Notes From a Sick Room

During the final years of her life, my mother was chronically ill physically, in a whole number of ways. I was known to refer to her as a walking medical dictionary - until she was no longer able to walk. When people asked me what was wrong with her, I would reply 'Everything.'

During this period, my mother endured an amount of physical pain that I can only wonder at. Despite periods of intense physical suffering, she remained remarkably - miraculously - cheerful. Then one day, after yet another angina attack, breathing crisis, or whatever, she turned to my sister and said 'I've had enough.' Within a matter of weeks, we were sitting at her bedside as she breathed her final few heaving breaths in this life. I've always wondered about all that.......

During December gone I felt unhappy about the way the winter had begun. The weather was hostile, the sky uniformly threatening, and there were hardly any more benign days. I counted the days to the solstice, and felt relief when it arrived.

At the same time, I felt a quiet contentment about affairs, and how I was getting on with matters practical. Work, as usual at this time of year, was more than I wanted - but I felt relatively contented with it at the time. I was feeling some satisfaction in preparing for the festive season, something I often don't do. And I was delighted to see my sister and her husband over New Year, for the first time in a decade.

During December, there was this background hum to everything. It felt warm, soothing. In part it concerned death. For me at the time, death had lost its terror, its sting. This seemed not a bad space to be in at all. What's more, I felt that there were no great ambitions still to be achieved in this life. I had more or less done what I needed to do.

On January 2nd, at 9.30 am, I was walking to work. It was still half dark, Inverness was silent and empty. There seemed something deeply wrong about the situation. Nearly the whole of Inverness was still in bed, save one or two intrepid runners and dog walkers. And here was I, pacing the darkened streets in order to go and make a few pennies (not much more).

When I arrived at work, the mild head cold that I had been nursing for a few days exploded into a deadly rainbow of sneezes and splutters. I finished my shift with difficulty, then went home.

For years, I had wondered what it would be like to have a migraine while already ill. I was about to find out. The following day the sharp migraine pain focussed on the right sinus area, and the vomiting of copious bile from deep retching gave me an experience I hope never to repeat. In the late afternoon my sister, her husband and dog came round on their last day in the Highlands. I could barely speak a word.

The following day I slowly began to feel better. Then, in the evening, a vice-like grip caught the bottom of my chest. There followed one of the most viciously painful nights of coughing in all my life. I've never known such symptoms turn up so quickly.

And so it began. Ill, ill, ill. I am accustomed to the intense but fairly short-lived pain of a migraine, but not this. Day after day of almost constant coughing, all the energy poured out of me. I would get up, have a shower if I felt I could manage it, get a little unappetising food down me, check my emails, before going to sit in a chair for the rest of the day. The effort required to get up and close the curtains on the other side of the room was the same as that normally reserved for climbing a remote mountain peak. I hadn't experienced anything remotely approaching this level of seriousness since arriving in Inverness almost a decade ago.

All the time, the warm, fuzzy feeling was playing quietly in the background.

On Wednesday of the second week of the illness I made an appointment to see a doctor. However, I needed to cancel due to lack of energy. I sat in the chair by the window as the light was fading, about four o'clock. I felt myself sink down, down, down. All sorts of things began to fade away: my ideas and opinions about life, about who I am. Habits, preferences, identity. Everything that goes to make 'me'. Just slowly dropping into the warm, fuzzy, oceanic space.

I felt as if I was descending into a realm of the cthonic (netherworld/underworld) gods. And there they were. Clear at centre stage was Cernunnos, the antlered one. The one about whom so little is definitively written, yet about so much is said: Cernunnos Lord of Nature and of the Underworld. Cernunnos the psychopomp, guide of souls from one life to the next.

In this space, there is no striving for life. The matter of life or death bears little relevance, is of little concern. It is viewed with indifference. In this pain-ridden, god-inhabited space, with its peculiar peacefulness, certain qualities of mystical experience reared their head. There was the oceanic feeling in and of itself. And there was time. I closed my eyes, drifted off (I had no strength to do anything else), then looked up, hoping that time was passing quickly and this would all come to an end. Half an hour seemed to have passed, but when I looked at the clock, it was a mere five minutes! I tried again. Twenty minutes, please. No, three.

(Incidentally, the only other context in which I have come across anything bearing any relation to this oceanic fuzz is Stan Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix One in the pre-birth drama).

Things continued to focus around stasis, stagnation, intermittent feelings of despair, pain. On Saturday  morning I looked out of the bedroom window. For once the weather, though still cold, was more benign. It was bright, with the sun sparkling on the snowy hills beyond.

All of a sudden, a change came upon me. This was the world, and I wanted to be part of it. This was the medium for my soul's journey, and was where I belonged. This was where 'my' consciousness had turned up for this lifetime as a suitable place for it to do whatever it had to do. It's here that things happen, all manner of wondrous thing, and it befits me to be out there in this phenomenal world. This is still the place for me, not the fuzzy, quiescent world I had inadvertedly allowed myself to sink into over recent times.

I felt a bit of energy move. Recuperation was on its way. Slowly, fitfully, at times painfully, the road to recovery stretches out before me.  I walk it with gratitude.