The Naming Ceremony: The Sound Of Distant Ringing

In the days before I learned to concentrate on a full length book, I used to have a Boy’s Own Annual that I flicked through occasionally. Sandwiched between the comic strips and activity pages, it had a 4-page spread of illustrated ghost stories that struck me as being a bit out of place, in the way that ghost stories often do.

One in particular really disturbed me, about a woman who fell so ill that she was mistaken for dead.The mourners were really shocked when she sat up dramatically in the coffin at her own funeral. As the days went on, she was so shaken by the experience that she arranged in her will to have an electric bell installed in her coffin in case the same thing ever happened again. After her death, the bell kept ringing in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. Experts opened the grave and checked the electrics many times but they could never find a reason for the strange malfunction…

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Mary rings my wife’s mobile phone up to 40 times a day. Short calls each time because she’s always very distressed. She doesn’t know where she is sometimes. She says that she is pressing her call bell for someone to help her but no one is listening. She tells us she feels cold and alone, or that she is covered in her own excrement and feels dirty.

She’s not dead though. I know she’s not.

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Mary is in a local care home, barely 15 minutes drive from our house, and we can’t see her due to covid restrictions. In the last 12 months, she tested positive for coronavirus on three separate occasions, survived double pneumonia, an emergency hip replacement and had one of the first covid vaccinations. She’ll be 96 in June. She’s my mother-in-law, and we didn’t always get on, but wow, what an amazing woman.

In the Second World War she made rivets for fighter planes and the noise of the machines was so loud that she taught herself to lip-read, talking with exaggerated mouth movements in order to be understood. She said they called it ‘Mi-mi-moing’. In contrast, when we tried to talk to her through the glass of the rehab unit last summer, she looked through us completely as though we were ghosts. The thought of not being able to tell whether your own children are a hallucination or whether they really have come to visit you completely chokes me up.

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In another world, relatives of care home residents denied visits would be out on the street collecting signatures and chanting slogans with loud hailers. They’d be holding hands and banging drums. Or perhaps parading outside Downing Street with placards bearing images of their relatives, like the mothers of "the disappeared" did in Argentina in the 70s.

But we are in lockdown. Our shaking hearts can only type and silently shout watered down slogans on social media. Like Mary, and the woman I read about in that ghost story as a child, we keep pressing our buttons but fear that no one is listening.

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If she were genuinely on 'the other side', it would be a truly terrible kind of afterlife. And it sure as hell is no way to live.

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* Mary's name has been changed. She hates being the centre of attention

A number of organisations are currently campaigning for the right of family members to safely visit relatives in care homes, including: