I remember taking the pen out of her hand when she was too tired to go on. Her head fell sideways. I noticed a twitch in her face. Nothing, until then, had come so close to breaking my heart. She was trying to grin at us, but couldn’t. Her cheeks twitched, not quite under control. Her mouth widened, and then fell slack again.
As the day went on, the doctors grew more and more worried. Never giving up, they ordered another scan. We wheeled Nicola through corridors, and watched through a window as they slid her into the scanner. The doctors were looking for some sign her infection was diminishing or that the fluid drowning her lungs was drying.
It wasn’t.
The consultant said, ‘We’re going to take control of her breathing again.’
But it wasn’t just that: Nicola’s kidneys were tiring from the volume of fluid they pumped out of her, trying to dry her lungs. She was half-asleep by now.
A nurse had explained: ‘As carbon dioxide builds up in her blood, it will make her drowsy.’
Nicola never knew she was going to die. The week before, we’d told the doctors we no longer wanted to talk to them in the office – we wanted to talk by Nicola’s bed, where she could hear. Now, though, the consultant led us into his room. It must have been Saturday afternoon.
He said, ‘Her condition is very serious.’
I tried to keep my head up. Joe and Martha were with me. ‘We understand.’
‘We need to put her on kidney dialysis,’ he explained. But it wasn’t the detail of her medical condition that mattered, it was the expression on his face.
Another machine was wheeled to Nicola’s bedside. We sat on chairs outside while they wired it up, then watched wheels spin, cleansing her blood, as if the sickness could be wrung from it to leave her limp but well.
‘We’ll let her sleep,’ one of the doctors said. ‘It helped before.’
It had – sleep had let her recover, and she’d woken better.
The nurse said, ‘Are you ready now?’
They increased the sedative. Nicola was so drowsy already that she could hardly feel us take her hands. Weakly she squeezed my fingers. I was trying not to cry. Her cheeks twitched, sketching her marvellous smile, then giving up, exhausted. Her eyes closed.
I put one arm round Martha’s shoulders as we left the room. Joe was very quiet.
Nicola was like that for a day, or perhaps a bit more. Waking at night, I checked my phone for messages, then cycled to the hospital as early as I could. No change. But on Monday morning, her numbers were lower still. The consultant was already standing by her door, surrounded by nurses and the matron.
His face said everything; he didn’t need to speak.
I called Martha and Joe, and Anne. I said, ‘It’s probably time you should come and see her.’
In the office the consultant asked whether we wanted to let her go slowly, or whether they should switch off the machines. There was no more hope, he said. Martha and Joe sat either side of me.
I looked at Martha and Joe for confirmation, then said, ‘Just give us time to say goodbye. Then let her go.’
Anne and Peter arrived. We left them alone with her. Then we went in ourselves. Martha and Joe, her children, Nicola … the four of us had been a unit for so long. Now we were together for the last time.
When Martha and Joe went out, I stood with her for a while myself, then said to the nurse, ‘We’re ready.’
She closed the door. It was a simple enough thing; they just turned off the machines that had been keeping Nicola alive, tirelessly, for the last five weeks. I held her hand; she didn’t hold mine. One by one the nurse switched off monitors, closed syringes. The room fell silent. I hadn’t realised how much noise it made, life. Now everything was quiet. It was just Nicola and me. I told her how much I loved her, but I was really only telling myself. I traced my finger along the line where her hair had fallen. I touched the mouth I’d kissed so often. The line of her jaw, her ear – I wanted to imprint them forever on my eyes, so I could always see her. There was so much that hadn’t changed – her foot under the sheet, her fingers squeezed between my own. So much of her was well. I reached down to kiss her forehead. It was like pressing my lips to ivory. The pain welling up inside me was a pressure almost intolerable. We had been so happy together, so lucky in each other. We had said everything, but there was still so much more to say.
The nurse stood at the half-open door. ‘She’s gone.’
She quietly switched off the last monitors. Took away the tube so her neck was free. My love lay on the pillow, gone. Switched off, all the memories in her head, of me and her children, of the time before me; a whole life of thoughts and dreams, of knowledge, of people – erased. Our loneliness was complete.
Martha and Joe came back in. None of us wanted to stay in the room long; Nicola was no longer there. I had a moment of not wanting to leave the body I’d so loved, but it was only a foolish impulse. She wasn’t there; we were alone. We walked out of the ward. Anne and Peter had already left. Down in the street it was sunny.
One of us said, ‘Let’s go to Greenwich.’
It felt as if we’d known all along that Nicola would die, though we’d always expected life. It feels, now, as if I’ve never left the room she died in; as if I’m standing there, still, by her bedside, touching her cheek. I don’t know that I will ever leave. We drove to Greenwich. Wind stirred the trees; the river flowed beneath us. We talked about Nicola, but about other things too. Back home, later, I emailed friends:
I’m so sorry to do this by email, but can’t face so many calls.
I’m afraid that Nicola was hit by another deterioration at the weekend. This time she was too weak to sustain it. We’re terribly sad to have to tell you that she died earlier today, completely peacefully. Martha, Joe and I were with her.
The three of us want you all to know that we’re going to cope with this the way Nicola would. We don’t want gloom. We want to keep remembering how wonderful she is; and looking ahead and staying positive, as she always did.
Epilogue
The weekend after Nicola died we held a party for her in our garden. We only invited the people we loved most. Some were probably missed – there was nothing organised about it. Before Nicola fell ill we’d been planning a joint celebration of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Joe’s eighteenth birthday, and Nicola’s fiftieth. I’d bought cheap tents on eBay. Now we set them up, prising open boxes that had stood abandoned in the basement for twelve months. Martha and Joe draped coloured lights across the lawn.
As the doorbell rang, our friends came in with plates of food. Foxgloves nodded in the darkening flowerbeds. Music played in the kitchen, a playlist we’d put together of all the songs Nicola had ever loved and danced to. Anne and Peter came too, and I realised then how much of our lives had been founded on theirs: their values and principles, their love for people and for art. At the party, Anne had tears in her eyes but didn’t give in to them; she was too brave for that. Peter talked. They didn’t stay long.
I knew early on that I needed to write this story. I said at the start it wasn’t sad, and I still mean that. Nicola’s illness was the most terrible year of our life together but it contained the purest moments of love we ever shared. Nicola was never more herself. Her sweetness, her humour, her love and intelligence were honed by sickness to their purest and final shape. She never loved the people around her more. She never valued so clearly what the world offered, or what she had given it. We saw far. And we realised our story, which had, like all stories, to end someday, was the happiest we could ever have hoped for.
Since she died, since the day when we went up to Greenwich, we’ve been trying to live without her.
The year before she fell ill Nicola put on Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, in partnership with the Royal Opera House. We never dreamed that she one day would be Eurydice and that I would have to follow her, searching for Hades’ gates. The other night I had a dream that she’d been seen on an island and I found myself there. I as
ked a man on the quayside where she might be. He said she’d gone inland, but she wasn’t on the island anymore.
‘How could she have left the island,’ I asked, ‘if she went inland?’
He looked at me and said, ‘How did you get here yourself?’
I couldn’t answer. I long to have the dream again. Within it, I believed there was a chance I really could find Nicola and bring her back.
People tell me I’m doing well, but I know there’s something wrong with me. I snap at them; I’m impatient; I disagree. There’s a surliness in me that feels as alien as a cancer, a dog padding at my side. There’s a darkness on the horizon behind me. There’s a black sea in front of me, and with every step I take, its waters rise higher about my legs.
Sometimes I just want to stay still. To sit in a chair with my eyes closed, to silence phones and computers, to stop everything moving and stay motionless, as if I had to hold myself rigid to staunch a flow of blood. But I don’t stay still – I go out, I work. It seems best to do things, frenetically if need be, rather than let silence fall.
And we’ve done a lot in the time since Nicola died.
In October, four months afterwards, Martha, Joe and I went to Buckingham Palace to collect her OBE. We worried the occasion would be stuffy, but it was perfectly managed, with good humour and a welcome for the excited families, none of us grand, who gathered in the courtyard beforehand. Everyone was happy to be there; no one was made to feel ill at ease. Standing in the wings during the presentation, I listened to the military band playing light hits on the balcony and realised they were halfway through ‘Stairway to Heaven’. ‘Mamma Mia!’ followed. Nicola would have wept with laughter. We have a photograph of the three of us outside, holding Nicola’s OBE in a leather case, the sun shining. Afterwards Anne and Peter took us out to lunch.
On our walks at Pin Mill, Nicola and I talked about the places that meant most to us – London and Suffolk, Rome, the Peloponnese and south-west France. We’ve been back to all of them in the months since she died. Call it a pilgrimage, if you like. I suppose I wanted to visit them for the same reason Nicola and I always returned: to keep them alive by constant renewal, like Australians tracking songlines to keep a bush in flower, a spring flowing, a rock balanced on a cliff.
I’m in France now, at Easter, as I write this epilogue. France is where we fell in love, and where our life together unfolded; it was the place we brought up our children. Driving past each bend in the road, each tree, I’m passing memories of almost thirty years together. Nicola is with me at every age: twenty years old, still carrying puppy fat, and something gauche that soon dusted away, like mildew off a leaf; a mother of two babies, sterilising jars; at the summit of her poise, two years ago; or hunched in a chaise longue, wearing a headscarf.
Remembering her is like watching my own soul grow old. She was my soul’s vessel, freighting it across oceans. Without her I feel a phantom in this tough countryside. The trees are older than me, stronger and more rooted. Even the birds seem more vivid. I feel invisible, as if no one will be aware of me when I stop on a hill, at a point where we once stopped together. Then, our voices might have been heard in the farm below, our footsteps sniffed by a dog; or threads from our coats built into a jay’s nest. Today I make no sound, leave no mark. This isn’t my place anymore. I came here with Nicola; without her I can only wander through it, unresting. It feels as if I’m haunting my own past life.
Out here a couple of months ago, I drove past the house where we used to live. My wheels splashed through puddles; it had rained. The water in those puddles fell twenty years ago; Nicola was beside me. In my half-state, I can fold time aside like layers of curtain, or like dust sheets pleated into a trunk to enfold a dress still faintly perfumed. Time seems as thin as paper, and as brittle, crumbling to dust as my hand passes through it; or as my eye sweeps a hillside where we walked, once, the children in carriers on our backs. I can hear the crunch of gravel under our wheels as we turn onto the drive, tired from twelve hours’ journey; our headlights sweep a patch of wall, a rose cut back for winter, and the locked door. They are all still there, those moments, inaccessible to the living, but visible to me in my waking sleep.
Nicola rests gently on the pillow next to me when I wake up; I can almost hear her breath. Then, when I sit up, she is gone, abruptly gone, and the earth’s weight falls heavily around me; roofs pressing down towards earth, the trees bowing under their leaves’ weight, and the clouds freighted with lead. In moments like this I understand death’s permanence. I glimpse Nicola; but she isn’t coming back. Reality is final, after all: final without appeal.
I know, suddenly and far too young, what old people know: how to live life looking only backwards; to survey it from a hill with the sea at your back and nowhere further to go but a path ending in couch-grass. How to pick out a hill in the distance, looking back, and remember the sweat beading our foreheads as we climbed it, the weight of our packs. Or to identify, hidden among trees, a bridge, a ford, a village where we stopped; a lake rimmed with ice; the house where our child was born.
But memories carry no taste of life, just ash. No one warned Nicola and me that our journey was reaching its end. We thought there were miles still to travel, our footsteps slowing gradually together. We thought, perfectly timed, we’d reach the final crest together just as our strength failed; lie down in the grass together, fall asleep with the sound of curlews presaging the sea. Instead, I’m here alone: strong, healthy enough, and stupidly alive.
I don’t know what to do. Sit on a bench. Revolve memories whose lines are already blurred from over-use, like charms fingered too often. I can set in motion a whole pageant of memory, clownish figures spinning along memory’s prescribed grooves, endlessly repeating the same motions, but they never comfort me. Life is only worth anything as each moment conjures itself into being. What’s left behind is just the worm’s cast, the snake’s sloughed-off skin; life’s refuse and detritus; a slag-hill of memories that we pile up around us, all mineral value mined from it to leave raw clay.
In some ways what’s happened is a terrifying acceleration towards old age, when everything I love will be in the past.
And the world is already changing around me, although I don’t want it to. The trees are growing up around the house. There’s a sapling sprouting by the terrace. About the time Nicola went in for her transplant I stubbed my toe, a blood blister under the nail. I’ve watched it slowly growing out. Soon I’ll cut it off at the nail and that moment will be gone. The time when Nicola was still alive is growing out, through my nails, my hair. I can’t stop myself changing, or hold myself in the time she knew. I can’t wrestle the sun or clamp the earth in its tracks. It rolls me away like a wheel, and Nicola dwindles behind me, left at the roadside.
Orpheus made his way to the Underworld to bring his lover back again. I don’t know what to make of the story of Pluto’s bargain: that he could lead her back to life so long as he never looked back. I understand better the image of him walking the woods, singing of Eurydice. A week ago, Martha, Joe and I buried Nicola’s ashes here, and planted a tree. This isn’t a sad place – Nicola was never a sad person. She was more at home in the world than anyone I ever met. She had judgement in the truest sense. I don’t just mean her aesthetic taste, exquisite though that was, but her instinct about things that should be done, and things that were wrong, or that shouldn’t be worried about. She lived life more accurately than anyone I ever knew, placing her footsteps with the grace of a dancer through friendship, work, love, parenthood. Life buoyed her up. She was at home in it as a dolphin in water, playfully; at home in it as she was in her own skin. Her death came far too early for Martha and Joe, and for me, but that gap will close as the rest of us grow old, and we come nearer to her.
I long to be nearer to her. Outside the door I can see the place where her ashes lie, and beyond it the forests and hills. I know that it can never be like this, because loss is final, but I wish I could find her again. I wish I had
never looked back. I wish I could be there now, with her hand in mine and the smell of earth around us, walking in the trees’ shadow.
Patrick Dillon
27 June 2017
Acknowledgements
This book has been made possible by some wonderful, kind and sensitive support. Andrew Lownie, my agent for twenty years, and a friend of Nicola’s as well, took it under his wing with exactly the right combination of tact and thoughtfulness, and removed all pressure from me. I could not be more grateful to him. Robyn Drury, at Ebury, responded to the book straightaway. She seemed to understand instinctively why I needed to write it, and what I wanted to say. Robyn’s wisdom and intuition as an editor has been invaluable, and perfectly judged. Claire Scott, Diana Riley and the rest of the Ebury team have been ceaselessly kind, patient and sensitive in shepherding it to publication. I am truly grateful to all of them.
I am grateful to the friends who read a manuscript that can only have been painful in recalling a year that left them, too, bereft. Their love and support sustained Nicola through illness. They’ve carried me, Martha and Joe through the time since she died.
Finally, and most of all, I want to thank Martha and Joe. This book describes a year that devastated us, changed us, and brought us closer together. They were the first to read the manuscript; without their support I would not have published it. A Moment of Grace is for them, with infinite love.
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