He chuckled softly, though the sound quickly faded, leaving behind a brief, pained wince that I’m sure he hoped I wouldn’t notice. I pulled up one of the chairs, its design just as obnoxiously uncomfortable as the ones out in the hallway, and sat down across from him.
‘I don’t want to lie to you, Ruth,’ he said, his voice measured and steady. ‘But after I tell you this, I want you to promise me that you won’t try to suffer with me through all of this.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, confused not just by his words, but by the mournful and maudlin way he spoke them, as though each word was causing him a level of anguish that I couldn’t hope to understand.
‘Look,’ he said, meeting my eyes, ‘one of the reasons I fell in love with you is because you’re kind, Ruth. Which is not something that’s particularly ubiquitous nowadays. You’re kind to people who don’t deserve it, and I don’t want you to be kind to me anymore.’
I’d be lying if I said my mind hadn’t started piecing things together before I sat down, but I didn’t want to believe he was going to say what I thought he was.
‘So, what is it?’ I asked, trying to stay steady, but my voice was faltering and breaking. I wasn’t any kind of medical professional, but I at least wanted to know the name of the thing inside his body trying to kill him.
‘Glioblastoma,’ he said finally, the word landing with an emotional weight I recognised all too well. He must have seen the vacant expression as I tried to wonder what kind of cancer it exactly was, I think I had heard of it before. ‘It’s a brain tumour,’ he clarified, ‘a proper nasty, aggressive one. It grows fast and spreads through the brain tissue like a forest fire.’
‘And… what? You can’t get chemo?’ I asked, desperately.
‘They can do surgery, and they can do chemo,’ he replied with a rhythm to his words, as if he was repeating what he had been told by professionals numerous times. ‘They’re asking if I want to start next week.’
Something told me that, though he’d stopped speaking, he hadn’t said everything he wanted to, so I stayed quiet.
‘I’m scared, Ruth, I’m really scared,’ he said with a vulnerability I don’t think I had ever seen from him before, even when we were married. ‘I don’t want to die but I’m just so scared how this thing is going to change me. The doctor said as it grows, it’ll affectmy mood, my personality, I can get violent, aggressive. And I don’t want to change, Ruth. And I don’t want anyone’s last memories of me to be of someone I wasn’t.’
His gaze dropped, fixing a glare on some vacant patch of air.
‘So, how long are we talking?’ I felt like that was the question I had really been waiting to ask.
‘I’ve got about twelve months if I go through with chemo and surgery,’ he said with a sigh. ‘The doctor said two years if things go really well.’
I felt like I should have started sobbing then, but it all seemed too cruel to process fully. All I could manage was the simplest, most primal thought pounding around my head.
‘But… I don’t want you to die,’ I whispered, as if this would somehow stop the tumour in its tracks, raise its hands as if to surrender and retreat back to where it came from, as if me saying that had some kind of impact.
‘I don’t want to die either, Ruth,’ he affirmed, his voice breaking as I could see him successfully hold back the tears from spilling. He hadn’t often cried during our marriage but there was something about him refusing to weep now, that felt even more devastating. ‘But them’s the breaks, ain’t it?’ He forced another artificial smile through the tears, though the brittle bravado wasn’t fooling either of us.
I knew he was doing his best to try and suppress everything he was feeling for my benefit: the fear, the regret, the grief, the looming realisation of your own mortality. We all know, deep down, that we’re going to die someday. But there’s a moment when that abstract, distant notion rapidly hardens into a cold, blunt truth. I saw it at least once a week when I helped someone come in to plan their funeral. I think we assume that death will only come for us once we feel sated by life, as though having your life abruptly and tragically cut short is something that happens to other people, never actually to us. In an instant, you feel the weight of every ordinary day you wished away, every postponed moment or holiday, and realise you never had as much time as you thought.
‘But you have to get the chemo, Ben,’ I urged. ‘I mean, I can’t remember the details, but I heard about this guy on the news, he had this inoperable brain tumour or something, and he fought it. He lived another six, seven years. There’s still so much life you could still have.’
‘Ruth,’ he said gently. ‘You know, the really cruel thing about glioblastoma is that it always comes back. Always. The five-year survival rate? Five to ten per cent, and the percentage it comes back: ninety.’
‘How do you know that?’ I asked.
‘Do you want to know how much time I’ve spent on the internet researching this thing?’ he replied wryly. ‘All my targeted ads on my phone now are about cancer, or wills, or skydiving, weirdly.’
I didn’t know what else to say, I didn’t even know how to react. He turned his eyes to listlessly watch the television as I just stared intensely down at the hospital bed sheets. After staring at it for so long, I now realised its design was made up of thousands of primary colour caducei interlocking with one another.
‘Did you not wonder why I’ve been at home more?’ he asked, with a little jest as if it was all one big prank he had been playing. ‘I’ve been signed off work since the diagnosis.’
‘I noticed you’ve been arguing with Bill a lot more.’
‘Yeah, that’s something for another day.’
‘Oh, Ben, love,’ I murmured, sliding my chair closer to his bed and reaching out, wrapping my hand carefully around his and squeezing gently. He turned to me, his eyes still glassy and exhausted, and I lifted his hand to my face, nuzzling my lips against it tenderly.
‘I’ll always be kind to you, Ben,’ I said, ‘and you know there’s nothing you can do to stop that.’
I didn’t know if losing Ben this way was worse than losing Greta. Is it better to know someone’s days are numbered so you can make the most of them, or to have no idea, and for their last day to feel just like any other? More and more, I felt death begin to takeon a shape, its vague, shadowy ambiguity sharpening. It was starting to feel like this vindictive amorphous being, deliberately taking things from me just to see how much it could make me hurt.
Ben didn’t speak any more after that, probably realising that another person knowing about his diagnosis made his impending death feel even more real. The life he’d always enjoyed so much was coming to an abrupt end. After a while, he gently closed his eyes, and I sat there, watching him sleep for a bit longer. Not in a creepy way – at least, I didn’t think it was creepy. I was just trying to imagine what he might look like dead, to prepare myself for the crushing weight I would feel when I looked into his open casket. Okay… maybe thatwasa bit creepy.
