Denial
By ardblair
- 504 reads
Denial
‘I think you should come now,’ they’d urged that morning. Driving north through a reluctant late December dawn, she’d fought to quell the rising panic. Would there be a dramatic, deathbed confession and, if so, how would she react?
‘They’re doing an A-rated clean, I’m afraid,’ the nurse warned as Lucy approached the ward door with its outsize notice “Closed Ward - Infection”. She nodded mechanically and rubbed the antibacterial gel into her hands.
As she pushed at the door, the cloying scent of disinfectant assaulted her. Pungent as it was, it couldn’t quite mask the pervasive smell of human decay. She spotted his bed as soon as she entered. It stood warily at the far end, all alone, like some crouched, prehistoric dinosaur on wheels. Approaching, she could see it was trapped by a tide of cleaning flotsam - buckets, mops, even a floor polisher.
The anger rose in tiny volcanic bubbles.
‘Could someone please move these?’ she mouthed at the ridiculously young nurse who appeared to be in sole charge of the desk.
Reluctantly, the teenage Florence Nightingale put down the remnants of the biscuit she’d been attacking, wiped her hands carelessly on her tunic and advanced towards the offending items. After a great deal of huffing and mutterings about it not being her job, she cleared a path to the bed.
Lucy’s father lay propped awkwardly on a mountain of bleached pillows, his face grey and sunken, his breath coming in loud rasps through the oxygen mask. As she reached out to touch his hand, his eyelids suddenly flicked open and those steel-grey eyes flashed acknowledgment of her presence.
Well, he didn’t seem like a dying man to her now, just much the same as he’d looked for the past week, ever since he’d been admitted here from the care home. ‘Chest infection,’ they’d diagnosed, then promptly closed the ward after two cases of MR.SA had been found. So far, he’d fought off the superbug but succumbed instead to pneumonia - ‘the old man’s friend’, as they called it.
Two auxiliaries appeared at the bedside and shouted in her father’s ear, ‘We’re going to move you back now, James. Cleaning’s finished. Hold onto your hat!’ they joked, lifting the drip stand and attendant paraphernalia as they wheeled the dinosaur back to dry land. The locker bumped against the bed, dislodging a white plastic bag; a pair of soiled pyjamas spilled onto the floor.
Lucy stood aside and let the pantomime play out. That’s what it felt like - a bizarre pantomime with a cast of clearly recognisable ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ and an audience primed to warn, ‘It’s behind you!’ or agree, ‘Oh, yes, it is,’ or deny, ‘Oh no, it’s not.’
For the last few days, the final scene had replayed itself inside her head. It cut between his trembling admission of guilt and a final, emphatic denial. Either way, she could not trust herself to react with dignity. And, above all else, that was what she wanted for both of them: a dignified exit.
Her father raised his right hand, skin membrane-thin and blackened with bruised blood. He fumbled with the mask.
‘You want to leave it off for a few minutes?’ asked a passing nurse, pulling the flimsy curtains round the bed. ‘Give you a bit of privacy to sit with your dad,’ she added kindly.
Her father pointed at the bedside cabinet and frowned in irritation.
‘Want a drink, James?’ she asked, removing his mask and holding up a small carton of ‘Fortisip’, now his sole form of nourishment. He shook his head and frowned more deeply, pointing in frustration at his mouth. ‘Oh, you want your teeth in, don’t you? Maybe you’d like to do that,’ she said, turning to Lucy.
Lucy gripped the chair very tightly. She’d never imagined it would come to this - carrying out the most intimate tasks for a man who, all his life, had strenuously avoided any kind of physical contact with his family (except of the dark, forbidden kind). On birthdays and at Christmas, there might be an awkward peck on the cheek but, for the rest of the time, he had kept himself aloof, visibly uncomfortable with any outward show of affection. Emotionally stunted, Lucy had concluded, and that knowledge had induced oddly mixed reactions: sometimes his apparent coldness repelled her, but at other times, she felt an overwhelming pity for someone who neither understood nor could express the natural demonstrations of love.
‘Let’s try the upper ones first,’ she forced herself to say, pulling on a thin surgical glove and reaching inside the glass for the ghoulish set of yellowed teeth.
Gently, she lifted his upper lip and negotiated the teeth into place, swallowing down the gathering saliva that threatened to choke her. She waited until his breathing had settled a little, then replaced the bottom set, averting her eyes from his forensic gaze.
When it was over, he sank back exhausted against the pillows. He closed his eyes and seemed to drift off. His left hand lay stranded above the sheet like an abandoned glove. The hand of a ninety eight year old - transparent skin papered over a spider’s web of violent-blue veins, the febrile roots of a dying organism. She lifted her own well-manicured hand and let it hover above his. Slowly, very slowly, she lowered it over his boney fingers until she held it in her palm. His eyelids flickered and she made to withdraw, then stopped, aware of a feathered pressure on her wrist. She froze, fixing her eyes on the faded, rose-patterned curtain through which a cacophony of alien sounds penetrated with surreal force.
‘I know it won’t be long now.’ Lucy jumped at the voice, dropping his hand as if it were possessed. He struggled to raise himself. Controlling herself, she stood up and lifted his bone-sharp shoulders with one hand while plumping the pillows with the other.
‘I feel quite calm. I’m ready to meet my Maker,’ he continued in a strong, assured voice. Lucy tensed, biting down hard to stem the emotion. Was this the moment of truth? The confessional cue?
But the moment passed, the lids drooped and his breath came in shallow dips as if each one had cost him dearly.
She shivered. Despite the overheated atmosphere, the preponderance of cold, metal equipment which dominated the otherwise sparsely-furnished ward chilled the air.
The morning edged slowly towards noon and his condition remained unchanged. She sat rigid in the stiff-backed plastic chair - an ergonomic disaster designed to produce maximum discomfort over the minimum period of time. Finally, a male nurse who wore his youth with maturity eased inside the curtain and said gently, ‘Why don’t you get yourself a coffee and something to eat? I’ll sit with him.’
Anxiously she looked at her father, checking for signs of imminent death as if she would recognise them. But he lay quietly now, his lush head of starched-white hair framing his sharp-edged features - straight nose, chiselled cheekbones, angular chin.
She smiled weakly at the nurse and fumbled for a gap in the curtain.
To Lucy’s strained eyes the hospital café seemed lit by a thousand, garish bulbs. Wherever she turned, the spotlight was on her – hard, cold and unforgiving. She crept into a corner table and breathed in the calming coffee aroma.
She’d hoped the end would come quickly but it didn’t look likely now. And that left too much room for memories, each one occupying an accusatory seat at death’s table.
For several years after her mother’s death ten, long years ago, and the family’s discovery of their father’s sexual abuse of at least one of his daughters, Lucy had endured a period of great distress, confusion and bitter anger directed against both her father and, more agonisingly, at times, against her mother whose silence had shielded a husband but exposed a child. Outside the immediate family, the issue was never discussed. In their ignorance, his friends spoke of him in a language she barely understood. Carrying a secret, Lucy discovered, was a painfully lonely responsibility.
With Anna’s death, almost certainly the result of the emotional damage sustained at the hands of their abusive father, and the return abroad of her other sisters, Lucy had felt overwhelmed by the burden of maintaining a relationship with her father. Over time, however, she worked out that there were only two options: one was to cut herself off entirely from him and leave his future needs in the hands of the very professional care home staff; two was to try to understand what had made him behave the way he had and work out a relationship from there.
She’d opted for the latter course, partly to ease her own conscience but mostly out of love for her mother whose voice she heard in the small, hollow hours pleading over and over again, ‘Don’t abandon him.’ And mostly she was glad she’d chosen that route. Whatever he had done, he was, after all, still her father and part, therefore, of who she was. Nothing could change that. And so she’d arrived at a place - not so much of understanding but of brutal acceptance that this was who he was. Not the whole man - but a deeply damaging part of him. Just now and then, however, a word, a look, a denial would fan the embers of repressed anger and she’d rail at the fates who’d put her to this cruel test.
Guiltily, she lingered over the coffee. Maybe it would all be over by the time she got back.
A few minutes later, she stopped outside the ward and tried to calm herself, elaborately working the antibacterial gel into her fingers flexed in prayerful pose Passing the other beds, she realised with a start, her father now occupied the one nearest the nurses’ station: one step nearer to heaven - or the other place.
‘James’s been checking the football scores,’ said David suddenly as Lucy broke through the curtain.
‘Wh . . . what?’ she stammered. Slowly, she took in the scene. Her father was sitting upright, hair obviously recently brushed and oxygen mask relegated to its stand.
‘Kilmarnock won against Celtic,’ he announced. ‘That’s put the cat among the pigeons.’
Confused, she turned to David for some explanation but he’d already slipped back through the curtain.
‘You feeling better, Dad?’ she finally asked, trying to make sense of the situation.
‘No, there’s so much noise in here,’ he said, puckering his forehead into a petulant frown. Lucy listened to the coughs and groans of the other patients and wished yet again that he could have been moved to a side room. She’d spoken to one of the junior doctors who seemed to have been left in charge over the Christmas holiday period to be told that, ‘Unfortunately, closed means just that – shut to all but essential personnel, both incoming and outgoing.’ All the side rooms were outside the main ward.
‘I’ll see if I can speak to someone,’ she offered.
At the end of the ward and just feet away from her father’s bed, there was a small lounge dominated by a cinema-screen television. From here emanated the strident sounds of the latest ‘Soap’ melodrama, playing to an empty house. David was leaning against the desk chatting to two female colleagues who both seemed highly entertained by his conversation. The blond one giggled flirtatiously while her plain-faced companion raked noisily in a box of ‘Heroes’, searching for that special one to offer David. The desk phone drilled through their chatter and eventually the flirty blond lifted the receiver.
‘Can I have a word, please?’ Lucy asked David. He turned immediately and nodded, ushering her out of earshot of the others.
‘Could you do something about the noise?’ she pleaded, indicating the racket coming from the patients’ lounge. My father needs peace.’
‘Sorry, of course. I’ll attend to it. And we’ll try to keep the volume down here as well,’ he added, pointing to the staff behind the desk.
She made to turn but David caught her arm gently and held her back. ‘This often happens when patients are nearing the end: they seem to rally before the final stage. It can be quite distressing for relatives. But if you’ve anything important still to say, now’s the time. It won’t last long.’
‘Thank you,’ Lucy said, grateful for this explanation. ‘It’s the fact he’s still got all his faculties, you see. Somehow he doesn’t seem ready for . . . you know, the end.’
She returned to her father’s bedside and was relieved to find his eyes closed. She switched off the merciless overhead light and shifted her seat to the other side, away from the equipment and closer to his hands. Gently, she placed hers on top of his and patted them in a slow, regular, comforting rhythm.
She sat in that same position until her shoulders ached and her back locked in protest. Minutes, maybe hours passed: time hung suspended in that screened waiting room. Artificially lit by row after row of strip lights, the ward evolved its own time zones, oblivious of the natural rhythms of night and day. She checked her watch – 3.30.
“If there’s anything important still to say,” David had advised. If only he knew. Time was running out fast and the most appalling sin had yet to be acknowledged. How could her father say he was ready to meet his Maker? She didn’t believe in heaven or hell in the Biblical sense but her father did. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ was one of his favourite poems and where could you find a more terrifying description of hell than in that poem’s searing images of ‘bottomless perdition’?
Was that what was keeping him alive? The fear of damnation? Whenever he shut his eyes, was the darkness filled with Miltonic, hellish sights flaming across his brain? She studied his face for answers but there were no clues, except for a slight relaxing of the facial muscles which hinted at an inner calm - the certain calm of denial.
How had he got to this place? This landscape of denial? She remembered watching a documentary once about some prisoners who had raped and murdered but who, despite overwhelming evidence against them, continued to plead their innocence. A psychiatrist had tried to explain that the men were so deeply into denial that over the years they had managed to convince themselves of their innocence. It wasn’t an act put on to fool their jailers: it was terrifyingly real.
Was that what had happened to her father, then? When indisputable evidence had presented itself, she and Robert had confronted him. But he’d sipped at his tea without missing a beat, then railed against his son-in-law for having the audacity to accuse him of such a thing. Over the next couple of years, she had raised the topic directly with him, hoping desperately to hear him speak the truth but these conversations invariably ended in ever more vehement denials which sapped her energies and reinforced her impotency.
And then Robert died and she needed all her strength to fight her way out of her own denial.
His eyelids fluttered momentarily and he tried to cough – a gurgling sort of hiccup that failed to clear his throat. David appeared at her side. ’I’ll give him something to make him a bit more comfortable. Just take me a couple of minutes,’ he said, inviting Lucy to leave.
In the corridor outside the ward, she found a toilet and stood hunched over the sink, splashing water over her face. The cold shock roused her from her somnambulant state. She stared at her reflection in the mirror – her bleached hair lay clamped against her head like a protective helmet; her eyes, sharp-blue and clear on other days, seemed dimmed and unfocused like smeared fog lights. She flushed a toilet and listened to the sound of normality.
‘He’s calling your name,’ whispered David when she returned. ‘Thinks the world of you, you know. Always telling the staff what a wonderful daughter you’ve been.’
The tears pricked sharp and sudden like a knife-wound to the heart. If only . . . if only.
‘Lucy . . . Lucy?’ For a moment she stood transfixed, listening to the whispered voice inside her head. Then she felt herself being gently propelled towards a chair. ‘I’ll leave you with him for a while,’ David said softly, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ll be at the desk if you need me.’
‘I’m here, Dad. It’s me - Lucy,’ she said, resuming her seat. Her father opened his eyes but didn’t look at her. Instead he stared straight ahead with a fixed concentration. With great effort, he forced his tongue round his lips trying to wet them. Lucy reached for a moisture stick and very gently ran it round the edges of his mouth. He nodded his head in thanks. In that moment, the abuser faded from her sight and all she saw was a frail, old man.
A minute or two passed. Suddenly, his breathing quickened to a series of little gasps as if he were summoning all his strength to speak. ‘In the drawer,’ he said finally.
Lucy frowned. ‘What is, Dad?’
‘Papers - bank . . . building society . . . top drawer . . . bedside cabinet . . . at the home.’
Lucy gave a little smile. ‘Everything in order then, Dad?’ Just what she would have expected from him. Everything in his life neatly packaged and filed - papers and people alike. No risk of a jack-in-the-box moment now.
‘Sorry there’s not more.’
‘More what?’ Lucy asked.
‘Money,’ he said, irritation in his voice.
She felt the hot tears welling and swallowed hard. For a heart beat she’d hoped he meant love.
‘We don’t need your money, Dad - but thanks anyway,’ she sighed.
Still his eyes remained fixed on a point somewhere straight ahead. Eventually, the eyelids drooped and his head sank back against the stark-white pillows, hard and unyielding.
Lucy resumed her rhythmic finger-patting and dozed. She woke with a painful wrench to the neck as her head jerked backwards. Snapping awake now, she checked her father’s breathing but still it rose and fell in crackling whispers.
Vaguely, she became aware of a shift in time and sensed darkness had fallen outside. Her watch said 6.30. She eased herself out of the chair and stretched her aching limbs.
Suddenly she felt very tired. She’d held herself together for days now, conserving her strength for decision-making about her father’s future - a return to the care home or a move to a nursing home? Now that it looked as if he wasn’t going to recover, the focus of her mental energies had shifted to dealing with his end. The stage had been set for a deathbed confession but, so far, the main character had refused to play his part. Now she just wanted it over. Then she could sleep.
A young nurse came in to check her father’s pulse. ‘His condition’s much the same,’ she said, glancing at the chart clipped to the bed end. ‘Are you staying in town?’
‘Yes . . . with my mother-in-law. She lives nearby.’
‘Then why don’t do go home and catch a bit of sleep? You look exhausted. Leave me a number and I’ll call you if there’s any change.’
Lucy looked at her father whose breathing seemed more regular now, then looked at the nurse. Sleep beckoned but guilt blocked her path.
‘You will sit with him, won’t you? I don’t want him left alone,’ she pleaded. The irony of her plea struck her with sudden force as the ward filled with raised voices announcing some kind of emergency. Who could ever be ‘alone’ in this environment?
Outside a fine, ghostly haar had drifted in from the North Sea. Now it was visiting time, the hospital car parks were jammed to bursting point. Desperate drivers had abandoned their cars on double yellow lines - forbidden yet strangely compelling territory.
Cautiously, she reversed out and onto the main road. Immediately halo-white headlights dazzled her vision and she strained nearer the windscreen. Robert had always done any night-time driving and, since his death, she’d avoided it whenever possible.
Traffic on the main north road groped its way through the mist, cursing it for delaying another eagerly anticipated Saturday night. Lucy crawled along, her eyes stinging with fatigue, her thoughts drifting in the white haze. Question after question queued in her mind like so many jigsaw pieces each waiting to be assigned its place in the puzzle. Why had her father resorted to abuse? He who had instilled in all his children an acute awareness of right and wrong, why had he failed to recognise the terrible wrong he was committing? Why had her mother never spoken out? Why? Why? Why? The queue lengthened with the passing miles.
The blare of an angry horn snapped her into the present and a dark shape skimmed past her wing mirror. Panicked, she pulled violently on the steering wheel and lurched back into the inside lane. That was close.
For the rest of the journey, Lucy focused every nerve on watching the road. By the time her mother-in-law’s house loomed out of the haar, her body was rigid with the strain of
concentration.
‘So, he’s rallied a bit?’ her mother-in-law asked as she ushered Lucy into the cosy warmth of her sitting room.
‘Strange - yes, he seemed quite peaceful when I left. They’ll phone if there’s any change. But I don’t think it’s . . . imminent.’
Despite her exhaustion, sleep would not come when she headed for bed. Her mind buzzed and flickered with sounds and images from the day like a snarled reel of film. She saw him lying there, so frail his papery skin threatened to split and peel off, exposing his very soul to scrutiny. Like a giant cocoon, the outside wrapped in a translucent fragility but inside burning with a fortress-like denial protecting and sustaining him.
She squeezed her eyes shut until they hurt, willing her mind into a blank state. She just wanted it over now - to be rid of the endless, unanswered questions and the ongoing fight with her conflicting emotions.
The noise woke her. Her mobile danced across the bedside table, its ring tone rising to a frantic crescendo before Lucy could answer it.
‘Lucy Gardner?’ a voice asked.
‘Yes . . . speaking,’ Lucy said, her voice a strained whisper.
‘This is Nurse Peters - Ward 9, Royal Infirmary. I’m sorry, Lucy, your father passed away peacefully a short while ago. I sat with him all evening and his condition remained stable . . . then he just slipped away - no warning.’
Lucy felt a dam of tears bursting in her throat.
‘What time is it?’ she asked, fighting to stem the flood.
‘Half past midnight. The time of death was recorded at 12.03.’
Lucy forced herself out of bed, shivering in the cold, night air.
‘Did he . . . say anything? I mean did he ask for me?’
‘No . . . no he didn’t. He was in a deep sleep by then.’
‘Will I come now?’ she asked, afraid of her own question.
‘If you’d like to come, of course.’ Lucy swallowed hard but couldn’t find a voice. ‘Why not wait ‘til morning? I’ll have all the paperwork ready by then.’
‘Yes . . . I’ll come in the morning,’ she forced herself to say. ‘Thank you.’
The phone slipped from her hand and she collapsed onto the bed, wave after wave of pent-up emotion rising to the surface. She buried her head in the pillow and wept - great, heaving sobs that wracked her limp body. ‘I wasn’t there . . . I wasn’t there,’ she sobbed. From a great distance she heard the words but made no sense of them. What did it matter, that final moment between life and death? She’d held his hand for days, moistened his lips, spoken to him of familiar things and things unknown. What more could she have done?
Her mind whirled in an eddy of grief and she wept for the father who might have been, for the sister she’d loved and lost, for the mother who’d kept her silence.
But above all, she wept for the lost soul who’d denied his family the right of closure and himself, the chance of redemption.
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Wow, very sad indeed but
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