10.3 The First Months

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

It was March. I was with Ellie at the top of the hill above the house, sitting in a gateway to look at the view and catch my breath after the climb. Suddenly there was a loud whirring and something the size of a paperback, with white wings vibrating at speed, fell on to the grass next to me.
    I was almost afraid as it wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. I didn’t even know if it was mechanical or living. Or was it – even – supernatural? Like a fairy?
    Then I recognised it. It was a dragonfly.
    But how extraordinary. There was no water nearby. And why now? It was early spring and much too soon for dragonflies to appear. What was it doing?
    It sat by me for several minutes, whirring like a helicopter.

We’d had Frog’s cremation in February. Cass had helped me organise it, and later she’d been with me as I threw his ashes into my nearby canal, and she’d hugged me afterwards when emptiness had overwhelmed me.
    Canals had meant so much to Frog.
    He loved their human-sized technology and we’d spent many holidays exploring England’s network of canals, dealing with swing bridges and locks, visiting pumping stations and canal-side pubs, falling asleep to the rustle of reeds.
    He loved walking along them because he knew we wouldn’t get lost, that I wouldn’t lead him off on some wild adventure, that as soon as he’d decided he was halfway to having had enough, we could turn round and walk back the way we’d come.
    Watching his ashes sink into the water had felt pretty final.

I was spending the nights sitting outside in my nightshirt and dressing-gown, woolly boots and quilted coat. I would fall asleep in bed, exhausted, and then wake a couple of hours later, trapped in a small black box, alone in a desolate universe. Outside, sometimes with stars, sometimes with God, was the only place I could bear to be.
    One night, as I stood to go back inside, unable to find any relief, I heard Frog’s voice. He was  waiting beside the picnic table, a shadowy figure. The words transferred straight from him to me, like an incident of telepathy I'd experienced many years before.

    Frog and I were in a pub, sitting at a table, when a man at the table opposite stood up with great purpose. The words 'Big Country' zoomed from his head to mine, hitting my forehead like a migraine. The man went over to the jukebox and chose a record. The music of Big Country rang out.

   ‘It’s just for now,’ said Frog's voice in the night.
    I almost laughed. Of course it was. All the bad things fell away.
    And one day as I was making my way along a track with Ellie, thinking only of putting one foot in front of the other, I heard his voice from in front of me and slightly to the right.
    ‘I’m with you all the time,’ he said. ‘I’m guiding you.’

The visit of the dragonfly was so strange, so magical, that when it had gone I was filled with happiness. The first happiness, I realised, since Frog had died.
    Frog was born in a Chinese year of the dragon. The category fitted him well as he was so fiery. I used to give him t-shirts with dragons on the front.
    Was the dragonfly visit another message, I wondered later.
    Might it even have been Frog himself?

At the cremation I’d included a poem* suggested by the Civil Celebrant (the person who led the service). The last lines read as follows.

    There is unbroken continuity.
    Why should I be out of mind
    Because I am out of sight?

    I am waiting for you, for an interval.
    Somewhere very near, just around the corner.

    All is well.

So other people had the same unorthodox experiences as me, even members of the establishment like the Church of England priest who wrote the poem, even men, and that made it easier to believe in them.

Things were bad - the worst I'd had in my years so far - but there were chinks, and I held on to them tightly.

To be continued

* The words are actually part of a prose passage, known by its first line, ‘Death is nothing at all’. It was written by Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918). He was canon of St Paul's Cathedral in London and a professor of divinity at Oxford university.

10.2 The First Weeks

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

‘I don’t want to live,’ I said to my sister Cass as we crossed the muddy field behind the house. ‘I just want to die and rejoin Frog.’
    ‘Would you do anything about it?’ she asked.
    ‘No,’ I replied.
    How could I, after everything my siblings had done for me?
    Since Jo’s visit, they’d taken it in turns to stay, never leaving me alone for more than two days at a time.
    
I clung to them because my default position was panic. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t function on the practical level – even turning a tap off could be too much. I would come down in the morning and find doors and windows still open.

Every part of me was on full alert, dedicated to one task only – survival.
    Whatever survival was.

To be continued

PART TEN. 1 The First Twenty-four Hours

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

2022

In that little hospital room, alone with Frog’s dead body, I had another of those flashes of understanding.

    On one level it was impossible to take in what had happened. Frog was only sixty-nine. I was sixty-eight. We’d been together for forty-four years. Two-thirds of my life had vanished in an instant. It was as if a door had slammed shut, leaving me with silence and four empty walls. It took my breath away to try and imagine a life without Frog.
    On another, however, I knew that this was my chance. My chance of a lifetime, of lifetimes.
    I’d never lived on my own before – always with family or in shared houses and places of work. I’d never forged my own identity. I’d spent my childhood looking after my younger siblings, my adolescence grappling with anorexia, my early adult life running away (from parents, from convention, from England), my years with Frog vacillating between him and my parents.
    Now at last I could find myself.
    And I knew I could do it. Unlike forty-four years earlier - when Frog had said ‘We have to get married’ and I’d replied ‘I know, but you’re so unsuitable’, when I’d had no vision of success, the opposite in fact - I was utterly determined and utterly confident.
    What’s more Frog – who had, I'd started to realise, always been more of a parent to me than a lover – had deliberately taken himself out of the picture in order to give me a chance. It was his last act of selflessness.
    To become whole was the only way I could ever be happy with Frog. It was my preparation for our next life together. I had to succeed. I would succeed. Frog’s sacrifice would be vindicated.

I didn’t sleep much that first night alone. I didn’t feel much either, thankfully. In fact, I was pretty numb, humming on one note like a stuck CD. Maybe I was trying to suppress the panic.
    I picked up the notebook I kept by the bed but all I could think of writing was some silly list, like something out of a romantic comedy called ‘Twenty things I will miss most’, things like ‘Someone to put body lotion between my shoulder blades where I can’t reach’.
    I gave up at four in the morning and went downstairs in my dressing-gown for coffee and toast. After breakfast, still in my dressing-gown, I tackled the kitchen table. This was more than a foot deep in Frog ‘stuff’, over forty years of it, and ageing as you went down like archaeological layers. I’d managed to keep a quarter of the table for myself, pushing Frog’s stuff away when it encroached on my space, even if that meant things falling on the floor as that was his problem. Now I wanted the whole table.
    I took tray loads outside into the chill January air and dropped the contents into various recycling and rubbish bins, keeping only things that might be of use like spanners, or sentimental value like Frog’s glasses, his phone, his handmade leather Filofax, belt and belt-purse.
    I collected two A4 envelopes of unlabelled keys, labelled the envelopes ‘unlabelled keys 6.1.22’ and put them in a drawer – for the moment. I couldn’t quite bring myself to put them in the metal-recycling box just yet – just in case.
    Was it callous? I didn’t care. I was following my deep inner promptings, and this was where they pointed me.
    And anyway I was helping Frog as well as myself.
    He’d retired fully shortly before the lockdown with the intention not only of rebuilding his Mini kit-car but also of clearing our barn-like shed and double garage which were crammed to the rafters with his stuff. All he’d done however was wander around with a plastic container full of different-sized nails and screws, looking upset.
    He was simply incapable of the job. And I was incapable of helping him – or rather I’d been fighting his clutter for over forty years and failed at every turn so had given up.
    But not any more.
    Like I had with Penny the day after she died, I sensed Frog’s spirit around. He kept me company, approving what I was doing, smiling at me, laughing at me even as he always did, and I felt almost happy. Here in the dark and stillness of a winter night, as I rifled through his detritus, we were spending joyous, private time together.

I passed the day however like a robot. Walking with Ellie to tell our oldest and dearest neighbours Claire and Ben what had happened, hugging Claire when she went into a panic. Spending an hour on the phone going through the procedure for Frog’s corneas to be reused. (Given his age, that was all they wanted.) Clearing away the Christmas decorations.
    Juliet, married to Tim who’d taken Ellie off my hands, had walked down with the miscreant at teatime the day before after I’d rung to tell them I was back. Ellie had apparently had a riotous time with their three children, one of whom was called Jack, and their Jack Russell called Russell. Ellie knew them all from her younger days when she was an escapologist and homed in on anywhere with creatures to play with.
    Simone, who lived next door to Juliet and Tim and whom I'd tried to ring from the hospital for a lift, had appeared at the same time. (In the end the hospital had arranged a taxi for me. In spite of their highly pressured emergency department the staff couldn't have been kinder or more helpful.)
    ‘I don’t know how to do anything,’ I’d cried half-jokingly to the two of them. ‘Christmas tree lights for instance. How do I deal with them?’
    Lights had been Frog’s job. I dealt instead with the decorations – so many of them given to me or hand made by family. I did once try to remove the lights from the tree and it had taken Frog two hours to untangle the wires afterwards and put them neatly away in their box. (In some ways – like with his records and CDs - he was well organised.) He hadn’t complained but I hadn’t dared touch the lights since.
    ‘Get the inside of a loo-roll or kitchen-roll and wind the wires round that,’ said Simone, whose house was immaculate.

    It worked a treat.

Then, halfway through the afternoon, I fell apart.
    I’d rung my brother Jo the night before to tell him what had happened, as he was child number two and so closest in age to me and had been my special friend before all the others came along. He’d rung our siblings and they’d all rung me, which in some ways was a bit of an ordeal but I’d rather they’d rung than not. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to them. It was simply that I found the telephone so hard. I needed to see a person before I could communicate with them. And especially so that night. But I survived.
    So I rang Jo again and I’d hardly started speaking before I started crying.
    ‘I don’t think I’m managing,’ I choked.
    ‘I’m coming down,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch a train straightaway.’

To be continued

9.6 Thank you

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

It was a few days after New Year. Our little potted Christmas tree with its ropes of white and coloured lights still twinkled in the sitting-room. Christmas cards still looped around the house on pieces of red string.
    We’d spent the festive season just the two of us, as we usually did these days. My siblings’ houses filled up with their children and in-laws at Christmas and, with my parents gone, there was nowhere else for us to stay. As for Frog’s family . . . well, that was another story.
    I’d found the time a little sad – Christmas was always a tricky time for me, remembering my difficulties with my parents and how that separated me from the rest of my family as well as other people. At least it had been normal however, unlike the year before when Christmas had been ‘cancelled’ because of Covid and there’d been an all-pervading air of gloom.
    We were now into 2022, and a new start for all of us, I hoped.
 
Frog watched as I prepared for my morning walk with Ellie, zipping myself in my ancient quilted coat and lacing my feet into walking boots.
    ‘I might come with you today,’ he said.
    ‘That would be lovely,’ I said. ‘I can show you the new route I’ve found.’
    I meant it, but I was puzzled. What had prompted that? He never normally walked with me round home.
    But then everything about him was strange these days.
   
As we set off, the sun shone but a cold wind was blowing and I was glad of my hat, gloves and scarf – red this morning in honour of the season. Choosing the different colours of my hat, gloves and scarf each morning gave a lift to wintry days.
    The start of the walk was a steep climb up the lane behind the house, and as Frog fell behind I grew impatient. Why was he walking so slowly?
    At one stage he’d been using the hill as an aerobic training track, charging up it daily in an effort to bring his blood pressure down. It hadn’t worked however, and nor had the Chinese herbs, and he was now on conventional medication. So his health should have been under control. Had he simply become unfit instead?
    His mother of course had died of a stroke at fifty-nine, so he’d approached that birthday with trepidation, but now it was ten years behind him.
   
I charged on ahead and stopped at a gate halfway up the hill to wait for him. There was a view eastward over fields and hills, and I breathed in the space and the silence and the fresh air. Even at this time of year, nature restored me.
    But where was Frog? He’d been ages. I looked back.
    At last he appeared around a corner below, and I was shocked. He was hardly moving. Each footstep appeared to be an effort. He looked old - and I'd never thought that before.
    When he reached the gateway I shifted to one side to give him space, but as I did so he gave a small cry of surprise and fell to the ground.
    His eyes closed and his breathing became intermittent and I knew something was seriously wrong. I rang 999, my hands shaking.
    On autopilot, I explained in detail exactly where I was, which wasn’t easy as we were far from civilisation. Luckily, as I’d been walking the area for over forty years I could name every farm and crossroads in the vicinity. It took some time doing so.
    When I described Frog’s symptoms, the person on the phone suggested I try and resuscitate him. I didn’t understand that. How could you bring someone back from unconsciousness?
    A neighbour had been resuscitated by his son and ever since he’d been in a wheelchair.
    They wanted me to put my phone on ‘speaker’ so that they could give me instructions, but my phone was too old for that, and then in my flurry I dropped it and lost it in the undergrowth.
    I tried to resuscitate Frog anyway as I’d had some training in first aid a long time ago, but he was sprawled awkwardly against a bank, difficult to get at and far too heavy for me to move.
   
As if by a miracle – by my reckoning it had only been a few minutes since Frog had collapsed - two ambulances and a medical car arrived, and an Air Ambulance helicopter landed in the field the other side of the gate.
    The farmer sped up on a quad bike from his yard below and unlocked the gate.
    With packs on their backs and cases in their hands, medics leapt out. They lifted Frog into the field and started attaching equipment to him.

I stood out of the way in the road and put Ellie on her lead. She was barking loudly. What was going on? Why were all these people here? Why was Frog the centre of attention and not her?
    Tim, a neighbour from further up the road appeared at my side.
    ‘Can I help?’ he asked.
    ‘Could you take Ellie,’ I said, proffering the lead.
   ‘Of course,’ he answered, taking the lead and walking back up the lane.
    Ellie trotted after him without a backward glance.
 
A medic with a clipboard came up to me and took some details.
    ‘Would John want to be resuscitated,’ she asked, ‘if there was a chance he would be a vegetable?’
    ‘Absolutely not,’ I said, wondering why she even had to ask.
    In any case, I had the conviction that somehow, in the bigger scheme of things, this was his time to go. He’d made his choice and we needed to respect that. Not that I could possibly have said that to anyone.

I tried not to look as they injected him and gave him electric shocks. His body shook like a jelly, but there was no sign of life.

The helicopter departed, and the two ambulances set off in convoy for the hospital in Exeter, Frog in the first, attached to life-support machinery, and me in the second with two paramedics.
    At the hospital they left me in a small empty room, saying they were going to continue trying to resuscitate him. I perched on the edge of a seat, struggling to breathe. Still in my dog-walking clothes, I felt hot and frumpy.
    A new person appeared and told me they’d stopped trying. Did I want to see him?
    I nodded.
    It took them some time to find the key for the room but at last they let me in and shut the door behind me.

I touched Frog’s hand. It was cold. His clothed body lay like a straw man without stuffing. I wondered whether his spirit was still around but I didn’t sense it.
    Thank you, I whispered to him. Thank you for our life together. Thank you. Thank you.
    I couldn’t stop saying thank you.

To be continued

9.5 Lockdown

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

Frog was in bed with a high temperature. He’d collapsed with uncontrollable shivering after a walk by the sea several days earlier and been ill ever since, not eating and hardly speaking. He was downstairs in the spare room so I was able to tiptoe in and out regularly seeing how he was but keep my distance so as not to catch myself whatever he was suffering from. Flu, I presumed.
    On the Monday I planned to drop Ellie off at the dog-minder where she played once a week with a gang of other dogs, coming back exhausted. It gave me a break and kept her connected to other dogs. Actually, she didn’t play with the other dogs, she led them. The dog-minder would sigh with relief when Ellie arrived saying, ‘Ah, now at last the dogs will be under control.’ At the end of the day she would arrive back at the compound first, with all the other dogs trotting meekly behind her. What a monster! She was now ten years old but as energetic and bossy as ever.

 

 

 At the dog-minder: Ellie and friends. (She is in the front on the left.)

I went in to see Frog before I left. He had the radio on so I presumed he was feeling a little better.
    ‘Just off to the dog-minder,’ I said.
    Frog opened his eyes.
    ‘Oh,’ he mumbled. ‘I don’t think that’ll be possible. We’re in lockdown.’
    ‘Lockdown!’ I said. ‘What’s that?’
     I’d heard the word recently but because I hadn’t been listening to the news – I relied on Frog for that – I didn’t know exactly what it meant.
    Frog tried to explain.
 
In a temper I put my boots and coat on and prepared to take Ellie out for a walk round home instead. How dare they restrict us, I thought.
    As I traversed the field behind the house a text pinged on to my phone.
    ‘You must stay at home,’ it said. ‘You must not go out . . .’
    I couldn’t believe it. How did they know my number? How did they know I was going out for a walk? Who was ‘they’?
    What sort of a country did we live in? Had it turned into a police state?
    In rebellion at the text – no way was I going without my daily dose of solitude and nature - I spent several hours wandering the hill, peeing in my secret wood, and enjoying the glorious spring sunshine (it was March).
    When I got home Frog was definitely more alert, but he looked worried.
    ‘I think I’ve got some sort of infection,’ he said. ‘I can’t pee properly and it hurts.’
    ‘How did you get that?’ I asked, slightly unsympathetically.
    I’d been in a temper with him too since the walk by the sea when he’d completely ignored something I’d said, even though I realised now it was because he was feeling so dreadful. What a horrible person I was.
    ‘I haven’t been drinking,’ he said.
    Oh my God. That was my fault. It hadn’t occurred to me that I should have been checking up on that. I wasn’t much of a nursemaid, was I?
    He managed to produce a urine sample and I raced to the A & E department of our local hospital. They were horrified to see me and kept telling me to keep my distance but eventually I saw a lovely doctor who spent about an hour talking to me, telephoning Frog who was able just about able to talk to her, and warning me that if he stopped peeing completely it was an emergency and I should get him treatment immediately.
    I went home with a course of antibiotics for him.
 
So that was the start of our lockdown experience.
    The rest of it passed more or less like our normal life. I took the dog for walks, Frog and I worked together in the garden. I talked to my neighbours when I was out, either on the footpaths or over their garden gates, and we swapped books. I sewed and read and swam in the little pool we were lucky enough to have. I practised yoga on the lawn.
    The weather was extraordinary, with blazing sunshine day after day, the sky a deeper blue than I’d ever seen it in this country before. In the silence I could hear the hum of creation. Instead of car exhaust when I stepped outside of a morning, I was greeted with sweetness and the sort of freshness you normally only found by the sea.
    Frog chafed a little as he loved shopping and going out so when we heard on the local news – where there’d been an ongoing debate as to whether or not you could drive to find a place to walk – that so long as your walk was longer than your drive it was OK.
    I took that to mean lengths of time (even though I realise now that they probably meant miles) so Frog and I took to venturing out occasionally to all our favourite places - the sea, the canal, the moors – as well as exploring new places because we had the time. It was idyllic as there was no one else about.
    The only downside as far as Frog was concerned was the fact that we couldn’t go to a pub or café but had to take a picnic instead. I found some vegan sausage rolls in Sainsbury’s however and tempted him with those.
    ‘Very nice,’ he pronounced them. ‘Almost as good as Ma’s.’

    Which, given that his mother's sausage rolls contained real sausage meat and, their magic ingredient, a smear of marmite, was praise indeed.
 
Another downside of our outings was Frog’s attacks of chest pain. These could be quite severe and necessitated him lying on the ground for half an hour or so, looking grey. But we didn’t pay too much attention to them – or at least I didn’t. He’d been spraying foam into the gap between the garage walls and its roof because he was rebuilding his Mini kit car in there and needed the place watertight. This had meant a lot of stretching up and so the pain, we thought, was probably muscular.
    Or at least, that was what Frog said. But whether it was what he believed was another matter.
    I began to have the strange sensation that he was keeping something from me. Being a Piscean, he could be a slippery customer, not always telling me whole truths, and I knew of course from the time of Sam that he could lie outright.
 
During the winter lockdown which wasn’t quite so nice, muddy walks being the only entertainment, I would go down to his semi-underground den where he spent hours playing patience on his computer while listening to music, and he would look at me with wide open eyes, the picture of innocence.
    Not.
    ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ I would plead. ‘You’re lying to me.’
    I knew that face so well and I was terrified of any untruth coming between us, of a repetition of the Sam years.
    ‘Nothing!’ he would protest. ‘I’m not.’
   But then as well as wide-eyed he would look worried, and sad, and a bit lost.

To be continued