Death is only the beginning

I’m not a big fan of anniversaries. The ones you want to forget, you remember. The ones you want to remember, you forget. 

And so it was I found myself wide awake early this morning exactly a year to the hour since my mum, Sheila Hartman, was attacked in her care home bedroom by another resident. Beaten about the head and body with a walking stick, the images of her dying from her injuries in hospital later that same day were still so sharp in the gloom it was as if they were were being projected onto the bedroom ceiling. 

So why am I sharing this? I don’t want your sympathy (although thank you again for your abundant care and concern when if first happened). No, I am writing this less as a grieving son and more as a journalist who wants to highlight a number of issues.

Slow justice is no justice

Firstly, the wheels of justice turn painfully slowly. Operation Vectra, the name given to the police inquiry, has been closed. No case could be brought against the killer because she was, like my mum, living with the consequences of dementia and unaware of her actions. (And in any case she too has now died aged 92. We sent her family our condolences and assured them we bore her no ill will).

But the inquest won’t be until mid December at the earliest. The CQC (Care Quality Commission) is still contemplating criminal action against the provider, HC-One. Central Bedfordshire Council’s safeguarding adults board hasn’t yet appointed a reviewer – or if it has I haven’t been told. And all the while the lessons that might be learned from these various inquiries to keep other vulnerable people safe are delayed – although to be fair to HC-One they’ve already made significant changes to staffing, training and management following their own much swifter internal investigation led by Nick Moor at Niche Health and Social Care Consulting. I thank Julie Kerry, HC-One’s chief nurse and director of quality, for allowing me to contribute to this review. That notwithstanding, the way we look after older people as a society – especially those living with dementia and other challenging health conditions – is woefully inadequate and needs reconfiguring. Which bring me onto my next point…

Broken system

Whilst there are some fantastic providers out there, the way residential care is delivered generally follows a broken template. Poorly designed or badly converted buildings. Person-centered care delivered too often in name only by too few staff who are almost always overworked, underpaid and undervalued. A two tier system of fees where residents who can afford it pay as much as £1500 a week – twice that of those who can’t and whose bills are settled instead by cash-strapped local authorities. Byzantine corporate structures where it’s virtually impossible to tell who the ultimate beneficiaries are of the eye-watering sums of money the biggest operators generate which allow sceptics like me to believe that too much emphasis is placed on shareholder profit at the expense of stakeholder loss. It’s a sick kind of financial balance sheet that can lead to threadbare and soiled bedsheets. 

There’s got to be a better way

I’m not suggesting a revolutionary change. But let’s create space in the sector for the sort of innovation in the built and human environments promoted by Roland McMorran and his Maracuja Club. Places where older people (and staff for that matter) actually want to go rather than dread. Because for now I hear too many people say, in all seriousness, “I’d rather you shot or smothered me than put me in one of those homes.” I guess it all comes down ultimately to what value we attach to older people. Whether we see caring for them as an investment or a cost and who picks up the tab when an individual can’t pay their own way for whatever reason. So my third point follows on from this…

Invisible people

We fetishise youth. The media worships youthful good looks. Look at what happened to my former BBC colleague, Miriam O’Reilly, deemed too old for Countryfile. That was more than 12 years ago yet older people remain largely invisible on our screens. I can’t help thinking if this had happened to a child, for example in a children’s home rather than a care home, the case would still be making headlines and there would be calls for a Sheila’s Law. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve not been vocal enough. Or that the majority genuinely believe older people are like batteries to be tossed out with the rubbish when they run out of juice.

Let’s wake up. There is no elixir. Short of dying young, old age is inevitable. And while the steady increase in life expectancy (now flattening out) over the generations is largely good news, what’s less good is that the number of years we can no longer live independently is increasing too. So let’s plan for it properly. And have a debate about what we really want in our final years. I can’t see the Club 18-30 and Centre Parcs generations being satisfied with the current set up!

Finally what have I learned and how have I changed personally in the past year? That I might have enjoyed a career in the legal profession instead of the media. I had no idea there was so much satisfaction to be gained from poring over Supreme Court rulings in cases like Jamieson and Middleton

That I no longer have the stomach to shoot the rabbits that plague our garden in non-myxomatosis  years. 

That as humans we get worked up about the silliest of things. Sad as the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree is, it’s only a tree. Totemic, I understand, and perhaps, therefore, something to mourn when the wider loss of habitat and species is, paradoxically, so vast as to be nigh on invisible. 

And the final lesson? That going for a long walk is a good way of helping red hot anger metamorphosise into a cooler determination. Wave if you see me. 

Black Hole

Bloodless skin too tightly drawn for lips. 
White. Like supermarket chicken. 
A row of teeth along the bottom curve. 
None along the top. (You lost those long ago.)
And that moustache that grandmas get
And tickle when you kiss.

It’s four. 
Trying to remember that last conversation for company. 
Except we didn’t know it was going to be the last conversation. 
Not then.  The detail’s faded. 
And without that to cling on to we’re drowning. 
A black hole.
Pulling everything 

In and out

All this framed from your broken boxer’s nose to your chin
By The Mask of Sorrow (you liked that film, the one starring Douglas Fairbanks. Or was it Tyrone Powers?)
Held in place by a loop of lawn green elastic. Stretched. 
But not yet snapped. 

Out and in

To breaking point. What does a fractured skull look like? I’d take a picture with my phone and send you. 
The police officers standing at the head of your bed have. For “evidential purposes.” 
One in uniform. The other in plain clothes.  A detective. Made them feel sick. My italics. My mother. 
Smash all the mirrors. 
They have no use anymore. 
Let’s have some bloody dignity here. Yes bloody. 

In and out.

Contusion
That’s the word the doctor uses. That and depressed fractures of the orbit. Dr Murray. David. I like his trainers. Why do I notice them when he’s telling me your eyeball has dropped into the place where your cheek bone used to be?
Look up from the Nikes. 
Neanderthal. Yes that’s the look. And with the head bandage a touch of Mother Teresa. 
Confusion. 

And out

“You can talk to her. She can probably hear you.”

“Pick a fight with someone your own size next time Mum.” 
As bright as the fluorescents.
The nurse gives me a strange look. Pity or disdain. She knows what I’m thinking. I think. 
And I’d like to have her. 

In 

That was a performance. Privacy now. Blue curtains drawn. Neat pleats. You’d like them. Voices on the other side. 
On this side whispers. Through the orange neck brace to your blood-flaked ear. 
The roar of the ocean inside a seashell. 
Cromer beach. Drowning out the beeps. Can you hear it?
I want to cry. Like the last time I saw you crying. When dad died. 
But I can’t. Him telling me to be strong. 
So I tell you that you are loved and list your children and grandchildren one by one. Eight names. Living. Breathing. Without your spark none of this.
None of us. 

And out

Let me hold your hand. 
It’s warm under the giant bubble wrap blanket. 
Dying this way is a numbers game. 
I’m an expert at this now.
I’ve been here four hours. 
A screen. About the size of that telly you won from the competition on the back of the Kellogs Cornflakes box. But in colour 
Top row. Green.  Waves. Listen with mother. The shipping forecast. 
Tyne, Fisher, Dogger, Heart Rate. 105. falling slowly. 

In

Second row. Yellow. 100%. 
Gold star. Tollington School for Girls, East Finchley. Top of the class. 
Except the oxygen machine is doing your work now. Cheat. 
And there’s a picture with your exam results. 
An X-ray showing your lungs are half full of fluid. Or half empty.  Whichever way you look at it. 

And out

Bottom right hand corner. Smallest font. Two numbers. In red. Blood pressure. 
Shannon, Sole, Systolic, Diastolic 
45 millibars falling more slowly. 

And in

Numbers. 
You were breathing too quickly when they brought you in by ambulance 
Morphine 
Now we’re counting the seconds between the breaths. 
It’s up to four. 
We’re in Italy. (That holiday you wrote about in the diary we’ve just found. The first family holiday after dad died).
We’re on the quayside. 
There’s a gentle breeze off the land. Scented. Filling the sails of the night fishing boats. 
Such small boats. 
Such a huge ocean. 
Slip the mooring. 

And out

We watch until she’s safely over the horizon.

Poetry as therapy. This is a work in progress, still raw. It’s been thoughtfully and lightly edited by my poetry coach, Pele Cox, and her fellow poet Sally Read. Between them they have offered invaluable support and knocked off some of the rougher edges. I am indebted to them for this and I have no doubt we will do more work on it together in due course. But for now I thought it important to post the piece while the events that prompted it are still fresh.

Many of you already know the circumstances and have very kindly reached out to offer your support. But for those who don’t, it’s about my 88-year-old mother, Sheila, who in early October was beaten by another resident in her care home and died from her injuries in hospital a few hours later.

My mum, Sheila, with my dad, Brian, on their wedding day. Matinee idols the both of them!

Read also…

The Patron Saint of Paint

Shaving

Foz

Foz is from Somalia. 

She steers my mother slowly across the care home lawn. A ship of state adrift on a sea of green. 

“Here are my two favourite girls,” I call from the shade of the arbour. Because if I wasn’t jolly I’d cry. 

“Haven’t seen you for a while,” I remark as she lowers mum onto the garden seat beside me and relays two porcelain hands from hers to mine for safe keeping for the next half hour. “Been on holiday?” 

“I’ve been to Mogadishu,” she says and then adds quickly before I have time to ask something crass like oh what’s the weather like there at this time of year  “to bury my mum.”

To bury my mum.  

I want to reach across my mother’s head and hold her hand. But, of course, social distancing has made human instinct less instinctive. So words are our lifebelts. To stop the grief sucking us down. 

Her name was Fatima. She was 60. A proud mother of four. Two children seeking new lives in America. Two here in the UK. Widowed four years ago so alone in the Somali capital. Taken by Covid before Foz could say goodbye. So she went instead to bury her. And then had to pay for hotel quarantine on her return. Red lists and all that. 

These are the bare facts. 

I look down at the mother who’s left. 

“You can share mine. She can be your honorary mum.” 

Still Life

Shackled by time slippers shuffled
Stooped to the high-backed seat
Queen throned, grey crown ruffled
Prince and Princess at her feet 

The Prince takes a marbled hand
But a child’s touch cannot reach beyond
Their birth to a foreign land 
To retrieve lost memories fond

In her realm time and place are a synaptic jumble
Behind curtained lids sightless pupils dart
O’er a past decaying to a mumble
As mind and body part

On a pedestal a not-still life 
Head set in stone yet body moving
To the heart beat of a mother and a wife 
Her monumental presence soothing


This poem came to me after visiting my mother in her care home with my sister, Joanne. It was our first visit in six months because of Covid restrictions and only the second time we’d seen her in a year. I had originally planned writing about how hand holding is central to human relationships and that holding hands through surgical gloves is wholly inadequate – perhaps surprising given that latex is thinner than a sheet of paper. But it turned out there wasn’t much poetry in PPE 😷 and I was stumped until leafing through Poems of Today, an anthology of poetry I serendipitously discovered later that same day on my mother’s bookshelf. In it I was struck by Midnight Lamentation by Harold Munro and in particular by the last verse:

I cannot reach beyond
Body, to you.
When you or I must go
Down evermore,
There’ll be no more to say
-But a locked door.

The locked door image resonated as a metaphor not just for death but for the death of memory that is dementia. Another book on mum’s shelf (and on mine too) – A Shropshire Lad by A E Housman provided the metre.

Mother’s Day

Dear Mum 

You didn’t like people making a fuss of you. So you weren’t a big fan of Mother’s Day. 

Before it all became what you disdainfully called Americanised, I do remember me and my sister bringing you breakfast in bed. Dad was in on the annual conspiracy and I’m sure you knew what was happening from the clatter in the kitchen. But you always feigned surprise when Joanne carried in the tray and I, her younger brother, theatrically threw open the curtains to let the morning shine on Kellogg’s Cornflakes, a boiled egg and toast (which left crumbs on the sheet we could feel through our pajamas when we were allowed to snuggle up next to you). Thank you for your indulgent smile that morning and every morning.

You still have it. Dementia may be emptying your mind. But it’s not draining your face. I’m picturing it now. It’s your gift to me this day (because mothers everywhere give far more than they can ever receive). 

Life. 

Social distancing

Sheila is 85 years old.
Sheila has dementia.
Shelia lives at Ridgeway Lodge care home.

At night she curls herself into ball and sleeps under a single sheet.
Like an ammonite in a museum cupboard.

Visitors need a PIN number to get in.
Just four digits.
But ten thousand possible combinations.

1 2 7 9

First a one and a two, then a seven and a nine
More a pattern remembered, not numbers, a rhyme
But the rhyme is not working. All visits are banned.
I can no longer sit and just hold her hand

1 0 0 0 0

So now I’m holding her hand in my head
And I’m that ammonite curled up in my bed.
Eyes screwed shut against the start of the day
Ears not hearing the birds as they play
But feeling the flesh of my kith and my kin
The warm reassurance of skin upon skin…

1 9 6 4

My earliest memory. Here roles are reversed.
The mother is young it’s the child who’s nursed.
A doctor is summoned. The boy is not well.
Perhaps scarletina he really can’t tell.
And my eyes are screwed shut as they kneel to pray
Ears not hearing a word that they say
But feeling the flesh of my kith and my kin
The warm reassurance of skin upon skin…

2 0 2 0

The warm reassurance of one hand in another
First mother to child and now child to mother
We speak mostly nonsense because how do you say
That you might not be back for a month and a day
So my eyes are screwed shut because I don’t want them to be
Ears not hearing her last words to me
But feeling the flesh of my kith and my kin
The warm reassurance of skin upon skin…

“That’s nice.”

“That’s nice.”

“That’s nice.”

Unfinished memories

I’ve just found a notebook in which Sheila May Marshall started writing down her childhood memories. It might be written for my sister and I although not explicitly so. The first entry reads: “Your mother walked eight miles a day to and from school.

“Grandad met me at the ‘busy’ road.”

On the next page she’s written ‘schools’ in capital letters with a squiggly line underneath and listed those she attended from age 5 to 16. Tantalising glimpses of the child I never knew appear next to each.

During the war lessons were often disrupted as she and her classmates were led to the air raid shelters.

At Tollington School for Girls in Muswell Hill she wore a green uniform and was in Royden House – one of four named after notable women. Astor, Allen and Normanton were the others. I must look them up at some point. But for now I’m only interested in the notable woman that became my mother.

But the next page is blank. And the one after. And the one after that…

It’s only when memories are written down that they turn into a history that can be passed on.

Next to the notebook is a contact directory. The oldest entries are in the neatest handwriting. Names I recognise. Tom and Elsie. Madge and Harold. John and Audrey. Uncles and aunties. Tom who worked full time until he was 91. Harold who said heavens and by jingo. Madge who made impossibly sweet tea with evaporated milk that my sister and I fed to her aspidistras when her head was turned. But their names are all crossed out. And next to one of them are the letters R.I.P in a much more spidery hand.


This is the first in an occasional series of posts about dementia prompted by my mum’s diagnosis with the disease.