Mark Gatiss

Mark Gatiss

Nothing about this is easy to write. My mother – a little dot of funny Anglo-Irishness with a lovely singing voice (after a glass of Carlsberg) – was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 71. I can remember with horrible clarity the day she came back from the doctor, having been told there was no hope – my sister, Jill, who had accompanied her, giving a minute shake of the head to us as they came through the door. Mam was remarkably stoic. More so than my poor Dad, who found it difficult to discuss the reality of it all.

I suppose we all wanted things to be normal for as long as possible. It’s only in such circumstances that you appreciate what ‘normal’ is. And that it’s the small things – laughter, talking, togetherness – that bind us all. Throughout this time, brilliant Macmillan nurses visited and helped Mam through her chemo. It’s impossible to speak too highly of their innate kindness and good humour. It made a huge difference, and the yellow glow of that daffodil emblem still makes me smile, even though the times were so dark.

Jill, who had worked as an NHS nurse since the early 1980s, had by this time become a district nurse and was, to our great relief, permitted to look after Mam at home. Thus, the last weeks of Mam’s life were spent there, surrounded by the people who loved her. It’s a strange contradiction that those times, sitting around the bed and swapping old stories, taking turns to make tea and sandwiches, are very happy memories.

My sister brought all her years of professional experience to looking after Mam, even though it was heartbreaking to endure, and when the end came it was a very good death. I can remember my sister holding Mam’s hand and then bowing her head to rest on the bed as Mam slipped away, like something from a medieval etching. It’s the sort of thing you never imagine you’ll witness or be part of.

A few years later, my sister found a lump in her breast. With cruel irony we realised the cancer must have been growing inside her all the time she was looking after Mam. Jill approached the end with similar stoicism. Not as a ‘battle’ (she knew exactly how long she had left), but as a process. A process helped immeasurably by being surrounded by her fellow NHS nurses who were also some of her oldest friends. Back on her old ward, this time as a patient, she was literally prescriptive about the drugs she needed! The atmosphere of good humour and gentle, practical care the staff engendered through the long days and nights that followed was unforgettable. No one likes hospitals. But to see that staff, that whole building, doing its best in the face of creaking infrastructure and underfunding to create a quiet, dignified end will stay with me always.

My brother-in-law, Dave, was devastated, of course. Always a source of quiet fun and kindness, he managed well, taking over sole parenting of their two boys but always feeling Jill’s absence. Who can say what the stress of this hammer blow did to him? At any rate, he suffered a massive stroke a few years after Jill’s death. Yet again, the NHS was there for him, through night vigils and painful visits. Yet again we found ourselves grouped around the sickbed, listening to every laboured breath, holding hands, bound together in our pain as he passed.

Nothing about this is easy to write. Except that knowing there is a system of care, a net to catch us when we fall is one of this country’s greatest success stories. That it has taken this terrible emergency to demonstrate this fact is telling and sad, but it’s also an opportunity.

We simply couldn’t survive without the NHS.

It is the best of us.

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