Hearing these words, I realise how utterly unfair this whole situation really is. One of these things alone would be almost too much to bear. But both? Now I’m pitying myself and that’s something I promised I would never do.
‘What am I going to do?’ I whisper desperately.
‘I’m going to call Grace . . .’ he says.
‘No, please don’t!’ I say quickly. ‘You heard her on the treadmill oversharing about her ovaries. This would be triggering for her. I’ll need to tell her gently.’
‘Your mum?’
‘I don’t have the strength—’
‘I’d ask Sophie,’ he says, ‘but Kate, I just don’t think she’s up to this. I don’t think it’s fair.’
He’s right. Let’s not devastate the kid. She’s sunshine, and don’t we all need that?
‘Cam isn’t allowed to drive, even if he hadn’t written off his car,’ I explain. ‘Just till they get the full picture from the diagnosis. Although after our accident, I don’t think—’
It’s déjà vu. The whole idea of needing more medical help so soon after the last lot.
The pain is doing what I’d wanted it to. Ratcheting up, quickly. I invite myself into Hugh’s office for somewhere to sit down for a minute, where I won’t traumatise Sophie, and I bend double.
‘Then I’m going to drive you to the hospital, and you’re going to see a doctor, who can tell you for sure what is happening and what to do next. Then I’ll take you home. And if it’s as you fear, you will tell Cam in the kindest, gentlest possible way that this baby is gone. You will cry. He will cry. It will be as bad as you’re imagining, or even worse. But you’ll hold each other and Charlie and get through this.’
I’m silent. And stunned.
‘You’ll take as much or as little time off work as you need. You’ll go back to your GP and see a psychologist. You’ll be a mum and a wife and you’ll do things a mum and wife should never have to do and, even when you feel like you can’t go on like this any more, you will, Kate. You won’t feel strong, and you’ll mess it up sometimes, but you’ll do this anyway, because you have no choice. Okay? No choice.’
This is the opposite of a pep talk. It’s Hugh outlining in excruciating detail just how bad things are going to get. But somehow it’s exactly the leadership I need in this moment. I’m too gobsmacked by the inherent sense in what he’s saying to even speak.
We collect our things and walk out to the car park and he drives me to the emergency ward where I stand at the reception desk, contemplating the tragic fact that my Medicare card is supposed to have four names on it in the future, and will only have two.
The woman on the admissions desk confirms my details and takes me through to triage. I’m ushered into a private cubicle and Hugh waits outside, while there’s an empty chair beside me, where my husband should be.
I lie on the bed and a doctor checks for a heartbeat she can’t find and beams on a screen a blurry picture of how empty I am. Did this little soul take one look at the carnage it was entering into and beat a retreat? And then I succumb to a desperate grief I wish wasn’t so familiar.
Eventually, Hugh walks me back to his car, opens the door for me and passes me the seatbelt and I wonder what the point is. I envisage him crashing the car and sending me flying through the windscreen. And that is that.
But he doesn’t crash it. He carefully drives me home, pulls up in my driveway and before I get out of his car, he tells me I can do this, as hard as it is.
And, as it turns out, I don’t have to. Because as Hugh drives away and Cam opens the front door, he takes one look at my face, draws me into his arms and sobs.
17
Cam and I spend the entire weekend, more or less, in bed. Charlie scrambles in and out when he’s not banging Duplo bricks on our wooden floorboards, or climbing all over us, squashing us together as if he knows something’s wrong and is trying to glue his family back together.
Knightley seems to possess a sixth sense about our pain. He won’t leave my side, curled in a fluffy black ball on our bed beside me. And time passes in a haze of flannelette PJs and cotton sheets, coffee and binges of Black Books and Castle while autumn sunlight plays across the sunshine-yellow walls in the bedroom, necklaces and earrings glittering on my grandmother’s mahogany antique dresser.
It’s a weekend of ‘just us’ as a family, which we’ll always remember. At least, I will.
Late on Sunday morning, with Charlie having a nap and my fingers still sticky from Cam’s signature breakfast in bed of pancakes and maple syrup, I steal a glance at him and wonder when the tendrils of dementia will first seep into the kitchen. How many more Sunday breakfasts will he make me? Will the tradition just drop off his radar one weekend, and I’ll find myself hungry at midday, tipping dry cereal into a bowl?
He’s still in such early stages of the disease, half the time we can almost pretend it isn’t happening. We can make excuses when he slips up and repeats himself or forgets why he came into the room. I can pretend he’s not getting enough sleep, or he’s stressed at work, and that’s why his mind is fragmented. If I try really hard, I can even indulge a fantasy that we’re going to grow old together. Or even properly middle-aged.
‘Katie, I need you to know how much I love you, even when I can’t express it,’ he says as we lie in bed, facing each other, close enough for me to study every fleck in his blue eyes. Every freckle. Every pore. My fingers travel up the tapered sides of his dark blond hair into that mess of curls on top, while he traces my face and neck and collar bone. Familiar choreography. We’re lost in each other, the way we used to be at nineteen when we were first exploring. But now there’s a different urgency. We’re imprinting every contour, every line, every blemish deep into our collective consciousness.
‘Remember this moment,’ he urges me. ‘Burn this into your brain, that I adore you. Have always adored you.’ His eyes fill with tears.
‘Cam, I don’t think you’re going to forget me overnight.’ At least, I hope he isn’t. Surely it’s going to be more gradual than that?
‘Never doubt it,’ he continues. ‘Never doubt us. I will never give up on you, Kate. I will always find a way to reach you. I want to remember you until the very end.’
We both know that’s not how this is going to play out.
I tortured myself with Dr Google one afternoon last week while Cam was at a seminar. I’d gone down a rabbit hole in a younger-onset dementia carers’ forum and asked for frank advice on what a newbie should expect.
He’ll forget all the mundane things first. Make mistakes. Get confused.
He’ll start to forget what you did that day, and then that hour, and then that minute.
He’ll forget people he doesn’t see much, and then the ones he does.
He’ll forget your child.
He’ll forget you.
He’ll forget who he is and how to eat and take care of himself.
One day, he’ll forget how to breathe . . .
It was a crash course that taught me this determined, steamroller of a disease is going to shut Cam down, one function at a time, like someone’s pulling the switches from some random control board, turning off the lights one by one until it’s pitch dark and there’s nothing left any more.