‘Would you like us to call someone for you?’
A young nurse asks me this while I’m staring at the empty seat next to my bed.
‘No,’ I say. I barely look at her before she walks away. I can’t face explaining to another person my family tragedy. How I have no one. Nobody to call.
The recollection of their deaths comes to me as I’m lying there. Piece by piece, memories of the funeral start to dawn. Memories of the terrible day of me arriving at the hospital – the very hospital I’m sitting in now – and realising I was too late.
It’s monstrous, the way your mind forces you to relive things. How it remembers and amplifies the cruel details that forever haunt you. Like the mounting sense of panic I felt as Danny’s coffin disappeared from view. I had to grip my chair to stop myself rushing up there and clutching on to it, as if there was still something that could be done to save him.
I remember Pete’s brother taking my hand, asking if I was OK. He was always kind, but I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for kindness. Kindness hurt, almost as much as the grief. It made it all seem so much more real. I declined his offers of help as politely as I could. Told him he need not stay in the UK on my account. So he went back to America. Pete’s parents went back to their home. No socialising. No hugging. No network of support. Just me, left to cry alone.
I knew, in that moment of loneliness, that the only person who could comfort me had vanished, had turned into a pot of ashes I didn’t have a clue what to do with. I kept the urns in the wardrobe for a long time, then eventually scattered Pete’s in the garden a month after his death, on the spot of the lawn where he used to sit in a deck chair on warm days reading The Telegraph. Danny’s ashes, however, remain in the wardrobe. I don’t feel ready to let them go. Whilst I felt the small, solitary ceremony I’d held for Pete by myself, standing on the patio, was in some small way freeing, I wasn’t able to go through with it when it came to my son. At the time, I decided I’d keep them until what would have been his eighteenth birthday. Or perhaps on the day he would have gone off to university, when I would have had to let him go anyway, to some extent, to explore the big wide world without me.
I don’t know if it’s helpful for me to remember all these things now and risk getting swallowed up by the grief all over again. Or if it would have been better to keep them all packed away.
It’s only once I see the old woman in the bed opposite staring at me across the ward that I realise my tears have started to flow once more.