Dad was himself

Dad was himself. Even old, he was naturally inclined to hope for good things. Now confused, he cried when he found he couldn't go home. He could never go home again; he couldn't climb the stairs, two flights; how could he have climbed them a few weeks ago, after his last hospital stay? But he had, on his bandaged feet, on his legs that were losing their skin, he had done it through dogged determination. But a week later, was carried back again to hospital.

He and Sue lived two floors us in a flat where everything fitted together like a nest of oddments, collapsed together in a general impression of browns, smelling of cigarette smoke, the papers on the desk never moving, the books on the shelves never moving, just a small area of kitchen still a workspace, just a small current flowing through the still, dark pool of age.

So Mrs T thinks of her father, about to die, and about packing up her mother's flat - all the bedroom first, then on to the bathroom - chuck - chuck - chuck - she would put the toiletries in the sack - but the clothes go to Help the Aged, where they give her a Gift Aid number.

One morning she has a John Lennon song in her head - "I'm only Sleeping" so seductively beautiful -

"But he was depressed" Mrs T thinks. "He didn't want to get up, or think, or make a plan. He could hardly even finish the song - it just repeated itself and lasted only three minutes."

Sleeping too much was a sign of depression, as surely as sleeping too little. And sleep was a foretaste of death, too much sleep a flirtation with death.

Mrs T has wanted to say these things to her father, agonised on the brink:

"Death is but a sleep and a forgetting". "Our little lives are ended with a sleep."

She had not had the opportunity to say these things. And he would have mocked her anyway because he wasn't ready to "sleep". Mrs T had wanted to help, but everybody has to die by themselves and there is nothing to say, in many cases, nothing at all that will help.

Mrs T carried "I'm Only Sleeping" around in her head and its unhappiness hurt her. She found it on YouTube and then went on to other recordings of John Lennon, and there was the cure; it turned out to be - Early Lennon. "It won't be long Yeah! " "This Boy" "I call Your Name". It was a roughness about his voice that did it - a fierceness to his nature - he sounded like a friend to Mrs T.