The really annoying thing about dying

In his first Notes from Solitude, the death of his dad causes Roger Bretherton to reflect on the relationship and the strange emergence of 'father’.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

A pocket watch rests next to a black and white photograph of a father lying beside a new born baby.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash.

The death of my dad was sudden and unexpected. I don’t know why it is that, from the moment he died, I have had to fight the almost irresistible urge to refer to him as father- a term of address I never used about him or to him during his life.

Perhaps in some psychotherapy session at some point my therapist referred to my ‘father’, and I may have followed suit. And maybe occasionally when socialising with those who seemed a cut above my largely lower-middle class background, I called him father so as to avoid the flat northern vowel sounds that would expose me as an interloper. But that was just to fit in- on all other occasions he was decidedly not father and definitely just good old plain, dad.

At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike.

But for some reason the moment he died, it felt like dad wasn’t enough. I now had to call him father - those were the rules. At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike by panting and sweating my five-year old self round the block, but the father who taught me to be… a man, or something like that.

The F-word has gravitas, presence, authority. Dads are human, often bewildered, occasionally pissed off, eminently huggable, easily taken for granted - just there. Admittedly, Freud would have lost significant gravitas if oedipal theory had considered common-all-garden dads and not cigar-smoking brandy-swilling fathers. And no doubt the climactic scene of The Empire Strikes Back would have lacked considerable pathos had Darth Vader casually quipped, ‘No Luke, I’m your’re Dad’.

The curse of the martyr, write Albert Camus, was to have other people tell their story. The principle doesn’t just apply to martyrs, it’s true of all those who die. To be dead is to become a character in other people’s anecdotes. That’s the really annoying thing about dying, we become a topic of gossip, people get to talk about us without the courtesy of ever having to talk to us. We become object, no longer subject. I think that’s why I resist calling my late Dad, Father. It objectifies him, makes of him something that he wasn’t. It, most definitely fails to do justice to all that he meant to me.

She simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company.

I say he died suddenly. It was a Sunday morning. I was in church at the time. Actually, worse than that, I was on stage speaking to a church. As a psychologist working in academia, I teach and train all kinds of people in every kind of organisation imaginable, but every now and then I get to speak in churches.

On this occasion I was talking about character, the positive qualities of being – like love, gratitude, hope, wisdom and so on – that make life worth living. When I stepped off the stage my wife was waving to me from the back of the room, which was weird given that we don’t go to that church and she hadn’t come with me. When I wandered to the back of the auditorium wearing my ‘what are you doing here?’ face, she simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company. For someone who prides himself on social insight, it shames me to say that it took a while for the penny to drop. We were in the car with the engine running before it finally dawned on me what she meant.

I try not to make too much of divine timings or fate, but there was something odd in the timing of getting that news. In that month I had addressed church congregations three Sundays in a row- which, as someone who is generally lazy and prefers not to work weekends, is an unusually intense frequency. But over three successive Sundays I had reflected aloud with those congregations that there were prayers that had accompanied the various stages of my life. Prayers that I found myself praying, almost as if they were prayed through me, as if they had chosen me rather than I they.

In my twenties I had found myself praying as regularly as a heartbeat, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me, to make me into the person you would like me to be.’ It was a radical invitation for God to put me through whatever was needed to become who I was meant to be. But then the prayer faded. Its visit was over, it had done its work and it moved on. But as I addressed the congregations on those three Sundays I mused aloud that while the prayer of my twenties had departed decades before, I found a new prayer stirring in my forties. Now as the father of teenage boys, my new prayer was, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me to make me the father you would like me to be.’

In the weeks that followed, people asked me whether I had had a good relationship with my dad. The most accurately answer was: we had the best relationship of which we were both capable. We both tried in our own ways to deepen our connection, but we were like the lovers in a romantic comedy; we always managed to miss each other. When he tried with me, I didn’t want to know. For several years, he left a book lying around at home that he wanted me to read. I never saw anyone touch it, but it moved around the house under its own steam. It was by my bedside, in the toilet, on the dining room table… Macavity the Mystery Cat would have been proud. It was called, Things We Wish We Had Said. We may have wished, but we didn’t say. I never read it. Years later, when I tried with him, he was too flustered to respond. Both of us in our own ways lacked the courage to connect any deeper. But I was never in any doubt that he loved me, and I him.

When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious.

He died of a heart attack on a Sunday morning asleep in bed, while my Mum was at church. Almost immediately his absence prompted a profound change of consciousness in me. When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious. If he was inexpressive, I was articulate. If he was like that, I was like this. And yet, almost at the very moment of his death, a reversal of awareness occurred. I started to see just how very much like him I was. His gentleness, his uncertainty, his scepticism, his care, his humour, were all mine.

There is a rule in family therapy, that adult children relating to their parents should set their expectations to zero. We never truly see our parents until we stop viewing them through the lens of our own desires; what we wanted from them but never got. Until we do that our lives don’t really work, we sit around waiting for an impossible transformation, a payday that never comes, the moment our parents become exactly how we would like them to be, not as they are. For me, that moment of acceptance for dad only came when he was gone, I accepted him as he was when there was nothing left to accept. I don’t write this with any great sense of guilt or regret at opportunities lost, more with a sense of gratitude for what was given but often taken for granted.

Oddly though, in the shadow of that seismic shift in my interior furniture, I detected the stirrings of an answer to my own prayer to be a better father. No longer compelled to define myself in contrast to what he was, I was freed to be what I was- both like and unlike him, and to be fair, more like him than I cared to admit. At some visceral level I came to appreciate how much of myself originated with him. I came to accept myself as a dad and my dad as a father.

Article

Change

26 July 2024

6 min read

Are we forgetting how to care?

The profound act at the heart of nursing.

Helen Cowan

Helen is a registered nurse and freelance writer, writing for audiences ranging from the general public to practitioners and scientists.

A nurse bends beside a bed and talks to a patient

Marie Curie.

Recently, at a nursing leadership programme in Oxford, attendees focused on the fundamentals of care. Have we forgotten how to care? What can we re-learn from those who pioneered an ordinary yet profound act that affects millions?"

Anam Cara is an old Gaelic term for ‘soul friend’, a person with whom you can share your innermost self, your mind and your heart. It is a term that Tom Hill, former chief executive at Helen House Hospice in Oxford, used to describe the relationship between his staff and the thousands of children and their families who passed through their ‘big red door’ in its first twenty-five years. The hospice (or ‘loving respice’ as it became known) had been founded by Sister Frances Dominica in 1982.

Other care in this country can also trace its religious roots. Between 1048 and 1070 in Jerusalem, the Order of St. John was founded for the purpose of helping pilgrims (“our Lords, The Sick”) who had become lost, weary, or beset by other difficulties while on their way to the Holy Land. Today, in the United Kingdom, the British Association of the Order has extended care to older people first in almshouses and later in care homes. A trustee for ten years was John Monckton, a man of ‘considerable talent, enormous integrity and deep religious conviction’; his tragic murder in 2004 led to the creation of the John Monckton Memorial Prize, which recognised and rightly celebrated commitment to care by care workers.

Today, across the world, seen and unseen, nurses, carers and families continue to provide compassionate care. “Assisting individuals, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery (or to peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge” is the very essence of nursing, captured by ‘architect of nursing’, researcher and author Virginia Henderson in 1966. Meeting more than basic needs such as breathing, eating, drinking and eliminating bodily waste (which are of essential importance), Henderson recognised the role of the nurse in enabling humans to communicate with others, worship according to their faith, satisfy curiosity and sense accomplishment.

In the desire for modernisation and professionalisation, have we lost sight of the core values and activities central to patient care?

An uncomfortable truth brought out in healthcare reports such as the Final Report of the Special Commission of Inquiry (The Garling Report) 2008, and the Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry (The Francis Report) 2013 is though that this type of nursing is too often done badly or even missed, leading to pressure injury, medication errors, hospital-acquired infection, falls, unplanned readmission, critical incidents and mortality. According to nurse scientist and scholar Professor Debra Jackson, “missed care occurs much more frequently than we might think”. She cites a systematic review in which ‘care left undone’ on the last shift ranged from 75 per cent in England, to 93 per cent in Germany, with an overall estimate of 88 per cent across 12 European countries’.

In one offensively-titled paper, “Shitty nursing - the new normal?” (in which the authors apologise for the title but not the questions raised), real-life pen portraits are drawn of patients lying for hours on hospital trolleys, immobile through infection or injury, ignored by staff. Whilst acknowledging contextual factors for poor care, such as a shortage of nurses and resources, the authors argue that circumstances cannot be the sole cause of missed nursing care.

A report published by the University of Adelaide, School of Nursing, has called for nurses to ‘reclaim and redefine’ the fundamentals of care. It asks whether the cause of the problem (of missed nursing care) lies “deep in the psyche of the nursing profession itself?” “Has something happened to the way modern nursing views and values caring?” it continues. “Indeed, is nursing in danger of losing its claim to care? In the desire for modernisation and professionalisation, have we lost sight of the core values and activities central to patient care? Or is this a broader social pattern where individuals are less inclined to show kindness, compassion, and care for others even if it is a necessary requirement of the job?”

Compassion, he emphasises, is more than empathy - and way "less fluffy" but much more measurable than kindness.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Professor of critical care medicine Peter Brindley and Consultant in intensive care Matt Morgan wonder whether doctors also “too often default to high-tech and low-touch” when patients are dying – a time “when community and connection matter most”. They powerfully begin with a mother’s comment: “Humans are gardens to tend – not machines to fix.”

Professor Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the first National Clinical Director for Children in Government and former Children’s Commissioner for England, and past president of the British Medical Association, suggests that we as a society need a “momentum for compassion”. Struck by the extremes of compassion witnessed during his wife’s treatment in the last years of her life, Sir Al wants to see a cultural transformation in healthcare: for compassion to be a key operating principle in NHS and care settings, led by the Chief Nurse’s Office; for every organisation to promote the importance of compassion at the professional level; for the views of patients and families to be sought regularly; for much earlier and better focus on compassion in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching programmes for all staff; for compassion to be inspected against by the Care Quality Commission; and for a willingness to encourage staff at all levels to expose poor practice as well as celebrating excellent care.

Compassion, he emphasises, is more than empathy - and way "less fluffy" but much more measurable than kindness. “It’s putting yourself into somebody else’s shoes – and doing something about it.” Recently appointed the UK’s first Visiting Professor in Compassionate Care at Northampton University, at the age of 80, Sir Al certainly is doing something about it. He has made it his new purpose in life to “embed compassion into every aspect of care”.

Like Sir Al, Queen Elizabeth II, the UK’s longest serving monarch, espoused compassion, in word and deed. Living a life of compassionate service, the Queen made clear that her Christian faith was her guiding principle. She speaks of Jesus Christ as ‘an inspiration,’ a ‘role model’ and ‘an anchor’. “Many will have been inspired by Jesus’ simple but powerful teaching,” she said in her Christmas Broadcast, 2000. “Love God and love thy neighbour as thyself – in other words, treat others as you would like them to treat you. His great emphasis was to give spirituality a practical purpose.”

When nurses do unto others as they would have done unto themselves, and act as role model to colleagues, not only do patient experiences of care and their outcomes improve – but so does job satisfaction for nurses: a critical factor in nurse recruitment and retention – the biggest workforce challenge faced by healthcare organisations. Across the UK, there are currently more than 40,000 nursing vacancies, and thousands of burnt-out nurses are leaving the profession early. Whether nurses decide to stay or go is driven in part by their daily experience at work. The late Kate Granger, Consultant in medicine for older people, inspired Compassionate Care Awards in her name, envisioning that such a legacy would drive up standards in care - and surely also help retain nurses, through restoring a sense of pride, achievement and fulfilment to the nursing workforce.