Listen to thisLen spent several years with his sister in care during the twenties. When he left the establishment, he found some digs, started work and later got married. He had no children during his 18 years of married life, something which saddened him greatly, but his happiness both at work and at home were clear for all to see. He talked fondly of his wife until the day he died and during his terminal illness his workmates visited him regularly for a year or more.
He was a cheerful character with a boyish, dimpled smile, keen on music and gardening, conscientious and law abiding, yet always ready to lean heavily on someone for guidance and support. He did not have a very firm grasp of his own identity and had bouts of depression. His sister is quite different so the reasons for his difficulties are not obvious.
There came a point in Len's illness (cancer of the lungs) when he could no longer return to his own flat, despite the support of one of the finest, old East End ladies I have ever met. (If ever anyone was a born counsellor, this lady was. To see her and hear her by Len's hospital bed was an educational and uplifting experience of the first order.) The hospital felt he was well enough to be discharged, so his sister telephoned me to see if we could help at Mill Grove. Several decades had elapsed since they had both been with us and yet she turned to us quite naturally. For years there had been some contact with them both; we had visited Len in hospital and this was the obvious next step.
This was how Len came to stay with us, and though it was only for just over 48 hours, it proved to be such a unique and memorable time for all concerned, it is worth trying to share our experience with others. He was far worse than we had been led to believe by the hospital, being incontinent, unable to stand, feed himself or suffering from frequent lapses of memory and comprehension. He was heavily medicated. A far cry from the person who had been making cups of tea for other patients described to us by the nursing staff.
He couldn’t have come at all unless we had had a fully trained nurse on the staff. She was immediately given responsibility for his care and did nothing else for the whole duration of his stay. The rest of the adults and the children had to fill the gaps she thus left, and support her in this new task. In fact, they were more than willing to do this, for everyone had agreed in the first place that he should come to stay with us. We had sent him hand made cards in hospital, signed by us all and had remembered him for months at family prayers; he was thus “known” to everyone and but for the age restriction on hospital visiting, all Would have seen him, not just the older ones.
The days of preparation for his arrival had an air or excitement. One of the boys mended an invalid's table; two girls picked flowers from a neighbour’s garden; others cleaned and tidied the two rooms he was to occupy. At breakfast on the day he was to come, no one needed a reminder of what was happening and when children came home from school, they all wanted to see him.
In the course of two days, over 20 of us popped in to see Len. His face lit up on seeing company and he knew all by name after only one chat. This amazed the children who knew that he had poor eyesight as a result of his illness. It showed that he cared for people, for them as individuals, and we had to restrict these informal chats in order to keep him from tiring. He chatted about the place as he knew it, about his work, his wife; they were interested in his open comments and by the genuine way in which he talked to them. Without it ever being said, the children were being reminded of the security, the permanence of the place in which they were living. They were also seeing the importance of their own contribution to Len's happiness. They mattered to him. The essential difference to him, between Mill Grove and the hospital, was the fact that they were living at one and not the other.
Len was thrilled to come back to his boyhood home for a “holiday”. He had wanted to more than anyone else. To be accepted at that place as an invalid, aged 65, was to know that he was accepted, not because he was in a certain category of person needing care, but because he was Len; he had a right to come home because of who he was.
It is doubtful whether he knew how ill he was; the drugs and the mixed messages from the hospital staff ("you’re walking much better, Len") confused him. I had to let the children know the situation though and this introduced a whole new dimension into the picture. For nearly all of them it was their first contact with a dying person. They were very interested and open about the whole thing and concerned about why Len was going to die, why God hadn’t healed him, what would happen to him when he died, etc.
There were, of course, no easy answers, yet that was not the point. Most important was the fact that we were able to be so real together. Death was providing us with an opportunity to share more deeply together. It affected us all in different ways, but it was something that all of us had to face, contrasting with the shallowness of so much communication in our society.
When the time came for Len to leave, we were all understandingly sad. Two of the older boys helped to carry him to the car and then into the hospital. The rest of the children gathered to say goodbye. One teenage boy cried and some of the younger ones noticed this. Len felt he had only just settled in. (In fact, we had run out of our caring resources now he needed 24 hours' attention and medical care.) Older ones visited him until he died, just over two weeks later.
His sister popped over the day after he died and together with us she planned the funeral arrangements. It had meant so much to her to have someone to lean upon who knew Len so well. She too, had been thrilled that he could return to Mill Grove.
We are still thinking and talking about Len, his life, his stay. It will take a lot longer for all the implications of the experience to sink in. It was such a rich and many sided experience that any description can only hint at what it felt like to take part in such an event. It’s enough to say that had he not come for those 48 hours, our lives and his would have been much the poorer. One wonders how many children and old people are so segregated from each other that we have, unwittingly, impoverished them.
This feature: White, K. Saying goodbye. In Payne, C. and White, K. (Eds.).The Best of In Residence, Volume 2. London Residential Care Association. pp. 62-63.
