I felt uneasy about Tuesday. You know that feeling when you know something isn’t quite right? I phoned work and said I wasn’t coming in as I needed to be with Laing. My exact reason I can’t recall, I just knew where my place was instinctively. I don’t remember much apart from staying at home, insisting he stayed in bed, making him coffee and/or tea. He wasn’t that hungry, that much I remember, but he ate, albeit slowly…
Tuesday we went to the hospital, not King George, but Queens in Romford. Laing had already made the journey there alone when he had the bone scan. He didn’t want me to be with him for that, and I was pretty much not in agreement with that, but it was his decision, his choice, and I was not going to contradict him over that. I wanted to, but all the years together, I knew sometimes he preferred to go it alone.
…
Monday I went to work. We had a brief text exchange:
Me: Trains all confused. Just left Fairlop. No heating.
Laing: That’s bad.
Me: That’s typical.
Later in the day he sent me a link to The Gramophone website that all Britten’s operas would be broadcast, as well as two other guys who were having anniversaries that year. One called Wagner and the other called Verdi. Anybody heard of them?
…
My previous blog was about our marriage. This is about Laing’s last week. Some of it is as clear as day, some is blurry, some I have no memory, so you will find the narrative lumpy, like my first attempt at microwave porage (or as us uncivilised Sassenachs insist, porridge). I hope that anybody who finds themselves in the same situation as did I will find this useful, as events leading up to his death seemed to happen…
This time last year I woke up for the last time a single man in the eyes of the law. We had been friends for nearly 37 years and most of that time we had lived together. Our relationship hurtled from friendship to rushed and fumbled sex to deciding we would move out of our digs together and start a new life in the space of a mere 4 months.
Once our relationship became a threesome with lung cancer as the unwanted interloper…
