The Day that Changes Everything

"My husband is dying today," I say to the uniformed man who is checking the contents of our bags as we line up for the aircraft. My small case contains all my cosmetics. "I do not want to check this bag into the hold as I want to get off the plane as fast as possible." I see his face change." Just throw everything away," says son B. "Just let them throw everything away, Mom," he says again. "Hold on, sir," says the man. "We are here to help. Carry your bag."

I am struck by his moment of kindness.

We sit immobile, son B and I. Numb. My husband is an hour or so away across the Channel. He is very ill. I have that morning instructed - if that's the word - son M to tell the doctors to do nothing. He has had enough. "They want to know, should they do everything, or nothing?" Nothing. He will last, they say, about 48 hours. They will make him comfortable.

I see the prospect of his bedside, I see us waiting, watching, I fear the 48 hours.

I cannot remember the flight from Stansted, or the plane, or what we say to each other. I sit frozen with dread. We leave the plane and make for the exit, where son M is waiting in the Arrivals.

"It's all over," he says. "Dad has gone."

The world reels. Son B doubles over; I hang on to son M. We sit down on a nearby seat. My heart beats in my ears. We are shocked, shaking, frozen; a family oblivious to people hurrying by.

At the hospital my husband lies in his cubicle in ICU. There is no small beep of machinery, no tubes invade his battered body but he is not peaceful. His face is drawn, somehow unfamiliar. His bed is immaculate and neat. He is still faintly warm. I do not cry, I do not breathe. I am poised; we thank the doctors, who hurry to meet us with faces stiff with anxiety and yes, guilt, as if they could have done something better but I know they could not.

Husband F died in spite of their frantic efforts to put right his failing system, their chase around his organ circuits shutting down one by one. But he should not have died. He is the first fatality in a long line of successes with a new procedure, a heart procedure which corrects atrial fibrillation, sending patients home after nothing more stressful than a few days of discomfort.

We have had six weeks of agonising intensive care and as many crises. A heart attack, a sudden, unexpected and grotesque colostomy, kidney failure, liver failure, an intestinal infection, periods of delirium in which a strong man wept, pleading to be taken home, to be given a gun so that he could pull the trigger, to be put into the water, to be let go; unaware that he is 10,000 miles away from home, not in the hospital near our house facing the Indian ocean and an African coast, but in France.

This day changes my life. This day I am husbandless, my grown children are fatherless. From now on I am a new person, a stranger to myself. I am devoid of a partnership; I have no best friend, mate, or ally. I am strafed by loss, sadness, grief. Alone. I will come to know the depths of a most human condition, an unspoken, feared, dreaded condition shunned by our western attitude to death, in which it never really happens, only to other people.

"If something should ever happen to you" are words spoken lightly, as if considering an unlikely option.

It is not unlikely. It is definite. It happens. Death comes. And you are left with yourself.