We’re inconsolable. We don’t know how to be consoled. Everyone knows how to deal with grief but how do we face desertion? In a world of men desperately clinging to their families for one more day, one more hour, we’ve been abandoned. It’s as though he’s died but worse. I try to justify it to myself that way. It’s nicer to think that he wants to save us the pain and uncertainty of dying later, even if it’s not true.
I sit, my three girls surrounding me on the sofa, reeling. It only feels like a few breaths ago that I was posting photos of us at family dinners on Facebook and planning a holiday to Rome. That was a different life, but here I am, stuck in this one. This life where I’m now a single mother and a widow? Divorced? Separated? I’m not alone, I have my girls. The girls. How could Sean do this to our daughters? How?
CATHERINE
Devon, United Kingdom
Day 68
Theodore is a deadweight, impossible to wake after the trauma of the last few days. Even though I can feel he is cool, with no fever, and just sleeping, my heart rate spikes until he emits a little whimper. Noise is proof he is alive. I bundle him into blankets. We don’t have time to waste. The Plague could be anywhere in this godforsaken house. I’ve wept through cleaning every surface, every toy, every object I think he might have touched, but what if I’ve missed something?
Anthony died in our bed, at home, as all men do now. Hospitals used to be a place of kindness and care but now they turn men away if their only complaint is the Plague with a resigned shrug of impotence, so we didn’t bother trying. I tried to imagine that it would help him, knowing his family existed in the same house as he did, even as we were separated by walls. His body was carried out in a bag by two officious women in hazmat suits. Who knows how far this virus has spread across my house? I can’t see it, can’t smell it, can’t hear it.
I had nowhere to go until tonight. My maddening, forgetful, beloved godmother, Genevieve, e-mailed me to say, “Still have house in Devon. Sale never completed when it was meant to a few weeks ago. Go stay there! Get out of London xx.” It made me want to weep with gratitude and throttle her. Now? I want to wail. You’re telling me this now? But it’s not too late. It’s not. Theodore hasn’t, by some miracle, shown any symptoms in the days since Anthony died.
The feeling of leaving the house in the early hours with my child in my arms makes me miss Anthony so much that tears spring painfully to my eyes. I’m never far from crying and the sight of streetlamps and Theodore sleeping with a seat belt, a suitcase in the trunk, makes me think of early morning departures to drive to Bordeaux to see Genevieve for a week of sunshine, drinking wine in a garden and time together. We were there having a holiday, as a family, only seven months ago in a different, happier lifetime.
No time to properly lose it though. I could cry all day, every day, and with Theodore in the car I’ll have free rein to weep but not to howl. Genevieve’s farmhouse is in the depths of Suffolk. Miles and miles away from this full city, heaving with sick men and infected women. I start to drive down the eerily quiet motorway, and every mile I put between us and London unwinds my shoulders even as tears stream down my face, soaking the surgical mask I’m wearing. We can ride out this storm in the safety of a deserted cottage in the middle of nowhere. Part of me is kicking myself for not asking Genevieve about it earlier but she had told me she was selling it in September, received an offer in October and, for all I knew, sold it in November with the buyers to arrange a move-in date. I could haunt myself with this missed oasis forever but that way madness lies. I did the best I could with what I knew at the time.
My mind wanders back to the days and weeks before Anthony died. No matter how hard I try, my brain is determined to question every choice I made. Anthony and I shouldn’t have touched as much as we did in the days before we had to say good-bye. I was selfish. A tiny, terrified part of me assumed he would die so, before we knew he was sick, I wanted every minute with him I could get. I didn’t know how to cope with this horror without him. I should have moved him into the shed at the bottom of the garden with a hundred books, a heater, a microwave and cans of soup. I should have left him alone. Maybe that would have saved him but instead I hugged him. I kissed him. I made love to him. I couldn’t let him go.