A cold day as I park the car on a sandy track leading to Boyton. The sun is low in the West and too weak to warm me. I think of Dad rubbing his hands to try and get them warm back at home. The tumour is slowly shutting his body down.
I pass one car in the small car park and go through the gate and past the wood that was full of cormorants last time. Today nothing.
That familiar feeling of comfort from being alone in the wild. I think about how strange that sounds – to be comforted by the company of nothingness – sea, sky, fields. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m swimming in the sea. Embracing the infinite. A reminder of how insignificant I am in the bigger scheme of things.
This morning I had done my final bits of Christmas shopping, visiting John Lewis in Martlesham and going from queues of traffic to queues of people at the cash tills. Now hear I am with no one, not a soul, and that familiar big sky.
The coastal path is on the same grass bank that I’ve been following since Shingle Street while the Ness is a constant pale brown strip across the river.
Boyton Marshes is on a corner of land which looks like 3 sides of a 50p piece with the Butley River coming from the North which then meets the River Ore arriving from the North East at one sharp corner.
Further up the River Ore is Havergate Island and beyond, Orford, and the start of the Ness with its lighthouse, pagodas and thin radio aerial towers.
The path now turns away from the sea to follow the West bank of the Butley River North West towards Butley. Everywhere is water. Little channels trickle into the river or the drains that crisscross the marshes. This is an RSPB reserve and is a home for lapwings, avocets and redshank, as I discover from their website.
The sun is now nothing more than a pale yellow smudge and my brother messages me to ask about presents for Dad. The last time we’ll do this. I suggest gloves that will go well with my socks to keep his extremities warm at night. That phrase ‘his body is shutting down’ rises up in my consciousness to haunt me once more.
For the umpteenth time I imagine his funeral and what I’ll say if I have to. It’s a relief to let the tears flow, streaked and dried by the East wind.
He is at home holding forth in his chair watching TV. I was shocked how much less he said when I got home on the 21st. So much can change in 2 weeks. It’s so quiet where it was once so noisy. I don’t think he even has the strength to laugh at stuff anymore. He stares at the TV and at me. Then back at the TV.
He wears slippers that have Velcro flaps to allow for his swollen feet. He has a rug over him. His glasses are on and his head is bent forward.
He seems more absent. The tumour is affecting his ability to make connections. His eyes seem to stare at the images but without seeing.
That bright spark that used to be there has all but gone.
Mum has fallen now into the role of full time carer. How strange it must be to be living with the love of your life (50 years they’ve been married – we celebrated their Golden Wedding in April) and then suddenly to be nursing him, helping him up out of his chair – him once so strong, now so weak, getting up with him 5 times a night to help him pee into a bottle. Last night she was up most of the night. She had to change his pyjamas and his sheets.
I wonder if she ever thought something like this might happen when she stood in that church half a century ago in her polka dot dress and veil, still so young, and repeated the vows ‘In sickness and in health’…’Til death us to part.’ And her still so loving, speaking softly to him ‘Peeka, my darling boy’ as she smooths his forelock of hair back over his head, just the way he used to before he started to forget.
She puts on a brave face but I can tell it’s tiring. Sometimes she sighs, emotionally and physically worn. Earlier she admitted ‘I’m not coping’. His deteriorating condition is too much for her to manage on her own.
One of the local clergymen had been here earlier and while he talked about the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, Dad slid further and further down in his chair so that he was almost lying down by the time they went. D instinctively being polite and and seemingly unphased while for them it should have been obvious that they had outstayed their welcome.
It took all of our strength to get him back into his chair and he’s barely able to move his feet now to get his legs close enough to the chair to be able to sit down in it properly.
I think of the way she has always made everything all right, the way mothers do. When I couldn’t sleep as a child, she would calm me, reassure me until the panic was gone and I’d be calm enough for sleep. For a long time in my life I was lulled into thinking everything will be all right and that I suppose that is a mother’s instinct. Everything is always ok.
But now it’s not.
Just now after the carer had come to help him up, help him wash and put him to bed mum just said out of the blue:
‘He’s still my Peeka but he looks so old.’ It’s true.
I reach the corner of this mini peninsula and, looking at the jetty and half dismantled red brick building, try to remember if this is Butley Ferry and when I used it. Was it with Dad? Probably.
We had walked together, fished together, skied together, gone on great holidays together. I assumed there’d always be more. We’d talked about it. In fact he was already planning his skiing trip to Austria in February as he’d done for years.
I remembered the last time we went skiing in Kitzbuhel. It was February 2013. Typically, he would always be up for the Apres Ski, him and the other old boys that he would meet up with every year. I think I was going through a weird time: I was having problems sleeping. I was stressed in my teaching job that I was doing at the time. So I didn’t want to drink and I sensed his disappointment. We had some drinks together at the little restaurant he liked to go to every night and it was fun – of course it was, but I was a bit absent. As always I wanted to do my own thing not just be with him all the time. How could I have known it’d be the last time?
Each little reminder of his imminent demise is a little stab in the heart. Every day I get a little reminder, normally when I first wake up and it takes me a few seconds to remember. Each time I recoil at the idea but I tell myself every time is one more thought that won’t take me by surprise the next time. I’m building my own defences like the thick brick and concrete walls that I walk past to protect myself from the final assault, whenever that will be.
Time to leave the river and turn inland wondering where we’ll be next time I pick up the path.
The Slow Walker 