But even this early in my fledgling grief, I suspect that’s probably not true. I’m going to disintegrate.
‘I’ll give you time with Cam alone,’ Hugh says behind me.
I don’t turn around. ‘Stay,’ I say in a voice I barely recognise. I don’t like being alone with Cam now. But I can’t leave him. I need to watch over him until they take him from here. From me.
Hugh doesn’t speak unless spoken to, but his strong presence in the room is such a comfort. I say something about needing to start calling people and he tells me we’ll get to that soon, it’s okay just to sit here with Cam for a while.
I’m instantly terrified to go home to an empty house. I don’t know what to do about anything. ‘Do I call in and wake Charlie up or tell him tomorrow?’
‘Let him sleep. Look after yourself tonight and get your bearings.’
My bearings? There can be no bearings in a life without my husband.
Charlie can have twelve more hours until his world is shattered. Twelve hours until his childhood innocence is ripped to pieces. Of course I’ve prepared him for this moment, as much as you can prepare a three-year-old, but I could never quite imagine us actually being here. There’s no rule book, and I desperately need one.
Grief is strange, when it happens in advance. Since Cam’s diagnosis two years ago, I’ve been processing this loss every day. I thought the time we had to accept it would make it easier. Sudden death must be so blindsiding in comparison. But now I’m here, I’m blindsided anyway, because I never truly believed this would unfold. Never stopped hoping for a miracle, even though we were so obviously not going to get one.
Hugh passes me a glass of water. He tells me grief can be dehydrating.
I can’t work out how he knows so much, but I do as he says and take the glass.
It strikes me that Cam will never need water again. He’ll never need pyjamas or sheets. Never a bed or a toothbrush or shaving gear. He’ll never drive. Never see the stars. Never anything. He is finished. Done. Gone. Full stop.
‘He’s never coming back,’ I whisper, finally appreciating what grief really is. This permanent ending of a person. The end of their story. The complete lack of their existence.
I want Hugh to argue with me. Tell me I’m wrong. That I’m exaggerating. That this isn’t as bad as I think.
Instead, he says, ‘I know, Kate. I’m sorry.’ And it feels like I could lose consciousness from the pain. As if everything that makes up my biology is weakening. As if I could die, too.
There’s a knock at the door and the nurse introduces me to the man who will take Cam’s body from here. I can see a gurney with sheets on it parked in the corridor outside the room. I’ve been here before when a body has been wheeled out – it’s a reasonably common occurrence in a place like this, but they always shut the emergency doors to the dining room, so residents won’t see anything. I hear the doors being shut now. For us.
I’m encouraged to say my final goodbyes. I look at Hugh, scared, and shake my head.
‘Would you like some privacy?’
‘No.’
‘Have you said everything?’
Said everything? We’ve lost thousands of conversations. Millions of words.
‘We might go, first,’ he explains to the undertaker and the nurse. He picks up my handbag from the floor and helps me with my coat. I stand at Cam’s side for another couple of seconds, put my hand on his arm, think one final goodbye, and then wrench myself away.
We walk into the corridor, and my ninety-year-old bestie, Barrie, stands in his doorway in pyjamas and a dressing gown, having overheard the nursing staff. We share a momentary glance, during which he communicates his empathy at my loss, and I communicate my acknowledgement of this awful struggle.
Hugh deals with the code at the exit. It’s all locked down in here because the residents wander, and I’m struck by the fact that Cam won’t do that, ever again. Won’t wander into the world. Or feel the crispness of the night air, which makes me shiver as it hits my skin. How does my body even know to continue on? To respond to the cold. To feel. To be?
Hugh’s car is parked in a visitor’s spot right near the door. The drive home passes in a blur. He asks me for the keys, unlocks the front door and pushes it open for me.
I don’t want to walk over the threshold. Cam carried me over it when we first moved in, even though we’d lived in various places before that. Such an old-fashioned, romantic moment.
‘Kate?’ Hugh says. ‘Let’s go inside where it’s warm.’
It’s not warm, though. I’m hardly ever home. Mum picks up Charlie from school each day and I visit Cam and we have dinner at Mum’s place. I really only come here to shower and sleep. I’ve even moved Knightley to Grace’s temporarily, because I was worried the poor dog was being neglected.
Hugh turns lamps on and makes me sit on the lounge and puts a blanket over me while he lights the fire. He brings me another glass of water, and a glass of wine, and says to keep my fluids up, even if I can’t control anything else.
‘Will I call your mum?’ he asks. ‘And Grace?’
I nod.
‘What about Cam’s parents?’
‘Yes, I’ll have to . . . What time is it in the UK?’ They’re not well themselves, and they’re going to be devastated.
Hugh wants to lift all these burdens but can’t. He should be out of his comfort zone but isn’t. After he’s coached me through making the few essential calls, he tells me there’s nothing more I need to do tonight. He sits across from me beside the fire. There’s total silence, except the crackling of the wood in the flames and the sound of my heart breaking.
‘Is there something wrong with me that I’m not crying?’ I ask after a while. I feel sick about it. I have a physical ache in my chest, as if my heart is clinically breaking. That’s an actual thing that I read about. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Broken heart syndrome. It happens to a lot of widows.
Widows. Old women in black, wailing. Grey-haired ladies on their own at the nursing home. Women from the two world wars. Not me. Not at thirty-eight. Not with a three-year-old.
‘Why can’t I cry?’ I ask again. Maybe if I did, the pain in my chest would ease.
‘The times I’m saddest,’ Hugh says, ‘it’s so deep it doesn’t come to the surface at all. When I—’ He falters.
‘When you what?’
He looks at me and shakes his head. ‘I’ll tell you another time,’ he says, and he glances at his watch.
The thought of him wanting to leave horrifies me. He stands up and I reach out and grab both his hands.
‘Please stay!’ I’m aware that I’m begging, but this feels like an emergency. It is one.
He squeezes my hands and lets them go. ‘I’m just getting you some paracetamol,’ he explains. ‘For the broken heart.’
Oh, yes. Why didn’t I think of that? If he chooses the rapid ones, this should all be over in about twenty minutes.
‘Grief is a physical thing as well,’ he says from the kitchen. ‘Painkillers can help with the impact on your body.’
Of all the people I could have asked to sit with me during this horrible, defining experience, I seem to have chosen the Indiana Jones of grief. I take the tablets. Wash them down with a gulp of wine.