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I recalled that sunny day when we sat in the car overlooking the pebbled beach at Clevedon less than two years later. Now it was January 20, 2010, and instead of sunbeams, dark-gray barrels of cloud pointed down from the sky. The boys were buckled into their car seats, and I decided to get in the back and sit between them. As I stepped out of the car I shivered as the wind bit my face. I wished I could push back the clouds and pull out the sun. I patted my coat pocket to make sure the bubble gum was still there. It was something Kate and I had talked about. The boys had been nagging us for ages to try some gum, and we’d both decided this was a good time to give them a treat.
“Boys, I have something really, really important and really, really sad to tell you,” I said, pulling them in close to my sides. I felt a little ear dig into my ribs on either side of my chest. My heart was thrashing around so wildly in there I was worried the sound of it might frighten the boys, and I took a long deep breath to try to steady the thud.
I’d picked the boys up from preschool and school and driven straight to our favorite spot near the beach at Clevedon, trying to keep things as normal as possible on the short journey. “How was your day?” I asked, immediately regretting the question. Whatever they said, it was going to get a lot worse. I don’t know what they replied; it took all my energy just to drive the car safely and pretend to be like any other parent picking up their children on a cold Wednesday afternoon.
This morning I’d written “Oh my God, my darkest hour” in my diary. Now this hour felt even darker. Reef and Finn listened intently, waiting for me to tell them the important and sad news. They were dressed neatly in their uniforms, and my heart went out to them. They were such good boys, always eager to please, and I instinctively gave them a little smile and ruffled their fair hair. I think I’d done a good job so far of hiding my feelings and I wished I didn’t have to tell them what had happened earlier that day. I wished I could be like other parents on the school run, chatting about friends or homework and telling the kids what they were having for tea. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, so I just squeezed the boys tight for a moment while I tried to control my breathing and hold back my tears.
“Say what you mean,” I imagined Kate whispering gently to me. Her voice was soft and encouraging but it cut straight into my heart. I remembered her saying exactly the same words just a few weeks earlier, as she lay in bed writing her list. “I think it’s really important to say what you mean, and I want the boys to learn that,” she had explained, before writing instruction number four in her diary: “Please teach them to say what they mean.” The school and hospital had reiterated this in their advice to me. I was not to beat about the bush or use vague language, as it might give the boys false hope or confuse them.
I cleared my throat and shifted position so that I could look at both their faces while I spoke. I had to tell them straight. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, boys,” I said, my voice cracking. Four soft blue eyes looked into mine. In that moment I saw Kate in the boys’ eyes, and I could feel her watching me. I remembered her crying and saying she wished she could swap places with Reef when he was suffering, and I knew exactly what she meant. If I could have shouldered both boys’ pain for them I would have, but it was impossible to shield them from this.
Their little eyes were scanning my face now like miniature flashlights, looking for clues through the fading light. They were only four and five years old, too young for this. I swallowed uncomfortably and felt my face redden as I tried and failed to hold back the tears.
“Mummy has died. She won’t be coming home from hospital again. She died this morning.” Hearing the words come out of my mouth made me gasp and break down. The boys clung to me, and the three of us cried in each other’s arms, spluttering out hot white breath into the cold winter air.
“Has Mummy gone to heaven?” Reef sniffed eventually.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is she on a cloud?” he gulped.
“Yes,” I said, before quickly adding: “You can imagine her to be on a cloud if you like.”
I’d been told not to say things like “Mummy has gone to sleep” because it might make the boys afraid to go to sleep in their beds at night, or they might imagine she could wake up one day. I didn’t want them to really believe Mummy was on a cloud, because she wasn’t, but I thought it might be all right for Reef to imagine her there, if that’s what he wanted.
Nobody spoke again for a while. We just sat and cuddled and cried until a loud engine noise overhead made us all turn around and look out the misty back window of the car. Through watery eyes we watched two aircraft fly diagonally across the heavy gray blanket of sky above us, leaving a perfect white cross in their wake.
“Look, Mummy just blew us a kiss,” Reef said, and we all carried on crying.
It was just the three of us now. I felt that very acutely as we huddled in our own white cloud together, sharing the same oxygen and pain. We sobbed solidly for at least half an hour, oblivious to the dark and cold descending on us. The salt from my tears stung my face, and the boys’ cheeks turned from their usual rosy pink to blotchy red. I could have cried for hours and days, but when the boys’ soft sobs and panting cries lessened a little, I sensed it was time to stop.
“Would you like some bubble gum?” I asked them. Their faces brightened a bit as they unwrapped the pink parcels of gum, but Finn still had tears coursing down his cheeks.
“Thank you, Daddy,” he said politely as he stuffed the gum into his mouth. “Why has Mummy died?” He sniffed loudly and looked straight into my eyes.
“Well, you know she has been very ill, don’t you? And when you saw her last night in hospital and she gave you a big cuddle she was very, very ill. She was so ill, she died.”
“I want to see her,” Finn said. “Can I see Mummy again?”
“I’m sorry, Finn, but you can’t see her anymore.”
He chewed his gum miserably, and I watched him helplessly, unable to think of a word I could add that would possibly make my answer any better.
“I like this,” Finn said after a minute or two. “It tastes nice, Daddy.”
Reef nodded. “Thank you for getting us the bubble gum,” he said, wiping the tears off his face with the sleeve of his coat.
“Can we have it again?”
“I think we should always have bubble gum on special occasions. Mummy thought that was a good idea too. Let’s go home now.”
Buckling myself back in the driver's seat I felt strangely calm. I’d successfully completed a task on my own, and a very major task at that. I felt Kate would have approved of how I handled the situation, and that she would have done exactly the same if she were in my shoes. It was comforting to think that.
As we pulled away from the empty beach I looked at the boys in the rearview mirror. Both were staring out of the windows with swollen eyes, chewing noisily on their gum and filling the car with the smell of sweet strawberry flavoring.
Those two innocent little passengers were now my sole responsibility. My stomach muscles contracted, and I tightened my grip on the steering wheel as I thought about the enormity of that responsibility. They had no mummy anymore; it was all down to me. I was suddenly a widower, and I was suddenly a single dad. Even hearing those words in my head shocked me and made my blood ebb and flow uncomfortably around my body.
Part of me wanted to run away and pretend none of this had happened, yet I also felt a powerful urge to do everything in my power to protect my boys and make Kate proud. I still wanted to be her Mr. Incredible; it was the very least I could do.
I drove slowly and carefully. I couldn’t take any chances now. I’d have to slow down on every journey. If something happened to me, who would look after the boys? Besides, there was no rush to get home. The house would be exactly as I had left it earlier. Nobody would be burning dinner in th
e oven like Kate used to. My lips curled into a weak, involuntary smile as I thought about Kate’s attempts at cooking. If you couldn’t put it in the microwave and wait for it to go “ping” it was beyond Kate. That’s what I always said to tease her.
Ruth, who was Kate’s best friend, helped her out when we got married, teaching her how to cook half a dozen simple dishes. Tagliatelle, lasagne, Mexican fajitas, curry and spaghetti Bolognese became her “specialties,” but Kate never really did master the art of cookery. Now Ruth had another role. “Ruth good for parenting advice,” Kate instructed, “as she has two boys same age gap—if conflict between grandparent views.” Remembering that little word “if” made me smile. Our parents are so different, and like most couples, we’d had our issues trying to keep both sides of the family happy. Now Kate’s parents, Christine and Martin, had a son-in-law but no daughter. Everything was messed up. I hadn’t even thought about that until now, and it made my head throb. It must have made Kate’s head throb too, but she was one step ahead of me, thinking up ways to make life easier for me after she was gone.
I like Ruth a lot. She used to be married to my friend Chris, whom I met twenty-odd years ago when I was learning to scuba dive. Eventually Chris certified Kate when she took her scuba-diving qualifications too. Ruth is divorced from Chris now, and she lives a short walk away from our house. I call her my “pet Rottweiler,” as she’s one of those friends who speaks their mind and tells you when you’re being an idiot. I admire that, and I thought how clever it was of Kate to set Ruth up to give me parenting advice.
I flicked a glance over my left shoulder. “Don’t swallow the gum, boys,” I said. “Remember, that’s why we didn’t give it to you before. Please be careful. Promise me you’ll be careful.”
“OK, Daddy,” Reef said. “I can blow bubbles, look!”
With that he blew a broken bubble, making a loud raspberry sound that made Finn giggle. They were still chuckling as we pulled into the drive and piled through the front door.
I missed Kate’s familiar cry of “Hello, boys!” as the front door opened. I missed not seeing her handbag strewn in the hall or her shoes kicked off at the bottom of the stairs, but to my relief and surprise the house didn’t seem half as empty as I’d feared. The phone was ringing; our terrier, Coral, was barking; and before I’d even got my coat off someone was knocking on the door.
It was Paula, one of the mums from school. She was crying her eyes out, and my immediate reaction was to try to comfort her. “I’m sorry, Singe,” she blurted out. “I just had to come round and I had to do something.”
“It’s OK, don’t worry,” I told her, giving her a hug. “I’m touched you came.”
It felt good to be the one offering support instead of receiving it. It was a role I was a lot more comfortable with. She held out a huge cake tin. “I have to bake when I’m upset. Here’s about two hundred and forty brownies. I’m so sorry!”
I laughed as she ran off down the path, apologizing, leaving me standing there with the overflowing tin.
Over the next few hours lots of other friends and neighbors arrived with bowls of curry, cottage pies and lasagne. Some popped in for a few minutes, others scuttled away and left wonderful goodies on the doorstep. I felt like a one-man disaster zone, like I’d become a mini-Haiti overnight, and I needed food drops and emergency rations to survive. Kate’s parents came round and played with the boys for a bit while I listened to all the phone messages, answered the door and slipped off into the conservatory to allow myself a little cry in private.
Kate was everywhere, but she was nowhere. Some of her favorite clothes lay crumpled on top of the ironing basket, and I noticed one of her brightly colored life jackets had fallen off its peg by the back door. We had a garage full of life jackets and every piece of survival gear you could imagine. The irony of it had never struck me until that moment. Irony didn’t even seem the right word; sheer rotten luck was more like it. Why had Kate not survived? She was fit and healthy. She never smoked and hardly drank, and she followed all the health advice going. The only thing she wasn’t great with was eating vegetables, but she did her best with them. She didn’t deserve to die. Why had this happened to Kate?
I could hear other people’s wives and mothers coming and going, offering words of comfort. My wife, my soul mate, was gone. Our boys had lost their mummy, but other lives carried on. Other people cared and loved and shared. Other people breathed and talked and hugged, and other people walked out of my front door and went home to their children and their other halves.
At 7 p.m. I was alone, and it was time for the boys to have their bath. Kate and I always stuck to the same routine. One of us would run the bath, and Kate would get the boys washed and tucked up calmly in their pajamas and kiss them good night. Then it was my turn, and I’d read them a story and invariably wind them up again. I would tickle them and make them giggle, and Kate would come and stand at their bedroom door, hand on hip and shaking her head disapprovingly.
She secretly loved it, and she knew I knew it. She was full of fun, and nothing pleased her more than seeing her boys laugh. She was also a brilliant mum, though, and rules were rules and bedtime was bedtime. “Come on, you three naughty boys,” she scolded, eyes glinting cheekily. “Time to settle down.” She kissed the boys good night, and then I kissed the boys good night, usually giving them one last little tickle when Mummy wasn’t looking.
Where did I start tonight? Now I had to be Mummy and Daddy, an impossible task. “Come on, boys, bath time,” I called. I’d said the same thing a thousand times, but now it seemed new and different, like I’d said it for the very first time. The three of us went upstairs together like we had done so many times before, except it wasn’t the same. Nothing would ever be the same again now that Kate was gone.
My eyes were drawn to the door frame of the boys’ bedroom. Their heights were notched up in pencil on the white frame where Kate used to stand, pretending to be cross. I remembered her balancing books on the boys’ heads and telling them not to wriggle as she recorded their heights. There wasn’t a lot between them, despite the eighteen-month age gap. Reef’s illness meant he wasn’t as tall as he might have been, and he and Finn looked incredibly close in age. “Need to measure me on door frame—Mummy was 5ft 1in,” Kate had carefully added to her list. That was a job the boys could help me with. That would be something good to do together.
I turned on the bath taps and noticed Kate’s favorite milky bubble bath standing on the side of the tub, half empty. “Half full,” Kate corrected me. I’d heard her say that so many times. She was a half-full sort of person. Kate’s glass was never half empty, even when sickness sapped her life away.
I held that thought in my head as I bathed the boys and got them into their pajamas, forcing myself to think positively. I would never get over losing Kate, but I was so lucky to have these two cracking little lads. They were a part of her and a part of us. I had so much to live for despite Kate’s death.
“Can we sleep in your bed tonight?” Reef asked. “Of course you can,” I said. They bounded into our bedroom and launched themselves on to the bed like a couple of little rockets. Kate had bought an absolutely massive king-size bed when she got ill. She had wanted to create a cozy nest when she was too weak to get up so the boys would have plenty of space to cuddle in with her. Sadly, she died in hospital before the bed was delivered, and now they had so much space it was ridiculous. They looked marooned in the middle of the huge cream leather frame, a cloud of fluffy white duvet surrounding them.
“Snuggle in now, boys,” I said. “Time to settle down.” They wriggled under the covers obediently, perhaps expecting a little tickle, but it wasn’t the right time for that. I was using up all my energy just going through the motions of being normal and not breaking down in front of them. “Now be good, sleep tight,” I said. I bent down to kiss them both good night. As I did so the scent of Kate’s perf
ume on the pillows mingled with the soapy smell of the boys’ heads. “Kiss boys two times after I have gone,” Kate said, but I didn’t need reminding. “Night-night, Reef,” I said, kissing one cheek and then the other. One kiss from me, one from Kate. I did exactly the same with Finn, then I gave them both a massive cuddle, grateful I could bury my head between them so they couldn’t see my tears.
I felt Kate’s presence very powerfully. Her perfume was so evocative I could feel her wrapping herself around me, around all three of us, and I half expected her to whisper a “thank you” in my ear after she watched me kiss the boys as she had instructed.
I quietly closed the bedroom door and let out a stream of silent tears, pressing my hands over my mouth so the boys didn’t hear me. As I did so I glanced in the open bathroom door and noticed the school uniforms still littering the floor, exactly where the boys had left them. That’s how life was now. There was nobody to pick up where I’d left off, and certainly nobody to finish my sentences or read my mind like Kate used to.
I stooped to pick up the clothes and froze as I heard an unfamiliar noise. It sounded like footsteps coming up the stairs, but that was ridiculous because I was all alone in the house. I held my breath and strained my ears, frantically trying to remember if someone still had a key or if I’d forgotten a visitor. I didn’t want to shout out and frighten the boys, but something wasn’t right. Nobody had called my name, and there’d been no knock at the door. It wasn’t Kate. The footsteps were too heavy to be Kate’s or, rather, for me to imagine them being Kate’s. I straightened my back, instinctively heading to the bedroom to guard the boys. As I stepped across the landing a sudden gush of water in the pipes around the bathroom replaced the sound of the footsteps.
I dissolved in tears. It was just the central heating creaking. I sat on the edge of the bath and sobbed as silently as I could. I’d never noticed how noisy the house was before. When Kate was here I guess I always assumed she was making the noise, but now she wasn’t. Even the bath was squeaking under my weight, making a grating “eee-aww” sound as my body shook with heavy, muted sobs.
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