Liz was doing okay. She still slept in the afternoons and we were able to take walks down The Avenue to Branksome Beach, or down the chines to the other beaches, but she needed to sit regularly. Fortunately, Bournemouth and Poole are very well organised in this regard. There are benches everywhere. And I would take her out in the car. She enjoyed that after being cooped up in the flat day after day after day. What we did pretty much depended on how she was feeling.
Because she was on steroids, her face was becoming moon-shaped and she was putting on weight. She was conscious of her weight, probably more so than most, because she had always been slim, but now she preferred to wear skirts with elasticated waists so she would be comfortable.
No matter how ill she was feeling, she always put on her makeup in the morning, and I knew she did this for me. And I did what I could to make myself attractive to her. It was how we had always been with each other. Despite the years, and her illness, nothing had changed between us. We were just doing what we had always done. We still loved each other, as we always had. But we weren’t making love, and we hadn’t been for some considerable time.
Liz enjoyed the garden, from the balcony. There were twenty two flats in the development and none of the residents seemed to use the garden except that those on the ground floor, who had small square patios to sit out on, would occasionally shift their chairs onto the lawn to take advantage of the sun.
There was always something going on in the garden. One of the ground floor residents had taken it upon herself to put a free-standing bird-feeder on the lawn and she stocked it daily with peanuts and bread crumbs, and Liz would sit in her chair with her feet up and enjoy watching the squirrels chasing the birds away, and the seagulls chasing the squirrels away. And once in a while a fox would put in an appearance, although they mostly came out at night. The building had motion-sensing lights on each corner and occasionally the ones on our corner would come on waking me up. When I got up to see what it was, it was always a fox. And occasionally we would hear the screams of something a fox had caught and was about to eat. We would lie in bed hoping that whatever it had caught would die quickly.
Liz had an appointment with the head of Oncology at the hospital every three months, and every six months he would arrange an MRI for her. He never told us what the MRI scans had told him, which was fine with me, because I didn’t want to know. I don’t think Liz wanted to know either. We felt that, in this regard, no news was good news.
Extract from my book WILL YOU TELL HER, OR SHALL I? A true story. My story. The story of how I lived with the ten-year terminal illness of my wife. Available on www.booksthepublishersmissed.com
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