Breathless from grief and gratitude-The death of Harry Leslie Smith Nov 28, 2018

Harry Leslie Smith

February 25, 1928-November 28, 2018

Everyone of us knows loss. Everyone of us has experienced the death of a loved one. Everyone of us has embarked, sometime in their life, on a journey through the shadow lands of mourning. The death of my dad six years ago in the early morning hours of November 28th can on occasion leave me breathless from grief. But I am very grateful for those last years with him and that our mutual efforts produced something worthwhile- a last stand for the Welfare State.

In the last 10 years of Harry Leslie Smith’s life, 5 books were published, hundreds of essays penned, podcasts produced, hundreds of speeches made across the globe, and tens of thousands of miles traversed on my dad’s quest to not make his past our future. I was my father’s comrade and partner during that odyssey, where sometimes my role was Sancho Panza, and other times Don Quixote.

Harry Leslie Smith was an ordinary man who lived through extraordinary times. He was born during an era when the working class lived in destitution, and the entitled classes lived lives of excess and narcissism. My dad's life's journey was a voyage most of his working-class generation endured: poverty, war and then renewal with the creation of the Welfare State.

Remember to subscribe if you can because I'd like to finish the job I started with him and remain housed. Getting a rather bad bout of cancer at the start of the pandemic, along with a diagnosis of lung disease, altered both the trajectory of my life and the prospects available to me. If I get 8 paid yearly subscriptions by the 30th, my rent is covered for next month.

Also at the end of the post is Jeremy Corbyn’s video tribute to my dad. So, if you can’t get through all these words scroll to the bottom to view the tribute. Take care, John

Chapter One:

You Died

Dear Dad:

You were angry at death when it came. If you could, you would have fought the Grim Reaper off with the broken end of a beer bottle. That's how you fought your mum’s boyfriend after you witnessed him strike her. You were ten years old, malnourished, “skin on bone,” as you said, from a diet of bread and drippings. But that didn’t stop you from standing up to a bully. There was no bullshit to you. You jumped into the fray when an underdog was being attacked. But death had you in his grasp and he wasn’t going to let you go because you were five years short of a hundred. You were too old and too sick to fight death. 

So, you fought me instead, and that’s all right because I was your son, best mate, and caregiver for the last ten years of your life. I understood your anger, your despair, and your frustration. I understood immediately why days before you died, you cried out, “John, you cunt; where’s my fucking tapioca pudding.” I knew you were disappointed in me while you were on your ICU deathbed. I couldn’t get what you wanted most - food in your belly to stop the pangs of hunger that triggered memories of your famished youth.

You were going to rage against the dying of your light as your father had done before you when he was dying, and his father had done before him. You wanted everyone to know when you shrieked at me that I was a cunt and that you weren’t going to leave life quietly.

Your scream thundered with indignation at the outrage of dying from your room to the nurse’s station, where I was bidding goodbye to Canada’s Government’s minister for Refugees and Immigration. The minister had come on a personal visit to thank you for the work you had done, to make refugees welcome in the last years of your life. 

Your outrage at being denied pudding stopped the nurses, the government minister, his assistant, the doctors, and me in our tracks. Sheepishly, I said, “he’s going to be the world’s oldest rebel to the bitter end, or at least until he can get dessert.” The nurses laughed while regret backed up in my throat like sick, for making light of your need for sustenance. As you lay dying, I thought, “I am a cunt,” because I can’t stop this, I can’t prevent you dying.”

Dying was an insult because a hundred times before, you vanquished it. This time, death rudely tailgated you and blared its horn, signalling your ending was soon to come. You were pissed that you had to die without even the comfort of a last meal. “A condemned man gets a bit of grub before meeting his hangman.”  

The doctors denied you food because they feared you’d aspirate, as you no longer had the strength to properly swallow. So, they ordered a nil-by-mouth order. You were going into death as you had come into life on an empty belly.

Hunger was fucking with your head. Yet when the Minister for Immigration and Refugees visited you and stood by your bedside, you did your best to be the “World’s, Oldest Rebel.” 

“There’s no time left for me,” you wheezed at him. One sentence, and you were breathless like you’d run the London Marathon because a BiPAP machine pumped ninety pounds of oxygen per minute into your lungs to keep them from collapsing. But you weren’t finished, and in between coughs, you spluttered out. “Save them, save the refugees.” Then you closed your eyes to rest. 

You were dying, and I refused to recognise this despite having seen both Mum and my brother Peter die. I kept denying to you that death was just around the corner because I was afraid of being alone and forced to pick up the pieces of my life without you. I kept saying to you.

“You’ll be as right as rain. I promise I will get you home,”

“Bollocks.” 

The day before you died, when you began bleeding from the lungs, I asked the ICU specialist on call if this was a mortal blow? 

The physician took me into his office and showed me a CAT scan image that displayed lungs rotting from pneumonia, pulmonary fibrosis and eight decades of smoking.

“What do you think?” the doctor asked? 

“I don’t have a bloody clue. I don’t have the knowledge to judge this or understand what must be done.” In my head, I thought of the mechanic who had inspected our car a year ago and said, “Can’t you see your vehicle is falling apart?”

But all I saw was an engine whose parts I couldn’t name. 

The doctor pointed at your vital organs and said nothing worried him, but your lungs.

“If they fail anymore, your dad will die.” “Time will tell.”

Then he briskly walked off to deal with another of his patients, equally ill and equally requiring his expertise.

After the government minister was gone, you looked at me as if to say; “Why can’t you get me pudding, I’ve done my job.”

You began miming the act of eating and drinking because you were so hungry and thirsty after days with nothing to eat. In the end, you were being reduced to your animal nature as the instinct for survival kicked into overdrive. 

I looked away from you and tried to find something hopeful to talk about. I told you Theresa May faced a no-confidence vote, and that her government was near collapse.

“Fucking Tories, and their banquets of food while we starve, Gibbet the lot.”

And then you muttered, “I won’t live to see another Labour government. I won’t live long.”  

I began to talk to you about Christmas and my plans for us over the holidays. You turned your head from me in resignation, as if you were preparing yourself for non-existence, for your extinction.

Suddenly you turned to face me and in anger barked.

“Bastard, all you do now is tweet. You know, tweeting isn’t going to save me?”

But I couldn’t stop tweeting. My head and my heart couldn’t manage all that was going on around me. I needed to make sense of things by encapsulating the moment in 240-character bites. On social media, I controlled the narrative of your dying because in real life I was powerless. I could describe the events you experienced as you fought death. Being on social media, the anguish of watching you die was less lonely. By telling others, I shared my grief. I tried to justify to myself that I was doing what was done in 1910 when Tolstoy died, from pneumonia at a provincial railway station. Then reporters sent a constant stream of telegraph messages to his millions of devotees anxious for news of the great author’s thumb wrestle with mortality.

Granted, you weren’t Tolstoy. But at that time, you were well-known and respected in left-wing politics in both the UK and Canada for the five books you wrote about your life during the Great Depression and the need for socialism in the 21st century. You were a frequent comment contributor to the Guardian Newspaper’s opinion section. Britain’s left revered you for barnstorming the nation during their 2015 and 2017 General election. You were loved for standing with Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s first socialist leader since Harold Wilson no matter how much he was maligned by the right-wing press or the supporters of Tony Blair, within the party. Ordinary people adored you because you supported public healthcare and travelled across England to speak in favour of The Junior Doctors’ Strike. You exhausted yourself in a gruelling speaking tour during the EU referendum to plead with Britain to Remain within the European community, in 2016.

In your mid-nineties, with only two years left to live, you toured Europe’s refugee camps- hoping to spur people to make the displaced from our wars in the Mideast welcome in our society.

In 2015, Canada, your adopted home for 50 years, fell in love with you when you did a cross-country tour of the country and asked citizens to “Stand up for social democracy.” 

At that moment, you were an important political symbol to tens of thousands on the left and to those who wanted a better world for all. Sill in the back of my mind, I sometimes thought tweeting about you dying was me being no better than the cynical newspaper reporter portrayed by Kirk Douglas in the film Ace in the Hole. 

“Fuck it. I am knackered, you groaned.”

Then you drifted into a sleep agitated by the tremors and jerks that were side effects from a strong inhaled steroid medication that your doctors hoped would eradicate the phlegm congealing in your lungs and suffocating you. 

Minutes later, you woke choking. “Do you want me to vacuum the gob caught in the back of your throat?” You nodded yes. So, using a small suction device attached to the side of your bed, I removed sputum that you couldn't swallow or spit out. 

Suddenly, you threw off your blankets and cried hoarsely.

“Get me out of here.”

“I can’t,” I responded.

“Let me eat something or kill me for Christ’s sake. You’re an arsehole, you know that.” “Just a bit of bread and butter, for your old man, eh.” “What can it hurt, son?” You began banging your table and chanting “Fish and chips, chips and fish.”

It hurt because I knew eighty-five years ago, in a doss house in the grimmest part of Bradford, you made the same passionate plea for “fish and chips, to your mum. But there was nowt for your tea because your dad was unemployed. 

For a moment, you nodded off and then awoke and winced from the pain. You were in agony because your legs and scrotum were swollen from oedema caused by heart failure and being bedridden. Your nurses encased you in special stockings to control the swelling. It made you look like you were a visitor from the 17th century. 

“Water,” you pleaded with me.

The best I could do was apply a small sponge dampened with ginger ale to your lips, tongue, and sides of your mouth. You sucked on it. The action reminded me of when a wounded bird takes nutrients from an eyedropper. It reminded me all too much of when Peter was dying in 2009, and even a ventilator couldn’t keep his lungs breathing. He was also denied water, by his doctors, except if it was on a dampened sponge. 

I caressed your head and said “Sorry.” I thought to myself; this ten-year-long road we’ve been on is- coming to its end. Death is stealing you from me, and I will be alone. 

While you slept, I looked at the flowers and card the minister of refugees and immigration’s assistant left. I looked at my phone and realised there were thousands of get-well messages on social media for you. Jeremy Corbyn’s office emailed that day about your wellbeing, as had the principal secretary for Justin Trudeau. MPs, writers, political analysts, economists, and thousands of ordinary folks reached out in commiseration with me.

Your dying was transmitted on social media. So, they relived the memories of when they lost their parents, friends, and family members. Major newspapers- around the world contacted me to get information, so they could write your obituary. 

It was fitting, and it was right the news media would want to mark your death because- for five years- you were like a shooting star thrown from the cosmos of history to blaze across social media platforms. You reminded the younger generations through your influential Twitter feed with over 250k followers that there was a better way to do politics, as well as a better way to build societies. 

I looked from my phone to outside your window. The sky was winter grey and hung low and heavy from the cold atmosphere. I wanted to go home, drink wine, and forget you were dying. Suddenly, you cried out.

“Why can’t you fix this?”

I wasn’t sure anymore if you were yelling at me or fate. 

For you, it was too late to fix anything. 

To this day, I wonder if our circumstances had allowed you to spend your golden years puttering around in the Algarve rather than on the road, trying to fix our broken society, whether you would have seen a hundred. 

The other question that will haunt me until I am dead. Would you have been happier to live out your last years in the shadow of others, not doing things, but having things- done for you? I don’t know. At least because of Harry’s Last Stand, your last act was met with a standing ovation rather than indifference. 

Twenty-four hours before you died, your physical condition grew worse, and you had developed an MSRI that was overwhelming your survival instinct. So, when I arrived that morning, your health was so fragile that a nurse instructed me to wear full PPE before going into your room. 

There a doctor was at your bedside. 

“Things don’t look good,” said the ICU physician after conferring with his notes.

The doctor t turned to you and said, as if you were a contestant on a game show whose remarkable winning streak suddenly ended.

“Harry, I think you did well to live to ninety-five. You were even supposed to be in Paris this week, for a conference on refugees. You’ve had a full life. I am afraid; however, you aren’t going to return to Paris. You are extremely sick and if I continue your treatment at best, you will be in a long-term care facility for the remainder of your life.”

“End it,” you whispered. The doctor responded, “You made the right choice. It was a pleasure meeting you.” 

At that point, I asked everyone in the room to leave. 

When everyone left, I begged for your forgiveness for not saving you. You didn’t respond, except that you held my hand as tightly as when we embraced after you brought the Labour Party conference to its feet with your speech about the NHS and growing up poor before it. I thought how is it possible that you are dying when your grip is so strong? A nurse returned and asked if I wanted a last photo of us together. Through my tears, I said yes. 

Afterwards, I went home to pick up your favourite wool blanket and a picture of Mum that I hoped would make you feel as if you were dying in your bed. 

I raised the head of your bed so you could sit up for your last moments of consciousness before a cocktail of drugs flowed into one of your veins from an IV drip to make you sleep your way to death. A nurse shaved your face with your electric razor. When she finished, I poured you a beer- that I had made into a shandy. When the sponge soaked with the shandy touched your lips, you screamed.

“That’s not a beer.”

I apologised and then dabbed the sponge into a glass of straight lager.

You then lay back down on the pillows of your bed and were quiet. You prepared yourself for the darkness to come. 

After the doctor signed the order to administer the morphine to make you sleep, a nurse came in with a syringe. At that moment, I received a video from Owen Jones. It was of him and Labour Party supporters chanting your name and crying out. “Hip, hip, hurrah.”

After I played the video for you, you clapped your hands and whispered, “That’s it.” And then you spoke no more, forever. You died 12 hours later in the early morning hours of a Wednesday in late November. 

Chapter Two:

A Time that is gone.

Dad,

I dreamt of you again, last night. And, in those moments of sleep, you were alive and three-dimensional. But when morning and consciousness returned, your image trailed off into the ether, the way smoke from a match, after being struck, drifts, and disappears into the air. To wake was to be startled by the sadness of knowing, you are dead. What you were as a man, a son, a husband, friend, father, and advocate erodes into forgetfulness, as each day, month, and year passes. You have become a still impenetrable image in a photograph that stares out from a mantelpiece onto an indifferent universe which you predicated in a book of yours.

If I lived another 50 years, in my heart and mind, it would be as if you only died the day before last. But to everyone else, and that is understandable, you are a past tense.

Even, your publisher said, “The world has moved on, from Harry.”  Why you should be forgotten in times like these baffles me. We are in such deep shit from this plague, from economic inequality and a growing march of fascism which tramples across nation after nation. It is an era of the Black Shirt and Brown Shirt redux. Surely, this should be a time when progressive politics, journalism and trade unionism endeavour to emulate your generation’s fight against Hitler which transferred the West into a Welfare State for the many rather than the few.

Since you died, the apartment we once shared has been silent. No one visits and no one can visit, because the world went still from Covid after you expired from existence. In this apartment, I feel like a museum curator, because there are more mementos of your life than mine within its confines. Your presence, your personality, and your temporal mark on what your life was about are everywhere. Pictures of Mum from the various vacations you took together in Hawaii, Venezuela and Jamaica sit in ornate frames above the television cabinet. Your beloved oriental carpets adorn the floor. The antique samovar, that you rescued from the catacombs of Toronto’s Eaton’s department store when you were employed there in the 1960s sits on the table near where I write and maintain your social media profile. My brother Pete’s paintings, from his early years as an artist, still hang on these walls, including his rendition of Velazquez’s The Water Seller of Seville, which he did for a class at the Ontario College of Art. He hated that painting and tried to throw it out. He was dissatisfied by his inability to make a replica of the work. But you saved it. You marvelled at Peter’s determination to become an artist. “It takes courage to create.” (The rest can be found in my book, I Stood With Harry.)