Boofff…

            The oxygen machine exhales. It goes all through the day, all through the night. My wife exhales, like a sign of resignation. It’s six in the evening and she hasn’t opened her eyes today, or spoken a word. This day, between her birthday and our wedding anniversary, is the day she dies. Yesterday the boys and I dabbed green tea on her lips and she smiled, but not today. Another long sigh. Her final breath? Not yet. There’s another, and another. And then no more. The last is like the wash of a wave fading into sand. The oxygen machine is still breathing. I remove the wedding ring from my wife’s dead finger, and box it in my fist. The machine exhales. I exhale. It scarcely missed a breath, this ring. I turn off the oxygen machine. Kate lies bathed in evening sunlight, the flesh of her arms already beginning to bruise with draining blood.

            It was the autumnal equinox, September 23rd. The sun had crossed the celestial equator and our last summer was behind us. Perfect timing. She couldn’t face another winter, she’d said. There was a full moon that night. I stood in the backyard. I took a slug of whiskey and I thought: What next? We had discussed what next a good deal that summer, knowing her death was imminent. “You’ll be fine,” she’d say, “I’m not worried about you.” I had a lot going for me. It would be a release.

            “And it won’t be long now.” “Oh, that’s all right then.”

            “But, I’ll tell you something. You don’t know how precious life is. You think you do, but you don’t.”

            I couldn’t argue with her. She was dying. What did I know? I look back on it now as a good summer, despite everything: painful, penetratingly sad, but without despair, and shot through with extraordinary moments of joy. It vindicated our decision. Precisely one hundred days before she died we were sitting in another sunlit room at the hospital. A doctor was telling us that the cancer had spread beyond all hope of containment. “How long?” Kate asked, and ventured her own estimate: “Six months?” But there was a pause before the doctor answered, “Perhaps.” The best he could offer, the last resort, was another course of chemotherapy, which, if it worked, would extend her life by a couple of months at best. It would be the kind of chemotherapy that made your hair and fingernails fall out, and made you sick to your bones. We knew all about chemotherapy. And the chances of it working? “One in five.” We didn’t have to decide right there and then, the doctor said, the following week would do, but the disease was moving fast and treatment, if that was the choice, could not be delayed much longer.

            We agreed, on the drive home, that it was not a decision to take on impulse. We would discuss it with Tom and Nat, our sons; we would weigh the pros and cons and do our best to make sense of the uncertainties. And in the days that followed we did those things. There was no agenda. Discussion came piecemeal over lunch on the patio, or watching the sunset up on the seafront, or in the quiet of the early hours, and we assembled the fragments forensically. It’s your decision, the boys said. We’ll support you in whatever you do.

            My first thoughts, back there in the consulting room, had lined up pretty smartly against the idea of further treatment. Even as the doctor spoke, I was doing the existential equations. I factored in the probabilities alongside the pain and indignities, and I could see no good reason to intensify and prolong the suffering, which was already considerable. The end was inevitable and close now, treatment or not. Better to take what we could from the last days, not lose them to the ordeal of chemotherapy. If the treatment didn’t work, which was likely, then it would just be adding insult to injury.

            I kept those thoughts to myself at the time. If Kate was forming a different view, and I got the impression she was, then it was not for me to interfere. It was her life. And before long I began to see other sides to the argument. She had responded well to aggressive forms of chemotherapy in the past. Why not now? And why was the doctor being so conservative, so pessimistic, about the outcome? Oncology is not an exact science. They get these things badly wrong sometimes. I was given six months to live, you hear people saying, and here I am, five years on, fighting fit! So, I made the case for treatment. I said perhaps it was worth a shot. “I don’t want to die with no hair,” she said. Rational deliberation had little to do with it in the end. It came down to a feeling of rightness.

            There are practical matters to deal with in the minutes and hours following a death. I called a doctor to conduct the certification, and a soft-spoken Ghanaian man showed up. I asked him if he could recommend an undertaker because, bizarrely in retrospect, I hadn’t given the matter any thought. The doctor went on his way and I called the Co-operative Funeral Service and, while we were waiting for the undertaker, the boys and I took turns to say goodbye. I stroked her hair. When the body was removed, we—Tom, Nat and I, and Nat’s wife, Rosie—ate some pasta and drank some wine. We talked about Kate. Her death felt, unexpectedly, like an accomplishment. It was a peaceful end, we agreed, a dignified one, and the suffering was over. I could not face spending the night in our, now just my, bedroom, so I laid a mattress on the floor in Tom’s. I read Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic for a while before settling to sleep, and I slept well. The next day, our anniversary, I took Kate’s wedding ring to a jeweler for resizing. I’d promised her I would wear it for the rest of my life.

            In the days that followed there was the funeral to arrange, and details to gather for the Registrar of Births and Deaths, who, when I got to see him, told me he was sorry for my loss, a phrase that must pass his lips fifty times a week, and then he gave me an oldfashioned fountain pen to sign some forms. Then there’s the funeral, and that’s it. A life concluded; a death documented.

            Then the memories started pushing through. Doors opened into unexpected rooms. Through this window, a crisp winter morning, through that, a summer’s afternoon. Fragments of childhood swirled up like leaves in a flurry. Schooldays. Work. The early years with Kate. I opened the back door and there we were, standing in a downpour. The scent of hard rain on dry earth. Soaked to the skin. Alive. The images were involuntary and spasmodic, as if my brain were trying to gather threads of meaning without much involving “me,” churning the memories, poking and probing. Reconstructing. Who are you? What next?

            What next? No idea. I was wandering through a mist, not knowing what to expect when the sun burns through. When I’m gone, just get on and do whatever you must. But what? Sell the house, she said. Pack in the job. Move to another town. Find another woman. Anything. I’ll be just a memory.

            I decided to follow Kate’s advice and retire from work at the earliest opportunity. You’re getting stale. I was. You’ve no appetite. True. Let go. She had it all figured out. I could use her life insurance money to pay off the mortgage, and, within a couple of years, I’d be eligible to apply for an early retirement package, which would give me a small pension to live on. So I found myself entering a branch of the Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society, briskly signing a check for ninety-six thousand, four hundred and eighty- eight pounds, forty-three pence, and going back out into the street with a tear running down my cheek. You get those stabs of absence to the gut when you least expect them. Eighteen months later I resigned my university post and got on with the things I’d much rather be getting on with. Walking the moors. Country pubs. Football. Reading. Loafing.

           Believe me, I’m a good loafer, but my brain wouldn’t rest.