Where are my next tears coming from?
To Aunty Cath
What a perfect day you chose to leave me, Cath, without notice, when I was not looking. But that was my fault. Send a text, send a text I kept saying to myself the other week, then it slipped my mind. You think there is always next time until there isn’t. 7th October 2023 was one of the happiest days of my life. James was getting married in heavenly Devon weather and grandson Jonas was to have a formal naming ceremony the next day. Back in Banstead on the 9th I wondered where my next tears were going to come from. Euphoria or sorrow. The answer came that same evening. My phone rang. It was Mary. Why? Mary didn’t ring me at that time of the day. My antennae bristled and hummed as I raised the device to ear. The sobs in her voice told me this was not a call to be taken in the kitchen with the telly on. I sprawled on the staircase where I often received bad news. Aunty Cath had gone, she said. On Saturday.
I shivered and shrivelled within, dazed, paralyzed by a scrum between contrasting emotions, until the next morning when, toothbrush in hand, I cracked in front of the bathroom mirror. Mau rushed in to find out where the neighing and hawing were coming from instead of the whirr of an electric toothbrush. It’s Aunty Cath I kept repeating, my eyes well rinsed with tears and my midriff convulsing.
Later that morning, on the way to the High Street I stopped to talk to a neighbour. My son got married, I said but I am on my way to get a plaque. She didn’t know what to say and I spared her by soon racing away. Cath, how could she know what it meant to me that you were not going to be there anymore?
We spent twenty years together on the CCU at Epsom, in the days before SPRs and SHOs and when almost all consultants were single-handed. You were my extra pair of eyes and legs and lungs and cerebral cortices, but yours worked much better than mine. You knew when I was heading for a fall or a slip and often headed me off with a shy smile and cock of your head and a toss of your raven black hair. Or a quiet word – ‘he’s not too happy, he’s waiting for you, the results are in the office; I’ll fetch the prescription,” whispered in your Marlene Dietrich voice. And you found out who was going through a bad patch and lent them your multitasking shoulder. You made teas and coffees and drew up rotas and arranged nights outs. The chocolate cakes you baked were both balm and guilty indulgence; a perk to perk us up.
How could my neighbour understand how you helped us get through the redesign and redecoration of CCU and how you kept going through Covid. How the CCU blue fleece jacket looked like haute couture designer wear on you as, with a determined clacking of your heels you waltzed off to the pharmacy or X-ray or a POd, on our behalf. You were back almost before you’d gone, mission accomplished without a fuss. The NHS relied on you to do the work of more than one and only knows it now you’re gone.
What a heartwarming sight it was to see your face neon light up when the grandkids Jackie and Kirsten came along. The little ones kept you going; but was it finding your beloved Paul on the 9th of March in 2021 that let this thing that took you away escape from its restraints I wonder. Perhaps, one day the clever science folk will tell us what grief can do to our battery cells.
The other day, on our way to St. James’s Park, after a faux pas with the QR Code, James asked me in filial exasperation, how I managed to get so far…or so I guessed he was going to ask because he swallowed the rest of his muted outburst. To me the answer was clear. Without you where would I be? That is why, though there were only a few days between us, I called you Aunty and it was because I couldn’t repay you for your years of help that I invented a kind character AntiKath in a story book I was writing. You liked that. But then you went and topped everything, toppling me into yammering grateful incoherence by organising a leaving party for me at short notice in July 2016, with Mary.
Cath, memories of you will never stop spinning in me, but Georgina and Beverley and the grandkids will have to imagine the memories you would have made had you gone on longer. I missed you when I left Epsom and I miss you even more since you left me for good. I wish I had sent that text message before the end, but I’ll console myself with the thought that on Saturday you somehow sensed James getting married and me on the dance floor doing the execrable impression of a marsupial leashed to a timebomb.
I’ll nail the plaque in your memory to the sycamore tree at the end of the garden I’ve been digging aimlessly for the last few years. And when Theodore and Jonas, the grandkids, or anyone else come I’ll tell them what a fine and beautiful human being you were, Catherine Hughes.
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