TOM UTLEY: My mother-in-law’s death at 99 was included in the daily Covid toll

Many of us have long grown bored and irritated by the daily incantation of the latest Covid death figures, read out to scare us on the evening news bulletins ‘like football scores’, in my colleague Richard Littlejohn’s memorable phrase.

I’m sure that most people didn’t pay much attention to the announcement last Saturday that 131 people died in just 28 days after being tested positive.

For my family, however, that bald figure had a terribly sad resonance, since one of those 131 was my wife’s beloved mother, who had died the previous evening at the venerable age of 99.

It is a fact that I saw my mother in law last week at the hospital. She had died 3 weeks earlier and she had been diagnosed with Covid a fortnight prior. [File photo]

Despite all the precautions taken by the devoted NHS staff, she contracted Covid in the Oxfordshire hospital where she’d been taken with a broken arm, which she’d suffered in the latest of a series of recent falls.

My mother-in law was, to my wife and her extended family, more than a football score. She was a person to be filed in the Office for National Statistics records on the pandemic.

Courage

Five daughters adored her and she was also the grand-grandmother to legions of great-grandchildren. 

By my calculation, she had 35 living descendants at the time of her death, with another on the way (if I’ve missed any out, I can only apologise; maths was never my strong point).

I wouldn’t presume to give readers a full portrait of her character, let alone an exhaustive account of her very long life. 

Although I have known her for over 40 years, I was able to see more about her since the moment I asked permission to marry her youngest child. To help flesh out that rare one in 131 figure, I have only a handful of photos.

During World War II, for example, she worried that she fell short of the Armed Forces’ minimum weight requirements for recruits. She was so determined to join the Army that she wore a fur coat to her medical. 

This just tipped the scales in favor of her (presumably the medics were blind to her appearance), so she served the war as an ambulance driver in the Army.

In the years I knew her, she was a permanently benevolent presence, rejoicing in the modest pleasures of her faith, the Daily Telegraph crossword, the occasional treat of her strange favourite tipple, gin and ginger ale — and above all, the family she loved and who loved her

After the war, she married a handsome fellow Scot — Mrs U’s father — an officer who had been wounded at Monte Cassino and decorated for his courage. When hostilities ended, one of his jobs was to keep an eye on the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII, during the latter’s visit to Rome.

There’s a wonderful photograph of him dancing with the duke’s wife, Wallis Simpson. So my mother-in-law could truthfully boast, in the words of the famous old song about Edward: ‘I’ve danced with a man / Who’s danced with a girl / Who’s danced with the Prince of Wales.’

Although they didn’t divorce, their marriage wasn’t a long-lasting success. After bearing her fifth daughter in seven years, my mother-in-law decamped from her native Ayrshire to Oxford, where she took a job in the university’s nuclear physics lab and brought up the girls alone. She lost her husband young. I have never seen him.

As for my own memories, how can I describe my mother-in-law to readers who didn’t know her?

Well, physically she bore a truly striking resemblance to the actress Angela Lansbury — famous, among many other roles, for playing Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in the film The Mirror Crack’d. She looked so much like Angela Lansbury that it was easy to believe they were identical twins.

Although she was kind and patient with her daughters’ mistakes, she was also a Roman Catholic devout who was sensitive to foul language. She was, however, very uncomfortable watching sex scenes in television.

When she came to stay with us for the births of our sons, I clearly remember my embarrassment. Each programme that we watched was filled with exaggerations and steamy lovemaking.

Radiant

I can recall thinking she would feel even worse if I changed the channel or turned it off. She would also be worried about me doing this on her behalf. What can a son-in law who is poor do?

In matters of sexual matters, she kept her innocence intact to the end. On one famous occasion, she was baffled by the laughter that greeted her announcement that she was off to the hairdressers for a ‘wash and blow **b’ (naturally, she meant a blow-dry). Fair enough, however, she giggled hysterically when the explanation was given to her.

But my most lasting memory will be of her radiant, electric smile — a smile inherited by all of her daughters — as she presided over gatherings of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In the years I knew her, she was a permanently benevolent presence, rejoicing in the modest pleasures of her faith, the Daily Telegraph crossword, the occasional treat of her strange favourite tipple, gin and ginger ale — and above all, the family she loved and who loved her.

It was a long and happy life. We were lucky, my wife says.

All this brings me to the main point of my week. For I reckon it’s deeply misleading of the BBC and others to reel off the daily Covid death figures, without putting them in the context of how old these people were at the time of their deaths.

My mother-in law died three weeks prior to my last visit. I was only a few days away from her death.

Alarming

Her appearance was atypically thin and tired. She also had only occasional lucidity. Though she was delighted to see her youngest daughter, she also made clear that she’d like to be left to sleep. 

She was clearly aware that her time had come. She’d had enough — and I knew that this was the last time I’d see her alive.

Covid might have reduced the length of her life for a couple days. However, a mild or second fall would have almost certainly had the exact same effect. 

Like so many of the very old, who appear as numbers in the daily Covid death toll, she would have died very soon anyway — with or without Covid. One day, after all, we’re all going to die of something.

Wouldn’t those daily figures be less alarming if the broadcasters made clear that so many of those who die after testing positive have already outlived the average lifespan — in my mother-in-law’s case, by around 17 years?

Meanwhile, shouldn’t we worry more about the Covid-free peripheral casualties of the pandemic, whose time in normal circumstances would not have come? 

I’m thinking of the breast cancer victims in their 40s and 50s, and others condemned to die because measures intended to deal with the pandemic have meant their tumours have gone undiagnosed.

Every death of a loved one is very upsetting. 

And it’s very sad that the joyful celebrations my wife and her sisters were planning for their mother’s centenary next year will now come to nothing.

But let’s face it, the death of a much-loved nonagenarian, blessed with a firm faith in everlasting life after the grave, is not nearly as traumatic as a life cut down in its prime.

My dear mother-in law may have been positive for Covid. However, it seems more appropriate to simply say that she passed away from old age. God bless her and may the light of God’s grace shine on her.