Extraordinary writing

This book is so hard to read that it is testament to the author’s skills that I continued to read it, avidly in fact, almost against my own wishes. Sarah Perry is writing of the death of her beloved father-in-law, his rapid decline from a cancer diagnosis to death in 2 months. She details the patient and family’s bewilderment of the quickness of occurrences, and particularly, the last 8 days of his life, when he no longer could look after himself, but when they were still working out how best to care for him.

Perry writes of the workings of the UK’s NHS, the hospice carers, the kindness of some staff, the callousness of others – such as the exasperated doctor who priorities the filling in of the ReSPECT form to note down the patient’s dying wishes – but a callousness Perry understands,

“I thought that often in the weeks that followed, and sometimes think it now – then, like the competing mechanisms of a mechanical clock, there comes a kind of counterbalance: it was not her job to wring her hands, or to eke out our shock – it was her job to see her patient’s wishes identified, notified, and carried out. How could she live, if she absorbed the sorrow and dismay of every family told they must prop that yellow folder on the windowsill where it can be seen? And it occurs to me now that perhaps she was really calloused, as I have so often said, since a callus will form in soft places that have too often been rubbed sore” (p85-86).

This is typical of Perry’s style, containing a stream of consciousness, but never losing focus or losing the reader. Perry’s father-in-law is exactly as the title says, a very ordinary Englishman, from a working class background, who has brought up his son well, loved and cared for a long disabled wife until her death, and who is unwilling to give trouble to anyone else. He is modest in his needs, and takes joy from simple things.

The novel is of Perry’s experience of her father-in-law’s dying, rather than of his experiences. We see through her eyes, her sense of being overwhelmed, of being flustered and not knowing what to do, of being too anxious to please the medics and carers,

“We’d lived in fear of inconveniencing others, of being found to have erred in some way” (p69)

There are as many English people with exactly these sentiments, as there are those precisely the opposite. She criticises herself internally for using too artificially bright and cheery a voice, like a nanny speaking to a child;

“So it was difficult not to say, ‘Well done!’, as if praising a child” (p99)

Perry watches herself watching herself, and takes mental notes, knowing she is going to use it as fodder for her writing.

“And on that evening after the doctor left us, as I saw nursing my bewildered anger and waiting for Robert to come, I understood that already I’d begun to form images and paragraphs out of what was happening to David; that I watched him not only with love’s frightened attention, but with the assessing acquisitive eye of the magpie” (p91).

Perry is remarkably honest about her own discomfiture with the situation, and with having to provide that type of care for her father-in-law.

“The door closed behind her, and mercifully there was a breach in the silence: movement in the bedroom, of a teaspoon rattling in a mug, a quilt shifting restlessly over a sheet – and oh, he’s still with us, I thought, beginning by now to find myself absurd, he’s not dead yet! I’d become frightened of him, and ashamed of my fear; I discovered that going into the bedroom required me to set my shoulders and resolve as if I were walking into the wind” (p71)

She does not hesitate to detail the ugly alongside the beautiful. She also notes that she virtually neglected her husband’s feelings at this time – despite their good marriage – even as they worked side by side to care for the dying man. It was as if she just did not have the bandwidth to take on board her husband’s feelings and struggles as well as her own and the patient’s.

The book has many poignant moments, of course, and excels when depicting the care the family had to give, and dependence David was reduced to.

“And I understood now how grateful I ought to be to him, for how readily and without shame he submitted to our nursing him, when all his life he’d been diffident and shy, and had only ever showed his love for Robert with a handshake. […] David, I think, was generous in his sickness, and quickly learned the craft of dying: he allowed us to nurse him, never fending us off, or thinking himself diminished and humiliated by it – and possibly understanding, even then, that it was our privilege” (p136)

The entire book is written with stoicism, a total lack of sentimentality, with great sincerity and not backing away from smallness, pettiness, petulance, which afterall, are just human reactions to difficult and trying circumstances, not to mention great sorrow and bereavement and shock. Perry depicts the complexity for those close family members involved in looking after a loved one to the end, the complexity of needs but also of emotional responses.

I never imagined this would be an easy book to read, and rightly, Perry does not make it easy, but neither is it about rubbing the reader’s nose in anything. It is painfully authentic, simultaneously involved and detached, tender but almost hesitatingly so. Very beautifully crafted, and I will admit I sped through it, not wanting to linger, but also appreciating its achievement.  

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