I lay awake last night thinking of people keeping bedside vigils. A vigil can of course be about hoping for recovery. It can also be about acknowledging that a long and fruitful life has reached its natural conclusion and adjusting to the idea of it ending.
My dad died in the summer of 2021 and in his case, we were resigned to it. We gathered round his bed, which the hospital had loaned us, in the living room of my parents’ house, my childhood home. We’d persuaded the paramedics not to rush him back to hospital. He’d been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer ten days earlier and was in sharp decline, so what was the point in sending him back there? He’d survived meningitis as a young child and bladder cancer in his seventies. Replacement hip joints for chronic arthritis in his eighties had extended his life further. He was 93 and he’d “had a good innings” as he put it.
The final night of his life, I dozed on a mattress on the floor, alongside his bed, alert for changes in his increasingly raspy breathing. When he woke in the night and found me there, offering him a sip of water, he asked me whether he had died. Why would I be at his bedside, unless I was an angel?
“No, you’re not dead, Dad,” I said. “I’ve come to be with you.”
Later, I heard him stir again.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“Where do you want to be?”
“Home. Definitely,” he said.
“You ARE home,” I said. “It’s Wendy here.” I repeated that it was a borrowed hospital bed and that he was in his living room.
He was struggling to speak, but asked about the cancer.
“It’s in your lungs and has spread to your bones,” I said. He seemed to take that in and I switched off the light.
At 1am he woke again. I offered more water.
“It’s Wendy here,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
“You’re at home,” I said.
“I know that,” he said.
Ah, okay. Character intact!
At 3am he was coughing, so I sat and watched him for a while. He opened his milky eyes and asked quietly, “Aren’t you going to get some rest?”
He was still sleeping when I woke next morning. When he surfaced, he refused the nutrition drink I offered. He was struggling to swallow. “No more,” he said, and I knew from his expression that he meant he’d had enough of everything.
My daughter and three-year old granddaughter arrived. She wore a sequinned dress. “It’s for dancing!” she said, swirling it to catch the light and making the whole room sparkle. She played with my mother in the kitchen, showing off her toy dinosaur and Mum got out a box of shells. My granddaughter held them to her ear one by one to see if she could hear the sound of the sea.
We moved to the living room. My brother recalled some favourite moments from his childhood. Mum reminisced about meeting Dad at Butlins in 1954, when they waltzed on the dance floor. “Shall we have the next foxtrot?” she asked him, leaning in close so she could see him (she was almost blind) and he could hear her (without his hearing aid, he was almost deaf). “Can you imagine that?” He smiled, the first smile I’d seen from him.
My sister was driving back from holiday in Scotland and joined us just after lunch.
A district nurse called in. She knew Dad from previous visits. A doctor arrived to check on Dad, accidentally leaving his bag behind, so I had to phone to ask him to come and retrieve it.
Dad died shortly afterwards, holding my sister’s hand, while the rest of us were out of the room. Perhaps he had been waiting for her. It was completely peaceful.
Moments later, the doctor came to collect his bag. He was astonished that my father had died in the meantime, but it was serendipitous, as he could officially confirm his death. “Sometimes my forgetfulness can be quite useful,” he observed.
I phoned the undertakers and they arrived promptly, one little, one large, both quite elderly and visibly struggling with the stretcher in the heat of summer, made even warmer by the Aga in the kitchen. We made sure my granddaughter was distracted upstairs while they moved Dad’s body. (With all the tight corners and clutter to navigate, it was like a scene from Laurel and Hardy. If he was looking down, Dad would have appreciated the slapstick humour.) My granddaughter saw the undertakers’ car pull away up the street. She grasped what we told her: that her great-grandfather had died because he was very old and very poorly.
Next morning, visitors gone, mum dozing in the kitchen, my sister and I started clearing away all the paraphernalia of care: the pads, the packs of nutrition drinks, sippy beakers, pyjamas, the stack of catheter supplies (a legacy of his earlier bladder cancer). Dad’s glasses and his hearing aids lay on the shelf. I shed tears as we worked.
Then I glanced down and found at the foot of the hospital bed by its wheels a line of shells that my granddaughter had carefully placed there, unnoticed, while we had kept vigil at my father’s side.
Evidence of timeless seas, tides rolling in and out.
I’m writing this while thinking about my partner Ian, his father and his sister, keeping vigil at his mother’s bedside, in hospital. She is the matriarch on his side of the family and has been my champion, too, from the day we first met in 1986. Since my own parents died, his parents are my final connection to that generation of our merged family tree.
Have you ever kept vigil at a bedside? Please do comment below if you are able. I love to hear what you think.
I thought of
’s beautiful poem while writing this piece, which I read on Substack last week: When Giants Topple, a love poem for her parents.I wrote recently about what it was like in the early days of being a mum of identical triplets. My daughter Becky has just published on Substack her own brilliant essay on what it’s like being a triplet and about twins in fiction. Well worth a read.
Thanks to everyone who read, liked and/or shared last week’s festive round-up, Red squirrels, roast wombat and pancakes. And thanks for your comments. I think we all secretly hanker after a room with a den in it!
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Until next time!
© Wendy Varley 2025
So lovely, Wendy. Thank you for sharing this intimate piece of your life. I, too, have sat vigil, many times, especially in my 20s when I lost so many friends to AIDS, but the hardest vigil by far was at my father's bedside in 2011. He was not communicative the last week of his life, and I was his health proxy, doing the things to make his transition as peaceful and painless as possible, administering morphine as the hospice nurse trained me to do. I talked to him, I bathed him, and told him how much I loved him and appreciated all the things he did for me throughout the course of my life. He died quietly in his hospital bed, in his living room the moment I stepped away to tend to something in the kitchen. I was gone for not more than a minute. It was a very hard thing, all of it. Some days I miss him very much. He would have been so happy that I finally started writing, something he always encouraged me to do. xoxo
Wendy,
That was beautiful.
I was thinking today of my own father's death during Covid. I was permitted to visit him one last time and did the day before, but he died alone in the Veteran's Centre the following morning. I so wish I had kidnapped him and brought him home instead!