Life After You Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  STAGE ONE: Famous Last Words

  STAGE TWO: Well-Placed Protection

  STAGE THREE: The Shared Experience

  STAGE FOUR: Just Keep Going

  STAGE FIVE: A Final Resting Place?

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  How do you go on after the unthinkable happens?

  Sudden death is rude. It just wanders in and takes your husband without any warning; it doesn’t even have the decency to knock.

  At the impossibly young age of thirty-seven, as they were making love one night, Lucie Brownlee’s beloved husband Mark dropped dead. As Lucie tried to make sense of her new life without Him, she turned to writing to express her grief. Life After You is the stunning, irreverent and heartbreakingly honest result.

  About the Author

  Lucie is based in the north-east of England (Newcastle) and recently won Best Personal Blog at the Blog North Awards. Her short story ‘T-shirt Weather’ was shortlisted for the Guardian’s 2010 short story prize, while ‘Late Night Final’ was shortlisted for the GQ / Soho House ‘City Stories’ competition. She has also written for The Independent.

  For Mark, wherever He is.

  Prologue

  Bad news travels through letterboxes and under doors like a noxious gas. By lunchtime on the day after my husband, Mark, dropped dead aged thirty-seven, there were at least three casseroles on the doorstep and a dozen sympathy cards on the mat. Representatives from both sides of the family who never met except for on ‘occasions’ had gathered in Mother’s hot little living room.

  My brother, Dan, had turned up first. At 8.30 in the morning, he screeched up to the house an hour after receiving the news, having driven sixty miles cross-country. He walked through the front door and held his arms out to me. It was a long time before he spoke.

  Everyone was looking at each other, or me, or staring out of the window, and all the while I tried to justify to myself and to them why I wasn’t crying. I tried to summon up the feelings I thought I was supposed to have. I repeated the mantra, Mark is dead, over and over again and waited for the moment when I would collapse, distraught, in a heap on the carpet. Nothing.

  Meanwhile, our three-year-old daughter B played the bossa nova demo on her Bontempi keyboard to this new captive and catatonic audience, and guzzled the sweets they’d brought her. She asked once where her daddy was and I told her he was at work. She knew I was bullshitting but she had Haribo so she let it slide.

  So while they nursed their coffee and their grief and listened to the bossa nova on a loop, I sat in the centre of the blast and calmly opened the Rioja.

  STAGE ONE

  Famous Last Words

  DAY 1: SATURDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2012, 8.13 P.M.

  I knew He was dead. His pupils were shot, and fixed on a point beyond me. He had no pulse. His face was pinkish-grey and doughy. But as the paramedics pounded up the stairs into the bedroom where He lay, I honestly believed they would bring my husband round. I had been doing CPR for twenty minutes on a dead man, but didn’t allow myself to believe it was the end.

  We’d been in the middle of making love – in my mother’s bed. We were there for the weekend for the funeral of my grandma, who, in an unfortunate twist of fate and tragi-comic timing, had died five days before Mark. We were making love in Mother’s bed because we were trying to conceive (she was out at the time, I hasten to add).

  Those who become embroiled in the complicated world of conception know that there is a ‘moment’ during the month in which all systems must absolutely go – you have a thirty-second window before the egg explodes and the sperm shrivels or something – so needless to say this wasn’t going to be the Barry White of sessions. It was business. We’d lost a baby in September and this was a last-ditch attempt to have another. And besides, Take Me Out was starting in ten minutes so we had to be quick.

  ‘You’ve still got your socks on,’ He’d said, climbing on top of me.

  Hardly the Humphrey Bogart of last words (his were reputedly: ‘I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis’). Seconds later, He crashed on to the pillow next to me, heavy as a felled oak. I slapped His face and told Him to wake up. He was breathing, heavy, laboured breaths into the pillow. I wondered if I should bother the emergency services with my call. Surely He would come round and I didn’t want to cause a scene in the street outside. Our daughter, B, appeared in the doorway, woken up by the screaming – I must have been screaming but I don’t remember – and she was crying and peering in. I told her the ultimate adult lie; that everything was all right.

  The voice on the phone told me to roll Mark over and begin compressions on His chest. I manoeuvred Him, with difficulty, on to His back and started in time with the voice: 1… and… 2… and… 3… and… 4.

  B was by my side now, crying and asking me why Daddy wasn’t waking up. I remember feeling conspicuously nude – except for the socks, of course – and considered where the nearest shroud of decency might be found when the paramedics arrived. (Towel… bathroom.)

  His lips were turning blue. I opened one of His eyes and it stared through me. I felt His neck for a pulse. His skin was already beginning to get cold, vital signs shutting down one by one, like lights in an apartment block. A nerve in His left thumb twitched. I wouldn’t believe He was dead.

  But I would later learn it had been instant. There was nothing anyone could have done.

  After the paramedics had arrived, I’d glimpsed Mark one final time. I needed to call Mother but the phone was where I’d left it after making the emergency call, discarded in panic on the set of drawers in the bedroom. I stepped in to get it and my eyes fell to where they’d moved Him on to the floor next to the bed. His arm was propped against the radiator. They’d placed a mask over His face and all I could hear were the faint beeps of machinery.

  My call to Mother went something like this; ‘Mark’s collapsed… the ambulance is here… they’re upstairs with Him now… you need to come home…’

  She was just around the corner babysitting at my sister Beth’s house, and while I didn’t really register her response, I knew that she would be arranging care for the kids and with us within minutes.

  B and I sat at the kitchen table and waited. B looked at me over the rim of a cup of milk. ‘I’m frightened of something,’ she said.

  ‘What are you frightened of?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No need to be frightened, love,’ I told her. But a cold shard of terror had lodged in my guts. We listened to the beeps and creaks coming from the room above us; each one part of a last-ditch attempt to save her daddy.

  When the paramedics came down the stairs after forty minutes, grim-faced and exhausted, and one of them uttered the words: ‘Mark’s died’, you might forgive me for my response.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right.’

  I suddenly, inexplicably, felt frightened of the body upstairs. Did I want to see Him? No. I regret that response now. A chance for a last cuddle before He went truly cold.

  ‘But whereabouts have you left Him?’ I asked. ‘Is He on the floor?’

  ‘Yes. With the blanket over Him. I’ll come up with you if you like…’

  I shook my head. ‘What will happen now?’

  The paramedic prodded at his electronic notebook with a stumpy digit. ‘The police will be here shortly. Then they’ll come and take Mark.’

  ‘Are you leaving now?’ I asked, watching as the team filed past carrying their arsenal of life-saving equipment, now redundan
t, back to the ambulance. ‘Please, don’t leave.’

  ‘They are,’ he said. ‘But I’ll stay until the police arrive.’

  10.05 P.M.

  ‘Was it your… husband?’ asked the younger, more ample-eared of the two policemen who were now sitting in Mother’s living room drinking tea.

  ‘Yes…’

  The other one, clearly an old hand at incidents of sudden death, took notes and handed me a photocopied leaflet, ‘Coping with Sudden Death’. ‘Have you decided if you want your husband cremated or buried?’

  Mark hadn’t been dead two hours, yet the policeman seemed surprised that I hadn’t considered the options for His disposal.

  ‘Tell me this is a dream,’ I pleaded with Mother.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not.’

  The Old Hand pressed his fingertips together and brought them up to his mouth. ‘We have all night,’ he said. ‘Take your time.’

  Policemen, up close, in your living room, have a kind of other-worldliness about them. On the whole, they’re taller than you would imagine, and their uniforms are straight out of the BBC costume department. Never having had a proper encounter with one before, their presence seemed to add to the theatrical quality of the evening.

  ‘Cremated,’ I suggested.

  I didn’t know what the significance of my answer was – I still don’t – but I was prepared to agree to anything to avoid all night in the company of these two.

  This seemed to have satisfied his line of questioning. For him, the bureaucracy of death was complete. He sipped his tea and reassured me that he wouldn’t leave until the undertakers got there. Small-talk doesn’t come easily in situations such as this (‘Been busy tonight?’ ‘Is this your first sudden death?’) so I stood by the window, willing the undertakers to arrive.

  It occurred to me that perhaps I should make some phone calls. But should I wait until morning to launch the grenade, or was it best to do it now, in this cold excess of time between death and undertaker? I asked the Old Hand for his advice. After all, he was the bearer of ‘Coping with Sudden Death’, which must surely have had a sub-section devoted to ‘Telling Family and Friends (about the) Sudden Death’. He brought his fingers to mouth again and paused. Then he said, ‘It’s entirely up to you.’

  I called my dad. He lived half an hour away in North Yorkshire with his wife, Karen.

  ‘He’s at the pub I’m afraid – anything I can help with?’ Karen asked. I glanced at the hour: 10.30 p.m. Dad’s habits hadn’t changed in forty years. Two pints of Theakston’s and he’d be home.

  ‘It’s just… well, there’s really no easy way to say this… Mark has died, Karen.’ Saying those three words for the first time, I felt like an actor rehearsing a script. They seemed fraudulent, somehow, with no basis in reality.

  Karen and Mark were good pals; they enjoyed talking over Sunday morning coffee while the rest of us slumbered upstairs on the weekends we spent at Dad’s. Mark had recently been exchanging letters with Karen’s dad relating to the war; Mark loved his stories about flying Thunderbolts over Burma, and Karen’s dad loved regaling Him with them.

  Karen had heard the three words, yet clearly they had no basis in her reality either. She replied with: ‘Your dad’s only just left the house. I’ll call the pub. He’ll be with you in half an hour.’

  I made one more call. To Mark’s sister. Perhaps I should have granted her one last sleep before her life changed for ever, but I figured she’d want to know. ‘I can’t believe it…’ she uttered. ‘I just can’t believe it.’

  I left her with the gruesome task of informing her parents, who were living 11,000 miles away in Australia. I can only imagine the phone call and their subsequent desperation to find a flight back to the UK, where each air mile would only bring them closer to the grievous reality that they had lost their son.

  Mother offered to call my sister Beth, who was just about to settle into the second half of a performance by Cirque du Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall. It was rare that she and her husband Will were spared a weekend away together, and this frozen one in February was it. The details of the call and its aftermath were described to me only later, when she and I lay in each other’s arms on the bed.

  She’d stepped out into the foyer to be told the news, whereupon her legs had given way under her. Despite desperate attempts to get home, she had no choice but to wait until the first train out of King’s Cross the following morning. She and Will had drunk whisky in the hotel bar until it permitted them to sleep. They arrived home just before noon the following day, as shell-shocked and disbelieving as the rest of us.

  Two men finally came to Mother’s door. The first man, a raven-like figure, stood in the puddled gloom of the streetlight, and announced:

  ‘We’ve come to take Mark.’

  Even now I can hear his voice uttering those words.

  I don’t have any concept of how long it took them to package Him up, manoeuvre Him round the bend in the staircase and out the front door. It could have been five minutes; it could have been half an hour. I had the TV on in the lounge, volume turned up full, with the door shut. All I remember was the silence once they’d gone.

  I slept fitfully that night, in the sheets in which He’d died. Then I woke, and He wasn’t there.

  FOUR YEARS EARLIER: SUNDAY 17 AUGUST 2008

  By 9 p.m., I knew there was something amiss. I’d been trying to contact my husband by phone for the last hour, but each time it had rung off. He would have started the hour-long journey to the centre of Cheltenham by now, ready to start His 10 p.m. shift at GCHQ. Three hundred miles away in Mother’s kitchen in Newcastle, I waited. There would be an explanation for this. He was never late for a shift. At 10.05, I called the office.

  ‘Has Mark arrived into work?’

  ‘No, He hasn’t actually. We were just starting to get a bit worried… who am I talking to?’

  ‘This is His wife…’ My throat closed up around the word ‘wife’.

  ‘Listen, give me a number where you are and I’ll make a few calls.’

  Panic had cleared my mind. I couldn’t remember Mother’s number. ‘Who are you going to call?’

  ‘I’ll just make a few calls. Don’t worry. Are you calling from the number that I can call you back on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I paced the carpet in cold dread. Ten minutes later, a consultant from Cheltenham General Hospital rang. They had Mark in. He’d just managed to call an ambulance before collapsing in the flat around four hours earlier. He was stable and coherent, but they were as yet unable to ascertain what the problem was. There seemed to be an issue with the blood flow in His right leg. If it persisted, and they couldn’t find a reason why, they may have to amputate the leg.

  ‘Is it life-threatening?’ was all I could think of to ask.

  ‘Not if we get the leg off in time,’ the consultant said.

  I stared at the muted television, unable to take in the words I had just heard. ‘I’m coming down, now.’

  ‘Yes, do so. But please drive carefully.’

  Mother, Beth and I gathered and held an eerily calm crisis meeting. I pushed the consultant’s words to the back of my mind and focused on the practicalities. Who would look after three-month-old B while I drove to Cheltenham? How would she be fed, given she was currently on the breast? Having no transport of my own, whose car would I drive down in?

  I threw clothing items into a suitcase, whatever I could find on the floor. Mother would come with me. Beth would stay with B, using whatever milk I was able to express for the midnight feed, and one of the ‘just in case’ ready-mixed formula feeds for the next morning.

  I hurried Mother out of the door and into her car. We drove as far as Darlington before my phone rang. It was Beth. The consultant had called again and asked that I call him urgently.

  ‘Change of plan,’ he told me. ‘We’re transferring Mark to Oxford. We’ve discovered it’s a problem with His aorta. An aortic dissection, in fact.’

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; ‘Is it life-threatening?’ was all I could think to ask.

  ‘I can’t answer no to that,’ the consultant said. Those were the exact words he used.

  Mother and I drove for five hours through the black August night, each of us unable to find a single word to say to the other. We stopped once at Woodall services for a toilet break. Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’ was piping through the sound system with ominous prescience as I paid for a bottle of water.

  I expressed milk from my swollen breasts and threw it out of the car window on to the motorway. We arrived at 5 a.m. in the desolate car park of Oxford’s Radcliffe Hospital. I jumped out of the car while Mother went and parked. I ran down empty corridors, whose polished floors reflected the strip lighting overhead, and found the lift to the cardiac ward.

  All I could see were His eyes, peering out from above the plastic oxygen mask that covered His face. Machines beeped through the thick gloom of the ward. He was waiting for me.

  ‘Love…’

  His eyes smiled.

  ‘Are you all right?’ was the only thing I could think to ask.

  ‘I am now you’re here,’ he said, reaching for my hand.

  He asked me to be waiting with a big bottle of water and a smile when He came out of surgery. I chivvied. He chivvied. But we both knew this was catastrophic.

  ‘Have you had any recent impact to the chest? Car accident? Spontaneous aortic dissection this extensive is most unusual in someone so young…’ The straight-talking Scottish surgeon, dragged from his bed in the middle of the night to operate in this most acute of emergencies, looked at Mark.

  ‘No…’

  The surgeon glanced at his clipboard. ‘You’re thirty-three, aren’t you, Mark?’

  Mark nodded through a tangle of wires and tubes.

  The surgeon turned to his registrar, then back to my husband. ‘Thing is, Mark, we don’t at this point know why this has occurred. But whatever the reason, your aorta has ruptured and our immediate and urgent task is to fix it. We’re just assembling the team, then we’ll take you down to theatre.’