Starting Over. Tony Parsons

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       three

      Think of death as the ultimate lie-in. Think of death that way. A lazy Sunday morning that goes on for all eternity, with you just dozing away until the end of days. That’s not such a bad way to think of death. Come on – it’s not all bad.

      What stops us thinking of death that way? I opened my eyes and I knew.

      My family were there at the stations of the hospital bed. It felt like a lot of time had gone by, and that they had not slept, or had any sleep worthy of the name, and that things had got worse. My wife, our boy, our girl.

      The great gawky Rufus, who had grown so extravagantly and yet still had so much growing to do. And Ruby, my darling girl, her face perfectly and incredibly poised between the child she had been and the woman she would become. And Lara, my wife, who I was planning to grow old with, because why would I ever want to be anywhere else? And now I never would, and now I never could.

      Those three were what stopped me from thinking of death as a Sunday morning that I would never wake from. Lara, Rufus, Ruby. The ones I would leave behind. They changed everything and made it impossible to let go, and made me want to weep, for them and for myself, because I loved them with all of my clogged-up, thoroughly knackered, pathetic excuse for a heart.

      A doctor came and fiddled about. Glancing at charts, squinting at me over the top of his reading glasses. And when I paid a bit more attention, I saw that there was an entire herd of doctors with him. Baby doctors, learning their trade, looking at him as though he were the font of all medical wisdom, and me as though I was a specimen in a jar.

      ‘Male, forty-seven, history of heart disease, had a myocardial infarction – let’s see – three days ago.’

      Three days? Was it already three days? The doctor held up a floppy black picture and pointed at some ghostly images. The baby doctors leaned forward with excitement.

      ‘See that? The coronary artery was already damaged by atheroma. Can you all see? Blood will not clot on healthy lining. Looks rather like the fur in a kettle, doesn’t it?’ The baby doctors eagerly agreed. ‘That’s what caused the thrombus – the blood clot – which blocked the artery, depriving a segment of the heart muscle of oxygen, and quite literally suffocating it.’ He put down the floppy black picture. ‘And that was the heart attack.’

      He was talking about me. For some reason I listened to all this with total indifference. It might have been the drugs. The doctor peered at Lara over the top of his reading glasses. ‘How long has he been on the NTD?’ he said, and she looked bewildered. ‘The National Transplant Database,’ he translated, and a light dawned in her eyes, a terrible light. Because of course she knew what he was talking about. It had become a big black chunk of our lives.

      ‘Three months,’ she said. ‘That makes it sound as though it’s a new problem, but it’s not.’ She was talking too fast, almost babbling. She held my hand as if that would make things a bit better. And funnily enough, it did. ‘The problems have been going on for years,’ she said.

      I looked at Rufus and Ruby, who had retreated to the walls when the doctors came in. They were in the chairs pressed up against the corner of the little room, frightened and uncertain, and I saw that at seventeen and fifteen, they were suddenly children again. They did not seem like teenagers now.

      No wry superiority in a hospital ward.

      No knowing smirks in here.

      ‘What are the odds?’ Lara said to the doctor, and one of our children whimpered at the question.

      The boy.

      ‘The odds get better the longer he holds on,’ the doctor said, getting ready to leave. He was smiling at Lara now, even as he edged towards the door. ‘Thousands of men die before even making it to the list. One in ten waiting for a transplant don’t make it because there’s no donor.’ He gave her a smile, and it wasn’t much of a smile, but I saw that he wasn’t such a bad guy, it was just that what was the end of the world for us was merely another day at work for him. And it was a big enough smile for my wife to cling to, and I could see that she was grateful. Some of the baby doctors were already out of the room. The big chief doctor was ready to say goodbye. ‘So the longer he holds on,’ he said to Lara, and it was as if I wasn’t there, or in a coma, or invisible, ‘the better the odds.’

      It was good news.

      Sort of good news.

      So I couldn’t understand why it made Lara unravel. She hugged me, making my IV drip wobble dangerously, and she told me the thing that was always between us though never spoken. And I regretted it now, leaving it unspoken through all those years, not telling her more often, and it seemed like such a stupid thing to have forgotten. And such a waste.

      ‘I love you,’ she whispered, stroking the back of my head. ‘It’s okay,’ she smiled. ‘You don’t have to say it back.’