Countdown To Zero. in And The Rest.

Six months before, we had no idea. No idea that cancer was already growing in your brain, stealing you. In Wetherspoons with my boyfriend, getting happily half-drunk on rose wine at midday, midweek, waiting for our food. Mum calls, Dad’s in hospital, in London, can you come? Like it’s a question, like I would ever say anything else. We leave the waiter to deliver our food to an empty table, we’re gone.

The birdlike doctor, so petite, so fragile, how someone so small can destroy our world. We might have a year, she says, and I don’t even cry because I’m just staring through her, my heart galloping but I’m still, frozen, the earth has stopped spinning. It doesn’t make sense that there will ever be a world without you, she’s lying.

A week before, a young man calls the work phone and asks for me by name. My boss knows, she knows you’re dying at home, she knows it’s hours and minutes now, not weeks. She thinks it’s my boyfriend on the line, calling to tell me that my dad has died and I wasn’t there. I read her thoughts in her eyes as she calls me to the phone, I’m holding my breath, I’ve been waiting for the call, I knew it would happen but no, please no, not here, not now, I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready, I can’t hear it, please just please don’t make me hear it.

It’s just one of our staff, calling in sick. I can’t even speak, I can’t move, I just drop the phone, and Vince is putting me in a chair and making me breathe into a paper bag and I’m shot to pieces, falling apart.

The day before, I’m working. I’m upstairs in the office, doing a training audit, wearing my smart black suit jacket and without any warning I’m crying, uncontrollably sobbing, and I just know I can’t be there any more. I go home and lie on the sofa next to your bed, you haven’t been fully awake for days now but I talk to you anyway, telling you about my day, just being with you. You have hardly moved in weeks, paralysed by pain and the drugs you’ve been filled with to blot out the worst of it, but suddenly you raise your arms a few inches for a cuddle. How much effort that movement cost you, it hurts. I hold you like I will never let go. Forever I’ll be grateful to whatever sixth sense it was that made me leave work early that day, because that was probably the last time I held you and you were aware of it. Because the next day you died.

Mum wakes me in the night, red-eyed in her dressing gown; we don’t need words. I’m there, downstairs with you where I need to be. I lie my head on your shoulder and you’re so hot, your body burning in its silent transition from here to nowhere. I burrow my face into your shoulder so my head is next to yours, I hope in some way that you can hear my thoughts, because they’re all for you. I’m thinking only of the good times, the times we were together, the times we shared as a family, the only times now that we will ever be complete will be in memories. I hope to someone I don’t believe in that you see them, I hope you can take them with you.

You take the centre of us with you. I’ve never known anything like the silence that invades our house once you are gone. The doctor comes, he signs the death certificate, he undoes all the drips and pumps that couldn’t keep you alive. He says you fought so hard and I cry because I’m proud of you, and because I know it’s true, you would never have left us if you didn’t have to.

I had to be there, I will never regret that I was. I hope you knew I was beside you, I could never have been anywhere else.

Last updated October 24, 2014