I know I’m not the only adult feeling the disillusionment of adulthood – the things no one ever warned you about. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if foresight might have changed something … anything! which might have lessened the pain I feel now – even if by as little as 1%.

These are pointless thoughts, I know, but they find me. They keep on finding me.

Do they have a special map to us … adults who have lost both parents, and within 18 months?

My father and I were the last people to speak to my mother before her heart stopped.

I spoke to my father on the phone on that last day – something about what he said made me uncomfortable but it was evening and I thought I would address the matter the next day. Three hours later he was gone.

I was too late. I was there within 3 minutes, but it was still too late.

I had held my mother’s hand on the day she died. I sat next to her bed and spoke to her. I told her it was OK, without actually saying that it would be OK for her to stop fighting and die – but she didn’t stop fighting. The last time I saw her alive in the ambulance, she was still fighting. We spoke to her, and she mumbled, but I didn’t think it was a reply to us.

Here’s what happened next: We waited and waited.

When you arrive at St George’s Hospital at 9PM on a Saturday night, you can hear Leonard Cohen sing, “The place is dead like heaven on a Saturday night.” I’m not making this up, that was really my first thought.

Ignorantly we initially went to the hospital’s reception. They redirected us to casualties and when we got there the ambulance with my mother inside was in the parking bay.

We told her we would see her inside; we had to take care of the paperwork. She mumbled. It wasn’t what you would think: the mumble which she repeated many times that day was not an effort to communicate something positive, it was a protest, a refusal, a natural instinct to hang on to life.

As soon as we entered the casualty reception I realised I had been wrong … this was a different kind of “Closing Time”. Perhaps that was only because it seemed entire families were waiting there. Of course it would be entire families! If you have to visit casualty on a Saturday night, it’s probably serious enough for everyone to come along.

We sat in the middle. As if in some surreal dream both the family on the left and right looked like people I had met before. And then a couple entered and they too looked much too familiar and I was sure I must have come across them somewhere, sometime before. It’s possible, of course, PE isn’t a big city.

They left before we did. The man was clearly in pain and they could not take the waiting. Who knows what happened to them?

At some point a man from the ambulance crew arrived and wanted me to fill in some paperwork. He wanted to know why we had called the ambulance.

For the record: The ambulance crew assured us that my mother was stable and not in immediate danger. I did not believe them. I generally just don’t believe anyway. But my sister did believe them or she would have been there with us.

“Obvious distress,” I told the ambulance man. At the time I did not think of telling him my mother couldn’t walk and we had no other way of getting her to medical intervention. We were annoyed with the question and we were still waiting.

I updated a close friend on WhatsApp and sent messages to other people who clearly weren’t awake or concerned about their cell phones.

Then a man came through the double swinging doors which lead to the intestines of casualty and he spoke to the lady at admission in a low whisper. No one else was clearly supposed to hear what he said, but I have a rather strange sense of hearing and I heard the gist of what he said. He asked if the Pienaar patient’s file had been opened. The lady answered affirmatively.

At that very moment I knew there was only one reason why that would have been a concern … and it was the fact that my mother’s heart had stopped beating. She wasn’t technically dead yet, but she was dying and there would be no way around it. I understood that this presented a conundrum to the staff. The ambulance crew had assured us this wasn’t a life-threatening situation … and then her heart stopped even before they had moved her inside. While my dad and I were waiting in the waiting room, there must have been quite a scuffle outside. The patient in waiting just crashed! Get her inside!

Even when we were still at home I was fairly convinced that my mother wouldn’t make it through the night. What concerned me was that she stayed awake. As it turned out, she died even sooner than I had anticipated.

My head swung a 90 degree angle to look at my dad. But his hearing was never great. I could tell he had noticed nothing and in his mind my mother was still alive. I didn’t tell him anything. I couldn’t. I said nothing.

Some time before this had happened I played a little exercise with myself which I often do. I would ask myself, Come on, what do you think happens next? The exercise is based on my theory that there are always signs of what is coming, simply because things don’t happen in a vacuum and if you can improve your ability to foresee what might happen next, then the shock is less. So according to that theory the shock should have been less for me – it didn’t help. If I write about that later, you’ll see I also knew that my father was about to die – I actually wish I had taken myself more seriously.

Back to my mother: during the “dead” time in the waiting room while I was trying to imagine answers, I concluded that a doctor would tell us terms like “multiple organ failure”, “a dire situation”, “touch and go” and that she would be admitted to ICU. I had already decided that I would sit next to her bed all night and that my dad would have to sleep in the car if he wanted to.

Basically I still imagined that I would be with my mother when she died. But when I overheard the “Pienaar patient” comment, I realised that there would be no ICU bed – there wouldn’t be another chance to hold her hand.

Yet the next part of the story dislodged me again. Suddenly someone ( I think it was a man) appeared at the double doors and asked for Mrs Pienaar’s family. My dad and I both stormed in his direction but he stopped us right there. He only needed “some medical information”, he said. Only one of us, he said. He seemed as eager as I was for the person to be me.

Of course, as I followed him into the ward, I thought I had been wrong. My mother was still alive! Why else would they want medical information?

And this was a really cruel twist.

You pass the swinging doors, following whoever. The smell of hospital hits you, industrial grade cleaning products. The walls are pale and the floor is a an ugly blue, an insult to beautiful blue. But that is nothing against what comes next: which is entering a room where your mother lies stretched out on her back on a cold steel table, her head pulled back as if there might have been an attempt to intubate her – and she is very clearly dead.

A  doctor sat behind her on a high stool and he was talking to me but my eyes were on my mother’s unbreathing body.

For the first time, ever, in my entire life, the shock caused me to hyperventilate. Suddenly I breathed hard and audibly. The doctor essentially said they had tried to resuscitate my mother but that there wasn’t any realistic hope and then he asked if I wanted them to continue.

I said no. I could see my mother was dead. My mother was 75, she had suffered from Frontotemporal dementia for years. She had been bedridden for around at least 2 years, she had had only 40% kidney function since 2017 already and she had had a stroke in January that year, and she had osteoporosis.

It was April Fools Day and mother was dead.

Still I did not trust that doctor, as mentioned earlier, I’m not the trusting kind. So I told him my dad is next of kin and I needed to speak to him.

I was thinking, what if this man, whom I don’t know at all, calls in my dad and says to him: Your daughter said not to resuscitate, so, now your wife is dead?

My dad still seemed completely out of touch with what was happening. The medical staff didn’t allow him to enter the room where my mother was. He said, “Please, do everything you can.”

The doctor was a tall man and from behind my dad, as he was speaking, I visibly shook my head. He saw me and I think he understood.

It was clear that they would now allow enough time to go by to create the impression that they were trying to resuscitate my mom.

I left the waiting room to phone my sisters. My elder sister was incredulous. OK, that’s not the right word. She was furious. She was beside herself.

My younger sister wasn’t answering.

Inside I sent more text messages, before they called us back into the abysmal intestines of the casualty ward.

Anyone who has had this experience, will know. The doctor calls you into a small room. They absolutely insist that you sit, even though sitting it not what you feel like doing. They have comfortable lounge couches, which seem strangely out of place and out of space. You don’t want to sit – but it quickly becomes clear that you have to.

I don’t want to relay the conversation, although it wasn’t long.

They would let us see her, but again we had to wait. They clean up before they allow the family in.

The next part is hard. I wanted to stay with her, but you know you have to leave at some point. The doctors said, “Take as long as you need.” But my father and I were two forlorn figures, wondering what to do, what to say and how long to stay with the body which could no longer contain my mother’s life. Our emotions were strangely blunted. The real thing comes much later.

I looked at my mother’s face and saw the Coca Cola stains around her mouth where I had desperately tried to administer meds to calm her down. But when death doesn’t decide to be calm, it won’t be.

Eventually, like two abandoned children we had to leave, walk back to the car and drove away – I think that was one of the hardest parts.

Somehow it was 23:30 by this time.

We had called the ambulance just after 19:00 – time flies in medical care, who knew?

On our way home my one, always-awake friend phoned. It was nice to hear from someone, while knowing no one else who mattered would know before the next day.

It was a slow drive back home.

I was supposed to sleep in my mother’s bed – but there was no sleep that night. And when the sleep eventually came, it seemed neverending.