티스토리 뷰
After 20 years of marriage, Joanne Walker and her husband agreed to split. Then he fell seriously ill and had no one else to turn to - but was it even her place to take charge any more?
It was over. Just like that. I'd stopped listening to him; he couldn't understand me. The usual stuff. We took our time - a couple of years, in fact - getting around to untangling our relationship. We had been together for 20 years: house, mortgage, interlocking extended family, three children, two dogs. I washed his underwear and he knew where the fuse box was. It was a life-long, partnership that began when I was 18. I knew him like the back of my hand.
"So, this is it," he said, as I watched him stuff T-shirts into a suitcase and resisted the urge to refold them. His eyes were dark pools of disbelief. Twenty years. He was my best friend. We had grown up together. He was right - it didn't seem possible.
I cried myself to sleep once but then refused to wallow. Taking control of he house, money, bills, plumbing - things that he had always dealt with - was terrifying but empowering. We still spoke or texted most days. Still wished each other goodnight. He talked me through a step-by-step unblocking of the kitchen sink, I sympathized when he said he felt tired all the time. I told him he should stop smoking; ho pointed out how much I was drinking.
We knew our marriage was over but neither of us seemed able to stop caring.
It was summer and I decided to take the children away for a week to Cornwall. We agreed it would be a good idea for him to join us for a day. He would drive there and back in a day - worth it to spend an hour with the kids - but when he arrived I could see that something was wrong.
He had been ignoring the increasing fatigue and gut-wrenching cough for months. I intended to drop them off at the beach but when we got there he could hardly walk. He was unable to carry all the children's beach paraphernalia. This was typical, I thought, exactly the kind of behavior that I shouldn't have to deal with any more. I stalked off and left him to it.
We drove back that evening in convoy, my eldest son travelling with his dad. It still wakes me at night, the thought of what might have happened in that car, during that journey.
The next day, my husband texted me with these words: "There's something wrong with me. I don't know what to do. I'm scared.
He was swelling - first his abdomen, then his legs. He called round to show me, pushed a Lego figure into the flesh of his calf to demonstrate how long the imprint took to disappear. The children watched with revolted fascination.
"Why didn't you go straight to the doctor?" I said, but he didn't know how to answer. I did, though.
He still needed my reassurance; needed my support, just as the children did, because we were still bound by these family ties, this routine nurturing. We had been each other's mother, father, sister, brother for so long it seemed natural to turn to each other in times of crisis. How then could I expect to carve out a new life for myself when it felt like an act of betrayal? An abandonment?
The GP thought it was chest infection and prescribed two antibiotics, the second because the first seemed to cause a reaction and worsen the swelling. He couldn't wear jeans any more, only shorts that were two sizes bigger than usual. His feet seemed to want to burst out of his trainers. He was two weeks shy of his 45th birthday. This didn't seem very old. Not when our youngest was six, our eldest 15. They weren't ready, I wasn't ready for - what? We still didn't know.
Next they thought it was kidney failure. Then, perhaps his liver was enlarged. We were still living apart but I knew he longed to rest his head on my shoulder. I once told him that he was mine to go through life with that he would not have to die alone. Worse still, when his mother died several years earlier, I sat at her beside and vowed to care for her son, had promised that she had nothing to worry about and could slip away in peace.
When his penis began to swell, he took himself to A&E where he was immediately diagnosed with congestive heart failure.
I feared the worst. I have never felt fear like it. I knew he was going to die. I wandered around the home we had shared for 20 years, picking things up and putting things down, the minutiae of our lives together, and I was able to grieve at last for the death of all our hopes and dreams.
Uncertain of my place, I held back from visiting him in hospital at first. I felt that I had given up my right to stand beside him even though I knew he wanted me there. The kids visited with other family members and when they returned, their distress manifested physically.
I was torn between a desire to nurture and utter rage at his inability to do this one simple task: taking care of himself. I fired off text after angry text. I was covering up for the fact that I felt that I had let him - let them all - down.
The children wanted him to come home when he was discharged but I knew that if I allowed that to happen, everything we had struggled through so far would be for nought and the problems would undoubtedly reappear in a month, a year, five years. Did I still want to feel this way in five years?
Anyway, I wasn't yet convinced that he would even get through this. Only 10% of his heart had been functioning for some time and it was unclear how far it could be expected to recover.
He had to undergo some exploratory procedures. These were scheduled for 10am when family and friends would be at work and school. I couldn't let him face that alone. I drove to the hospital, only to find there were no parking spaces. Circling the car park several times, I eventually pulled up at the side of the road, called his mobile and blurted a tearful, desperate, barely coherent apology on to his voicemail for not being there.
The weeks passed. Recovery was slow but, incredibly, the signs were good. He had been lucky, he would be discharged the next day. I sat with him on a bench, the sun on our faces, outside the cardiology unit and he lit up a cigarette. I remonstrated. Did he not at least owe it to our children to take care of himself or was he continuing to destroy himself to spite me? To make a liar of me?
His reply? "You don't get to tell me what to do any more."
And he was right.
So was it that I couldn't stop caring or was it that I didn't want to - because then I had to admit that I may be horribly, irrevocably, permanently along?
This all happened three years ago. We are now in the process of finalizing our divorce arrangements. Feelings of guilt are certainly my overriding response to the situation: not just because I left him alone at this crucial moment to face his own mortality. It is more than that. My guilt arises from the fact that I sacrificed our marriage to prove that I wasn't afraid to live without it.
The truth is that I will never stop caring; my kids go on caring, so I must too. Is it possible that this bond, which can be stretched so painfully by separation, can only actually be broken by death? Ironically, this is exactly what we promised in the first place.