I had about twenty minutes to try and work out what to pack
for Liz. I didn’t have a clue. It wasn’t as if she was just going away for the
weekend. That would have been easy. She might not be coming back. Working
on the principle I should take enough to get her through tomorrow, assuming
that for her there would be a tomorrow, I packed a nightdress, underwear, her
toilet kit and her brush and comb. And I packed her lipstick. She had never
liked to be seen in public without lipstick.
So she would be ready when the ambulance arrived, I helped
her out of bed and into her dressing gown. Then I sat her down on the bed and
put her slippers on.
She looked round the room, taking in the new ceiling, the
sliding doors of the new wardrobe unit, the new wallpaper, the new carpet, the
new curtains and the heavy-weight black-out blinds I had had fitted to help
keep the traffic noise down at night. She took it all in, as if committing it
to memory.
The ambulance arrived just before four thirty. “Top floor,”
I said, buzzing them in. I stood at the door and waited for them to come up the
stairs. I heard one of them say he was glad they didn’t have to carry someone
up the stairs. “She’s in here,” I said, leading them into the bedroom.
When they saw the condition Liz was in they realised she
wouldn’t be able to walk down the stairs, so one of them went back for a
wheelchair.
“I’ll come in the ambulance with you,” I told her. “Someone
can run me home later.”
When they wheeled Liz out of the bedroom, she indicated with
movements of her hands that she wanted to be wheeled round the flat. She took a
long look at each room, and finally nodded. She was ready.
I found myself wishing I had cleaned up the mess in the
hall. But I wasn’t to know this was going to happen. No sense beating myself up
about it.
It was a struggle getting her down the stairs. Not only
because of the combined weight of her and the wheelchair, but also because of
the narrowness of the staircases.
A couple of people from flats in the block walked in through
the front garden gate as we walked to the ambulance. They had plastic food bags
in their hands from the supermarket across the road. They stopped to let us
pass and wished us luck. They told me if I needed anything when I got back, to
let them know. They were being kind, but it was entirely possible that what I
would need when I got back was something they were not qualified to give, and
that was guidance on how I was going to manage without Liz. It all depended on
what happened within the next few hours.
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
Twitter: Maximillian19
FB: facebook.com/Booksthepublishersmissedcom
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