Three or four a week, for about two years. You do not sleep through them and you do not go back to sleep after.
I did that at forty-eight, and at forty-nine, and at fifty, and the only person who ever said thank you for it was an agency nurse who came twice.
Rhydian always had a reason why he could not be there.
Work was too demanding. He was exhausted. He would come next weekend.
One weekend became another month, and then another year.
I kept a diary of her care from 2021 — not for him, for the doctors.
I have gone back through it since. In two years and four months he was in that house eleven times.
Four of those were Christmas and birthdays. Two were to collect post. One was forty minutes.
A few hours before I made that thirty-first call, I had been sitting under those hospital lights holding her hand and asking her not to leave me yet.
Not please don’t go.
I said don’t leave me yet, which is a different sentence entirely, and I heard myself say it and I heard what was in it.
A woman asking a dying eighty-year-old not to leave her alone with the rest of her own life.
PART 2
Then I rang her son again.
It was ten past eleven at night where I was and late afternoon where he was, which I had worked out on a piece of paper like somebody doing homework.
It rang out and went to voicemail.
I rang again. And again, until I no longer cared how desperate I sounded.
Eleven o’clock. Half past. Quarter to twelve. I have the log and I have looked at it exactly once.
The gaps get shorter as the night goes on, which is the part I find hardest to look at. A woman speeding up.
I only wanted him to understand that he might be running out of time to say goodbye to his mother.
Instead another woman picked up and laughed at me.
Old wife. She said that twice.
She was not even unkind about it, which is the thing I keep going back to.
She found it funny. She was enjoying herself, and she was performing — for him, in the next room, in a way that told me she had heard about me before.
Old wife is not a phrase you invent while holding a champagne glass.
