“Remember, it is about quality of life now rather than quantity.”

Chapter Four: Crossroads

7:54 AM · Nov 23, 2018

It was the funny type of rest where you fall into a sleep that is cut with jagged dreams that sometimes please but often disturb.

The uncomfortable periods of sleep I had four years ago when my dad was dying returned to me last night. I had too much noise in my head from seeing earlier on that day, the homeless person on my town’s main street who apologised because his mood was grumpy. I often have too much clatter banging around in my mind at bedtime. Just before sleep, I always have a barrage of thoughts or emotions that overwhelm my sleep reflex. I should be unconscious but the aftereffects from my cancer operation two years ago still cause discomfort as well as a prostate that works to rule in the PM hours. Sleep is a spendthrift with me.

I have Ativan or Lorazepam to muffle my brain for a few hours. I use it sparingly. After my heart attack in 2006, I was prescribed it to calm my anxiety, which I experienced because I felt death’s breath around my neck when I was just 42.

When death came for my brother, three years after my heart attack, I doubled up my prescription of anti-anxiety drugs. I needed to get through those days and keep my dad from sinking into an irretrievable depression.

My anxiety was immense while I worked with my dad on the first three books. It was understandable because my dad was sharing with me, on an intimate level all the anguish he endured in childhood and youth at the hands of a society enslaved by the 1%.

After Harry’s Last Stand was published, I stopped needing anti-anxiety medication because I saw that I was fulfilling a purposeful destiny with my dad.

I returned to a nightly half tablet last year because death’s breath breathed down on my neck again in 2020 after my diagnosis for rectal cancer. Since then, death lingers nearby me ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. Besides, the pressures of living in a covid world with a dodgy body, a collapsing healthcare system, limited employment prospects, and a finished book but no takers; made mother’s little helper not only appealing but necessary for my sanity.

When my dad in November 2018 was in the hospital, I wanted my tweets to encapsulate the man and our family. I wanted to make what was happening to him intimately relatable by being as honest as possible about him and me.

 8:17 AM · Nov 23, 2018

I had a mental health breakdown in my 3rd year of university. As it was the 1980s, I was not treated kindly except by Harry and Friede, my parents, who took me home to the country and restored me to health with love and patience.

I was suicidal. I remember Harry and my mum picking me up from university, putting me in the car and Harry weeping with joy that I was alive, while my mum warned him to watch the road.

When my dad was dying four years ago, I didn’t want or need sleep aids because, like him, I was afraid that if I nodded off, I would miss something, whether it was his death or a failure to attend to his needs. I owed my dad that because he was a loving and caring father. Who, despite his many imperfections, wanted his children to have a life less painful than his upbringing. He succeeded there. But I explained it in the book I wrote last year. Both he and my mother unintentionally created different traumas for their children. Larkin wasn’t wrong; “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” Mine, I believed, also fucked us up, but they did it without malice, and I believed that even when I was very young.

8:22 AM · Nov 23, 2018

And yet, Harry was always afraid that he had done the wrong things for us when growing up and has said. "I didn't know what family life was like when I helped raise you with your mum; I was flying by the seat of my pants."

8:25 AM · Nov 23, 2018

Every time, I have seen Harry on TV or giving speeches about refugees or poverty, all I think is "This is my dad, who ate from rubbish bins to keep himself alive during The Great Depression, and I love him so much."

But in that love, I felt and still do, a profound sense of anger that Britain decided children like my dad didn’t matter and could live like animals.  In so many ways, I understand how someone, after being colonised or dehumanised by an oppressor could become a terrorist. My father didn’t because my mother offered him a safe haven with the love she gave him. The price my mum paid in loving my dad was sometimes a price too great and she suffered because of that love.

“Do you want to go for good?” I asked hesitantly.

“I am not sure,” Friede said, and then her voice fell into a whisper as she completed her thought, “I need some time away from you and England. I want to return to my country because I feel like a stranger here.” The Green and Pleasant Land

I hate this day four years ago because my father was fighting for his life, but it was agonising for him to do it.

2:45 PM · Nov 23, 2018

I am about to go with Harry for the cat scan and Picc line. I tell him because he's agitated: go to the garden in your mind because it's summer, 4 o'clock in the afternoon and the air is still and filled with the scent of flowers.

Orderlies took my dad to another room to put a Picc line into a vein in his hand. It was the best way to deliver continuous medication to him as well as draw blood.

By this point, my father to breath needed a BIPAP machine that pumped pounds of oxygen into his damaged lungs. He was so old that one of his eyelids no longer closed properly This caused him great irritation for sleeping in the ICU because light always filtered through that eye. But the greatest agony he felt from his eye that would not close was from the BIPAP face mask. The air hitting that eye had the same force as the wind if he drove down a highway at 140km with no windshield. 

Putting the Picc line in was a horrendous experience for my dad. From behind, that closed door, I heard his screams; and it concerned me. I called out to be, let in to calm him. But the doctor inside told me to be quiet. His screams continued, and all I could think of was sentences from: Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future.

Sounds tumbled out from nearby open windows as if they were heavy objects- falling to the hard ground below. But the sounds we heard in the darkness from these neighbourhood windows weren’t ever inanimate. No, they were cries of pain and of torment. Sometimes they came from women being beaten senseless by their husbands or in other instances children suffering the wrath of their fathers, who, in unemployed angst had taken both to drink and blind fury. Other times, the cries- that came from open windows sounded like howls from a circle of hell that even my parish priest would have been reluctant to admit existed. But they were not the growls of the damned- just the screams from people who were too poor to pay for morphine to ease their pain from cancer and make their passage to the next world gentle rather than grotesque.

While I stood, agitated and frantic, outside the room where behind the door, my dad was screaming, a doctor I knew from emergency walked by and stopped to chat with me. He had treated my dad when he needed a catheter to empty his bladder some months previous. The emergency physician was insistent when he said, “Remember, it is about quality of life now rather than quantity.” 

My discussion with this doctor reinforced some misgivings I was having about my dad’s treatment.  I was worried my efforts to bring my dad’s stay in the hospital to world attention might also be wrongfully prolonging a life that should end.

10:09 PM · Nov 23, 2018

Really tiring day today. I left the hospital and felt just shattered. It passes, but this battle between life and death drains all who have an emotional connection to it.

Thank you for reading this. As Elon Musk is running Twitter- I have no idea how long the platform can survive. It is why I put together on substack the Tweets from the week my father lay dying in a hospital in November 2018. I want to preserve all those thousands of tweets made on the Harry’s Last Stand account because they speak of a time and a place when we could have stopped fascism. It is his history, my history and your history in many ways too. Your solidarity with me as a subscriber to my substack is so appreciated.

Take care, John.