpaired, but she was clearly dying. At one level mum knew it, but she refused to
acknowledge it. She did not want to confront the thought of her own death. Maureen agreed, but
said, “I regret that I did not tell my father certain things when he was dying. Tell Margaret now”,
she said, “because soon it will be too late”. I told Ant and Jen what she had said. Sometime that
day I told mum “I love you”. And later I said, “you were a good mother to us”. She smiled and
looked pleased. I thought of the difficult years in Kenya when despite her husband she kept her
family together and functional, and kept enough money coming in to support all of our various
lives. I couldn’t think of anything else to tell her.
On Easter Monday mum’s speech was horribly sluggish, probably partly because her tongue and
lips were so dry, but it also seemed as though the muscles were to some extent paralysed. Every
movement seemed to consume a little more of the last irreplaceable remnants of glycogen her
muscles needed. Her movements were slower and less sure, so that sometimes when she tried to
touch her lips her fingers missed slightly and she had to try again. She was terribly fatigued, and
even the slightest movement was difficult. She could not lift her head to drink, and I went and
found some straws from next door that made it possible for her to drink without too much effort.
Despite her physical depletion, she tried hard to help us when she wanted to be lifted in bed or
turned onto her side or back. She spent almost all of the day asleep in her bed. Jenny spent most
of the day with her, sitting with her or lying beside her on the bed. We put a commode in the
room so that mum did not have to struggle all the way down the corridor, which by now would
have been much too difficult for her. We were all overcome by the terrible difference between
that woman who had managed the ascent of Kilimanjaro to the bathroom yesterday and this
exhausted ruin who could hardly summon the energy to open her eyes.
When I was alone with her for a few minutes I read her a fragment of John Donne’s Last
Sermon: “And into that gate they shall enter and in that house shall they dwell, where there shall
be no cloud or sun, no darkness or dazzling, but one equal light; no noise or silence but one equal
music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no foes or friends, but one equal
communion and identity; no end nor beginnings, but one equal eternity”. She went very still as I
read it, but I cannot tell whether she really heard me. I spoke quietly and she did not have her
hearing aid in.
In the afternoon she vomited some blood. Jenny coped with that as she had coped with so much
else in the last few days, but sounded shocked and scared when she told us. We discussed what
to do, and having talked to Maureen, finally decided that we should call a doctor, in the full
knowledge that he would probably recommend that she go back to hospital. Because it was a
bank holiday, we knew we could not contact the doctor who had last seen her, or even her GP, so
a locum would come. When she finally came, she told us “since Margaret has vomited blood,
soon she might well vomit a lot of blood. It’s the bank holiday so it will be difficult to arrange
for professional carers to look after her at home. And anyway your mother might soon need

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technical care that would be impossible to provide at home. I would prefer that you sent her to
hospital”. She spoke to mum and explained in her gentle Scottish accent that it would be better
if she were to go back to hospital.
All of us, including mum, were worried that she would have to go back to Ward 6. The doctor
said, “initially you will have to go there because you have a bed there, but the doctor might be
able to move you to a private side ward or into Ward 17”. Mum said she had an appointment to
see a doctor at 10 the following morning, and the locum told us that she could not be sure to get
an ambulance to the house early enough to keep the appointment. Mum would have to go back
that evening to the buzzers and bubbly nurses in Ward 6.
Although mum agreed to go into hospital, and did so with apparent relief, I think it was because
she felt that things were getting out of control and that it would be better to be nearer immediate
medial help. Personally, I wasn’t so sure that medical help was all that advantageous, but I was
scared. Things could become abruptly very difficult for us and very frightening for everybody. I
could not envisage what we would do should mum suddenly start vomiting bright blood in the
middle of the night. It seemed too much to bear. So I said nothing and agreed. I felt like a
coward.
The doctor phoned for an ambulance. While we were waiting for it, mum told me as clearly as
she could manage that when she came back to the house she would make us a gift of £3000. She
said she had always wanted to keep enough money to be sure that she would not be a burden on
her children, but that it no longer seemed likely that she would live to 90 as she had imagined.
Since money was not foremost in my mind at that moment, I said, “Oh, don’t worry about that!”
She replied somewhat testily, and with the careful movements of her parched lips and tongue that
was so difficult to watch “I’m not worried, just trying to make a retrospective gift”. The effort
involved in that conversation had been considerable, and I felt puzzled. What was she getting at?
I later discovered that in planning her estate, she would be allowed to give up to £3 000 away in
any one year. She was trying to save on inheritance tax.
When the ambulance came, in the evening, the men could not get the stretcher into the corridor,
so mum had to walk from her room to the hall. Ant and I waited in the hall with the ambulance
men. One of them was a keen connoisseur of floor tiles. The ones in the hall were magnificent.
They still had their lustre, they should be restored, and all that was needed was a special soap
and some elbow grease. At last, mum arrived, teetering slowly into view, clutching at the
doorframe, shuffling from a long, adventurous, sometimes difficult life into an unpromising
future. The men were very professional, efficient, kind. She was soon loaded onto the stretcher,
and the stretcher loaded into the ambulance. Jen and Maureen went with her in the ambulance
and Ant and I followed in mum’s car. Ant and I agreed that we did not believe that she would see
her house or garden again.
Back in the commotion of Ward 6, back in her narrow hospital bed, mum looked drawn and
uncomfortable. She had hiccoughs again. She found it uncomfortable on her back, difficult to
turn over in the narrow bed, and even more uncomfortable on her side, always the left side. Mum
looked not just ill, but ill-tempered too. She obviously hated losing control over her life. The
staff were in charge; she was a patient and not a person, and nothing was adjusted to her wants.
On top of the impersonality of it all, by using her first name they invaded her privacy, reduced
her status to that of a child, and stole the last shred of dignity she could cover herself with. We
stayed with her for a while, but there was not much to be said. Jenny decided to spend the night
there in a chair at her side. Ant and I went to try to find Jen some food and water. It was nearly 8
in the evening on Easter Monday. Asda claimed to be open 24 hours a day, but it wasn’t, and we
had to go right back to Yarmouth until we found a garage with a shop that was open. We brought

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our doubtful sandwiches back, then said goodbye with a mixture of misgiving and relief and left
them in bedlam.
On Tuesday morning, we went back to the hospital early to be there when the doctor came.
Mum had spent an uncomfortable and uneasy night, frequently shifting around, vomiting once or
twice. Now she found it difficult to open her eyes. She would manage to open them, then the
lids would slide back half way and she would lie there, her eyes half open, for some moments
before letting them shut again. She was breathing heavily, with a great gulp of air followed by a
long soft moan as the air sighed back out of her. She had lost control of her destiny and was
losing her grip on life, but had not had time to adjust. The water was whirling down into the
plughole; the bath was emptying, willy-nilly.
She wanted to change her night-dress. I helped to get her sitting up. These moments were
difficult. I felt her thin flaccid flesh under my fingers. I held gingerly, afraid to crush her tender
tissue against the bone, wanting to hurry, to get it over with. But when Ant and Jen began to
unbutton her clothing I left the curtained room, as hurriedly as I had in Runham. The thought of
taking off her night-dress, seeing her naked, seeing the scars of her operation, was too much for
me. That Antony could do it amazed me. I did not have his fibre or perhaps his distance.
The hours dragged by, and no doctor came – at least, no doctor came to her. Occasionally either
Ant or I would leave the claustrophobic curtained space around mum’s bed to go and find
something to drink, or go and ask a nurse when we could expect to see a doctor. Visitors sitting
at the bedsides of the other patients watched us walk past, their eyes dumb with pain and
boredom and wishing they were elsewhere. The hustle and hubbub continued all morning, a mad
fair of the flotsam and jetsam of the NHS. At about midday a hand came through the curtain and
took her records away. I was the only witness, and I said nothing. We tried to get a doctor to see
her but he was always in another ward, or at the end of this ward working his way towards her,
or in another hospital.
She never lost consciousness completely, and seemed quite alert even when apparently asleep, so
that she woke at the slightest sound other than the normal hullabaloo. We all tiptoed around and
spoke in whispers. At some point I altered the felt-tipped “Margaret Sharman” into “Mrs
Sharman”. That was my crowning achievement in support of her dignity. When I tried to read
John Donne’s sermon again she turned her head away and went “mm-mmm”. In my own ears I
sounded like a sanctimonious cleric reading her the last rites.
Finally we saw the doctor – neither Jamieson who was on holiday nor Ostrowski who only came
on Wednesdays, but some new locum – at about 3 o’clock. He and his acolytes spent a few
moments with mum, calling her “Mrs Sharman”, and then came outside the curtains and took us
into the empty day room. There we all sat around and leaned together like conspirators. The
results of the scan had shown last Wednesday that there was more cancer than liver. The bone of
her ribs was also riddled with cancer. I wanted to ask him why nobody had told her the truth, but
he wouldn’t have had the answer. He went on; chemotherapy would never have done more than
reduce pain and discomfort. Her liver had failed, he said, and her kidneys were also failing. She
would probably not live more than a few hours, but she might possibly survive for a day or two.
We told him that she was in some pain and asked him to prescribe something to make her more
comfortable. We asked him to have her moved to a quiet ward, and an hour later the ward
manager told us that she would be moved to Ward 17.
After we had spoken to the doctor Ant and I left to buy food and for me to change my return
ticket to Belgium. We went back to Runham and cleaned the house some more. The house had
not been so clean for years, perhaps a decade. Over the last few days Ant and I had swept and
hoovered and mopped and scrubbed room after room, tackling stairs and bathrooms, picture rails
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and crockery, ruthlessly removing the wildlife from the corners and crannies. Surfaces that had
been dull now sparkled. Dustbag followed dustbag into the binliners, and great heaps of bulging
binliners were stashed waiting for the dustbin men. Our anxiety and feeling of helplessness was
directed into something we could control, something we could make better. We emptied the
washing machine of its last load of sheets and hung them to dry. And then we went back to the
hospital.
When we got back they had moved mum to a quiet private room in Ward 17. Jenny was to have a
bed beside her. Maureen was there, a great relief and comfort to all of us as she had been
throughout these dreadful days. On the bed beside mum’s pillow was a spring-loaded syringe
attached to a tube and a cannula in her forearm. Morphine at last. She was on a drip, and a
catheter filled with deep brown liquid snaked out from under the blankets.
Mum’s breathing was much more laboured than it had been earlier. Each in-breath made the skin
of her throat cave in to her chest and each out-breath was a deep lingering groan. For much of
the time her mouth was open, and her jaw was sunk partly back so that her top teeth jutted into
the air. Her tongue lolled back, a dry reddish-brown lump in her throat. It looked almost as
though someone had placed in her cavernous mouth a kidney that had been too long in the
butcher’s window.
Her eyes were closed but she was not sleeping. Jenny told her I was there and she struggled to
open her eyes to look at me. They seemed filled with some unspoken horror. “This is much
better than Ward 6,” I said, and she grunted. She hated what was happening to her, and she could
not understand why people were not trying to make her feel better. At least, that’s what I thought
her grunt meant.
Grunts and moans were all that was left to this intelligent and articulate person. But she was not
unconscious. She was aware of what was going on, but still nobody had told her that she was
dying.
Amongst her other tribulations, the bed was alarming her, and she kept moaning and stirring and
trying to find a way to get more comfortable. The mattress was designed to avoid bedsores, and
transverse tubes would deflate and inflate every twenty minutes. I asked the nurse whether
bedsores were really such a problem for someone so close to death. “With patients in this
condition,” she said, “bedsores could develop in less than an hour. Maybe even in 20 minutes.
If she gets bedsores they would be extremely painful”. The bed continued to be a trial to mum,
but with the nurse’s explanation, I at least would be able to grin and bear it.
The nightmare went on, getting more horrible with every eternal second. Every now and then
Jenny would moisten her lips with a little sponge on a stick. When she felt it on her lips mum
would try to grip it with her lips to suck the water into her mouth.
At one point in an endless afternoon and evening I was standing and watching her from beyond
the foot of her bed, off to one side. I caught sight of a mirror directly opposite me, above the
sink. In the reflection a pale man was standing there, pressed rigidly back against the wall, one
hand covering his mouth in consternation, the other folded protectively across his chest. I moved
out of my line of vision and sat down at the foot of the bed to wait for each desperate breath.
Her body was still. Apart from the noise of her breathing, the only sign of life was the slight
stirring of the blanket over her chest. With the end of each noisy outbreath, everything would go
still, the seconds dawdling by. Just as I thought that the end had come, without warning, the
blanket stirred again, a faint movement, and the next appalling gasp began. I found myself
breathing in the same ragged rhythm and now my hand crept up to cover my eyes.

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Jenny stayed where she was, sitting near mum’s head, holding her hand, caressing her shoulder
or her cheek, murmuring “it’s all right, mum, it’s all right.” It certainly wasn’t and all of us knew
it. I stayed as long as I could bear it, then left to go back to Runham.
Wednesday morning dawned bright and cloudless. The wind was icy. Ant decided not to go to
the hospital that day. I would gladly have made the same decision.
When I got there Maureen was there; mum was lying on her back, her eyes almost closed, with a
gummy-looking glitter just showing between the lids. Her face was dark and the skin taut over
the bones of her face. Her eyes were great round balls in the sockets. Her mouth was open in
that dreadful slack-jawed gape of the day before, but now it was worse, her lips partly pulled
back from her teeth and the jaw further collapsed towards her throat.
The room was filled with the sound of her breathing. An inward sigh accompanied every
inhalation, like a swimmer filling her lungs between each stroke. This gulping inrush was
followed by a brief pause, and an instant later by the sound of her breathing out, a deep, loud
groan that lasted for three or four seconds. Then there was a pause while she seemed to gather
her courage and her energy for another gulp at the thin air, the only thing keeping her alive. The
successive long vibrating groans were like the complaint of a man wracked in anguish too great
to be borne. Each successive breath was a long, eternal agony.
The door of her room was shut to keep the horrible noise of this dying woman from terrifying
other patients up and down the ward.
Jenny leant towards her. “Mum,” she said. I signalled frantically not to wake her, but Jen
ignored me. “Mum, Martin’s here.” Her breathing faltered and her eyelids fluttered. She forced
them half open. The beautiful brown was clouded and greyish, the whites almost the same dull
colour. She moved her eyes and looked at me. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. Her
eyes were closed again. I sat next to her for a while, not knowing what to do, what to say, what
to think. Her painful groans smothered every thought.
Hour after hour we sat there breathing, watching, speaking in whispers. Meanwhile, as we
watched, she struggled on alone with the vexing problem of air.
Sometimes she opened her eyes a little and seemed perhaps puzzled about where she was.
Sometimes she seemed terrified of what was happening to her. Sometimes she seemed to see
something in the corner of the ceiling so awful that she was transfixed, her exhausted eyes
riveted until her will could no longer keep her eyelids from sliding almost closed.
Eyes open or closed, she hissed and moaned and sucked at the air, and we sat and waited, our
hands in our laps.
At some point the morphine ran out and mum began to pluck querulously at the blankets. She
tried to move her legs and to roll onto her side. I went and found a nurse and told her that mum
was not comfortable. She came quickly in and replaced the empty syringe with a full one. “I’ve
increased the dose a little,” she said. After a while mum quietened down again and the steady
groaning battle resumed.
Now there was a slight gurgling flutter to the outbreath, a gentle liquidity that had not been there
before. Her lungs were filling with her own body fluids and she was drowning a millilitre at a
time. To say goodbye to your drowning mother is difficult. To say it every second for hours on
end is intolerable.
I went home to have lunch at about three in the afternoon. At about 5:30 or 6 a nurse phoned.
Jenny had asked for me to come quickly. “Your mother has vomited blood”, she said. I sped to
the hospital, trying to keep under the speed limit and not managing. Luckily there was very little
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traffic and I was there in about 20 minutes. When I got there nothing had changed, and yet
everything was different.
The familiar living corpse went on, breathing slowly in and noisily out, that ghastly irregular,
halting rhythm. The gurgle was much more evident but the unbearable groan was deeper and
louder and more heartrending yet. Despite it all she was still not in a coma. A few minutes
earlier mum had suddenly stretched out both arms and opened her eyes wide and cried out. It
had horrified Jen, and with good reason because mum herself seemed terrified. She told me that
some time after that, mum had looked at her and mumbled something. Jenny was sure she had
said, “I don’t want to die”.
Suddenly the irregular gurgle spluttered and mum began to choke. I ran out to find a nurse and
within seconds two were in the ward, one with a tube that she put into mum’s gaping mouth and
throat to suck out – what? The liquid that bubbled and splashed into the jar was a creamy brown.
It looked like cappuccino, but slightly glutinous. The hose sucked loudly like the vacuum at the
dentist’s.
Mum’s appalling choking stopped and in a few minutes the dreadful rhythm began again.
Sighing gulp; deep moan; pause – is she dead? – no, it’s not that easy, here’s another gulp,
another pause and another interminable baritone moan. Her mouth was ugly. Her whole face
was ugly. Her life had become gruesome.
Her terror was almost palpable, dying behind those closed eyes, a mind crumbling slowly by
fragments into darkness. There was no dignity in this grisly wasted struggle with death, no
quality in the tattered life that remained. All my futile hopes and empty words echoed in my
head. This was revolting, nobody should have to suffer this. How can we stand here and let one
minute follow another so endlessly, watching this brave person die under this bright unchanging
neon light? How can we wait here, counting each dull excruciating second, waiting as creeping
moments add nothing but degradation? How can time drag on so long, so pointlessly, so full of
pain and horror? How can our hands be idle? Outside, across the bright green sunny field, boys
were playing football.
I could not bear it. I left the room. A nurse followed me. Are you all right? Yes, fine, well, no,
this is horrible. Yes, they wouldn’t let a dog suffer like this, they’d have you in court. Yes, I
killed a baboon for less, she had fallen out of a tree and cracked her skull, and I killed her with a
panga. Your mother’s death is particularly awful, it isn’t like this, people lose consciousness
before this, I’ve not seen anything like this. She was in Ceylon, you know, during the war, in
Naval Intelligence, and then she lived in Africa. Oh, that’s interesting, we never know our
patients except in here, so it’s interesting, to know that. She played the cello in the Nairobi
orchestra and sang alto.
Ten minutes later another nurse came hurrying to get me. “I think you’d better come, she’s
going…” I hurried back into the room. Mum was lying partly contorted onto her left side. Her
face was swollen and almost black, the colour of a storm cloud. She looked quite unlike anyone
I knew. She seemed to be a waxwork of a victim of strangulation. Her mouth was open, teeth
jutting into the air that had failed her, the dark tongue lolling, her lips livid, with dark ruby blood
smeared across the lower one. The breathing was over. I sat down, thankful, empty, horrified,
afraid. She was gone, she had battled on to the end, but the corruption of the body had won,
there was nothing left. Jenny and the nurses were silent, shocked, appalled by what they had just
witnessed, the blood and the terror and the ghastly clamour of suffering. I looked at my dead
mother. I thought about what I could say. I sat down by her head. The living women looked at
me, stared at the body in the bed. The room was filled with the absence of breathing.

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“Goodbye”, I said.
Her black face gaped, motionless, hideous in the equal light.

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