This post, potentially, could be the most difficult to write so far. More difficult than the first confessional piece or the ones about my flawed mental health or even the one when I apologised for losing my rag at you after a highly successful charity thing. None of them compare to this.
I’m starting these sentences over and over again and trying to write words that capture and hold exactly what I want to say, but it’s impossible. The phrases have been swirling round my head all day, shining with the promise of a beautifully structured sentiment and sparkling little trinkets of cleverness and erudition, but now it actually comes to writing down the specifics of what I want to say to you; the nub if you will, I am blank.
My diagnosis pushed our relatively young relationship to extremes we couldn’t have imagined. We’d been together only a few years and had already faced a few challenges but we had borne the brunt of them with our trademark united front and solid intention to always put our family first. We braced ourselves for the onslaught cancer was going to dish out and we shielded our boys from what we could, but you, you took the worst of it. It was you who stood firm against the battering of hospital trip after hospital trip. It was you who answered the phone that always seemed to be ringing. It was you who told people I was too tired to see them or too scared of getting their cold or just too damned incapacitated to speak to anyone other than you. You had always said you would protect me, and you did.
From the moment of diagnosis you stuck with my moods, my tears and my hysteria. You weathered the storm of my reaction and kept your own counsel, you never once made me feel less of a person because of my cancer – and that’s some mean feat because cancer makes it its business to mess with your head.
When I couldn’t look after myself you looked after me. When I couldn’t look after the boys you looked after them. And sometimes in between we even managed to have some fun, like the time we went to Bath Spa and were two baldies together – Right Said Fred eat your heart out. It sounds bizarre but we laughed a lot during those times, we had to, otherwise we might have sunk.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent the last 15 months apologising to you because every day there was – is – something I need you to do. I’m less independent than I was, I can’t carry heavy stuff or move heavy things; I’m half the woman I was. This is such an issue for me yet you truly seem not to care. For a while I thought this was a bad thing; you should care about my body image the way I do, but you don’t see it like that. You just see me.
I am fighting this fear that cancer has given me – the fear that you will leave this half woman I have become in search of a better one. I am fighting many fears along those lines; but you know this. We married in sickness and in health, I just don’t think either of us expected it to be put to the test quite so quickly.
I always knew you were a good man, I knew I’d chosen well, that you would be kind, supportive and loving, I didn’t know the extent to which this was the case though. You put me first, the boys second and yourself somewhere below the cats so I could endure my illness safe in the knowledge that you had everything covered.
You know, husband of mine, I have barely touched the surface here. You are my darling, my sweetheart, my friend and my love. Thank you.