The Empty Family Read Free Page B

bed and spent a while wetting her lips. I was at home with her now. I knew how much she hated physical discomfort; her appetite for these drops of water was so overwhelming and so desperate that nothing else mattered.
    And then word came that the doctors would see us. When we stood up and told her that we would be back, she hardly responded. We were ushered by a nurse with an English accent down some corridors to a room. There were two doctors there; the nurse stayed in the room with us. The doctor who seemed to be in charge, who said that he would have been the one to perform the operation, told us that he had just spoken to the anaesthetist, who had insisted that my mother’s heart would not survive an operation. Her having had a stroke, he said, did not help.
    ‘I could have a go,’ he said, and then immediately apologized for speaking like that. He corrected himself: ‘I could operate, but she could die on the operating table.’
    There was a blockage somewhere, he said. There was no blood getting to her kidneys and maybe elsewhere as well – the operation would tell us for certain, but it might end by being exploratory, it might do nothing to solve the problem. It was her circulation, he said. The heart was not beating strongly enough to send blood into every part of her body.
    He knew to leave silence then, and the other doctor did too. The nurse looked at the floor.
    ‘There’s nothing you can do then, is there?’ I said.
    ‘We can make her comfortable,’ he replied.
    ‘How long can she survive like this?’ I asked.
    ‘Not long,’ he said.
    ‘I mean, hours or days?’
    ‘Days. Some days.’
    ‘We can make her very comfortable,’ the nurse said.
    There was nothing more to say. Afterwards, I wondered if we should have spoken to the anaesthetist personally, or tried to contact our mother’s specialist, or asked that she be moved to a bigger hospital for another opinion. But I don’t think any of this would have made a difference. For years, we had been given warnings that this moment would come, as she fainted in public places and lost her balance and declined. It had been clear that her heart was giving out, but not clear enough for me to have come to see her more than once or twice in the summer – and then when I did come I was protected from what might have been said, or not said, by the presence of Sinead and Jim and Cathal. Maybe I should have phoned a few times a week, or written her letters like a good son. But despite all the warning signals, or perhaps even because of them, I had kept my distance. And as soon as I entertained this thought, with all the regret that it carried, I imagined how coldly or nonchalantly a decision to spend the summer close by, seeing her often, might have been greeted by her, and how difficult and enervating for her, as much as for me, some of those visits or phone calls might have been. And how curtly efficient and brief her letters in reply to mine would have seemed.
    And, as we walked back down to see her, the nurse coming with us, there was this double regret – the simple one that I had kept away, and the other one, much harder to fathom, that I had been given no choice, that she had never wanted me very much, and that she was not going to be able to rectify that in the few days she had left in the world. She would be distracted by her own pain and discomfort, and by the great effort she was making to be dignified and calm. She was wonderful, as she always had been. I touched her hand a few times in case she might open it and seek my hand, but she never did this. She did not respond to being touched.
    Some of her friends came. Cathal came and stayed with her. Sinead and I remained close by. On Friday morning, when the nurse asked me if I thought she was in distress, I said that I did. I was sure that, if I insisted now, I could get her morphine and a private room. I did not consult the others; I presumed that they would agree. I did not mention morphine to the