My husband's last wish was to be an organ donor. On the night he died his doctor came running down a corridor after me with both hands behind his back, and told me my husband had given him something three weeks earlier that I was not allowed to see while he was alive.
My husband's last wish was to be an organ donor. On the night he died his doctor came running down a corridor after me with both hands behind his back, and told me my husband had given him something three weeks earlier that I was not allowed to see while he was alive.
PART 1
Cassian and I had been married three years when I finally got pregnant.
We had wanted it for a long time and at some point we had stopped saying so out loud, the way you do, because saying it out loud every month becomes its own injury.
Six months later he was diagnosed.
I am not going to name it. It does not matter for anything in this account and my daughter is going to read this one day.
They told us three months at the outside. We were in a corridor at Thornfield General and neither of us said anything for a while, and I remember that a man went past us with a floor polisher.
He was not going to be there when she was born. We both understood that standing in that corridor, before either of us said a word about it.
That evening he sat next to me on the porch with one hand flat on my stomach.
He said: if anything's still any use when it happens, I want it donated.
I asked him not to talk about dying while she was kicking.
And he said: that's exactly why I have to.
Then he looked down at my belly and said the sentence I have since repeated at two funerals and one very bad night.
If I can't watch her grow up, maybe I can give somebody else more time to watch theirs.
I want to record what his mother did the first time he said that out loud at a dinner table, because it comes back.
Rosamund put her fork down and said she thought it was morbid, and that people ought to be left in one piece, and that she was not going to discuss it in front of food.
He said it again anyway. Twice more, over the following weeks, at that same table, in front of her.
I did not understand at the time why he kept raising it. I thought he was being stubborn with his mother, which he had been for forty years about other things.
He went downhill much faster than anybody had told us to expect.
By my eighth month I was doing his buttons for him and pretending not to notice when he had to stop halfway to the bathroom to get his breath.
And about three weeks before the end, he started asking to see Dr Kaine alone.
I would come back from the machine at the end of the corridor with two teas and Idris Kaine would be coming out of the room, and my husband would be looking at the window.
Every single time I asked what it had been about, he took my hand and squeezed it and said the same thing.
There's something I need to arrange. Trust me.
That was not him.
Nine years and that man never kept anything from me. He told me things he should not have told me. He once confessed to a scratch on a rental car eleven months after we had returned it and nobody had ever mentioned it.
Three weeks of closed doors and trust me, at the end of his life, while I was eight months pregnant.
I let him have it.
I have thought about that decision every day since and I still do not know what else there was to do.
He died at four in the afternoon with my hand around his.
The donation consent has to be signed inside a window. There is no version of waiting until you are ready, and Delyth Orr, the coordinator, was as kind about that as a person can be about a thing that cannot be moved.
So I signed it that evening in the family room down the hall.
Four pages. I got to the third one.
There were fourteen people in that room. Two other families waiting on other patients. A volunteer with a tea trolley. A man asleep in the corner under a coat.
Rosamund had been out in the corridor and I did not see her come in.
She crossed that room and took hold of my right wrist — the one with the pen in it — and lifted it off the paper, and she held on to it.
Nobody moved. The volunteer stopped with a cup halfway to a saucer.
And she said it at full volume, so that every single person in that family room heard her:
You don't get to give away my son. You've had him three years.
Then she leaned down closer to me, with her hand still around my wrist, and said:
I carried him nine months. Give it here. Well?
I was thirty-six weeks pregnant. I was sitting down. My husband had been dead for three hours and eleven minutes.
I did not answer her.
PART 2
I want to be honest that this was not strength.
There was nothing in my mouth. I sat in a plastic chair with a dead man's paperwork on my lap and a pen in a hand somebody else was holding, and I looked up at her, and I could not produce one word.
What ended it was a nurse in the doorway saying something completely boring about needing the room, in the flattest voice in the world.
Rosamund let go and stepped back and straightened her coat and said, to nobody, that she would be in the car.
I finished signing at about six. My hands were shaking so badly that Delyth had to witness the last page twice.
At half past seven I was walking out through the main doors of Thornfield General with a plastic bag containing his watch, his glasses and a phone charger, and Idris Kaine came down that corridor after me almost at a run.
He was grey in the face. He had both hands behind his back.
He said: wait. Please wait.
I have watched that man deliver bad news for eleven weeks. He is fifty-four, he has been a consultant for nineteen years and he is extremely good at it, and he has a particular voice he uses.
He was not using it. He could not look at me.
He said: Cassian gave me this three weeks ago. He was very clear about one thing. You were not to see it while he was alive.
Then he brought it out from behind his back.
It was a document wallet. The cheap kind, plastic, with a press stud, the sort you buy in a pack of five, and it had a coffee ring on the front corner.
That is what I looked at first. Not the thickness of it. A brown ring on the front of a plastic wallet, which meant that at some point my husband had put a cup down on the thing he was writing about dying in, on a table, in a room, on an ordinary morning.
It was about an inch and a half thick.
I said: what is it.
And Idris Kaine — who had known for three weeks, who had sat in that room with my husband four separate times, who had watched me come back down that corridor with two teas — said:
I think you should be sitting down and I think you should not be alone.
He took me back inside. He put me in a small room off the corridor that I had not known was there, the kind with two soft chairs and a box of tissues and a lamp instead of the overhead light, and he asked whether I wanted him to stay.
I said yes. I have thought about that since. A woman I had known for eleven weeks by her clinical role, and I said yes, because there was nobody else in that building and my mother was four hours away and I did not want to open it on my own.
He sat in the other chair for two hours and eleven minutes and did not speak unless I spoke to him first.
He asked, once, whether I wanted a glass of water, and I said no, and he got me one anyway and put it on the floor beside the chair where I would not have to acknowledge it.
I have thought about that glass of water more than I have thought about most things people have said to me since.
I opened it at about ten past eight.
The first page was in my husband's handwriting and it was not a letter.
It was a date. Fourteen months before he died.
PART 3
Cassian was diagnosed fourteen months before he died.
Not six. Fourteen.
Which is three months before I got pregnant.
I sat in that small room and read that date about nine times, and then I said it out loud to Idris Kaine, in the form of a question, and he said yes.
I said: he knew before she existed.
And he said yes.
The chronology is on the second page, in his handwriting, laid out the way that man laid out everything, because he was a project manager for eleven years and he could not help it.
Diagnosis in the September. The appointments. The second opinion in the November, four hours away, that he told me was a work thing and that I have found the fuel receipt for.
And then, in the January, one line that I had to put the page down for.
A told me she'd stopped hoping. Decided.
I had said that to him in the kitchen on the fourth of January.
I have gone looking for that evening and I can produce almost nothing. There is a photograph on my phone from the fifth of a cat on a wall. That is the closest thing I have to evidence that the week existed.
Whereas he had it dated, in a chronology, in a document wallet, eleven months later, in four words that he underlined nothing of.
That is the asymmetry that I have not got over. For me it was a Tuesday. For him it was the day the decision got made, and he had been standing three feet away holding a plate. I remember saying it. It was not a big conversation and I was not crying — I said it while I was loading the dishwasher, that I thought I had stopped hoping about it, and that it was probably a relief.
And my husband, who had been carrying a terminal diagnosis for four months, stood in that kitchen and heard his wife say she had stopped hoping for a baby.
Decided.
I got pregnant in the March.
There is one more line in the chronology between January and March and it is seven words and I have looked at it more than at anything else in that wallet.
Feb 2 — did not say anything again.
That is all. No explanation, no column entry, no reasoning attached to it.
Somewhere on the second of February my husband opened his mouth to tell me and closed it, and then he went and wrote down that he had done that.
I do not know what room we were in. I do not know what I was doing. I have gone through my own photographs from that week and there is nothing.
That is the entry that made me put my hand over my mouth in a hospital side room at eight in the evening — not the diagnosis date, and not the kitchen.
Seven words about a moment in my own life that I have absolutely no memory of.
He knew what he was doing. He knew for the entire pregnancy and for four months before it. He sat on a porch at six months and told me he wanted to be a donor and did his surprised face at the diagnosis and held my hand at appointments he had already had.
Everybody who has heard this story so far has said the same thing to me at this point, and I have said it myself, out loud, in that little room, at about half past eight at night.
He decided for me.
He made a decision about my body and my life and the next thirty years of it, on his own, in a kitchen, in January, while I loaded a dishwasher.
I have not softened that and I am not going to. It is true and it is the worst thing anybody has ever done to me and it was done by the person who loved me most.
But it is not the whole of it, and the rest of it is in that wallet, and it is the reason Idris Kaine could not look at me in a corridor.
PART 4
The document wallet is an inch and a half thick and most of it is one thing.
Two columns.
He started it in the January — the same month as the kitchen — and the last entry is dated eleven days before he died.
On the left: reasons to tell her.
On the right: reasons not to.
Eleven months of it. Sometimes three entries in a week, sometimes nothing for a month, in four different pens.
I am not going to reproduce the columns. They are mine and I have read them perhaps forty times and there are entries in there that I will take to my own grave.
I will give you the shape.
The left column is longer. Considerably longer, and it gets longer over time, and by about July it is winning by a distance.
She would want to know. She will find this out afterwards and it will be worse. It is her body and her decision and I am not entitled to it. I am doing this because I am frightened and not because it is right.
That last one is in there four separate times, in four different months, in his handwriting, underlined twice on the third.
And the right column has almost nothing in it.
Six entries in eleven months, against forty-one on the left. I counted both, twice, in that room, because counting was the only thing I could do with my hands.
Two of the six are about the pregnancy in a medical sense and I have shown those to my obstetrician and she said he was right about them, which I did not want to hear.
One is about his mother. One is two words long and I do not understand it and I never will.
One is dated the second of February and says only: couldn't.
And one is dated the eleventh of April and it is four lines long, and it is the reason he did what he did.
But one of them is dated the eleventh of April and it is four lines long, and it is the reason he did what he did.
On the eleventh of April we drove back from her twelve-week scan.
I remember that drive. I remember the road — Ferrier Road, the long straight bit past the reservoir — and I remember that we did not have the radio on.
And I said something in that car.
He wrote it down. Verbatim, in quotation marks, that same evening, because he knew immediately what he had just been handed.
I am not going to put my own sentence in this account. It is eleven words long and it is about what I would have done if I had known, and I did not know I was answering anything, and I meant it completely.
I read it in that little room eleven months ago and I recognised it instantly. I have never once been able to argue that I did not say it.
That is what he was doing for eleven months.
He was not managing me and he was not protecting me from the truth in the way people mean when they say that.
He had asked me the question by accident on a road on the eleventh of April, and I had answered it without knowing, and he spent the rest of his life trying to work out whether an accidental answer counts.
The last entry, eleven days before he died, is one line and it is the only thing in either column that is addressed to me.
I still don't know if I got this right. That's why you're reading it.
The eleventh of April entry is not the last thing in that wallet. Behind it, in a separate sleeve, there is a single index card with four names on it in his handwriting.
Four women. My oldest friend. My cousin. A neighbour two doors down. And Delyth Orr, the transplant coordinator, who he had met twice.
Above them he had written: people who will come if she calls at 3am.
He had made a list. He had thought about the three in the morning that he was not going to be there for, and he had written down four names, and he had never mentioned it.
Three of those four women have been in my house at three in the morning since. One of them twice.
Eleven days before the end he had also asked me, out of nowhere, whether I still had my grandmother's ring. I said yes, in the box, why. And he said no reason, he'd just been thinking about it.
I have not found out what that one was about and I have stopped looking.
I telephoned Idris Kaine in the spring, about six months after, and asked him one question I had not been able to ask in the room.
I asked whether Cassian had ever said out loud why he was giving the wallet to a doctor instead of leaving it in a drawer at home.
And he said yes, and that it was the only time in four appointments that my husband had cried.
Cassian told him: if I leave it in the house she finds it on her own, at two in the morning, thirty-eight weeks pregnant, and there is nobody there.
He said: I want somebody to hand it to her, and I want them to have read it, and I want them to sit down.
That is why Idris Kaine could not look at me in that corridor. He was not carrying a secret for three weeks.
He was carrying an instruction.
PART 5
Now the donation.
Idris Kaine told me the rest of it in that small room at about half past nine, and it is the part that took me the longest to be able to say without stopping.
Cassian knew from the second week that almost nothing was going to be usable.
The disease he had rules out most of it, and he was told that plainly and early, and he understood it completely.
He kept saying it anyway.
On the porch with his hand on my stomach. At a dinner table, three times, in front of his mother, until she put her fork down and said she would not discuss it in front of food.
He kept saying it because it was the only sentence about his own death that did not make me cry.
Idris Kaine worked that out before I did. He said it in the little room, carefully, at about a quarter to ten, and he said it as a question rather than a statement, which I have since understood was a professional kindness.
He said: did he talk about anything else to do with dying, in front of you?
I sat there and went through six months and the answer is no.
Not the house. Not the accounts. Not the funeral, which his mother arranged and which I signed off on in eleven minutes because I had never been consulted about one line of it.
Nothing.
Six months of a man who project-managed everything, and the only aspect of his own death he ever raised with his wife was one he already knew was impossible.
He tried the other sentences. He tried them in the first month — the practical ones, the ones about the house and the accounts and what I would need. I cried at all of them, every time, and he stopped.
And then he found one that I could sit still for.
Maybe I can give somebody else more time to watch theirs.
I did not cry at that one. I could hold his hand through that one. I could even nod.
So he used it for six months, at every table and on every porch, and it was not a wish. It was a place we could stand together and talk about him dying without me falling apart, and he built it on purpose, and it worked, and I never once suspected.
I asked him one question before I opened it and I want it in here because his answer is the reason I got through that night.
I said: did you tell him not to do this?
And he said yes. Twice.
He said he had told Cassian in the second appointment that in his experience this goes badly, that people find out anyway and find out worse, and that he had said it plainly.
I asked him what my husband had said back.
He said: he asked me whether I'd read the file first. And I said no. And he said, would you read it and then tell me again.
Idris Kaine read the two columns three weeks before my husband died, in that room, while I was down the corridor buying two teas from a machine.
And he did not tell him again.
The three weeks of closed doors were not about arranging the donation.
They were him asking Idris Kaine, over four appointments, whether there was anything left that could actually be given. Anything at all.
The answer, in the end, was corneas.
That is what was signed for on those four pages while a woman held my wrist in a family room. That is the whole of it, and it is not nothing, and two people can see because of it, and I have a card in a drawer.
He asked those questions alone so that nobody would ever have to say that answer to me in a corridor.
There is a note in the wallet about that too, from the second week, four words long and not in either column.
Don't let them tell her.
I have shown that line to two people and both of them assumed it referred to the diagnosis dates.
It doesn't. It is dated in the wrong month for that and it sits on a page with three appointment times on it.
He meant: don't let anybody sit my wife down and explain to her that the one thing she thinks is going to come out of this is not going to happen.
He was arranging it, exactly as he said. He was arranging for the sentence he had given me to survive him.
I have not forgiven him.
That is the honest position at eleven months and I have stopped being embarrassed about it. I am not going to arrive at a Sunday where the columns make it all right. He took eleven months of my life and he took them for reasons he himself wrote down as insufficient, four times, underlined.
And I am not sorry she exists. Both of those are true and they are going to be true at the same time for the rest of my life, and a woman in Coldbrook has told me that this is not a contradiction I have to resolve, it is just the shape of it now.
Rosamund and I do not speak.
She sent flowers to the funeral and did not come to the burial. She has seen Elke twice.
I have thought a great deal about the family room, and where I have landed is this: she said the truest thing anybody said out loud that entire day.
She had carried him nine months and I had had him three years, and she stood in a room full of strangers and said so, because there was nowhere else in that hospital for it to go.
She just said it to a thirty-six-week pregnant woman with his paperwork on her lap, and she picked the day, and that is not something I am able to hold.
Elke is nine months old. She has his hands and she has an opinion about carrots.
She was born eleven days after he died. I want to put that down because people always assume there was more time in it than there was, and there was not — I signed those forms at thirty-six weeks and she came at thirty-seven and a half.
Delyth Orr was in the room. Not professionally. Because she was one of the four names on an index card and my friend rang her at half past one in the morning.
I did not know about the card at that point. I found it three weeks later.
I have thought about what that woman must have felt, driving to a hospital at two in the morning for a stranger she had met twice, having read a man's handwriting on an index card three weeks earlier and never having said a word about it to anybody.
She still comes on Thursdays.
There is one more thing from those three weeks and I only understood it in the little room.
The wallet is on the top shelf of the wardrobe in a box with his watch and his glasses. She will get it at eighteen and not before, and I have written her one page to put in with it, and my only instruction to her is that she is to read the columns before she reads the last line.
Because everybody reads the last line first and it is the wrong way round.
I still don't know if I got this right. That's why you're reading it.
I have decided what I think that sentence is, and I could be wrong, and I have another seventeen years to change my mind.
It is not an apology and it is not a defence.
It is a man handing his daughter eleven months of his own working, in his own hand, in two columns, so that when she is old enough to judge him she will have to do it properly.
He did not ask her to forgive him.
He gave her the file.
I have one more thing and then I am finished.
For about four months I thought the worst part was January — the kitchen, the dishwasher, me saying I had stopped hoping, him standing there four months into it.
It isn't.
The worst part is the eleventh of April, on Ferrier Road, past the reservoir, with the radio off and a scan photograph in my bag.
Because in January he was frightened and silent and that is a thing a person does.
On the eleventh of April I answered his question. Out loud, in eleven words, in a car, without knowing, and he wrote it down that same night because he understood exactly what had just happened.
And every single day after that, for seven months, he was living inside my answer.
Everybody who reads this is going to want to know what I said.
Elke will know at eighteen, because it is in the wallet in his handwriting and she will read it.
May you like
But I have decided that nobody else is going to, and the reason is not that it is private.
It is that eleven words said in a car by a woman who did not know what she was being asked is not a decision, and I am not going to let anybody on this earth read it and tell me that he was right.
