Her dream vacation was interrupted by her husband’s illness. “I suddenly felt like I might lose him”

Some winters come in full sun. This one started on a sunny day in early September, a week before my fortieth birthday. I celebrated with friends on the beach in Folkestone, a town that juts out into the English Channel as if it wanted to reach out towards France. It was the beginning of two weeks filled with dinners and drinks – which I hoped would allow me to avoid organizing a large party and safely enter the next decade of my life. The photos from that day seem absurd today. Intoxicated with the feeling of my own importance, I photographed a seaside town basking in the warmth of the Indian summer. An old-fashioned-looking laundromat that we passed on our way from the parking lot. Pastel concrete beach houses along the coast. Our children, jumping through the waves together, trying to swim in the unbelievably turquoise sea. A bowl of original flavor ice cream that I ate while the kids were playing.

There are no photos of my husband, H. Nothing too strange – I usually take photos of my son Bert or the sea over and over again. What is remarkable, however, is the hole in the photographic documentation from that afternoon to the moment two days later when a photo of H. was taken in a hospital bed, trying to force himself to smile at the camera.

Already in this idyllic seaside town, H. complained of feeling bad. This didn’t seem particularly alarming – I discovered that having a small child in the family brought an endless stream of germs into the house, causing sore throats and rashes, stuffy noses and stomach aches. H. didn’t even particularly complain. But after lunch, which he couldn’t eat, we went to the playground at the top of the cliffs. H disappeared for a while. I took a photo of Bert playing in the sandbox with a bunch of seaweed stuck to his pants like a tail. When H. came back, he told me that he had vomited.

“H. is probably really sick.”

I remember moaning, “Oh no!”, trying to sound sympathetic, while secretly grumbling about how much of a hassle this was. We’d have to cut our day at the seaside short and head home, and then H. would probably have to sleep. He was holding his stomach, but under the circumstances it didn’t seem particularly disturbing. I was in no hurry to leave, and it was probably noticeable because I clearly remember the sudden shock when our friend – one of the oldest we knew still from school – he touched my arm and said: – Katherine, H. is probably really sick.

– Seriously? – I was surprised. – You think so? – I glanced at H. and saw him grimacing, his face glistening with sweat. I announced that I would go get the car.

When we got home, it still didn’t seem to me that it could be anything worse than a regular stomach flu. H. went to bed and I tried to find something for Bert to do since he had been denied the opportunity to spend the afternoon on the beach. However, when H. called me upstairs two hours later, I saw that he was getting dressed. “I think I need to go to the hospital,” he said.

I was so surprised that I burst out laughing. H. was sitting on a plastic chair in the waiting room with a cannula in his hand and looked like a pile of misery. It was full of rugby players admiring their broken fingers, drunk guys with cuts on their faces, and elderly people slouched in wheelchairs whose caregivers didn’t want to take them back to their nursing homes. I dropped Bert off with the neighbors and promised to pick him up in a few hours, but soon I was texting him asking if he could spend the night at their place. When I left H. at the hospital, it was past midnight and he still hadn’t been taken to the ward.

I went home, but I didn’t sleep. When I returned in the morning, it turned out that H. had gotten worse. He could barely remember what was going on around him and he had a high fever. He said the pain had been getting worse overnight, but now it was the worst, and the nurses were changing so no one could give him the medicine that would give him relief. And then his appendix burst. He felt it happen. He screamed in pain and the ward sister shouted at him for being rude and making a fuss. The patient in the next bed had to get up and defend him. He spoke to us through the curtains, saying: “They left him in a terrible condition, poor guy.” There were still no signs of action. H. was terrified. Then I was terrified too.

“I suddenly felt like I might lose him.”

I had the feeling that something dangerous and terrible had happened when I wasn’t around. And it continued – the nurses and doctors, in my opinion, were going on and on as if they thought you should just let your insides burst without moaning. Suddenly I felt like I might lose him. He clearly needed someone to defend him, so that’s what I did. I stuck to my post, ignoring visiting hours, and when the pain became unbearable, I followed the ward sister around until she helped him. I’m usually too self-conscious to order pizza, but this was different. It was a matter of me versus them, my husband’s suffering against their rigid procedures. I wasn’t going to back down.

That evening I left at nine and called every hour until H. made it safely to the operating room. I didn’t care that I was bothering you. Then I lay awake until they brought him back to the room and I heard that he was fine. Later I couldn’t sleep anyway. In moments like these, sleep feels like falling – one sinks into luxurious blackness only to be jerked out of it abruptly, and then looks around at the darkness around him, as if he could spot some portent, some omen in this restless night. But all I could find here were my own fears: the unbearable fact of H.’s suffering and the terror of having to cope without him.

I was on duty for a whole week, between taking my child to school and picking him up. I was with H as the surgeon explained the extent of the infection with something akin to admiration. I was with him, torn apart by anxiety, when his temperature stubbornly refused to drop and his blood oxygen saturation to return to normal. I helped him take slow walks around the ward and watched him fall asleep, sometimes even mid-sentence. I changed him into clean clothes and brought him tiny portions of food. I tried to ease Bert’s fear of his father, hooked up to so many wires, tubes, and beeping machines.

Somewhere in the middle of this catastrophe, a space suddenly opened up. There were long hours spent driving from home to the hospital and back, sitting by H.’s bed while he napped, waiting in the cafeteria during doctor’s rounds. My days were full of tension and relaxation at the same time – I constantly had to be somewhere, conscious and alert, but at the same time I became redundant, I was an intruder. I spent a lot of time looking around, wondering what to do, while my mind frantically tried to categorize all these new experiences, to find context for them.

And in this space something suddenly happened that inevitably had to happen. For some time now, my life had been under the pressure of a strange, unstoppable hurricane, and this was just another of its effects. Just a week earlier, I had resigned from my job as a university lecturer, hoping to find a better life somewhere away from the constant stress and hustle and bustle of a modern university. And right now I was taking carer’s leave, right in the hottest weeks at the beginning of the semester. There was no doubt that I was stretching everyone’s patience, but there was no one else who could handle this mess.

What’s more, I had just published my first book in six years, and another upcoming deadline was hanging over my head. My son recently returned to school after the holidays, and I had the usual motherly concerns about his ability to cope with the demands of first grade. Change has come, and with it its close relative has appeared – the specter of death – not so much knocking on my door, but kicking it down with an exceptionally brutal, inconsiderate force.

On my thirtieth birthday, I unexpectedly found myself at a wake. I met a friend at the pub and piled in to discover it was booked for the wake of an Irish funeral. Everyone was dressed in black, and a band was playing in the corner – two young women with violins, singing folk songs. Of course, I should have turned around and left immediately, but I was afraid that my friend wouldn’t find me, and it was raining. I thought that if I stood by the door, no one would notice me. I actually have no idea what came over my head – any sane person would have gone out and sent a text. But I stayed, thinking that this was my luck – it had sent me a kind of announcement of death at the end of the teenage decade of my life.

It got even worse when my friend arrived and it turned out that she looked remarkably like one of the women from the band, who had meanwhile left the stage. It wasn’t just my opinion – the deceased’s family apparently mistook her for the now-absent violinist. My friend was hugged, her hand was squeezed, her back was patted, and she was adamantly insisted that she had to stay and drink with everyone else. Without the slightest idea what was going on, and assuming, as I later learned, that it was merely a display of warm Irish hospitality, she accepted the invitation and even managed to brush off questions about her musical talents with something that seemed modest but was actually a flat denial. We only managed to leave because we had theater tickets, which were irrefutable proof that we needed to go somewhere else.

The whole episode had something of a Shakespearean farce performed just for me. However, looking back, it was a fun adventure. I celebrated my fortieth birthday with H., freshly released from the hospital, and all birthday celebrations were canceled. At ten o’clock at night Bert called me upstairs and immediately vomited on me. This went on until late at night. But then it didn’t matter anymore, because I had already weaned myself off sleep. Something has already irrevocably changed.

There are gaps in the fabric of the ordinary world that sometimes open up and you fall through them to somewhere else. Somewhere Else, time runs at a different pace than here and now, where everyone else functions. Somewhere Else there are hidden ghosts that people in the real world sometimes only glimpse out of the corner of their eye. Somewhere Else exists on a delayed basis, so it’s hard to keep up. Maybe then I was already standing on the edge of Somewhere Else, but now I fell there, simply and discreetly, like dust falling into the cracks between the floorboards. I was surprised that I actually felt at home there. Winter has started.