A piece of the past

In my front room is a chaise longue that was given to my Dad by a patient. He was a GP from 1958 - 1994 and, as well as individuals and families, he was the doctor for nursing homes, including the Home for Distressed Gentlefolk, where he treated the owner of the chaise.

According to Google, the charity is now known as Turn2Us, but this was back in the ‘80s. ‘Gentlefolk’ fits with a chair from two centuries ago; it makes me smile to have a couch that wouldn’t look out of place in Freud’s Vienna, in the room where I sometimes see clients.

Last year I dreamt of the actual couch that my Dad had in his surgery. It came with the house, which he bought, semi furnished, from a doctor who predated the NHS. In the way of dreams, details I’d forgotten were vivid - its height, the cracks in the worn covering, the feel of the cellular blanket - but now it was reinforced by heavy scaffolding, that underpinned and protected whoever lay there.

On this day sixteen years ago I sat with my Dad on the last day of his life. I didn’t find it easy to visit him in the nursing home: from infancy I was labelled as ‘too sensitive’ and it’s true, I was alive to every dread. In hospitals I felt I was trespassing at the boundary of life and death. But I still went to see him and, as time went on, I learned to balance my fears with respect, and gently find my place, my own way of being present.

I was privileged to witness him, his strengths and his vulnerability, and I am privileged to witness others, learning to face things they fear will destroy them. I know it is possible to find the courage to peel back what we carefully present, and repair what was damaged.

I know it can be painstaking and slow but, when we make that effort, we heal not only ourselves, we can move and inspire others - whom we may never meet - who benefit from our strength and grace.