complicated family. His girlfriend was new, and young. He also had a wife, from whom he was separated but not divorced, and children. There was clearly animosity between these two groups of people, and they tried not to overlap at the hospital. If they did happen to overlap, there was often shouting and finger-pointing between the wife and the girlfriend.
But mostly this didn’t happen. Mostly they came separately, and the girlfriend was there every day, the wife less frequently.
The girlfriend came with her mother, and we all sat there—us on one side of the room, and them on the other; the space between our two families so little that if there had been a table in that space, we would all be sitting around it.
I liked seeing them every day. Sometimes we said a few words to one another. Mostly we just smiled and nodded. Often one or the other of us was crying, and we would look away in that small room, to give the crying person some privacy. When you died, and we were leaving the hospital, the mother rushed after us to say that she was sorry and to hug us goodbye.
Unexpectedly, we had a lot of company in that place of fear and grief. There were those families in the waiting room who were suffering through the same ordeal. There were the doctors and nurses, particularly the nurses, who were with you every day, sitting in the room with you, changing your dressings, monitoring your vital signs. The nurses were amazing, and you would have especially liked the nurse who had the same name as one of your old girlfriends, and who came back on her night off just to check on how you were doing after you’d had to have the second emergency bowel surgery.
You would also have liked the anesthetist, who came to talk to us when Mum and Dad were at the hospital, to say how sorry he was that you had died. I asked him if you had been afraid, and he said that you just told him to make sure you didn’t feel any pain. But clearly you had had a conversation with him, and I’m sure, knowing you, that the conversation was also about him in some way. That is why he had remembered you. He was impressed enough by that encounter to want to share with us your last fully conscious moments.
The surgeon who performed the second emergency operation took the time to reassure me that your cancer was a complete fluke, that it wasn’ta result of genetics or lifestyle. It had simply happened, without explanation or cause.
Now, when people are afraid of entering that death tunnel, whether it is their own impending death or that of someone close to them, I tell them that although it may be devastating, they won’t be alone. They will have good company—people who, while they may not know the individual who is dying, will fully understand the situation. This, in itself, is immensely comforting. In this place where you feel nothing but alone, you are not alone. And it makes a difference. It makes the unbearable less so.
29
This is a story I always wanted to tell you, to write to you, but I never did. It is a story of the last time I was in Italy, when I went to visit Keats’s apartment in Rome. It is a story about dying, one that would have appealed to your romantic imagination, and a story that might have given you a measure of comfort. So, I’ll tell it to you now.
It is a long climb up the stairs to number 26 the Piazza di Spagna, to the two small rooms and the tiny terrace let to John Keats in the summer of 1820.
This is the room where Keats died at the age of twenty-five. There is a narrow bed and a view out the window of the Spanish Steps. In the room there are white daisies embossed on the pale blue ceiling, amarble fireplace. When Keats was in this room there would have been the easel and brushes of his friend, the artist Joseph Severn, and perhaps vases bristling with flowers, the smell of coffee, the sound of church bells.
At the bottom of the Spanish Steps is a marble fountain in the shape of a sinking boat. The middle of the boat is
Brenda Novak
Italo Calvino
C. C. Hunter
ylugin
Mario Puzo
Charlotte Boyett-Compo
Toby Neal
Amarinda Jones
Ashley Hunter
Riley Clifford