Shonky neurones: When the heart's home is a time and place left long ago

How would I choose to go? I think I would like to go peacefully in my sleep. A nice cliched death. But when? Next Sunday night after a roast lamb dinner, making it unnecessary to go to work on Monday? But I quite like going to work. Perhaps I should go when I am 80 and old and tired with an incurable disease. But what if I am well and enjoying lawn bowls and boozy lunches with mates?

When it comes down to it, I would like to go in my sleep when dying is a better option than living. I wouldn’t want my death in my bed to be a nasty shock to my family. I would want it to be a mildly happy relief — mildly happy, because I would want them to miss me a little bit.

In truth, this preoccupation with death is about Oma going — not that I want her to die right now.

However, as her memory frays away and her behaviour is less and less related to sense and logic — and more and more people are telling us to put her in a nursing home — I think about what would be best for her. What would she choose for herself?

I know she wants to go somewhere. Every day she wants to go home to Croatia. But it is not a need that can be met with a plane ticket. She wants to return to some place back in time where the fields are green and dotted with poppies and cornflowers; where the daily flow is ruled by the seasons; where home is a three generation household and no one is ever alone; and where the people in that house are still going about their business.

I have to go home, she says, my parents are expecting me. I have to help my father in the workshop. Will you please call my parents so they can come and get me. Can we walk home today?

In the late afternoons she paces up and down the hallway peering into rooms as if expecting her grandmother at the spinning wheel or her mother baking cheese strudel.

I know that nothing feels right to her, things don’t smell right or look right. Sometimes she asks me what family in the village I belong to. Sometimes she  looks at me as if to say who the hell are you.

I want to say to her, the people you love and remember are long gone. They are dead, gone to God, and you are stuck with people from the part of your life that you don’t remember any more.

Can I also say to her that the only way you are going to hook up with those people you love and remember is if you die? As a Catholic, shouldn’t she believe that they are waiting on the other side, that the village she yearns for is heaven? Perhaps I need to remind her about the basics of Christian doctrine, that heaven is a reward for life well lived.

I grapple with the language of death. It is the only guarantee that life offers yet it is a subject no one wants to discuss. People look at me with horror if I say that I think it is okay for my mother to die. It’s as if I am bringing down a curse upon her and myself.

Is dying so bad if all that awaits is mental obliteration, sedation in a nursing home bed and an undignified end?

I have memories of a friend’s mother, all papery skin stretched over brittle bones, in a flannel nightie, in a foetal position, wasting years waiting to die. She wasn’t living any more, just dying too slowly. Her family prayed for her to go.

If I were a proper believer I would pray for my mother to go to god before I have to look her in the eye and say that she now has to go to a nursing home. To her it would be further abandonment in a country that never felt totally like home.

Recently she had a perfect opportunity to die in her sleep, just as I would like to do.

All the family were there, her kids and grandkids and we took her to a venue where they played the sort of music she would have listened to in her youth — Balkan folk, gypsy jazz, the fast-paced kolo. She danced like a young thing. The beat of the music fired up her shonky neurones and took away her dementia — at least for a while. She was thrilled and excited when she went to bed. But she missed that opportunity.