Please note: this piece contains strong language
I sit quietly, utterly content in the unusual still that has embodied the house as the late afternoon sun streams in through our rainbow windows.
My husband is busy in the kitchen.
My two young girls are outside in the back garden constructing their own assault course deliberating extensively over what piece of apparatus they will clamber on next. I can hear their enthusiastic voices each vying for audience with the other to ensure their overflowing ideas are heard and taken on board during this construction process of such magnitude.
I have a short amount of time!
I will be summoned soon as chief time scorer.
So I sit still for now, thankful for the five minutes while I sip my tea and I watch.
My one year son stands a few metres in front of me, his chubby thighs are strong as he squats down with great aplomb and picks at the threshold between the living and dining area. It’s a raised threshold by a couple of centimetres, the wood stain has been chipped away in parts from a thousand crossings of baby walkers, trikes, bikes and scooters that have raced round our home over the last few years. His concentration is fierce whilst he picks. He then stands tall and proud, flashes me a cheeky, toothy smile and with his bare foot he begins to negotiate the raised level touching tentatively, trying to work it out, back and forth, back and forth as only a curious one year old can.
I continue to watch, my delight wanes.
My eyes begin to sting.
My thoughts catapult me into the future; a common but frightful occurrence these days that has to be fought against at all costs. It is a future that screams at me from the darkness. It is the place where my husband has been ripped from us. His terminal cancer has robbed us.
I am alone with my three children. I am alone and bereft of the one person in this world who loves my children as I do.
My son, in my mind, is now 15 with multiple thresholds that he must navigate across as adolescence takes its iron glad grip. I try to advise, console, counsel but without the weight of my husband behind me I feel...transparent. Hollow. We are now a family of four instead of five. How do we travel across into that new landscape?
In this new place all I see is anguish, heart-wrenching, guttural anguish and repair, so much repair needed for my childrens’ broken hearts that I will be left to mend and feel so unequipped to do so. My girls have had the privilege that my son will not – they’ve had their daddy longer and know him well. They will remember him. The songs he sang, the stories he told, the advice he gave during long bedtime chats, the meals he cooked, the rules he enforced, the problems he solved. They’ll remember his horsey rides, his tickles, his cuddles, his forever paternal love. Their bond is strongly cemented. My perfect boy however will still be of an age where he doesn’t understand where his daddy has gone. How do I explain to him the day he brings me his daddy’s bicycle helmet looking for him to take him out? And the older two – how do we tell them that soon their daddy will no longer live? How do we explain that he will be in another world travelling along side us but not fucking physically with us where he should be? He’ll no longer put them to bed, take them to school, put on their shoes, brush their teeth, bath them, play and tussle with them, counsel them, fill them up with confidence and love. For my husband and I, the slow road of grief has begun as we try to prepare for our ultimate separation.
Yet, we are so very ill prepared for death. How do you prepare to die?
My husband assures me that when the time comes I will rise to the occasion Linda Hamilton Terminator style! He tells me I will astonish myself and yet I find that hard to believe. He won’t be here to reassure me and I will be forced to forge ahead navigating in the dark.
For now though I pull myself back to the moment, I re-adjust myself back to the new rubric in which we have now redefined our lives – everything in the present. My son has moved on and is now focused on an old padlock that he has pulled from some forgotten drawer. The girls’ assault course has been abandoned and I can hear screams and whoops of pure childish joy as their father chases them around the garden. I wipe my tears and smile. Our future can wait for now.