The heartrending sound of Nancy’s crying wrenches me from a deep sleep. I sit bolt upright in the dark. She’s trying and failing to climb up on the bed. I grab her under her arms and lug her up to me, wrapping my arms as tightly as I can around her as I hold her against my thundering heartbeat.
This isn’t piteous crying. This is full-on convulsive weeping. Her little body is wracked with sobs, her breath comes in great gasps, and above her shrill, incoherent and desperate noises I make out one word, shuddered out over and over again like a mantra.
Mummy.
Dear, sweet God Almighty, can nothing save us from this pain? Can nothing ease the devastation for my little girls of waking in the middle of the night and being hit by the cruelty of their reality?
It’s fucking brutal. The gaping chasm Claire’s death has left in their lives, and mine, is unbearable. And while I’ve been fucking Maddy till blessed oblivion finds me, the girls have nothing.
Nothing.
There is no toy or ice cream or hair accessory on the planet that can begin to compensate for the loss of their mother. Of the human being whose body they knew intimately before they were properly conscious. Whose same body sustained them for the first few months of their lives.
We can watch videos of Claire, fill the house with photos of her, and saturate our pillows with her perfume, and ask her for signs, and rejoice when she sends them, and share our most special and our most trivial memories of her. And we can believe that she’s in a better place.
But none of that matters.
And none of it fucking helps.
Because she is not fucking here.
I rock my beautiful, amazing, brave daughter in my arms as she wails and flails and soaks through the soft cotton of my t-shirt with her torrent of tears.
‘Want Mummy,’ she sobs against my chest.
‘I know, sweetheart, I know.’ I know so fucking well. This grief of ours is cyclical. Whenever I feel like I’m getting a handle on it, like last night, when I floated off to bed after my sensational afternoon with my beautiful fuck-buddy, it hits one of the girls like a freight train, and the domino effect is instantaneous.
It’s vicious. My own grief is magnified for the agony I experience at seeing my daughters’ pain. And I would do anything to assuage their pain. Anything.
‘I miss her, I miss her, I miss her,’ Nance chants through floods of tears. She’s crying so hard she could easily make herself sick—it wouldn’t be the first time.
‘I know, my angel,’ I tell her. ‘Of course you do. She misses us too,’ I know it. I’m squeezing my eyes shut, my entire body trembling with the effort to hold it together, to hold my tears in. I absolutely believe in letting the girls see my grief. There’s no stiff upper lip in this house.
But sometimes, like right now, when they’re being tossed around on a terrifyingly stormy sea of grief, they need to know there’s a captain at the helm who can steer them into less troubled waters. They need to know the captain’s not too busy losing the fucking plot to be able to navigate.
They need to know he’s got them.
And the worst part of this tragedy is that their faith in the resilience, the constancy, the ability of the adults in their lives to survive the greatest trials is bashed to hell. I’m the last parent standing. I’m the only one standing, in fact, between them and life as orphans, and that knowledge torments me daily. It taunts me whenever I think I’ve found a lump in my balls. It mocks me when I even consider crossing the road outside of a pedestrian crossing.
So I don’t.
And it makes me doubt that they have any real faith in my ability to protect them. Not to fade into ashes before they’re ready to go it alone in this cruel world.
It should have been me.
God should have taken me.
Yeah, they would have grown up with Daddy issues, but my dying wouldn’t have been as much of a loss as losing their mother has been and will be.
What? I’m just stating facts here.
She was their mother. Their entire world. And I know if I’d died she would have shown incredible strength and resilience. It would have been awful for her, but she would have managed.
I push back against the headboard with my head and attempt to shuffle my bum further down the bed so I can get Nancy into a reclining position. I’m well aware grief doesn’t fade in a straight line, but God would it be easier to bear if it did. If we knew that every day would be the tiniest bit less brutal than the last.
A year isn’t a long time. It’s only one of everything, really. Two of some things. Two Father’s Days. One Mother’s Day, except Claire was so sick in March last year that her last Mother’s Day was a terrifying blur. One—disastrous—Christmas. One of each of our birthdays, though Stella’s second birthday without her mum is coming up in a couple of weeks.
I’m fucking dreading it.
Nancy’s thrashing lessens, but she’s still shuddering and weeping within the cradle of my body when Stella pokes her pale face around the door.
Shit.
Although not a surprise. The shrill harshness of Nancy’s crying fits would rip the deepest of sleepers from their dreams.
I raise a weary arm to wave her over. ‘Come here, darling.’ A glance at the clock tells me it’s three-oh-seven.
Double shit.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asks, clambering onto the bed.
‘Nancy’s just sad,’ I tell her. ‘She misses Mummy.’
‘Oh,’ she says quietly. She nestles in against my arm and strokes Nancy’s head. ‘Me too,’ she whispers.
I lean my head sideways to nuzzle against her as best I can with my arms full of Nance. ‘Me three.’
‘Maybe Nancy can be in the middle of the sandwich tonight,’ Stel says. ‘So she feels safe.’
My weary heart swells, although I wonder if I’ll get any fucking sleep tonight. ‘That’s a lovely idea, sweetheart. Let’s give it a try.’
Edging myself down so I’m horizontal with Nancy in my arms requires immense abdominal strength, but I get us there. I roll onto my side, still cradling her, as Stella lies down on her other side. Nancy’s still lost in a world of her own grief. Stella shuffles closer to her, spooning her, and I stretch out my arm so I can stroke the soft hair of my eldest.
I’m so proud of her. She’s a natural caregiver, just like her mother. The knowledge of how greatly Claire would enjoy seeing the people her daughters are blossoming into is a vice around my heart. There’s no doubt Stella’s stepped up where the wellbeing of her little sister is concerned, but it’s not fucking fair that she’s had to.
We lie like this, the three of us, and gradually Nancy’s sobs quieten down to piteous, exhausted shudders.
‘Does anyone want to think of a sign to ask Mummy?’ I whisper. To be fair to her, Claire has always held up her end of her deathbed bargain. The ability of my overachieving late wife to deliver signs from the other side is, frankly, jaw-dropping. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I Want it That Way has blared out in all manner of contexts. Even her spirit is impressive.
‘Partridge,’ Nancy murmurs. Actually, she’s so knackered she slurs it.
‘A partridge?’ Stel and I say together. What the fuck?
Nancy’s little body stiffens. ‘A partridge.’
Okay then. ‘A partridge it is,’ I say with a confidence I don’t feel.
Good luck with that darling, I say silently to the ceiling. And, you know, before they head off to school would be great.
The problem with having both your kids end up in your bed most nights is that you can’t set your alarm for as early as you’d like without waking them. And extricating yourself from your bed when you’re usually the one stuck in the middle can be tricky. So I tend to set my alarm for slightly later than I’d like and slightly earlier than I need to get them up, and we all wake together.
But when my alarm goes off this morning, the shock it gives my fatigued body is horrific. I clock-watched for hours last night as I lay and stewed and spiralled in those dark, dark early morning hours when your pre-frontal cortex isn’t functioning properly and the worst and least likely possibilities seem perfectly rational and well worth obsessing over.
My favourite: what if I die? What if I get testicular cancer, or any kind of cancer, or get run over by a bus? Or even by someone on one of those fucking lethal electric scooters? What if I get MS and my two young daughters have to become full-time carers? What if I get sepsis?
It’s a well-worn path, this spiral, but it never gets easier to navigate—or to avoid. I worked myself up so much last night as I lay there keeping watch over my sleeping daughters, both of them blissfully, and temporarily, oblivious to their tragic reality. I told myself around five-thirty that I should just get up, that it would be too painful if I fell back to sleep again.
And yet it seems that’s what I did, and now it’s six-forty-five and I’m shaking with tiredness and with the headache that comes from such excessive emotion.
I reassure the girls that they should wake up slowly and get myself showered, but it doesn’t help much. My mind travels fleetingly, blissfully, back to that spectacular shower with Maddy, but I’m too tired to go there. There are mornings when exhaustion and the shock of facing my reality all over again conspire to leave me nothing short of shell-shocked.
Ruth’s in the kitchen, thank fuck, when I get the girls downstairs, somehow fully dressed in their uniforms. I despise how relieved I am to see her face on mornings like this. It’s not just a matter of having moral support in the form of another adult, one who’s been with our family for years and understands all too intimately what we’ve been through.
It’s that she’s able to offer the girls strength in a way that I’m not. There’s no hiding the fact that Daddy doesn’t always have his shit together, while Ruth quite clearly does. Even if Stel and Nance can’t articulate that difference for themselves, they can feel it, and it shows in the way they react to her. To put it simply, there’s no fucking around with Ruth. She’s stern, yes, but it’s her very implacability that they find so deeply reassuring.
She gives me a warm nod and a tiny raise of her eyebrows. ‘All okay?’
I look like shit. It’s quite obvious all is not okay. ‘Bad night,’ I mouth, and she purses her lips together in a silent show of sympathy that almost sets me off as Norm pushes his empty bowl towards me with his nose, giving me his trademark baleful look.
‘Coffee’s brewed,’ she tells me, in case I don’t have my wits together enough to pick up on the heavenly smell.
‘Thanks,’ I croak. ‘You’ve fed Norm, I assume?’
She presses her lips together in a thin line and shakes her head at the ever-opportunistic dog. ‘I certainly have. Radio off or on this morning, girls?’
‘On!’ Stella shouts. Nancy agrees more quietly. Her little face is pale and pinched this morning, her eyes red-rimmed, and it fucking kills me. She’s fragile; I can feel it. I make a note to email her teacher and ask her to go gently on Nance today.
‘On it is,’ Ruth says in her wonderfully cheerful, matronly way, and flicks on Radio Two.
‘Ahh, this is an oldie but a goodie,’ she tells the girls as an upbeat song fills the room. It’s familiar and infectious, and I can’t help but grin tiredly at it.
‘I don’t know this song,’ Nancy grumbles, kicking at the edge of the island.
‘This is I Think I Love You,’ Ruth tells them. ‘By—’
I freeze, one hand outstretched for the cafetière. ‘Holy fuck, The Partridge Family,’ I say.
‘Daddy!’ Nancy says.
But I’m bent over the island, pushing my hands into my eyeballs in an attempt to hold back the tears. Fucking hell, Claire, I tell her silently. You little beauty. Clever, clever girl.
‘It’s the Partridge family,’ Stella tells her. ‘Like partridge.’
I shudder out a breath and turn to Ruth, who’s looking as though I’ve finally lost my marbles. ‘About four hours ago,’ I say, ‘Nancy asked Mummy for a sign. A partridge.’
Ruth’s eyes grow wide. She’s well used to our signs and is as enthusiastic as we are when they show up.
‘Did she now?’ she asks. ‘Wow. Well done Mummy.’
The girls are now jumping up and down in excitement. ‘It’s the Partridge family!’ they shout. They’re on that precipice between exhaustion and mania, and it’s not clear which side they’ll fall on before Ruth gets them off to school. Even Norm is momentarily roused from his usual stupor. He practically cavorts around the island, almost taking Nancy out as he narrowly avoids a bar stool.
Jesus Christ.
I take advantage of their turnaround in spirits to let out a shuddery exhale. This emotional rollercoaster we’re on is fucking exhausting.
And it feels like we’ll never get off it.
