In the Midst of Life

I was feeling her pulse, feeling the slow, ever slower pulse of mortality.
    A nurse had put the orchids on the windowsill, and placed the forget-me-nots in a small vase on the bed table where she could see them. Mrs Merton sensed my presence and opened her eyes. ‘I will soon be going to my Bert,’ she murmured, looking at the vase. ‘He’s waiting for me, I know. Waiting, my dear lad.’
    ‘I’m sure he is. I have not the slightest doubt he will be there to greet you,’ I said.
    Slowly she turned her eyes from the spring flowers to meet mine. ‘One thing bothers me, though,’ she said softly.
    I leaned closer. ‘What is it? Surely nothing can bother you?’
    She made an enormous effort to speak. ‘Sister, do you think he will know me? My hair was chestnut brown when he went marching off. He loved my hair. Now it’s all grey. Do you think he will still love me?’
    Close to tears, I said very slowly, ‘Mrs Merton, nothing can change love. You know that, don’t you?’ She nodded her head. ‘He is waiting for you, and he loves you. For him, you have not changed.’
    A little moan of contentment was her response, and she glanced again at the forget-me-nots. Her lips moved, but her words could not be heard. Then she closed her eyes, and did not open them again.
    I telephoned the younger son, Jason, and told him that Mrs Merton would probably die that night. He arrived at about 11 o’clock and sat with her through many watchful hours, and she died as the dawn of a new day wasbreaking.
    None of us knows whether there is life after death, but the simplicity and beauty of Mrs Merton’s faith is something I have seen many, many times. It was not necessarily a religious faith – God, the Church, Heaven, were never mentioned. Mrs Merton’s faith was grounded in love. And God, we are taught,is love.

THE ADVANCE DIRECTIVE
     
    Mrs Cunningham. The name was on the admission list for the day. Ovarian cancer, total hysterectomy at the Royal Free, and referred for radium treatment to the Marie Curie Hospital. The name rang a bell, and I remembered old Mrs Cunningham and the perpetual feud with her daughter – but was it the same person as the lady I had known when I was a junior student nurse?
    Mrs Cunningham had had a minor operation, for varicose veins, I seemed to remember, the stripping of which in those days necessitated a fortnight in a hospital bed and a fortnight’s convalescence. Such a lengthy stay in hospital enabled patients and nurses to get to know each other, and she invited me to her home after her discharge. She was a very interesting lady, and also amusing in a la-di-da kind of way. Her husband had been in the diplomatic service and she had travelled all over the world with him. She had a sardonic humour and her comments were witty and pithy, and mostly directed against her long-suffering daughter, Evelyn.
    Evelyn was a lady of about forty, a professional, with a first-class degree from Cambridge and a worn out expression, the latter acquired, no doubt, from her daily commute between Henley-on-Thames and London. Why they lived together, when they clearly hated each other, I could never make out. They would have been better off living apart, but they clung to each other with the horrible force of a lifetime’s habit. What had happened to Mr Cunningham I never discovered. They were both extremely reticent about him, but I gained the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he had disappeared with somebody else’s wife and a large sum of money.
    One way or another, the two ladies were very hard up. Theylived in a huge house in the best part of Henley-on-Thames, with a vast garden terraced down to the river, where they had a boathouse, but no boat. The house and garden were far too big for just the two of them, but they were too proud to give it up and move to something more suitable. And so they struggled on, Mrs Cunningham keeping house and tending the garden, which was really beyond her, and Evelyn earning the money, which just about kept body and soul together.
    Mrs Cunningham had been all over India, Ceylon and North Africa with her husband, and as I had never been beyond the shores of England and was longing to hear about ‘those far away places with strange sounding names’, I cultivated her friendship. At the time she seemed to me very old, being sixty-two, but she had obviously had a very lively and adventurous life. In Morocco, at a time when all Moslem women were heavily veiled, she had