Quite what
happened is a blur. From psyching myself up to accepting that it was finally
over and I was losing her, I found myself pushing Liz through Poole Park in one
of the hospice’s wheelchairs on a mild day in March two months later. She had
been up and down for a month, mostly down, and then they had got her medication
right. She still couldn’t walk, and she slept a great deal, but the rest of the
time she was sitting up in bed full of the joys of spring. To say it was a
bewildering time for me would be putting it mildly.
I lost count of
the number of women who died in that ward in the space of those two months; the
faces in the beds were changing all the time. Some seemed to be around a few
days, but one woman who was brought in one
morning and given the bed next to Liz’s, sat up in bed knitting for most of the
day, and died that night. There seemed to be a constant procession of
friends, relatives and loved ones. It was a bewildering array of changing
faces.
While the faces
in the other beds were changing, Liz – who was enormously popular with the
staff because she was so cheerful and uncomplaining - had become something of a
fixture, and I had settled into a routine of driving to the hospice at around
ten thirty every morning, staying until they brought her lunch, then returning
in the evening after I had eaten and staying until about nine.
Nothing had
changed with respect to her speech, but I didn’t care. It was enough that I
still had her.
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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Maximillian19
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