PART TEN. 1 Day One

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'd 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 what’s more Frog – who had, I was beginning 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.
    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. 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 the first night alone. I didn’t feel much either, thankfully. In fact, I was pretty numb, humming on one note like a stuck CD. 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’, more than 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. 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, keeping me company, approving what I was doing, smiling at me, laughing at me even as he always did, and I felt 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 the day before, had walked down with the miscreant at teatime after I’d rung to tell them I was back. 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 try once 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.
    In spite of that, 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