In the Midst of Life

see him. It happened that I was with him on the day of his death. I had seen quite a lot of people die, all nurses have, and I knew what to expect. As soon as I entered the room I could see the change, which is obvious to the experienced eye. In the last few hours of life something mysterious happens, which can best be described as a veil being drawn. The dying person looks the same, but is not the same. Breathing changes, skin colour changes, the eyes change, muscle tone all but vanishes, speech becomes virtually impossible. The nearer one approaches death, the less one has the strength to resist it.
    I told my mother to call the rest of the family. By a miracle of public transport, they all arrived, and he died in the evening of that day.
    The doctor was not called until afterwards, and then only to sign the death certificate. He asked if we wanted a woman to come in to lay out the body, but I said no, I wanted to do it myself. And so I prepared his body and put a shroud on him, in readiness for his last journey to the grave, as I had been taught in my first year of training.
    I do not know what the doctor entered on the death certificate. He knew, and we knew, that the cause of death was old age. But he could not put that. Legally, death has to be the outcome ofan illness.

 
     
    Foreverything there is a season,
    A time for every matter under the sun.
    A time to be born, and a time to die.
    —
Ecclesiastes Chapter 3
,
verses 1
and 2
     

AN UNNATURAL DEATH
     
    It is rare to predict one’s own death, or to meet anyone who has done so. But occasionally it happens, and I knew such a lady.
    Mrs Ratski was Latvian, born in the 1880s, and virtually her whole life had been lived under the shadow of military conflict. She was a simple peasant woman, and she was immensely strong, both physically and morally.
    In 1941, the German armies marched into Latvia and brutally crushed the resistance. Her husband and four sons were forcibly drafted into the German army, and they all died except Slavek, her youngest child. Slavek survived because he was taken prisoner of war by the British. It was the luckiest day of his life. In England he was a free man, and he worked on a farm, which is where he met Karen. Slavek was a good-looking boy with wide blue eyes, blond curling hair, and an infectious
joie de vivre
that made everyone he met feel good. Karen was a Land Army girl, and the work was hard, the day long, and she was often exhausted at the end of it; but not too exhausted for assignations with Slavek.
    After the war, in 1947, they married. He worked as a garage mechanic and she as a hairdresser, and between them they saved up enough money to put a deposit on a terrace cottage and take out a mortgage. They were proud and happy property owners, and they had two little daughters who were six and seven at the time this story begins.
    One day Slavek received a letter from his sister Olga, in Latvia, saying that their mother had suddenly announced that she was going to die, and that she must see her only surviving son first. Accordingly, she had applied for a visa to leave the country.
    Nothing more was heard for fourteen weeks and Slaveksupposed that the whole thing had been forgotten. He had not reckoned with the resolution of a determined old lady! Alone, and with only a spare pair of boots and an extra shawl, Mrs Ratski had set out to walk across northern Europe, to reach the French coast, and find a boat that would take her over the channel to England.
    This sounds a fanciful story, but at that time it was not. Millions of people trekked thousands of miles across the length and breadth of war-torn Europe, to reach a destination they thought might be home, or at least a haven from persecution and danger.
    The first that Slavek knew about it was a policeman at the door, saying that his colleagues in Reading had received a phone message from the police in Dover, informing them that an old lady, who spoke no English, had been referred to them by the port authorities. Her only identification was a piece of paper that bore Slavek’s name and address. The old lady was his mother.
    The following day, the police brought her to his house. The meeting between mother and son was deeply emotional. She clung to him and wept, and blessed him in the name of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ and all the Saints in Heaven. ‘You are my only son left, my youngest, my fairest, my swan, my hope. To see you again has been my dearest wish. Now I