If I Die Before I Wake

by Emily Koch

  After what must have been months and months of doing my best to show the doctors my mental alertness, of attempting to move different parts of my body, of straining to speak – or even just grunt – I stopped. When they ran tests, I didn’t bother to try and respond. I had a new goal: death. I hoped that if they thought I was unresponsive for long enough, they would let me go. After listening to conversations between doctors and my dad, I knew they could. They could stop feeding me, or let me slip away the next time I got an infection.

  I had many reasons for thinking this would be for the best. I would be doing everyone else a favour. I could give Bea, Dad and Philippa the chance to move on with their lives. Even if I woke up from this nightmare, who could say whether I would be able to walk? Look after myself? Feed myself? I couldn’t burden them with that.

  I looked at it as the kind of life-or-death decision I’d heard about people making when a climb went badly wrong; it was rare, but there were still stories. You had to keep your cool, make the best decision for you and your partner. It would be horrendous to cut your friend’s rope and send them to their probable death, but if it meant the difference between one or two people crashing to the ground, then you’d do it. And, theoretically, the same applied if you had to make the call on cutting the rope above you, knowing that the fall would kill you, but save your partner. That’s how I looked at it. I was cutting my rope. It was the best decision I could make in the circumstances.

  A feeling that I deserved to die had slowly built up over the months of lying here. This had all happened for a reason. My body and my guilt locked me into my sentence. There was no question in my mind that this was a punishment: and my biggest crime had been killing my mum.

  That’s what Philippa said I had done – my sister wasn’t known for mincing her words. Is it any excuse to say that I was ‘only eighteen’ at the time, when Mum found out the cancer was back? While Dad lobbied our mother with reasons for hope and life, in the face of her second round of radiotherapy, I held her hands, looked into her eyes and let myself be carried away by her desperation and pain. If I hadn’t taken her side and let her slowly surrender, we all knew she would have had more skin-blistering treatment. She would have listened to me.

  But she had such convincing arguments. She was so sure of what she wanted. ‘Was hospice nurse,’ she reminded me, writing her stilted messages on the notepad she carried everywhere. Talking was too embarrassing because of the slur she was left with after they removed part of her tongue, and too painful because of the dryness the hours of radiation had bequeathed her. ‘Saw hundreds of people die,’ she wrote. ‘Know what I want. No more treatment. Help me explain to your dad.’

  How was I going to break it to him that she was giving up? He was already a shell of his old self. My voice felt loud those days, in a house where no one else seemed to speak. Dad had retreated into crime thrillers, guitar practice, and piles of geography coursework marking – the once-open door to his study now firmly shut. He hated talking to Mum through the notepad, so he avoided it as much as she did and they moved politely around each other, hiding from difficult conversations in their separate quiet worlds. How was I going to tell him that his wife wanted to die? Philippa had followed his lead and sunk into a bitter, seething silence. Mum got ill when she was fourteen, and died when Philippa was sixteen – it was hard to know how much of her reaction was down to Mum’s illness and how much would have happened anyway as she embraced her teenage moodiness. She swung from sulking in her room to screaming at any one of us. Mum was not spared, and in fact seemed to get the worst of it. It was hard to watch them together, with Philippa refusing to hug her, looking at her with undisguised hatred, deliberately making her life difficult by insisting different clothes be ironed, or different food be cooked for dinner, or that she wanted to watch a different DVD to the one we’d chosen for our monthly family movie night. Mum’s capacity for patience was astonishing, and when I glanced at her eyes to check for tears, they were always resolutely dry.

  I didn’t have quite the same level of tolerance. One evening Mum pushed a note over the dinner table, asking Philippa, ‘How’s Jenny?’

  Out of nowhere Philippa had rolled her eyes and sneered, ‘Screw you. Seriously – screw you.’

  I followed her upstairs to her bedroom, fuming. Mum didn’t deserve this. Ignoring her protests, I slammed open her door. ‘What the fuck, Phil?’

  ‘Leave me alone.’ She was crying, wiping her face with the sleeve of her hoodie.

  ‘Why are you treating her like this?’

  ‘Do you even know who Jenny is?’ she asked, sitting down on her bed, picking up a magazine and flicking through its pages. ‘She was my friend from debating club. Which I don’t go to any more because Dad has to take Mum to her acupuncture session on Tuesday nights instead. Doesn’t she get it? I haven’t seen Jenny for months, because of her.’

  I looked around her room – at her Cruel Intentions and Never Been Kissed film posters, her old teddy bears kicked off the bed onto the floor, the history textbooks on her desk – looking for something that would help me understand her selfishness. ‘You think debating club is more important than Mum getting better?’

  ‘It’s all right for you. You don’t care that everything has changed since she got ill. I caught Dad crying the other day. Have you ever seen him do that before? He didn’t even cry when Nana and Grandad died. Mum’s made him miserable.’ She slapped a hand down onto her magazine’s cover – as if this fact was sure to convince me.

  ‘It’s not her that’s made him like that,’ I said, sitting down in the chair at her desk, smoothing over the open pages of her textbook. ‘It’s not her fault. It’s the cancer. If you need to blame something, blame that.’

  She tore the cover of her magazine off, ripped it into small pieces and tossed them into the bin by my feet. ‘But I can’t touch the cancer, can I? I can’t shout at it. I can’t see it.’ She looked up at me, tore out another page without glancing down, screwed it into a ball, and held my gaze until I had to look away.

  The next day I was helping Mum do weeding in the garden – she tended it devotedly right up until the final weeks of her life – and she pulled her notepad out of her apron. ‘Sun cream?’ she wrote, and I got up from my kneeling pad to fetch her some from the house. In the August sun she needed to apply a high factor to the long scar running down her neck, the result of the surgery to remove her lymph nodes which had been done at the same time as they removed part of her tongue. I had started walking away across the lawn, when I heard her speak – a rasping, garbled word, but unmistakable. ‘Alex.’ I turned, and she beckoned to me. As I made my way back to her, she started writing again. ‘Ask Phil to bring it to me,’ she wrote. ‘You take a break. She can help me.’

  I winced. ‘I don’t know if she’ll come, Mum.’

  ‘Ask,’ she wrote.

  I sighed. I didn’t want her to be disappointed.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she wrote, smiling up at me from her spot on the ground at the foot of the apple tree. ‘It’s just her way. I understand. Ask her. She might come.’

  But Philippa wouldn’t leave her desk when I passed the message on. She rolled her eyes and told me she was too busy with her homework.

  This was how she was for the whole two years of our mother’s illness. How would she take it when I told her that Mum was going to refuse more treatment? Part of me was worried that she’d be glad – worried she might even tell Mum that she would be pleased to see the back of her.

  I spent several days agonising over how I was going to tell them. I’d always been a procrastinator, particularly when it came to sharing bad news. I could have saved myself and the people around me a lot of pain if I hadn’t been. And there were things I should never have put off telling Bea, things that happened in my final weeks. I’ve paid for that cowardly delay these past few months.

  In the end, it was taken out of my hands. While she was in the shower, Dad leafed through one of her notebooks. He found
the page that read, in fat blue felt-tip pen, ‘No more treatment. Help me explain to your dad.’ I was watching TV in the living room when he strode in, threw the notebook in my lap and asked: ‘When were you going to tell me?’ His face was red and shiny with sweat, his breathing fast and shallow. ‘I won’t have it,’ he said, when I didn’t reply. Snatching the pad out of my hands, he walked back out of the living room. The door to his study slammed. ‘I won’t let her!’ He shouted the words this time – it was the loudest noise I had ever heard him make. I muted the TV, walked quietly out into the corridor and put an ear to his door. All I could hear was the sound of sheets of paper being torn from their spiral binding – Mum’s notepad. ‘You can’t do this to us, Diane,’ he shouted, before the house went silent again. When Philippa appeared at the bottom of the stairs, wondering what was going on, I dragged her into the living room and sat her down next to me on the sofa. She wasn’t glad after all. ‘She can’t do that,’ she said, her eyes wide. ‘The doctors won’t allow it.’

  ‘They’ll have to.’ I put my arm around her. ‘And we have to respect her wishes.’

  She pulled away. ‘We do not,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to go along with this?’

  I nodded, without looking at her.

  ‘What’s wrong with you? You can’t let her die. The radiotherapy will make her better this time.’ She spoke rapidly, standing up. ‘Dad will know how to talk her round. You can’t let her do this. Please.’ She started crying. ‘I just want my old mum back,’ she whimpered. I still couldn’t look at her face. ‘I want everything to go back to how it was before.’

  Over the first months I had spent in hospital, my mind stormed with these painful scenes. I was convinced I was being punished.

  By choosing death I finally accepted my fate: I had to pay for everything I had done.

  3

  I REMEMBER THE last time Bea visited me, before everything changed for both of us.

  The nurses had positioned me on my left side, propped up with cushions to relieve my back and prevent the pressure sores that they constantly checked me for. This meant I was facing the window; my eyes were closed but I could feel dim sunlight on my skin. I listened to the sirens as the ambulances sped by on the road outside, their pitch changing as they passed.

  The door to my room whined, and someone padded up behind my back. I recognised the scent: citrus and cigarettes. Bea walked around to stand between me and the window, and I felt the soft touch of her lips on my forehead – her usual greeting.

  ‘Only me,’ she said, her sing-song voice drowning out the chatter on the ward. ‘Oh.’ She touched my face. ‘Hang on, I’ll sort that out.’

  Footsteps. Then the soft rip of paper from near the foot of my bed. Footsteps approached my head again. Bea dabbed a tissue to the corner of my mouth, where saliva was dribbling out and dampening the pillow under my turned cheek.

  Don’t, I thought. She wasn’t my nurse. I didn’t want her to see me as her helpless patient. Don’t do that.

  ‘There we go. That’s better.’ She walked around to the other side of my bed and leaned in to kiss my right ear, then pressed her cheek up to mine and asked, ‘Are you dreaming in there?’

  She paused.

  ‘That would be nice.’

  I felt the cold frame of her glasses against my skin, then she lifted her head away from me and her weight sank the mattress as she climbed onto the bed, curling her small body around the back of mine.

  ‘Then maybe, when I go to sleep and I dream, we could meet up, you know? Dream-me and dream-you. Hang out.’

  Her bent knees dug into the back of my thighs as she breathed into my neck.

  ‘Sorry,’ she sighed. ‘It sounds stupid. But I had a weird dream about you this morning and it would be nice to think it was really you, somehow.’

  She put a hand on my back.

  ‘I dreamed I was in bed, about to get up. Then a cat jumps in through the window and starts clawing at my back, like this.’ She scratched her nails through the thin material of my pyjama top in long, deliberate strokes down my spine. It was the best thing I had felt in days. ‘God, Al. I swear you’re still losing weight. These ribs.’

  She gently dragged her fingers upwards towards my neck.

  ‘Anyway, so then it starts drawing circles on my shoulder blades. Like a little, I don’t know, a little cat masseuse or something.’ She laughed without a sound – but the slight movement of her lips on my neck set the fine hairs of my back and shoulders on end. She inhaled, and reached her arm around my stomach.

  ‘Outside I could hear someone moving their bins around. I think that was real. I could hear someone laughing.’ She rubbed my abdomen. ‘And I was pissed off because – well, you know what I get like when I’m woken up before my alarm goes off.’

  I did. A smile flickered through my face without moving any of my muscles. I remembered my dopey, puffy-eyed Bea, her face creased from the folds in her pillowcase, rolling over and groaning at me if our neighbours dared to slam the door to their flat before seven o’clock. If I ever needed to get up before her, I had to be absolutely silent. Although, strangely, if it was the other way round, she was allowed to make as much noise as she wanted, and switch all the lights on.

  ‘Then this cat starts pinching my fingers,’ she said. ‘And I’m thinking, how is this cat pinching me? Then there’s more laughing, but this time in our bedroom. I hear this voice, saying: “You’re so cute when you sleep. Sleepy little Honey Bea.”’

  She had always pretended to hate it when I called her that.

  ‘I know that voice, I’m thinking. And I say: “You’ve been gone a long time.” I smile, I reach out to touch your face.’

  She lifted her hand to my cheek.

  ‘And I say: “You’re back. You came home.”’

  Bea.

  ‘It was vivid. You were right there, pinching me, stroking my forehead. You were kissing my scar.’

  I saw her. That perfect scar, a little dent that tugged her lip gently up towards her nostril, the only visible remnant of a mild cleft lip. After several years of me kissing it, she had eventually stopped trying to hide it behind her hand.

  ‘I was happy,’ she whispered, the laughter gone. ‘But then you weren’t there. You know how in dreams the edges slide away? I rolled over and reached for you, and you weren’t there any more.’

  She held her palm tight against my stomach, thumbing my protruding lower ribs instead of the muscles she used to stroke.

  ‘And then I woke up and I remembered. You couldn’t have been there.’

  She sniffed, and her head moved away from me.

  My body may have been paralysed, but I could still feel when my heart twisted for her, as it did then. I wanted to lift my needled hand and put it on hers, and tell her it would be over soon.

  That was my hope. I wanted to put an end to it, knock the weight from her small shoulders and push her forward into better days. I was making progress, I thought. They would soon start to talk about letting me die.

  Before my hospital confinement, we used to talk about our three future kids. Two boys, one girl. They’d all be climbing (taught by me) and learning to draw (taught by Bea) from a young age. They would learn guitar from my dad, and we’d name the girl after my mum. Bea had never met her, but it was her idea. I remember exactly where we were when she suggested it – on holiday in the Algarve. The beach at Praia de Odeceixe was a spit of golden sand, bordered on one side by a river and lagoons where smaller children paddled, and on the other side by the sea, where older children played in the surf. Bea was sketching me as I lay on my back, propped up on my elbows, while I tried to work out how the black, jagged cliffs of schist overlooking the river mouth had been formed and shaped – and, more importantly, whether they could be climbed.

  ‘There’s a little girl over there, who keeps throwing her brother’s toys into the water,’ Bea said, putting her pencil down. ‘She’s a terror.’

  I turned to see. ‘Where?’
/>   ‘Don’t move!’ she said. ‘I haven’t finished yet.’

  I shook my head and laughed.

  ‘Sorry.’ She picked up her pencil again. ‘I didn’t mean for you to look. I was just saying.’

  With my head back in the desired position, I resumed my study of the cliffs.

  ‘I was thinking, if we had a girl, one day,’ she said. Her pencil scratched at the paper, and I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. She tilted her head, squinting her eyes at the sketchbook, assessing her progress. ‘We could call her something to remember your mum. Maybe not Diane – it sounds a bit dated now, don’t you think? But what about Didi?’

  I smiled. Little Didi. Using my mum’s name had never crossed my mind, but now that she mentioned it – yes. It would be the perfect way to keep her memory alive.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Am I allowed to talk?’ I asked. ‘It would involve moving my mouth – it could mess up your masterpiece.’

  She threw her pencil at me and laughed. ‘You may speak.’

  ‘In that case, I think that would be a great idea. Mum would have loved it.’ I handed her pencil back, trying not to move the rest of my body too much.

  ‘What was she like?’ Bea asked.

  ‘I’ve told you, haven’t I? I feel like I’ve told you everything.’

  ‘There must be more.’ Bea put her sketchbook down and moved her towel closer to me. She sat down at my side, pulling her pale green kaftan over her knees. She’d insisted that she wanted to go somewhere warm, where the sea was bright blue and the sand was golden – somewhere I would be forced to walk around without a top on and show off my climber’s shoulders, she had added with a grin. She picked up a handful of sand and let it slip out in cascades between her fingers. ‘Tell me little things about her,’ she said. ‘I wonder if our children will be like her in any way, even if they never meet her?’

  ‘Little things?’ I repeated, tilting my head back and closing my eyes against the glare of the sun. ‘She didn’t know how to say no to people.’