Thinking about it now, Gran had been talking about her "living will" for the past decade, to most of the members of her vast clan. Few of us could bear even thinking about the death of this small, powerful woman around whom the whole family revolved, and we tended to try to change the subject.
So many of her family, as well as her friends (some young and fairly recent) had an intense personal relationship with Gran. This usually meant visits to her corner flat on Portobello Road in London, where it was obligatory to drink and eat just a bit too much, because Gran hated waste. She was intensely interested in the details of other people's lives, unflinching in her questions, unshocked by our answers.
There was no generation gap with her and she was as good a great-grandmother as she was a grandmother. Each visit would be followed by an email (before she went online she would post little letters) with helpful and often irritating suggestions about how you could improve your life: "Before I call the social services I am going to pay for a cleaner to come round to your house. Begging your pardon but it is a pigsty." And then concluding: "Has anyone ever told you that your widow's peak is terribly sexy? I love you."
About six years ago, she wore me down. "Sophie, I will haunt you if you don't do the right thing and make sure that I die when I am meant to," she said and forced me to read her living will, otherwise known as the Advance Medical Directive, which said: "I wish it to be understood that I fear degradation and indignity far more than death."
Gran explained that she had too many friends living less then a half life after strokes and serious illnesses, and because she was so independent and organised (she thought old age had made her scatty, but this was only in comparison to the absolute order of her younger days), she particularly feared living "without all her marbles". I must have looked suitably taken aback by the threat of a haunting because she made me, along with my father, the cosignatory on her living will. My uncle was cited as next-of-kin and, importantly, her doctor also signed it.
Once a pilot, three times married, mother of two, stepmother of four and foster mother of three more, she seemed indestructible. She had survived two alarming illnesses. First meningitis and then a recurrence of an adhesion in the bowel she had suffered 60 years earlier in Calcutta, which she immediately self-diagnosed. (When the surgeon came out of the operating theatre he said: "I suppose you won't be very surprised to hear that your grandmother was right.") With the bowel problem she insisted we brought her living will to the hospital, but on that occasion - fortunately - she didn't need it. She did yoga up until a few days before her death and apart from a knee that had started to slow her down was extremely fit and supple. A couple of weeks before she died she did a shoulder stand in the park and people tried not to stare at the sight of this nearly 90-year-old woman with her feet in the air.
I only dared tell her later, but after I had visited her in hospital following her bowel operation I threw her precious living will away. I was tired and traumatised and had decided for some reason to take it home with me. I'm not sure why, but I slipped it into the newspaper I was reading and when I got home I found that I didn't have either. I remember throwing the paper into one of the bins outside my local tube station. It was dark and I was weeping. I went through all nine bins on Kentish Town high street in a desperate attempt to find it, and didn't even particularly care when I saw a mother from my son's school. I had to give up when the dustmen came and shooed me away.
After that I was unsure if I were worthy of being a co-signatory, but when I finally plucked up the courage to confess, Gran cheerfully told me that it didn't matter as she had a more up-to-date version with her new doctor's signature and gave me and my father a copy. I didn't know how soon I was going to have to refer to it.
Gran's last week was a good one. She took herself to see the Turks exhibition at the Royal Academy, went to the cinema on Portobello Road, went to her osteopath, saw a number of her grandsons and stepchildren and came round to my (carefully tidied) house for supper. She said that she felt a bit chesty and strange, but she was still sparkling and funny. I drove her home and stayed and drank wine with her; we laughed till we cried and went over the invitation list for her 90th birthday party the following week. This list was to be very useful for knowing who to contact for her standing-room-only Notting Hill memorial, where dance music was played - my uncle and father brilliantly compered speeches by people from all the eras of her life, while pictures of her from the age of six to 89 were projected behind them.
My father saw her on Saturday evening and said that she didn't sound quite right but she told him she just wanted to go to bed. When she didn't answer the phone the next morning both my father and I went round to her flat and were alarmed to see that the curtains were still drawn at 10 in the morning. She didn't respond to me calling her and so I went into her bedroom and sat down beside her. I woke her up and she said in a very strange, new, slurred and furry voice: "What a lovely sleep I've had." I noticed that her pillow was covered in fluid and changed it. We made her a cup of tea (slightly nervously because we were the two people she didn't allow in her kitchen) and I mashed some banana. I fed her and held the cup of tea to her lips, and she seemed confused and weak. We called my uncle, my stepuncles, my sister and cousins to tell them Gran was unwell. There were sparks of her still there - she told me off very slowly because the tea wasn't hot enough - but it was disconcerting to see Gran not in control. We thought she had had a stroke and we called the locum, who was unsure. He called an ambulance. Before we left I made a bag for her, and after repeating it about four times, she was able to tell me that she wanted me to pack her living will.
At the hospital they took blood from her, made her raise her legs and stick out her tongue a lot. They weren't sure what was wrong. By then my sister and cousin had arrived. My sister and I took Gran to the toilet and to both of us she managed to communicate how humiliating she found it. She looked at me when I was holding her at the sink and washing her hands for her and said: "I hate this." When I asked her what, she managed to explain she hated being like "a child".
The hospital told us that they were going to keep her in for the night and watch her chest infection and that we should come back the next morning. But a couple of hours later we were all called back in because Gran had taken a turn for the worse. She was in distress, twisting and turning and trying to talk, even through her oxygen mask. She was grabbing on to me and asking me to get help, even though by this time she had two nurses by her side. Her breathing was laboured and she kept wanting to know what time it was. This went on for about half an hour, until a young doctor came, examined her and took us into the family room.
He explained that acute pneumonia had set in - I immediately thought how Gran had called it "the old person's friend" - and that although they could take her away and put her on a respirator and perhaps try and drain the fluid from her lungs, this would not prolong her life much longer and would be a frightening and invasive action. He referred to the living will he had seen by her bedside. He suggested that we could agree to giving her a mild sedative and that she would then be able to die naturally and peacefully. I felt that Gran had been priming me for this moment for years, and knew that she would have wanted to have been allowed to die naturally. It was far more difficult for my dad, because this was his mother and he felt ultimately responsible. My sister and I talked to Dad and together we decided that we would not choose the invasive medical treatment.
She was given a sedative and her breathing relaxed. After about half an hour the pulse in her neck became weaker until it stopped. She had said before that she wanted to die with my sister massaging her feet and me stroking her hair and that was exactly what happened. My father and cousins came and said their goodbyes.
The next morning my first feeling was not one of grief that I had lost my amazing grandmother, but of gratitude. I felt grateful that Gran had been brave enough to persevere with her reluctant relatives so that when it came to it, we knew what she wanted. And, although I have sometimes longed for it, I haven't been haunted by her yet.
Visit www.livingwill.org.uk
