Journey of a soul
Jeremy Clarke
When my grandmother died, a family legend grew up that, as she was breathing her last, her son, my Uncle Frank, the proverbial black sheep, was seen sitting beside her hospital bed reading the back page of the.Daily Mirror. It was an outrage that confirmed suspicions in many quarters that Frank was entirely lacking in human decency. Many haven't spoken to him since. His reputation plummeted still further when, soon afterwards, after a protracted long-distance courtship with a Filipino lady half his age, he married a Russian. But for most of us it was the Daily Mirror story that put him beyond the pale. It has never been made clear to me whether we were outraged because he was reading, or because he was reading a tabloid, or because he was reading a sports page. I made sure, however, that when I visited Uncle Jack last week as he lay dying in hospital I left the paper in the car.
Originally Uncle Jack had gone to hospital for an investigation. He'd woken up shouting about a pain in his lower back. His gigantic doctor came and poked him with two sausage-like fingers then confided to us that he thought the cancer in Uncle Jack's prostate had spread to his lower spine. We loaded him into an ambulance ('Help! Help!' he yelled) which took him to the local cottage hospital, where he was allocated a bed on a six-bed men's ward.
Next morning I rang the hospital to ask how he was and I could hear him yelling in the background. 'He's been very abusive,' said the sister accusingly, the suggestion being that as a relative of his I was partly to blame. In the afternoon I went to visit him. The other patients, elderly men, looked either worn out or in deep shock. 'I
don't mind,' said the skeleton in the next bed, but he does.' He indicated an Lshaped form in the bed opposite with the bedcovers pulled tightly over its head.
They X-rayed Uncle Jack, but because nobody was qualified to interpret the photograph it was sent away by post to another, larger hospital. A week went by. He was in too much pain to come home so they attached a morphine drip and gave him sedatives in a largely futile effort to keep him quiet. Towards the end of the week he contracted a chest infection, which quickly turned to pneumonia, and by the weekend his lungs were bubbling with fluid and we were taking it in turns keeping a vigil at his bedside, He was going down so incredibly fast, the betting was that he'd be dead and we'd all be home in time for the Antiques Roadshow on Sunday evening.
On Sunday morning, paperless, I was alone with Uncle Jack in the bare-walled side room they'd put him in while he died. He was semi-conscious and struggling to breathe, rattling horribly on both the inhale and the exhale. I put my hand in his and he clung on with an iron grip.
It was my birthday. Holding the hand of a man breathing his last put me in an unwontedly philosophical frame of mind. At the cinema recently I saw a film trailer that began with a deep, disembodied American voice stating unequivocally that if you weigh someone the second before they die, then you weigh them again the second afterwards, there is a discrepancy of about 14 ounces. The implication being, I guess, that we do in fact have a soul, that it weighs nearly a pound, and that it vacates the body the instant we die. Whether it was a trailer for a science-fiction film or what I've forgotten. And as far as I could tell the astonishing claim left everyone in row F completely unmoved. But I remembered it now and I promised myself that I would attend closely when the end came in case a departing soul was occasionally visible to the naked eye. After that I speculated for a moment on the transitory nature of human existence. Then I forgot about all that nonsense and wished I'd brought my newspaper in with me after all so I could read the football reports.
Uncle Jack was still breathing at lunchtime when the cavalry arrived and I was relieved for an hour. I had a swim and a bite to eat and returned to the hospital for the afternoon shift. Again, I nearly took my newspaper, then remembered the flak Uncle Frank had taken and left it in the car. I went in and Uncle Jack was still rattling away. At the bedside, four people whom I won't name were keeping vigil. All had their heads in a newspaper except one, who was reading a novel. A comic novel, I noticed.
Uncle Jack stopped breathing at ten past six in the evening. I was watching him closely but saw nothing unusual.
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