15th April 2022. So here we are. Four years on. Another year gone, and again, or still, I remember. After all four years is not such a long time.
I remember the conversation with the consultant:"I thought I was ready for this. And I'm not." "No-one ever is."
I remember sympathising with him over how many times he must have to have these conversations. "You have to do it more with some specialisms than with others," he said.
I don't know if I was shifting focus to stop feeling, or if I was trying to remind myself that this was a daily occurrence. Nothing earth-shattering. Except for us. Our world had already collapsed.
I remember the conversation at the bedside that wasn't a conversation. He was already delusional, with only moments of lucidity. He believed he was being filmed, that it was all being live-streamed. At one point he wondered if something had gone wrong, and he was already dead. He asked how the nurses and orderlies making so much noise in the corridor could "carry on, as if nothing was happening here." I remember how angry he was.
At least this time he had something to be angry about – something bigger than the nonsensical voting system on Strictly.
I don't know for sure what he was angry about this time, I didn't ask. It would not have helped. I was there because the Ward Sister, Helen, had called me to come in early, to see if I could calm him down. It would be a first, but I'd give it a go. I talked about banal things. I showed him pictures of the cats…and admitted that, yes, I had changed the bed-linen because I was staying over to look after them. And, no, I wouldn't touch the paperwork that he claimed to have organised. We both knew I would.
Eventually.
Soon.
He might have been angry that they hadn't listened, when they told him he was diabetic, and he knew it was pancreatic cancer, and now it was too late: they couldn't stabilise his blood pressure enough to do the dialysis that would be needed before they could even do the scan that would show whether or not it was operable, which wouldn't make a difference because he was way too weak to be operated upon.
He might have been angry at being in hospital and not at home with Felix & Dodger.
He might have been angry about whatever imaginary scenarios were playing out in his Urea-affected brain.
He might have been angry because he knew he was leaving and the "one day" he had promised me for over thirty years had escaped us both.
He might just have been angry that it was all taking so long.
I don't know. Because I didn't ask. It wouldn't have helped.
What I did know, and what did help, afterwards, was that he was angry enough for both of us, so I got to skip that classic stage of grief. I had seen how little his anger had achieved over many of the later years of his life, and I saw how it achieved nothing at the end of it. I was being shown that my adding to it would serve even less.
I think maybe that is the lesson that I have carried forward. The futility of anger unless it is converted into action.
Anger keeps Greta shouting at people who might listen and do something. Anger got Nelson Mandela (rightly) locked up, long before the world caught up on the rightness of what he was angry about. Anger got Suffragettes chained to railings or locked in prison. Anger got Ghandi marching, and the UK miners picketing. Anger leads to riots and peaceful protests and petitions and all manner of things that ~ slowly ~ eventually ~ do change the world. I am not anti-anger, per se.
But I have no truck with anger for the sake of expressing a point of view. Not any more. I have seen too much of it. All it does is poison everything it touches: the angry person and everyone they share it with.
The thing is: anger is expensive. Energetically. The reaction to circumstance is momentary. It takes energy to sustain. That's a fire that only needs stoking if you're going to put it to use.
Or maybe, I just can't handle the futility of anger because it takes me back to that Sunday morning in 2018.
I remember his fingers drumming on the bed. "It's a military thing. What they play as they're leading the prisoner out to be shot." I don't know if that was accurate. But he was keen on military history. And he was a drummer. He would know.
I had nothing to say.
"We both know this is just about goodbye," he said.
"I love you," I said.
We hadn't yet done the bit about how you don't drag these things out any longer than necessary. At least, I don't think we had. I remember things in detail, in the details, but the order of them is slipping away.
I remember nurses removing the tubes and wheeling him off the ward into a sideroom "to give them some privacy". Death is a private thing in my family. He honoured the tradition of waiting until I'd left the room. Before that though, as they were moving him, he rallied enough to joke "are we there yet?"
"Nearly," I said. Which was true enough.
I don't know what they pumped into him. I had asked that they "make him comfortable". It didn't matter. I told him it was a sedative "so you can finally get some sleep". Sleep? Rest? Can't remember the word, and that might matter. He hadn't slept for days. It was very nearly the last thing I said to him, and I suspect it was a lie.
That too wouldn't matter. His body was already shutting down, one organ at a time. It was like he was going round the rooms, closing the windows, switching off the lights.
This fourth anniversary is the first time I've wondered if he dreamed in that last sleep before he stopped breathing. I wonder what kind of dream it might have been. I hope that there was music, or cats, or me.
The actual last thing I said, while he was still breathing, but no longer conscious, with the radio playing old music in the background – I hope he liked that I insisted they leave the music on – the very last thing I said was: I'm just going to feed the boys, and then I'll be back. I didn't make it that far.
I don't remember if that was the time I got a taxi to pick me up at the entrance to the UEA campus, or whether I went home to mine and got one from there. I do remember the cabbie's radio was playing How am I supposed to live without you…?I
I have the answer to that now, four years on, but it was a wrenching question at the time.
Poppy walked into the room with me. They had closed his eyes. I remembered that no-one had done that for Mam. I held his hand, already shockingly cold. I drank the tea. Poppy said I could stay as long as I wanted, but he was already gone, and I had no idea how one explains such a thing to cats.
I walked back here. I remember I stopped to take a picture of the sky. I called his best friend. She didn't answer: she was sitting by her husband's bedside and he would follow Clive a few weeks later. I called my brother. He didn't answer. He was out of the country. I had no-one else to call.
It would be the last time I slept here for 18 months, the last time I slept in his bed, in his bedroom. The bed has gone. The fitted wardrobes are still there, and his guitar is in the corner, but the room is different now. It's now my bedroom.
A week or so ago, I wrote in my journal that I didn't want to write about this anymore. Clearly I was wrong. Clearly it is still important to me to remember – and to be sure that the world, or someone in it, knows that I remember.
Sometimes.
Once a year, at least.
To be fair, the rest of the time, I remember all the other days. I remember the first times, rather than the last ones. The first time we met: Liza Wolfe Band, Mischief Tavern, 30th May 1982. The first time he came to my flat and we drank tea and talked until one in the morning. The first time we made love: my 20th birthday. The first time he met my parents, stupidly early on a New Year's Day because he didn't know how we used to "do" New Year up north. The first time he met me at the station. The first time we saw Springsteen. The first birthday present, the first music gift, the first time he quoted my Dad.
And I remember everyday things. Sunshine, pub gardens, bands, holidays, beaches, pain, nightclubs, cooking, fights, laughter, walking round to his, him sitting in the car outside mine, books that passed between us, films and tv series we watched, crossword puzzles, rain-storms, even an earthquake that had me calling him at three a.m. to ask was that just what I think it was????
I remember beautiful days…and horrible ones…and all the ones that were just ordinary and lovely because they were ordinary and we were us.
I remember all the times I defended his choosing to live his life the way he did, and my choosing to love him anyway.
And I remember having to pick my way through the mess he left behind – and how that too had its rewards.
I don't "remember" why I "loved" him. Because I know why I love him, then and now and always. It's as obvious and as inexplicable to me now as it was when I was 19 years old. I am lucky to have had him in my life. And I know – and I know that he knows – that loving one person does not preclude you from loving someone else.
I have not spent the last four years wishing he were still here. In fact, much of the world scenario of those years, I am glad he was spared. I miss him. I miss "us". And I am doing what he told me I would do: being ok, living my life the way he wanted me to, by being as happy as I can for as much of the time as I can.
~ / ~
