When I returned to London on the following Monday I bought a paperback about Auschwitz and the Final Solution at the station bookstall, and read it on my journey and over the following days, filling out my sketchy knowledge of the history of the place, and acquiring some sense of the individuality of its victims and their experiences. Many of them, knowing they would never survive, left letters to their loved ones buried in jars or canteens in the camp, hoping these documents might one day be discovered and delivered, or at least read by somebody. The most moving of those cited in the book was a letter from Chaim Hermann, a Sonderkommando, to his wife, which was written in November 1944 and dug up from a pile of human ashes near one of the crematoria at Birkenau in 1945. The Sonderkommandos were able-bodied prisoners who were compelled to work in the extermination process itself, ushering the unwitting victims towards the gas chambers, removing their corpses afterwards and burning them in the ovens of the crematoria. To refuse the work was to invite instant execution; to perform it brought better living conditions - for a finite period. In a way the Sonderkommandos were the most unfortunate of all the victims of Auschwitz. The great majority of those who died there went unsuspectingly to the gas chambers. The Sonderkommandos lived for months with the certain knowledge that sooner or later they too would be killed, because the Nazis could not risk allowing them to survive as witnesses, and in fact their first duty was likely to be disposing of the corpses of their predecessors on the ghastly production line of death. Chaim Hermann described Auschwitz as ‘
simply hell, but Dante’s hell is incomparably ridiculous in comparison with this real one here, and we are its eye-witnesses, and we cannot leave it alive
’. He also said that he intended to die ‘
calmly, perhaps heroically (this will depend on circumstances)
’, hinting at a final act of resistance, but it is not known whether he achieved that. He himself had no way of knowing whether his wife would ever receive his letter, but in the midst of all this diabolical evil he asked her forgiveness for not sufficiently appreciating their life together, and this was the sentence in his letter that most affected me: ‘
If there have been, at various times, trifling misunderstandings in our life, now I see how one was unable to value the passing time
.’
We looked at three private nursing homes.The only one that didn’t smell of urine nauseatingly mixed with air-freshener, and was in other respects acceptable, was horrendously expensive, but I decided that Dad’s life expectancy must now be limited, and that what time was left to him should be made as comfortable as possible. They had a vacancy, and were prepared to keep it open for a week or two, but when I went back to the hospital after the weekend the news was not good. Dad’s condition had not improved over the previous few days, in fact it had deteriorated. Dr Kannangara was not available, but I spoke to a young doctor, a houseman I suppose, who was his chief assistant, and asked him if Dad was likely to be fit to make the journey north by ambulance in the next week or two, and he shook his head doubtfully. Dad was still having difficulty swallowing, and losing weight through lack of real sustenance. He continued to require an IV drip, and was plucking at it feebly again with his weak right hand, sitting in his wedged-in chair beside the bed, when I greeted him. I showed him the brochure of the nursing home and talked in a cheerful tone about moving him there soon, and he stroked the glossy paper with its coloured photos of the bedrooms and the conservatory, but I had no way of knowing how much, if anything, he understood. Even sadder was that he clearly didn’t understand when I told him what a thrill it had been to hold my grandson, his great-grandson, in my arms the previous Sunday, when we visited Anne and Jim. I was nervous of doing so, the baby seemed so tiny and fragile, but Anne gently insisted on placing him in my cradled arms, and having just been fed he looked up placidly at me with unfocused eyes, drunk with breast milk, until a bubble of indigestion moved his mouth into the semblance of a smile. ‘There, he smiled at you!’ Anne exclaimed, and I accepted the fiction. ‘He has Maisie’s mouth, like you,’ I said. ‘And your nose,’ she said. ‘I suppose I get the ears,’ said Jim. ‘They seem to stick out like mine.’ I relayed all this to my indifferent auditor because it was better than sitting in silence, and anyway I enjoyed recalling this happy visit.
Dad seemed drowsy as well as inattentive, and when I commented on this to a nurse she said, ‘That’s because he fought us this morning when we got him up.’ They used an ingenious kind of crane with a canvas cradle to lift him off the bed and into the chair and back again. I began to develop a great respect for the nurses in this crowded ward, who do a difficult job with patients whose minds are going and whose bodies are collapsing, and many of whom seem, like Dad, ungrateful for their care.
There were no set visiting hours in the ward: visitors were allowed to come and go at almost any time, presumably in the hope that they would keep the patients stimulated and help with tasks like feeding and giving drinks. I got used to holding a non-spill cup of the kind used by infants to Dad’s lips, and occasionally spooned a little fruit yogurt between them, reflecting that sixty-odd years ago he would have been doing the same for me (or, on reflection, perhaps not; male/female roles were more differentiated then). One morning that week I happened to be sitting with him when the ward nurse, Caroline, came up with an Afro-Caribbean auxiliary in tow and began drawing the curtains round the bed. I asked if I should get out of their way. Caroline looked at me in a slightly challenging way and said: ‘No, I’d like you to help Delphine wash your father.’ I was taken completely by surprise. Inwardly I recoiled from the idea, but I could think of no way to refuse that wouldn’t discredit me in their eyes.‘All right,’ I said.‘What do I do?’‘Delphine will show you,’ Caroline said, and left us to it. Delphine put on a waterproof apron and a pair of latex gloves taken from a sealed pack, and looked at me sceptically. ‘Better take off that nice jacket,’ she said.
It was an extraordinary experience, which took the reversal of the infant-parent relationship through the taboo barrier. Basically I was helping to change a nappy on an eighty-nine-year-old man, but he happened to be my father. First we had to take off his pyjamas and vest, which entailed helping him to sit up, and rocking him from side to side. His body looked painfully thin and wasted, but being a tall man and big-boned he was still a heavy dead weight to support. He was wearing a diaper under plastic pants. Delphine covered his loins with a towel while she washed his upper body, and I dried it; then she removed the pants and the paper diaper. He had passed a small bowel movement, but it did not smell too bad, perhaps because of his bland diet. She washed and powdered his private parts, in a respectful but matter-of-fact way, then attached a tube to his penis and strapped a reservoir for the urine to his leg. Then we put the pyjama trousers back on him, and a vest, and the pyjama jacket. What a relief it was to see the bare forked animal clothed again. My arm ached from the effort of supporting him. Throughout the operation Dad was mostly passive and obedient, though once or twice I had to take his hand when he tried to push Delphine’s away. ‘He normally give us more trouble,’ Delphine said laconically. ‘Must be ’cause you’re here.’
When we were finished, and Dad was lying back against the pillows, she stripped off the latex gloves and tossed them in a pedal bin. ‘Thanks for your help,’ she said. ‘I’ve never done anything like that before,’ I said. Even when she was very ill Maisie was never as helpless as Dad, and she was always able to get to the bathroom with my help or the nurse’s. ‘I don’t think I will ever forget it,’ I added. When Caroline came to check that everything was OK, Delphine repeated my remark to her. ‘Now you know what we do every day,’ Caroline said. At the time I assumed that she was just seizing the opportunity to off-load a routine chore and attend to something more important, but I wondered later whether she wasn’t deliberately giving me a lesson in what would be entailed in Dad’s long-term care. When I told Fred on the phone that evening (I was staying in the Lime Avenue house again) that I had helped to wash Dad, she said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ I said that I could hardly believe it myself. I was glad to have done it, but I wasn’t anxious to repeat the experience, and my dominant emotion was a fervent hope that I would never require such a service myself, from anyone.
Dr Kannangara was very elusive that week, and to my annoyance I missed his ward visit on the Thursday. I did however see the young houseman, Wilson by name. He took me aside and led me into a store room off the end of the ward, and spoke in a quiet confidential tone. He told me that the specialist would make another assessment of Dad’s condition on the following Monday and see me afterwards. ‘He’ll probably suggest inserting a PEG tube,’ he said, and explained that this was a device which fed sustenance directly into the stomach. ‘Your dad’s had an extension of his stroke, which has further reduced his ability to swallow. If he doesn’t get more nourishment he’ll gradually get weaker and weaker.’ ‘And with this tube he’ll get stronger?’ I asked. ‘Let’s say he’ll remain in a stable condition. The same as he is now - unless he has another serious stroke, of course.’ He looked at me speculatively. ‘Your father’s achieved a good age, nearly ninety. In cases like this we like to be guided by the family. We can keep him alive, but without much quality of life. Or we can make him as comfortable as we can and let nature take its course. It’s really up to you.’
I didn’t like being presented with this choice. I didn’t like it at all. When I told Fred about it that evening, she could hear the stress in my voice, and decided I needed moral support. ‘I’ll come down to London tomorrow, and stay for a few days,’ she said. ‘Jakki can look after the shop. Ron will help out.’ I didn’t try to dissuade her, though I did warn her the house was a tip.
I met her the next morning at King’s Cross, and we took an extravagant cab all the way to the hospital. Dad didn’t look too good. Somebody had tried to shave him earlier and I guessed he had made the operation difficult, because he had a couple of cuts, and patches of his stubble were untouched. He didn’t seem to recognise Fred, though when she began to speak to him he looked sharply at her as if the sound of her voice triggered some faint memory. I wasn’t sure that he recognised me any more.While Fred and I went through a pantomime of hospital visitors chatting away to a responsive patient his eyes were following the uniformed nurses and ancillaries who went to and fro past the end of his bed with a kind of feral attention, as if he knew that these were the people on whom he depended for food, drink, and other physical needs. It seemed to me that he had regressed even past human infancy on the evolutionary scale and that his reflexes were disturbingly like those of an animal in captivity.
Fred was shocked and dismayed by what she saw. Afterwards, when we were back in Lime Avenue, sitting in front of the electric fire in the dingy dining room with cups of tea, we discussed the issue of the PEG tube. She said she didn’t see the point of keeping anyone in Dad’s condition alive by such an intrusive and artificial procedure. ‘Of course the doctors have to offer to do it, since it’s available, but the houseman gave you a heavy hint that they think nature should take its course now.’
‘But that puts all the onus on me,’ I said.‘I have to decide whether he lives or dies.’
‘We’re all going to die sooner or later, darling,’ she said, and her ‘darling’ was gentle and sympathetic. ‘Do you really want him to be lying in a hospital bed for perhaps months, unable to speak, unable to recognise anyone, looked after like a baby, fed through a hole in his stomach? It would be kinder to let him go.’ I nodded agreement, but I must have looked unconvinced, because she added:‘What would you want
me
to do, if you were in the same condition?’
‘Oh God, let me go!’ I said. ‘No PEG tubes, no life-support machines, please.’
‘Well, then,’ she said, as if resting her case.
‘I suppose the reason I find this so hard,’ I said, ‘is that it’s the second time in my life I have held another person’s life in my hands.’ And then I told her what I have told no other person, that I helped Maisie to die.
That last Christmas she was very ill, very weak, and in pain, though she bravely concealed the severity of it from the children. The cancer had metastasised all over her body and she knew there would be no remission. When I arranged for the kids to go on the skiing holiday, she saw a window of opportunity, to leave without fuss a life that promised nothing but more suffering, physical and emotional. She didn’t want to die in a hospital, or a hospice, looked after by strangers, however kind. ‘I’ve had enough, Des,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure how much longer I can stay in control. I’m tired. It’s time to go, and you’ve got to help me.’ I think our GP guessed her intention and decided tacitly to cooperate. Her principal means of pain relief was a battery-operated syringe driver - a fairly new device in those days - which administered a continuous supply of diamorphine subcutaneously, refilled by the visiting nurse as required. Maisie was able to increase the supply herself according to need, but only up to a safe level. She also used Distalgesic tablets when the pain was very bad. Towards the end of Christmas week our GP wrote a prescription for a larger than usual quantity, ‘to see you through the New Year holiday’, and as he handed it over he looked me in the eye and said: ‘Too many of these combined with alcohol can be dangerous.’ On the last night of the year I crushed twenty Distalgesic tablets and helped Maisie swallow them in a mixture of warm milk and brandy. She turned up the syringe driver to maximum. I kissed her, lit a night-light candle beside the bed, and lay down beside her, holding her hand, until she fell into a deep sleep. Then I sat in an armchair and watched her breathing until I fell asleep myself. When I woke at 4 a.m., the candle was out, and she was dead, her face quite peaceful, her limbs relaxed. I called the doctor at six and he came round. He didn’t ask any questions, and in due course he signed the death certificate. Later that morning I phoned the ski resort in Austria to tell Anne and Richard.