Harold never accepted the end of his own life.
It was late in 2011 when a cheerful nurse would visit our home each evening to help him consume a plethora of medicines and help ready him for bed.
“When I get better, I plan to buy that house,” he said to her, pointing out of our bedroom window. A row of distant houses sat set in stone in the same place they had been the day we met. For all I knew they had been there one hundred years before that too.
“I nearly bought them once,” he continued. “Nearly.”
And he had. Nearly.
It didn’t matter that the doctors told him that he only had months left, Harold had only two philosophies. Never moan about anything, and get on with living your life. That was it. There was a time in the final week when I caught him out of his bed doing exercises. He was busy doing squats using his zimmerframe, his body almost wasted to nothing.
“You have to keep your strength up,” he said enthusiastically without an inkling of acceptance of his fate.
During the initial diagnosis, the doctors had been clear with him.
“Harold, you have the heart and lungs of a young man,” he was told.
“It’s just the cancer Harold.”
And it was just the cancer. The years of walking to and from work had left his body strong and fit, but the disease was there nonetheless. To start with he had surgeries. It seemed to keep it at bay, but then like an invasive weed, it spread and finally became an inferno. I watched with almost disbelief as my husband of sixty years was consumed by it. You may wonder if it hurts less as you get older…that we’re wiser perhaps with age, but it doesn’t hurt less. The end is always painful when you love someone dearly whenever it comes. We know not when we know not how. It is simply the price we pay for loving, but love we must.
And I loved Harold.
On his final night, Gilly slipped into his room upstairs.
“I brought you some Bacardi and coke, Dad,” she said, giving him a drink that his nurse most certainly would not have approved of. He drank it contently and smiled. He left us in the night, comfortable in his own bed.
In many ways, I am glad that it was Harold who went first. After sixty years we finished one another’s sentences. He had been with me since he stumbled into the chemist and asked Mr. Slade if he could speak to me. So many adventures. A whole life together, and yet there were still days when he would call me at school and ask me how long to boil an egg.
“Hi, it’s me,” he would say. “How long do I have to put the egg in for again? I forgot.”
He would have been lonely alone. I’m quite sure of it.
And yet now I was alone. In the days, weeks, and months that followed I would think he was still in the house. Doing something in one of his many spaces. That feeling has never faded. I feel Harold all around me. He was my best friend, my rock, and my husband.
What a truly wonderful man.
I am so thankful to have spent my life with him.
Lesson 37: Alone and lonely are not the same thing, Friday, November 10th
Well done Rob, so happy we got to know Harold💜
Once again, I am moved by this week's beautiful passage. They remind me of the relationship between my parents.