Story

Last Christmas, my father died. It was a typical and singular passing

by Oliver Soden

In my mother’s study, after my father died, we found his unopened Christmas presents in a forlorn pile, not far from the ugly chair in which, ill or well, he had always sat, and a low table on which were piled his glasses, glasses case, glasses cleaner and a little cloth.

He was that kind of man. Upstairs, on his desk, his Filofax lay open, kept until the last in the handwriting that had become stiff after a long-ago stroke, the entries (“scan”, “hospital”, “hospital”) more upsetting than the most explicit talk of cancer could ever be. These—the glasses cleaner, the Filofax—are the triggers for which there can be no warning. Imagine it. Contains strong references to spectacles and Filofax entries throughout.

Nobody knew what to do with the presents, but unwrapping them seemed impossible. I threw more than I could afford at them, the cashmere pyjamas, the designer slippers, as if cashmere could soften the path to the land of the dead and be some proof of affection and love, a proof that was never asked for, never needed. The day to return the pyjamas has passed, and the trousers, bought to fit his newly wizened frame (thinness such as that could never be called “slender”), are still too big for me. “Tell the shop he’s dying,” my mother suggested, when it became e clear that his life was now one of hospital gowns and hospice T-shirts. I considered telling the shop that he was dead, which at that point he wasn’t, quite.

The ambulance had had to come on Christmas

Day. We had spent Christmas Eve carrying up sick bowls to the sound of Carols from King’s, and Christmas Day morning was passed at the pharmacy, as well as at a garage in search of ripe bananas in the hope that he could eat them. The garage was packed, full of awkward husbands sent out to buy missing or forgotten ingredients, phoning home to say that the garage was clean out of whatever-it-was, but how about these? There was a long queue for the cash machine, and I wondered why. When we got home my mother phoned 111, and then realised that draining fat off a goose is too much when someone upstairs is vomiting blood. She found a rib of beef instead and put it in the oven. She is that kind of woman. With one eye on the lookout for the ambulance, I calculated cooking timings. It arrived when the potatoes were being peeled.

The paramedics found a blockage, suggested hospital. My father put on his dressing gown, and I fetched a swish Montblanc bag of his that Ihad been borrowing. “Oh have you?” he said, in mock disapproval. He hadn’t wanted to take it into the hospital in case it got stolen. “It won’t get stolen,” I said. “It’s your good bag, take it with you. They have lockable cupboards.” He is business-like. Phone charger. Hearing-aids charger. He walks himself down the stairs and waves from the ambulance, perhaps already knowing, as, somewhere, we all do , he will not see his home again. “On to the next thing”—a phrase my mother and I have used for decades to describe his almost paranoid briskness, his ability, an hour and a half before curtain-up at a nearby theatre, to start twitching in panic and asking waiters for the bill.

ILLUSTRATION BY JESSIE BAYLISS

Afortnight later, through amorphine doze: “Your contact lenses. In my bag.” Oh, he’s gone, I thought, he’s really gone, and begin to explain that, no, my contact lenses are at home, and this is the hospital. “The black bag”, he says. “Take your contact lenses out of the inside pocket.” I open the bag, which like everything else he owns has not one but two stickers in it indicating its owner and address. And, of course, there they are, two forgotten boxes of contact lenses, which I remove from the inside pocket, to his satisfaction. For his mind to be at rest, which in this dying time it mainly is, not a tissue can be out of place on the wheelie table by his bed. The next day I found him asleep, clutching the black bag to his side like a pet.