Jimmy Carr

Jimmy Carr

Dear NHS,

Not all stories have happy endings. Spoiler alert: in this one, my mum dies. In spite of advances in medical science, miracle cures, Hail Mary passes and last-minute reprieves, the reality is, for all of us, death is our ultimate fate. But thanks to the NHS, none of us have to face it alone.

My mother Nora Mary Carr (née Lawlor) was a nurse. She trained at the Regional Hospital in Limerick, Ireland, and came over to London in the early 1970s. She was one of those migrant workers, the ones who (when we’re not having a global pandemic) get given a hard time: ‘These immigrant doctors and nurses, they come over here, saving our lives.’

My mother was – how can I put this? – fucking hilarious. Any talent I have in me, I got from her. I don’t know what she’d make of my stage act but I think she’d want a credit and royalties. Fun, loud and inappropriately sweary, she was the life and soul. She had a literally breathtaking laugh. If you really got her good, she’d fall completely silent, eyes half closed as she slowly rocked back and forth, looking like she was having some sort of fit. To be clear, this isn’t what killed her, but what a way to go.

Some say: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ And some say: ‘Home isn’t a place, it’s a person.’ Well, my mother was my home and, when she went, the grief pretty much broke me. She was young – in her mid-fifties – when she died in Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, London. Opposite the Houses of Parliament on the River Thames, you could scarcely find a more picturesque spot to watch a loved one fade away and die.

Twenty years later, and I still feel the waves of grief. I’ll find myself driving the route I took to visit her in hospital and it’ll hit me. I’m right back there in 2001. She passed in September, just before 9/11. It felt like the sky was falling and the world was ending – just like it does now.

My mother first got sick in January of that year. That’s nine months of 24-hour care, day in, day out. There are countries in the world where that simply could not happen. Who would have paid for it?

The care my mother received was, as you’d imagine, exemplary. But it was not just my mother who was looked after in that hospital. Through their support and unending kindness, the doctors and nurses also took care of my brothers and me, and helped us to cope. Or to pretend to cope, which I think is as close as you can get in that sort of situation.

Pancreatitis isn’t a fun way to die. There are false dawns; you’re in and out of intensive care. It must have been hard for my mother to get the diagnosis – she’d have known the prognosis all too well. I remember at the end, a nurse told me that I should call my brothers. She said that my mother had around five hours. Imagine that. The nurse had seen so many people die that she could say, with accuracy, what was coming and when. Mercifully, she knew the signs, which allowed us all to be there at the end.

If you can be with a loved one when they die, you should. Her hands getting cold as the circulation shut down, her breathing getting heavy, the death rattle. Bearing witness to a death is an incredibly intimate thing. You should be there, not because it’s easy – it isn’t – but because one day you’ll want someone to hold your hand.

It’s amazing to me that I can look back on a period of my life that ended with the most important person in my world being taken away with a prevailing feeling of gratitude. Gratitude for the extra time we got with her. And gratitude for the love our family were able to share with her in an environment that felt constantly supportive. The truth is, in those nine months that hospital became our home and the NHS became part of our family.

Of course, you want to go back to thank the doctors and nurses who fought the good fight. Who allowed my mother to die with dignity and, thanks to the pain management team, peacefully. But I can’t go back because that ICU is gone. It’s still there, obviously, but those doctors and nurses are no longer on shift and someone else’s relatives pace the halls. And it’s not like I have one doctor and a couple of nurses to thank. It’s an entire system. I’ve got to thank ALL of them. The doctors, the nurses, the hospital porters and custodians, the administration staff – there’s an army of people who make up our NHS.

‘National’ is at the heart of the NHS, itself at the heart of being British. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, perhaps we should take the politics out of the NHS. It’s just too important to be a political football. Maybe we should do what they did with pensions. Triple lock it, link the spending on healthcare to GDP and write it into law. Be generous. Let’s take care of the NHS before we think we’re going to need them.

And make no mistake: we will all need the NHS. Private healthcare is all very well for ingrown toenails and Botox – it’s for vanity. But anything serious, you want the big guns. You want the NHS. If you’ve got cancer or Covid-19, you don’t give a fuck about a colour TV in your room.

Not all heroes wear capes. A lot of our NHS staff don’t even get to wear the proper PPE. It would be remiss to not mention and honour the healthcare workers who died caring for us in this pandemic. The unimaginable bravery they knew. Like firemen walking into a burning building, they knew the risks and they worked anyway. So many of them did not make it out.

I have no god. No disrespect if you do, ‘May your God go with you,’ as Dave Allen would say. Prayer to me is abstract; it’s whispering into the abyss. But I do believe in the NHS. I know if I dial 999, an ambulance is coming. It’s real. I know if I walk into an emergency room, a doctor will see me. They’re always there.

It’s hard to think about the future in the middle of a pandemic. But one thing I do know is that, one day, odds are I will die in an NHS hospital. And I’d like to say thank you. Not only for taking care of my mother but, as I’ll not be in a fit state to say it on the day, thank you for being there to comfort and care for me at the hour of my death.

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