Two hours after my wife died, after their mum died, we pull up back at the house. No one on the street knows where we’ve been, or the grief we bring back with us.
My younger brother is already there. He’s brought breakfast — chocolate croissants and raisin Danish, a much-needed coffee. He’s a welcome sight. There are hugs for the boys, a wordless embrace for me. We sit and eat. It turns out we are hungry, or we need energy, or both.
My brother, Sam, is all action and pragmatism. I give in to him, willingly, ceding control. He knows a little bit about What Happens Next: his mother-in-law died several years ago, and he and and his wife, Luisa will have had to go through something similar. Forms and documents and instructions and decisions.
I hand him some leaflets I’ve been given by the hospital. He tells me, he’ll sort it. Getting the death certificate, organising the cremation.
We don’t want her ashes: this much I know. Towards the end I had a growing conviction I could not bear to see the biggest thing in my life reduced to a handful of dust in an urn. I’d mentioned this to her and she’d said, good for you.
My older brother, Andrew, is on his way down from Manchester. He’d been at the airport about to embark on a family holiday to celebrate his birthday. His wife and kids, my nephew and niece, have gone without him. He was already through passport control when he turned around.
I need to make a call. We are supposed to be having house guests, our friends Lisa and John and their teenage daughter, Olivia. We’d suspected Gill would be in hospital even before things deteriorated, but had reckoned it might be good for the spirits to see them. To help take our mind off of things.
I decide I can’t manage speaking to them, so I message instead, to stand them down.
The boys are rudderless. They wander from room to room, not knowing what to do with themselves, as if searching for something. She is everywhere, and nowhere.
Rafe takes to his bed, and curls up in a ball. I go up to try to comfort him, but I have no words, so I simply hold him as he cries silent tears, and after a while I leave him to his private anguish.
Oscar’s head is down about twenty degrees, as though he is lilting. Stan looks gaunt, and sits in the front room, choosing to be alone.
At some point, Sam goes. He’s going to drive up to Chelsea, and get the death certificate from the hospital, and begin to sort all the other things I don’t want to think about. I am enormously grateful.
And before I know it, it’s just the four of us in the house, as it will be from henceforth. It feels weirdly like that moment after you get home from a holiday, when you don’t quite know what to do with yourself. There’s so much to do, but at the same time, everything can wait.
Her things are everywhere. As if she had just popped out.
She had no idea that the last time she shut the front door would be the last time. She was just supposed to be going in for a procedure.
Later, I will acknowledge it was better that way. I cannot imagine leaving your home of over twenty years knowing it was for the final time.
****
It is 11am. The rest of the day stretches interminably ahead.
Pretty soon, it dawns on me that we could actually use some friendly faces, some cheering up, anything to take our minds off of our new reality, and I message Lisa and John again, to see if they would be up for a visit for a few hours. They live in Bath, but are in the neighbourhood, seeing relatives.
The boys think it’s a good idea, too.
They arrive in the afternoon, bringing our lunch with them. This is how it will go for the next few weeks. People will arrive, with bags of food from Waitrose, M&S, Sainsbury’s or Tesco, soup and Pringles and cake and fruit and biscuits and tray bakes, because the last thing I want to think about is shopping, and it’s the one thing that people can actually do to help.
Lisa and John and Olivia bring distraction, and more than that, they bring an unexpected cheer to our gloomy house. They fulfil their unspoken contract and somehow contrive to lift our spirits.
They have been on the periphery of Gill’s decline, as most people will later find themselves to have been as well, because she refused to be headline news, and did not want to invite sympathy of any kind, because she didn’t want to deal with other people’s grief, and was not able to process their love. She had no time, and no room for it.
At various points, I take difficult phone calls. From my Dad. From her sister, and her brother.
My elder brother, Andrew, pulls up outside. I leave the boys with my friends, and he drives me to a nearby pub by the river, almost devoid of customers, and words come out of my mouth as I try to share the events of the last twenty-four hours, and I can’t remember what I say, but he tells me I cried. In fact I think we both did. He has been the one I have spoken to the most these last months, trusting him to disseminate to the rest of my family, because it is utterly exhausting updating people with miserable news.
After a while I think I should be getting back to the boys, and he drops me off before heading over to our Mum’s. He will bring her tomorrow.
In the afternoon, we decide to go for a walk, to the Woodland Gardens, in Bushy Park. Though it is August, it is unnaturally dark and grey, and the skies threaten rain.
We park and begin to tramp up the familiar tree-covered path, making way for the odd cyclist, side-stepping dogs and joggers.
We pass over a picturesque bridge, move through a gate. The boys find sticks. John keeps them chatting with jokes and his trademark positive patter. Olivia feels a bit like one of the boys, too. I like the dynamic she and Stanley seem to have fallen into. Friendly, competitive, verbal jousting, cheeky sarcasm.
I pull Rafe into me as we trundle along, on autopilot.
We move through another gate, and into the gardens, verdant green punctuated by the vibrant colours of flowers in bloom. We begin to wend our way past plants with huge, tropical leaves, landscaped beds.
There is a reassuring familiarity to this walk. I have done it for decades. With pushchairs, with toddlers, with teenagers. In every month, every weather and every season. Somewhere, out of sight, are rabbits, foxes. Squirrels scamper, and scale boughs and branches. The green parakeets shriek and chatter overhead. John amuses us all by trying to identify their calls on an app on his phone.
Nine hours ago, my wife left this world.
But it dawns on me, a huge conviction that Gill would have loved the fact we had met up with our friends, and gone for a walk in one of her favourite places. I feel like we are inadvertently honouring her.
I can’t keep this thought inside my head, and so I share it, with everyone, and we all agree. And the boys and I decide that this is what we will do, every year. Maybe not in this park. But we shall put on our shoes and get ourselves outside, and walking, on this day, every year. As a tribute to Gill, who loved nothing more than being outdoors, with her family.
Shortly after, the heavens open, a spattering at first but then huge, fierce drops that pound the canopy and splatter down below. None of us are dressed for it. It is comical. We are fifteen minutes from the cover of the cars. We run and weave from tree to tree, trying to find one that offers a modicum of shelter. We are all laughing, as we get soaked. It is an impossible task, shielding all seven of us. We shuffle and huddle like penguins in a snowstorm.
At some point, the rain refusing to let up, we decide there is nothing to be done but to make a run for it. We trot and splash through newly formed puddles on paths we trod not ten minutes previously. The summer rain feels weirdly appropriate. As though the sky is weeping for my lost wife, but also cleansing, in some way. It is easy to load it with meaning. Significance appears everywhere, today.
We drive back in the car, dripping wet, our heads filled with our own thoughts. I break the silence: I ask the boys if they want Lisa and John to stay for dinner — but that if they stay for dinner, then I think it’s only right that they should stay the night.
Do we want guests and company, tonight of all nights.
The answer is a unanimous, instantaneous yes.
We arrive home, for the second time that day. Everyone changes into something dry. Clothes get put straight into the washing machine.
We open wine, order curry.
At dinner, we break into poppadoms and tear naan and spoon aloo gobi and stuff our faces with vivid-coloured morsels of prawn and chicken and lamb coated in cadmium and coral and burnt orange hues.
Afterwards, we clear the table and play games, a raucous one involving horse-racing and betting, another where you have to guess the fake artist who doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be drawing.
One bottle of wine is emptied, then another.
Finally, the boys troop off to bed. They’re going to sleep in one room, to make space for our guests — but also, because that is what they do, and why they are so close.
The older two seem just about OK, but the momentousness of the occasion gets the better of Rafe, and he clings to me and shakes, and I hold him tight and tell him that we’re going to be OK, that it’ll all be OK, even though I have no idea if or when it will, because I realise I haven’t actually digested this day one little bit, I have thrown myself into driving, into hosting, into making decisions, and trying ever so hard not to think about anything that happened this morning, because already it feels like I have witnessed something you shouldn’t.
I go back downstairs and talk to Lisa and John, and for the first time, emotions seem to bubble close to the surface. Lisa asks for a hug and barely holds back tears. John shakes his head in wonder. We, too, are a three, when we used to be a four. It feels like Gill is upstairs, about to come down at any moment; or has turned in, gone to bed already. It can’t be that she is no longer here.
At some point I call it, say goodnight and head up, one flight, not two, because I can’t face sleeping at the top of the house and the room where I leapt out of bed at six thirty in the morning to grab the phone and get the summons to the hospital. It barely seems credible.
Instead, I ask Lisa and John to sleep up there, and apologise for the lack of clean bedding, and the mess.
I take the spare duvet, which is in fact a sleeping bag in a duvet cover, and grab a pillow, and sleep in Stanley’s room, which used to be the guest room.
I brush my teeth and stare in the mirror. My bloodshot eyes stare back.
I check my phone, clear it of messages from relatives and sympathy. Stick it on the wireless charger. Climb into bed.
It is only then that I break down.
