Louise Curtis: A Nurse's Story

When she finally did pass, Dad didn’t like her driving all that often. Perhaps he had a premonition of what was to come when she wrote off my mum’s car about six months later and only narrowly missed crashing into a very sturdy and unmovable tree.

She got on the wrong train once in France and ended up in Italy. She’s missed countless other trains and flights. When it comes to relationships, I would describe her love life as unfortunate. So naturally, when I heard her sheepish voice on the other end of the phone, I started thinking the worst.

‘I’ve got diarrhoea, Louise. It’s really bad. I’ve hardly slept all night. When is it going to stop? I’ve taken three Immodium tablets and it’s eased off slightly,’ she said, much to my disappointment.

‘You shouldn’t take Immodium, you need to let it all pass through your body.’

‘I mean, a lot has already come out. Like, a lot. I’ve been to the toilet I don’t know how many times. It’s just as well I’ve got my own en-suite room now, because I was in a dorm in a hostel the night before last. I’m booked in to go on an eight-hour boat trip today. Is that OK do you think, or am I going to poo my pants?’

‘Ooooooh, that could be risky.’

‘I’ve only got a full day on this island and then I’m working. I can’t imagine there’s much more to come out of my body.’

‘OK, well make sure the boat has a toilet and stick to dry crackers for food.’

‘OK, thanks. I’ll see how I go.’

I guess I felt honoured that she valued my medical advice, given that my parents usually ignored any insights I offered, only to be told exactly the same by the GP. Ed, who had previously lost control of his bowels on a trip with me around India, and I were expecting worse and found the call anticlimactic.

I messaged her later to check on her and she told me she hadn’t been able to move far and had got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet, fainted and hit her head on the tiled floor. I told her to drink more water. The rest of her trip passed without incident, thankfully, and she landed back in the UK safe and sound at the end of the month.

I wasn’t to know then that a couple of days later, both our lives would change irrevocably.

It was Monday 27 January. I had the week off work and had just finished eating supper when my mum called. I picked up and she told me that Dad had passed away. What? Why? How? I started sobbing uncontrollably. I couldn’t understand. He was eighty-six but there was nothing wrong with him. We’d been playing silly games and telling Christmas cracker jokes only a month before. I sat on the sofa stunned and shocked, and wept. Lexie knew something was wrong and she didn’t leave my side.

The next morning, I went up to North Yorkshire with Ed to be with my mum. My sister was due in from London later on that morning. I went to meet her at the train station. She got off the train, and started crying as she walked towards me before she hugged me. She never hugs me, and I can’t remember the last time I saw her cry.

The next few days were a mix of dark humour, tears and country walks. Ed, a news junkie, kept us informed of all the latest coronavirus developments in China but that was the last thing on all our minds.

Mum told us how Dad died. The pair of them had just finished supper and were about to watch the evening news. He was sitting in his favourite chair when he suddenly started fitting. Blood came out of his mouth. Mum told us of her struggle to get him on the floor to perform CPR. She called for an ambulance. The paramedics arrived and worked on him for forty-five minutes. It sounded like he had gone very quickly and no amount of resuscitation was going to bring him back.

In a way we were all grateful that his life ended like that. It was quick and he was spared a long, slow and painful death. It didn’t make the gut-wrenching grief any easier, though. I wondered when I had last spoken to him. I frantically searched through my calls history and emails to see what I’d last said to him. All I wanted to do was to talk to him again.

I had often thought that Dad dying would see us all around his bed arguing over when to stop life support. I always believed his decline would be gradual and that I would see it coming and be able to have some medical input. But this was so out of my control and the last thing that I thought would have happened. We decided against a post-mortem so I don’t know exactly what Dad died of but I’ve gone over and over his last moments in my head, trying to understand medically what happened. Accepting I will never have an answer has been incredibly hard but I do know there was no way anyone would have been able to save him.

Throughout those days, I never saw Mum cry. She kept herself busy. We all got on with sorting out the mountain of admin that comes when someone dies. Death has never been a taboo subject in my family, and Dad had prepared a folder with instructions on what to do on ‘his passing’. He’d even written his own tribute; it was terrible, very dry, and read a bit like a cover letter for a job with a truncated list of some of his achievements. My sister offered to have a go at re-writing it with Mum’s help. I was so impressed by the end result and how she delivered it with such confidence in the church. The whole congregation was captivated. It was beautifully written and a fantastic portrayal of Dad’s life. That period ended up bringing us closer together as sisters.

After the initial shock had passed, I felt, along with my sister, that we should thank the paramedics for being so diligent and for staying with my mum for far longer than they needed to. Dad would have been so appreciative too. I know how hard some cases can be, particularly when you then have to move on to the next patient and continue your shift. When we get thanks, it’s often because of a life saved but unfortunately in this case, it was my father’s time. I tracked down an email address and sent a message to the ambulance crew. It was reassuring to have my wider colleagues show first-hand how amazing our NHS emergency team is, and how valuable we are to families and society.

That time immediately after his passing was a bit of a blur. My emotions washed over me like waves; one minute I’d be fine and then the next floored with grief. It was exhausting. There were moments of light relief, though. My mum, sister and I were sitting together in the lounge one evening when my mum asked my sister about ‘her man’.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘It’s nothing,’ she replied, before launching into a detailed description of the crush she had formed on someone she had never spoken to. I don’t know how she gets herself into these situations.

‘Honestly, it’s pathetic. How old are you?’ Mum said, teasing her. ‘Was it a Master’s you got and now you can’t even say hello to someone? You’re acting like a spotty teenager!’

There was one night we all got drunk and opened the door to a neighbour who had come to drop off a condolences card. And I remember trying to wash my dead father’s blood out of the cushions from his favourite chair. I stood at the kitchen sink and thought aloud: ‘I never thought I’d be doing this.’ That chair has remained empty ever since.

At the weekend, my sister went back to London. Ed had returned to work some days before so it was just me and Mum for a little while. We both teared up when I left. Dad had said he wanted to be cremated and Mum had agreed with him that we would hold a service of thanksgiving to celebrate his life and mourn his passing. Both the cremation and the service were to happen on 12 February.

During the days in between, I was taken aback by the strength of my grief. One day, it took me five hours to get up off the upstairs landing floor. I don’t even remember how I got there in the first place. I’m normally very proactive and can’t sit through an entire film without feeling the need to be doing something else, so to be caught in this state of paralysis came as a shock to me.