Chapter 11 - Terminal

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There is a terrible situation when you are tending your terminal child. You want to be there for him when he dies. You have been there for so long, loving and caring. The concept of being absent during the last moments of your child's life do not bear thinking about. This would be cruelty beyond belief and it created particular problems for us. Sometimes we had to leave the house. Generally our shopping was performed by friends but sometime we ran out of something vital. Other times we had to leave the house when Max's morphine tablets became ineffective and much stronger medication was required. Usually his medication would be brought to the house by hospital visitors but there were times when his medical needs outpaced their visits. My medication trips left me apprehensive that Max might die while I was gone. His death was not like that. There was no quiet slipping away.

I slipped into a strange fantasy world of hope. I know that children live with 'magical thinking'. This is where a child's hopes and dreams exist in a magical world which has no connection with reality. I started to do the same. Surreal mind games. I had to. It was the only way to survive.

You cling to anything that offers hope. I remember being appalled when listening to a mother who told me that her son would be fine because the astrology column in her newspaper predicted that all would be well for his star sign. She bought the paper every day so she could look at the stars. She had an absolute and desperate conviction. I was appalled because we and she knew that her son was terminal. He died two weeks later. I was appalled because I was on the outside looking in. I had not yet reached that point where this behaviour could be understood.

I understood once Max became terminal. I took him to a healer. How do I explain this?

There is so much we do not understand. We have progressed in our scientific knowledge beyond all belief in the last fifty years. There is still evidence that we know so little. It is curious that during Victorian times there was a strong belief that they had discovered all that could be discovered. If we know nearly everything that could be known then advances would be painfully slow. They are not. Our knowledge of the universe takes leaps and bounds. We are on the edge of discovery not at the end. This, together with the fact that the Chinese and Indian civilisations have used healing for many centuries, made me think that there might be something to be gained from seeing a healer. We desperately needed hope and had nothing to lose.

The healer asked if I was working and I explained that I was not because I had been nursing Max for ten of the previous twelve months. She said that no fee was necessary. This was important to me. Not because of the cost but because it suggested that her intentions were true.

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