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Sunset over Glasgow taken from Kelvinside
Photograph by
Ann Donaldson

The way things

were: the care my

dying mother got

Michael Elcock

My mother died 23 years ago this coming summer. She was a character of great energy and spirit, and – as much as anything else about our relationship – we were the best of friends. Mum was 23 years old when I was born, and so to me this year feels like a kind of bookend; as if in a funny sort of way I’ll be living on borrowed time if I survive past 10 August 2012.

     When mum telephoned me from Edinburgh to tell me that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer I was working in Vancouver. She told me she had been given six weeks to live. It came right out of the blue and I remember walking for hours that afternoon along Vancouver’s waterfront with a stomach in knots and a heavy, heavy heart, trying to figure it all out. I was already booked on flights to Nova Scotia, Paris and London for meetings about a big government cultural project I was working on; a project with brutal deadlines involving millions of dollars, and a really miserable board of directors to deal with.
     I managed to add a flight to Edinburgh onto my schedule and my wife and two-year-old daughter left for Edinburgh the next day to help sort out mum’s needs and affairs. She had already said she wanted to spend her last weeks with us, and so the three of them went about the arrangements for closing down the Edinburgh house and moving her out to British Columbia. When I got to Edinburgh a few days later I met with mum’s physician, and with her oncologist at Edinburgh’s Western General. They gave me her files so that we could take them to Canada.
     The NHS coverage did not extend to Canada, and my mother had no Canadian medical insurance. We telephoned our family physician in the village of Sooke on Vancouver Island and explained the situation. We made it clear that my mother would be spending her last weeks and days with us, in our house – not because of cost, but because she, and we, wanted it that way.
     By the time we got home with my mother some two weeks later, the local hospice society had delivered a bed; one of those push-button electric beds that raise you up and set you down. Our physician came to the house to see my mother the day after we arrived. It was important to balance her medication, and our doctor did that over the next few days. It took her several visits. At the same time she arranged for a daily visit to our house by a local community nurse.

A little more than half of my mother’s last six weeks were spent in Canada,
in our house, with care from the local medical community that I can only describe as having been sent from heaven.

     A friend in nearby Victoria, a cricket umpire called Gilbert Smith, offered to come and visit my mother. Gilbert was a Belfast man, a minister with a doctor of divinity degree from Edinburgh University. None of us, and certainly not my mother, were churchgoers, and Gilbert didn’t lay on the religion. He just offered some wonderful, wise solace for the spirit. My oldest pal, from childhood days in Spottiswoode Street, flew up from California. My dad came out from England, and my mother’s twin sister flew over from Glasgow. They all saw mum before she died; they all gave her comfort.
     My mother passed away almost exactly six weeks after the diagnosis had been made in Edinburgh. We purchased a burial plot in the local cemetery and had some beautiful lines from Stevenson etched onto a block of granite above her resting place. A friend came out and played the pipes, and that was that.
     A little more than half of my mother’s last six weeks were spent in Canada, in our house, with care from the local medical community that I can only describe as having been sent from heaven. It was all part of an extraordinary mix, and all of it helped my mother get through the most difficult time of her life. Those few weeks gave each of us an incredibly rich, spiritual experience. It was the most memorable of times.
     When it was all over I contacted our physician in Sooke and asked her to let me have the bill. I was expecting it to be in the many thousands of dollars. It came to a little less than $500. Even then, 23 years ago, that was a miniscule amount of money for the superlative care my mother had received. I called the doctor’s office and said that they must have made a mistake, that it must be more. No, I was told, that’s what it is. The doctor came on the line. ‘If you want to, you can make a donation to the Hospice Society,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they would appreciate it.’
     I know that kind of care is rare in the UK, if it exists at all nowadays (this piece has been inspired partly by the recent SR articles of Victoria Law and Marian Pallister). It has been gone from western Canada for at least 20 years. Our physician has retired and the new one thinks along more ‘modern’ lines. Our Conservative federal government in Ottawa and our Conservative government here in British Columbia also think along ‘modern’ lines. If you want special care, which is how they would describe the attention my mother received, then you’ll have to pay for it. Big time. And I won’t get into the discussion about how the big multi-national pharmaceutical companies have managed to subvert just about every nickel and dime that isn’t nailed down. But as we move along towards our own ‘borrowed’ time it’s worth remembering these things once in a while; the way things were.

Michael Elcock was born in Forres and grew up in Edinburgh and West Africa. He emigrated to Canada when he was 21. He was athletic director
at the University of Victoria for 10 years, and then CEO of Tourism
Victoria for five

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