Pulse

rules and sometimes its answers, but that’s not how you experience it at the bedside. And then there’s the remorselessness of hope. Even when hope of cure is gone, there is hope for other things – some specific, others not. Hope means uncertainty, and persists even when you’ve been told there is only one answer, one certainty – the single, unacceptable one.
    I didn’t do crosswords or jigsaws – I don’t have that sort of mind, or patience. But I became more obsessive about my exercise programme. I lifted more weights and increased my time on the step machine. On Friday runs, I found myself at the front of the pack, with the heavy guys who don’t do chat. That suited me fine. I wore my heart monitor, checked my pulse, consulted my watch, and occasionally I talked of the caloriesI’d done. I ended up fitter than I’d been at any time in my life. And sometimes – crazy as it may sound – that felt like solving something.
    I sublet my flat and moved back in with my parents. I knew Mum would be against the idea – for my sake, not hers – so I merely presented her with the fait accompli. Dad took leave of absence from his office; I cut out all extra curricular activities; we called in friends, and later nurses. The house sprouted handrails, then wheelchair ramps. Mum moved downstairs; Dad never spent a night apart from her, until she went to the hospice. I remember it as a time of absolute panic, but also a time with a rigorous daily logic to it. You followed the logic, and that seemed to hold the panic at bay.
    Mum was amazing. I know MND sufferers are statistically less likely to be depressed about their condition than patients with other degenerative illnesses, but even so. She didn’t pretend to be braver than she was; she wasn’t afraid to cry in front of us; she didn’t make jokes to try and cheer us up. She treated what was happening to her soberly, without flinching from it or letting it overwhelm her – this thing that was going to crush out her senses one by one. She talked herself – and us – through her life and our lives. She never referred to Janice, or said she hoped I’d eventually have her grandchildren. She didn’t lay anything on us, or make us promise stuff for afterwards. There was a stage when she weakened dramatically and every breath sounded like a hike up Everest; then I wondered if she was thinking about that place in Switzerland where you can make a decent end to it all. But I dismissed the thought: she wouldn’t want to put us to such bother. This was another sign that she was – as far as she could be – in charge of her own dying. She was the one who made sure the hospice was lined up, and told us itwas better to move sooner rather than later, because you could never predict when places became free.
    The bigger the matter, the less there is to say. Not to feel , but to say. Because there is only the fact itself, and your feelings about the fact. Nothing else. My father, faced with his anosmia, could find reasons why such a disadvantage might, if viewed from the right perspective, become an advantage. But Mum’s illness was in a category way beyond this, beyond rationality; it was something enormous, mute and muting. There was no counter-argument. Nor was it a matter of not being able to find the words. The words are always there – and they are always the same words, simple words. Mum’s dying, but Dad’s losing her. I always said it with a ‘but’ in the middle, never an ‘and’.
    I was surprised to get a call from Janice.
    ‘I’m very sorry to hear about your mother.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Is there anything I can do?’
    ‘Who did you hear from?’
    ‘Jake.’
    ‘You’re not seeing Jake, are you?’
    ‘I’m not seeing-seeing Jake, if that’s what you’re asking.’ But she said it in a frisky tone, as if excited that she might, even now, be provoking a stir of jealousy.
    ‘No, I’m not asking.’
    ‘Except that you just did.’
    Same old Janice, I thought. ‘Thank you for your sympathy,’ I said, as formally as I could. ‘No, there’s nothing you can do, and no, she wouldn’t like a visit.’
    ‘So be it.’
    The summer Mum was dying was hot, and Dad wore those short-sleeved shirts of his. He used to wash them by hand, then struggle with the steam iron. One evening, when Icould see he was exhausted, and trying unsuccessfully to fit the yoke of a shirt across the pointy end of the ironing board, I said,
    ‘You could send them to the