Drop Down Dead Dad — Chapter 2
The Day My Mum Died
My mum, Ann Arnott (nee Swinhoe), died on May 21st, 2017, at the age of 77, following a brief encounter with lung cancer. I would have liked to say she “fought with cancer” or “she battled cancer”, but she didn’t put up any fight.
During her illness, I spent a fair amount of time with her. She knew she was dying, as her diagnosis left no room for ambiguity, and her health deteriorated rapidly. However, she remained steadfast in her resolve, expressing her desire that no one engage in speculation about how long she had left, nor did she wish to broach the topic of her illness. She wasn’t in denial; she simply didn’t want to talk about it with my dad or with me (her only child).
I found this reluctance to communicate difficult to accept because I knew we didn’t have long, and I didn’t feel we knew each other very well. I was poorly equipped to counsel her but I would have gladly tried. On several occasions, I tried to get her to talk about old times but she made it quite clear she had no need for distraction or any trips down memory lane.
With a heavy heart, I accepted her decision. It was her choice, her life, her final days.
She came to stay with me and my wife, Suzanne, for a week because my dad had fallen down the stairs and dislocated his shoulder. I now believe that he did it deliberately, but at the time, it just seemed a very unfortunate accident. He was in hospital for a while, and my mum was alone at home and quite frail. It was only a few days after her cancer had been diagnosed. I invited her to come and stay with us, and initially, she refused, but after a day and night on her own in that miserable house (I’ll write a chapter about the house later), she changed her mind.
At our house, she spent most of the time in bed. She was barely eating anything; Suzanne and I tried to tempt her with various foods that we knew she used to enjoy, sweet things mostly, but to no avail. Occasionally, she would have a cup of tea and a solitary biscuit. She needed help to get up and down the stairs.
Most evenings, she would join us downstairs for a while. We talked a little about my dad sometimes, and one evening, she requested we supply her with some writing paper and envelopes. She wrote him a letter that I was to take with me the next time I went to visit him in the hospital. I was desperately keen to know what she had written, and I did eventually find out — it was heartbreaking because she said very little about herself, only that she was being well looked after and hoped he was doing OK.
Over the years, my mum and I had talked about having a stairlift installed in their house for my dad, but she was adamant that it wasn’t possible because the stairs were too steep or the house needed rewiring first. It’s funny how she had developed these false beliefs when a stairlift would have really benefitted my dad.
Perhaps she didn’t want to make his life easier.
Anyway, while she was staying with us, I made some enquiries and found a local company that said they would be able to install a stairlift no problem and I got it booked in for the Saturday morning. I knew my mum would be unable to manage the stairs, and a stairlift was her only hope of maintaining some kind of normality and dignity at home.
Meanwhile, my dad was growing tired of being in the hospital — he missed being able to smoke and watch TV all night, I presume. I had spoken to him on the Thursday morning on the phone and explained that we were getting a stairlift installed on Saturday and that once it was installed, I’d fetch him home from the hospital.
On Friday evening, our peace was interrupted when my mum got a phone call on her mobile while she was sitting downstairs with me and Suzanne. It was my dad; he was back at home, and he was full of hell, demanding to know where she was and why there was no milk in the fridge. To our horror, we learned that he had discharged himself from the hospital and made his own way home by taxi. He couldn’t wait any longer for a cigarette, apparently. My mum was really upset by his call, and Suzanne and I tried to comfort her.
I felt so sorry for her and I couldn’t understand why my dad was being so nasty to her — didn’t he care about her? Wasn’t he concerned about her and about making sure the last few weeks or months of her life were the best they could possibly be?
I drove to my parents’ house that Saturday morning to meet the stairlift installer. I let myself in, and to my utter astonishment, I found the curtains drawn shut in the sitting room and my dad lying on the settee, partially covered with a travel blanket. He was surprised to see me and said, “I thought we were getting a stairlift?” with a tone of accusation. I had to explain that it was being installed soon. Somehow, he had misunderstood the plan completely.
The stairlift installation went smoothly and once it was complete, my dad embarked on the journey upstairs and back down; his demeanour made me think of a child at the fair, yet bearing the weight of age and debilitation. His eyes seemed to hold a glimmer of approval, though he never voiced it — only the absence of criticism offered insight into his thoughts.
I made a quick trip to the nearby supermarket to grab some milk for him. I couldn’t help but curse his childlike preferences as I prepared a cup of coffee to his precise specification— an equal mix of milk and water, heated in the microwave with a teaspoon of instant coffee granules, along with one heaped and one level teaspoon of sugar.
Then, I embarked on the gruelling 70-mile round trip to retrieve my mum from my house and return her home. If only my dad had stuck to the plan, it would have all unravelled so much more smoothly. His eagerness to return home, where he was utterly ill-equipped to care for my mum, added to her incapacity to look after him, created a challenging situation.
The injuries sustained from his fall down the stairs had left his upper body in an even more contorted state than before. While at the hospital, he had surgery to reposition his shoulder. However, due to the high risk of heart failure during anaesthesia, the procedure was rushed and not entirely effective. As a result, his left arm remained in a sling, and his hand was essentially nonfunctional.
The situation at my parents’ house was profoundly sad and desperate. I felt awful leaving my mum there after she’d enjoyed a week of respite and comparative luxury with me and Suzanne. But it had been her choice to return home. With hindsight, I realise that she must have felt she didn’t have any choice — she rarely left my dad on his own and I know now that this was by his design. His complete dependence on her shackled her, forcing her to decline invitations from friends for outings and holidays.
On the morning of the day she died, I got a phone call from my dad at about 7 AM. All he said was, “She’s gone”. I knew he didn’t mean that she’d up and left, so I simply said, “OK, we’ll be there as soon as we can”. When Suzanne and I arrived about 45 minutes later, my dad was in his usual chair, and he greeted us with a tearful voice and said, “The Marie Curie people are upstairs”, so we sat down and waited. It was horrible. He was smoking more than usual, and he was less communicative than usual. Neither Suzanne nor I knew what to say. I always felt awkward in my dad’s company, and that day, the awkwardness was off the chart, and the air was thicker than usual with his cigarette smoke.
I don’t recall much of the events of that morning except for my dad making a phone call to his cousin Margaret to let her know that my mum had died. He then proceeded to tell Margaret that my mum had never liked her. It was one of the meanest things I’d ever witnessed, and I just sat there and let him do it, feeling powerless to intervene because he had announced his intention before he picked up the phone and Suzanne and I had both begged him not to do it. He insisted that we stay while he spoke to his cousin.
Strangely, my mum’s death was not the only significant thing that happened that day…
In the evening, her friend Sam called me and told me that she had a letter for me from my mum. I immediately started to cry; I was overcome with emotion because this meant that my mum HAD wanted to talk to me, but she hadn’t felt able to, so she had written me a letter instead!
I went to sleep that night with thoughts about the letter’s contents. Perhaps the truth about my birth father was finally going to be revealed. Or maybe my mum wasn’t really my birth mother? Maybe I’d actually been born a female or with some abnormalities or something. Some strange thoughts led me into a troubled sleep.
I made the 35-mile journey the following morning to visit my dad, spent some time with him and then called in to see Sam, who lives nearby— it was the first time I’d ever met her as she and my mum had only been friends for the last 7 or 8 years and our paths had never crossed. We talked for a while about my mum, and then she gave me the letter. My name and phone number were written on the front of the envelope in my mum’s handwriting.
I told Sam I would take it home to read as I knew it would make me cry. I had no doubt that reading something from my mum that she had known would be her final words to me would bring me to tears.
On the drive home, I revisited my thoughts from the previous night about what might be revealed by the contents of the envelope. I was excited. It felt like I had a communication from ‘beyond the grave’!
As soon as I got home, I sat down on the settee with Suzanne, and we stared at the unopened letter. It didn’t feel very substantial. I had been hoping for several pages, and this didn’t feel like more than one page. I was shaking as I opened the letter. It was indeed a short one — just one side of A5 paper, hand-written and dated 2014. And it simply explained that there was a little brown case in the cupboard under the stairs at my parents’ house and hidden among the contents of that case was another letter addressed to me that contained some important information that I should have and I must be careful not to let my dad know about it.
The following day was my 45th birthday. I hadn’t planned on visiting my dad again, but I had to go and see if I could recover this second letter from the brown case. I made the 35-mile journey once again to my dad’s house — much to his surprise. I sat with him for a lot longer than I wanted to and was beginning to think that I wouldn’t get an opportunity to look in the cupboard under the stairs when, at last, he said those little words I’d been longing to hear…
“I need to go to the toilet”
He was now completely reliant on the stairlift, so thankfully, it always took him several minutes to make a round trip to the toilet. My heart started racing as I realized this was my opportunity!
As soon as he was out of the sitting room door and I heard the drone of the stairlift, I hurried to the dining room, to the cupboard under the stairs and opened its door as slowly and quietly as I could. It’s always dragged heavily across the carpet, and I was terrified that he would hear it — despite all his ailments, there seemed to be nothing wrong with his ears — so I had to proceed extremely slowly, which only added to the tension!
My heart was pounding as I stepped into the enormous cupboard and saw the small, antiquated brown case. The aged metal clasps, seemingly reluctant to yield, tested my nerves. Panic welled within me as I feared my dad’s imminent descent down the stairs. At long last, I managed to open the case. Nestled inside, just as my mother had described in her letter, was an envelope bearing my name. I grabbed it, noting its surprising weight (certainly more than one page this time), and concealed it under my shirt.
Closing the case with great care, I crept out of the cupboard and quietly closed its door. I was sweating and feeling faint by now and was incredibly relieved to return to the sitting room and find it empty. My dad was still upstairs. I had time to send Suzanne a quick text to let her know I had the letter in my possession and would be home soon.
As soon as my dad returned from his toilet expedition, I was on my feet, ready to leave. He was in mourning; he wasn’t sure whether he wanted company or not, so I didn’t feel bad leaving him. I needed to get home and find out what was in this letter that was so important yet so secret it had to be hidden in a case under the stairs with the only clue to its existence being kept by a close friend of my mum. The whole 50-minute journey, I thought only about the contents of the envelope that I had retrieved under my shirt.
It was about 5 p.m. when I arrived home.
Remember, it was my birthday. Suzanne was waiting eagerly for my return. I showed her the envelope. She offered me a gin and tonic, which I gladly accepted. We were due to go out for a meal at 7 p.m. that evening. We agreed that it was a good idea to have a drink now, just to calm the nerves. We were both ridiculously intrigued and excited. There must be some seriously important information in this envelope — why else would it have had to wait until my mum’s death in order to be revealed to me?
Just like the day before, we sat on the settee together. I gulped my drink, and then I just couldn’t wait any longer; I had to know what was inside the envelope.
It contained about 20 sheets of A4 paper, all held together with a single oversized paper clip. The cover page was a printed letter from an organisation called NORCAP, which I had never heard of and nothing about the letterhead gave me any clues as to what their business was. It was dated March 2012, addressed to my mum, and it said:
Dear Mrs Arnott
I hope that you may be able to assist me. I am helping XXXXXX to find relatives with whom she lost touch some time ago.
From XXXXXX’s birth certificate we think there is a connection with the Swinhoe family. I understand that this was your name and I would very much appreciate your help.
It may assist you to know that XXXXXX was born in Didsbury, Manchester in the winter of 1960.
I couldn’t make any sense of it. I didn’t understand what it meant because my mind was just a fog. I had always known that my mum was originally from the Manchester area, so I thought that perhaps she had a long-lost cousin who was trying to reconnect with her. Swinhoe was my mum’s maiden name, and she had a lot of aunts, uncles and cousins.
Suzanne figured it out way before I did… the pertinent date was 1960, Twelve years before I was born when my mum was just 20.
Anxiously, I turned to the next page, and there it was, confirmed in my mum’s own handwriting within a lengthy letter addressed to me. I was not the only child, as I had believed all my life. A profound revelation shook my world; I had an older half-sister I had never known existed, whom my mother had relinquished for adoption when she was just a few weeks old.
I cried uncontrollably as the reality hit me.
A mix of joy and sorrow washed over me. Joy in the discovery of a newfound sibling and the untold stories that lay ahead. Yet, sorrow for my mother, who had harboured this secret for 57 years, a hidden burden that she was unable to share with me while she was alive, that only now saw the light of day. Sorrow also for the little boy who could potentially have had a playmate to keep him company on those lonely Sunday afternoons while his parents were napping.
In her final letter to me, in which she explained the circumstances of my half-sister’s birth, my mum told me that it had always been her hope that one day, the three of us would get together. But she had never told my dad about my half-sister (she met my dad and married him eight years after my half-sister was born), and she had been too frightened to reveal her secret to him when my half-sister made contact.
So my mum and her first child never met again — they never even talked on the phone. They emailed each other like pen friends for five years, and then my mum died, and that’s what the rest of the contents of the envelope were — emails that my mum had printed off so that I could read them and learn about my half-sister through them. I found her phone number in one of the emails, and I called her immediately, not thinking what my calling would signal to her about her birth mother.
She answered the phone, not recognizing my number, of course, and I said, “Hello, it’s Flemming”. She paused for a few seconds and then asked me if she could call me back. I told her that would be fine, and we ended our first phone call there.
She must have realised that the fact that I was calling meant Ann was dead because why else would I be calling her — she knew that Ann had kept her a secret from me for the last five years. So when my half-sister returned my call, she already knew what I was going to tell her about Ann.
We talked for a long time that evening, and it was one of the most fascinating things that I have ever experienced; I talked to my half-sister — the one I had had all my life but had never known about.
My half-sister and I live in nearly opposite corners of the country. Meeting in person would be a challenge due to the distance between us. We nearly crossed paths, though, at Ann’s funeral: she travelled all the way from her home near the south coast of England, a journey of more than 500 miles, to be at the back of the church for the funeral. She was nearly invisible and certainly went unnoticed by my dad. As I escorted my dad out of the church, I managed to exchange a quick smile and wave with my half-sister. It brought me some comfort, knowing that she was present at her birth mother’s funeral.
If my dad had known, I think it would have killed him.
Not many people were aware of my half-sister’s birth. As per my mum’s letters, only her parents, a very close family friend, and a Methodist minister were privy to the fact that she was pregnant. Consequently — despite having emailed back and forth with Ann for five years — my half-sister has very limited knowledge about the circumstances surrounding her birth. She did find out who her birth father is, but beyond that, the details are scant, unfortunately.
You might wonder why my half-sister didn’t push Ann for information during their five years of email correspondence. Well, she did ask, but Ann wasn’t very open with the details. I believe my sister was cautious about pushing Ann away. At the outset, she had to make several attempts to engage with Ann, who was hesitant to connect with her daughter, and that’s why their relationship was restricted to email communication.
My half-sister was eager to uncover more details about the events of 1960 and hoped that someone who had knowledge of my mother was still alive and might possess some information they’d be willing to share. Together, we have made several attempts to investigate this matter but, unfortunately, have made little progress.
However, our story was far from over; there was another bombshell just waiting in the wings for us, one that wouldn’t be unearthed for a few more years…
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