The Last Right by Marianne Thamm (my reading book .txt) 📗

be the hell in with God and that she should give Him a good telling-off. He said she could use any language she liked with Him, tell Him He was unfair and just let it all run out. That was such an eye-opener to me. I used to do some counselling and later I used the same method.

And then he got onto talking to her and said, “But now you tell God you are sorry for what you said but will God please explain to you why you needed to have a child that was so sick.”

And then he spoke nicely to her and told her to calm down and then he would leave. The next time he would come with something else and I thought that was so good to let her get rid of that anger. A lot of what we were doing was trial and error. I also didn’t always know how to handle the situation.

Sometimes we would have this perfect weather and I would go up to the room and Patsy would be in the double bed. I would take her morning tea and her medication up to her. The curtains would be drawn and it would be pitch dark.

I’d pull open the curtains trying to get it open and light. That was when Craig and Neville were in London while he was there for his kidney ops.

I would go in and I would say, “I have brought you your juice.” I would know what kind of a night she had had as I am up a hundred times in the night to use the loo and I heard her walking in the passage.

Then one night she stood in front of my door and she said, “Mom, I see lights out there.”

And I got up and went to look and you know, I saw that light. And we never saw that light again. To this day I believe it was God’s light and that he showed us “Don’t worry, Craig will get through this op okay.” It was God’s light because when we looked again, that light was gone. And there was no place where this light could have come from.

Every day I would try. I would go into the room and open the curtains and say, “It’s a beautiful day out, come stand here at the window with me.” Later I learned after talking to the psychologist that I must not do that. That I should not fight with her and try to make it light. Because she was all dark. She was pitch dark inside and it made it worse for her because why must I see the light and she can’t?

After that I didn’t do that any more. I waited until she was in the bath, more tactfully, just gradually opened the curtains a little bit. Because when I came in again she was back in bed, blanket over the head, sheet over the head.

And I thought of Neville at the other end and what hell he was going through. He had to look after Craig. He cooked for him, did his own laundry, and had to be with him in the shower.

But thank God we had my husband’s brother overseas and his grown-up children and they used to go and relieve him and one of them or two of them would take Neville off to a restaurant. Go and let him eat and just breathe a bit while the other would sit with Craig.

I wrote these stories for Neville to read to Craig every day. Neville said he was not good at telling stories so I wrote them.

And you know how I wrote them?

Under the blankets with a torch because my husband and I were in the same room, in two single beds, and he used to moan if I had the light on. So that is how I wrote all those stories.

We didn’t go over to London. My duties were with Patsy. But my husband couldn’t handle it; he just wanted to go home. He couldn’t even make food. But I told him, “You have to stay with me. I need you here.” Eventually he stayed.

Then Neville came home with Craig and I remember us going to the airport to meet him. Neville’s bosses sent the most wonderful things. There was this massive teddy bear waiting. And there were Neville and Craig lugging these things along.

Patsy was very excited about their return and before they arrived she said that we had to prepare a feast. But it was not a good thing we had done because Craig was on a diet. But we didn’t know.

He was never a good eater. We always battled to get him to eat. I spent my life telling stories to get him to eat – “down came the bird” or “open the garage”. He wasn’t a robust child, not a fat little boy.

But we were so looking forward to having him home. He had these huge, terrible scars all over his body. Down the front a big cut and all around the side to the kidney. Oh Lord, what that child went through. And he just took it in his stride.

But Patsy couldn’t take it. She didn’t want to see those scars. It was agony for her. I could see it when she saw him undress. And she couldn’t touch him. And the psychiatrist said to me that Patsy must bath him and not me.

But she couldn’t. It just got worse and worse. She eventually wasn’t eating at all. She would not come down from the room. Craig used to ask where his mom was and I would say that she is sleeping. He would go up to the room to see her and she would try to play and do little things with him but she would soon be exhausted.

I was hurting so much. I couldn’t force her to do those things when I knew how it must feel for her. So then the psychiatrist