That Christmas Past and the Chateau

Putting together the pictures for the scrap book is a labour of love. I have chosen F's happiest ones; he always had a lovely smile and these pictures are of his most radiant. They are disparate ones of family and friends in different activities and places and make me realise just how blessed we have been. But in all the myriad photos of F and I standing together there is no space between us which says this is as far as you go; this and no more. No presentiment of his loss. We are full of life. We are secure and happy and enjoying the moment; not knowing that it would be so brief.

I have been impelled into widowhood: no-one asked me whether I would care to be a widow. We deliberately go into marriage, but we accidentally become a widow. We do not consider the possibility beyond it being a vague thing on the horizon that will probably never happen. "One day if something ever happens to me" is a game we play. We do not believe in the inevitable. And there are no lessons in how to deal with this new, altered and inevitable state of existence. Which is astounding, given that it is the future of every single couple in the world. Someone has to die - or walk away, or divorce, or stray. Someone has to be left.

So, I am the one left. F and I ceased to communicate when he went into the hospital. We were not lucky enough to have a lingering death, during which we could rationally plan the future, and talk, and say goodbye. Where I could begin to mourn. We expected, in France, to emerge with his health intact and were not prepared for the crash of crises, one after the other, that took him further and further from consciousness, conversation, recognition or comfort. For six weeks he was ravaged by ventilators, drugs, delirium, tubes, ICU nurses and by I and the family, or friends, standing by. For six weeks I was at his bedside for seven hours a day but he did not know it.

The fact that his nurses and doctors hardly spoke a word of English isolated him; he must have been terrified. F was hard of hearing, and anything but a linguist. He would not have understood a word they were saying even if he were conscious - which he must have been, in flashes. Once he said to me, I absolutely hate it here. But his moments of equilibrium were few and far between and all the more cruel, as each one presaged another crash and we had no more than a few cruel hours of thinking we were perhaps going to survive, after all.

These memories are so painful, they are not good at this time of the year. I should be humming Christmas tunes; I have wrapped my gifts and will take out a pretty tree we have which changes colours; I will set it up and I will make mince pies. I should not be thinking of that Christmas in France.

it was really cold, the sky was perennially grey. I do not remember sunshine. Son M, his wife P and baby V were with me then. We moved from the commercial hotel in which we had been staying, near the hospital, into a chateau which son B and I had found. We were so elated to find it; old and elegant, it had so much charm and character we thought this would be a good place to spend Christmas. But we did not reckon on the cold and draughty floors of a very old building, and the fact that baby V was crawling and spent most of her waking hours sitting on the floor, where we had to dress her in layers of clothing to keep her warm.

I had a few little decorations with me (as we would have been happily celebrating Christmas with a recovered F, had things been different); I scattered them about in the suite of rooms we occupied but it could not have been more dreadful. Even the baby, her smiles and sweetness, could not combat the emptiness, the bizarreness of where we were and what we were at. Her grand father, of course, did not even know it was Christmas.

We ate an expensive lunch at a boutique hotel we discovered nearby, that Christmas day; the three of us and the baby. The table was prettily decorated with orange glass baubles and touches of gold; the service was excellent, the food strange, the wine costly, the whole thing an ordeal. We struggled through our meal, through the day - but we were still hopeful, then. What we were enduring was only temporary. No-one had yet discussed with me my future status. I had not envisaged my husband's death, it was unthinkable. Our husband and father was simply going through a dreadful glitch.