The death of a father in the times before Covid.

Standing with Harry 

A Memoir of Grief Repurposed in the Before Times.

                     By J.M. Smith

  “Perhaps it is a little scary but the mystery surrounds and is us and one can only look on with wonder.”

Peter Smith

1959-2009

Preface:

Hi Dad:   

After you passed, things went to shit for me and the world. Can you imagine it, we both got the Big C. I got hit bad with cancer. And the world? Well, it got hit hard by a global pandemic created by the Corona Virus. It was a one, two-punch. Cancer knocked me on my arse and while I was trying to get to my feet, society stumbled to the ground beside me bloodied by the force of this plague that destabilise our normal way of life. 

It still blows my mind, that almost a year to the day, you died, I was diagnosed with rectal cancer. Now, that is bad luck on a colossal scale. Since then, death has breathed down my neck like an agitated creditor. Physically, I am much changed and much weakened by the brutal struggle it takes to survive cancer during a global pandemic with few financial resources. I am now acutely aware of what you meant when you said, on your deathbed, “It’s later than you think.” I am writing everything down about my life and yours because I don’t know if I will survive my cancer or the virus that stalks humanity. Even if I bargain my way out of those two bastards killing me. There is something in my lungs killing them slowly like what Pete had. So who knows how much time I have left?

These notes must be read as if they were diary entries from an Antarctic explorer who reached the South Pole but isn’t sure if he has the strength to return to the base camp and wants to leave a document about the endurance and loss it took to be an explorer.

In the end, this book is me trying to make sense of us, our relationship, our politics, and the world we inhabited. I want to understand if we did any good during those last years of your life when you dedicated your time to not making your past our future. I want to understand better what made you tick and what makes me tick differently. There was so much that motivated both of us to create Harry’s Last Stand and ensure your life was preserved in memoirs, essays, and video interviews. 

Your character was far from perfect. You can’t escape being dented, bruised or defective if you grow up, as you did, in extreme poverty where you must fight for your daily survival. The miracle is you were able to emerge from all that pain to lead a life that had a purpose where you gave and received love from those you cared about. You were the only child from your family who survived emotionally intact, from the horrors experienced in the Great Depression. But you didn’t do that alone.

Mum’s profound love for you kept you centred and kept you kind. It gave you a worth you did not feel you deserved. Mum saved you from a life that otherwise would have been filled with acrimony and too many disappointments because the traumas from your childhood were sure to poison your adulthood without her love. Mum knew that she saved you and, in the process sacrificed herself. I came to learn this when she confessed to me, days before her death, “I am glad I gave your father the love he needed to survive.” However, it would take me a further ten years to fully understand the extent of her love for you. It was when you, revealed to me with the vigour of a deathbed confession the false narratives that bound both of you together as well making me and your other children believe that two plus two could equal five. 

But mum’s love for you didn’t save our family because tragedy and heartache followed us from the slums of your youth to the suburbs of your middle age as a stray dog looks for an owner. 

For years, there was much joy and laughter in our household. Yet somehow melancholy was always within the grasp of each member of our family. How could it not be when both you and mum had experienced so much terror as children from either extreme poverty or, in her case, the rise of Nazism in her native Germany? Nemesis was against us because it takes generations to cleanse a family line from the traumas of economic abuse and emotional neglect when young. All your children experienced mental health issues that manifested themselves in anxiety, lack of self-esteem, and youthful binge drinking. And, in my brother, Peter’s case psychosis, which was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Among my siblings and me, there was discord, rivalry and resentment that became worse after a booze-up because we weren’t happy in our skins. 

 Despite a parent’s love being equal, each child experiences their relationship with their parents differently. I can only talk about how you and Mum dealt with your traumas from youth that marked my upbringing. 

Our family dynamic was both incredibly beautiful and very flawed. I don’t believe the fates could decide if they wanted us to be a comedy or tragedy, and we ended up a bit of both. Still, all the turmoil, all the laughter, all the anger, all the secrets, all the betrayals and all the love was worth my price of admission. Or, as Pete said, in 2009 when he was dying, “It’s been a fucking blast”. 

So, forgive me, if these impressions I am about to write of you all, and the time past we shared are imperfect or flawed. But it is how I remember it in my flesh and blood. 

Chapter One:

You Died

Dear Dad:

You were angry at the death when it came. If you could, you would have fought the grim reaper off with the broken end of a beer bottle. That is 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 from 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 end 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 try 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,” which you responded to with a sharp, “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 of your rotting lungs. “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,” he added, and then 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?”

“I know, sorry.” 

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. Canada, you adopted home for 50 years fell in love with you with your cross-country tour of the country in 2015 when you asked citizens to “Stand up for social democracy.” You also had a Twitter following of 250k, which was the largest in the world for any non-celebrity nearing a hundred years of age. 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 passioned 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 that was damp 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 well-being, as had the principal secretary for Justin Trudeau. MPs, writers, political analysts, economists, and thousands of ordinary folks reached out in commiseration with me. By your dying on social media, 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 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 is 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 developed an MSRI that was overwhelming your instinct for survival. 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 then 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.  

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 out, “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 were preparing yourself for the darkness to come. When the nurse came in with a syringe of morphine to make you sleep, forever more, 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 dreamed of you again, last night. And, in those moments of sleep, you were alive and three-dimensional in my imagination. But when morning and consciousness returned to me, your image trailed away from my mind the way smoke from a match drifted and disappears into the air after being struck. Every time I wake, a sadness startles me, knowing that you are dead…..

Thanks for reading my susbtack because your support is my life line. Today, I included a rather long excerpt from my unpublished book about my dad and the odyssey we took with the Harry’s Last Stand project. It’s a well written book but probably will never find a publisher big or small to publish it. But those are the way the chips fall, sometimes. Regardless, my purpose with Harry’s Last Stand is still valid and my dad’s legacy needs saving. So if you can subscribe with a paid amount and if you can’t take the free one and spread the word. Take care, John