Travelling without moving

On Coping #21

Every night

someone sleeps at your side.

.

For two weeks

it was me

now your sister and I alternate.

.

Sometimes in the evening

we watch Below Deck

and vicariously voyage across the Mediterranean on a super yacht.

.

Travelling without moving.

.

When it gets late

I nap next to you

my bed a reclining chair.

.

I am asked

how do you sleep?

.

Everything is relative.

.

Compared to my bed?

Or compared to sleeping alone

without you?

.

At night

in the hospice

there is the low hum of the heating.

Like the atmosphere on an aeroplane.

.

So each time

as I tilt the chair back

I turn left.

.

After a lifetime of economy

I settle back in business.

.

Everything is relative.

.

I fly to the far off places

we always said we’d visit together:

Japan

Portugal

Iceland.

.

Some nights

I take ghost flights to the future

and visit all the lives

we will now not live.

.

The one where we retire to Spain.

The one where you make a mother of the bride speech at our daughter’s wedding.

The one where you persuade me to go back to directing.

The one where I persuade you to run the National.

The one where our dog dies and I tell you all the reasons we shouldn’t get a new one and you get a new one anyway and I’m secretly pleased.

The one where we sit together at 90 and play scrabble.

The one where we move to Paris.

The one where we move to America.

The one where we spend a year living in a camper van.

The one where we are grand parents.

The one where we just carry on with the life we’d already built for ourselves.

.

Everything is relative.

.

When my ghost plane lands

and I wake in the half light of early morning

I think instead

of the life we didn’t live.

.

The one where we hated our jobs

or where you were made redundant.

.

The one where we couldn’t get pregnant

or where we lost a child.

.

The one where we had no family around us

or where we didn't have life insurance.

.

The one where you became depressed

or I became an alcoholic.

.

The one where we stopped loving each other

or never even met in the first place.

.

Everything is relative.

It just depends what you choose to relate to.

.

Eventually

I return

from impossible futures

and alternate pasts

from imagined lives

that did not

and will never

happen.

.

To the life that has.

.

The one where

we met

chose to love each other

got married

had children

continued to love each other

worked hard

spent time with our families

and our friends.

.

The one where

at 43

you were diagnosed

with stage 4 cancer

and braved 2 years of treatment

where I coped on the sidelines

as best I could

where you came

to live out your days

here.

.

The one in which

I sit

right now

holding your hand

counting seconds between breaths

smiling at you when you rouse.

.

Look at it baby.

.

This life.

.

The life we have lived.

.

It’s

It’s just

.

Previous > On Coping #20: Crossing the void | Next > On Coping #22: Three twenty two

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On Coping is my story of surviving on the sidelines of cancer. It begins in 2022 with On Coping #1, written the day after my 41st birthday. The day my wife Imogen, the mother of my three children, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.  It’s the story of what happened next. Read from the start.

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