Now is Not the Time for Flowers by Stacey Heale

Author:Stacey Heale [Heale, Stacey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785120275
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Death

‘Alexa, play the death rattle’

I

magine a new colour. Close your eyes right now and try. Focus on a brand-new colour you’ve never seen before; nothing that is slightly blueish, not a green-yellow or a wild aurora borealis. Sit with your eyes closed and imagine it.

You can’t. It’s impossible. Your eyes have experienced all your retinas will allow.

Watching someone you love die feels like a similar impossibility. When tragedy happens to someone else, we say, ‘I can’t imagine’ because no, of course we can’t. You can try but the concept is so abstract, so unimaginable to fully conjure in your mind’s eye, even if we have experienced something similar.

I imagined Greg dying when he was first diagnosed five years ago and every day since. I wrote his eulogy in my head during the car journey home from the hospital when we were told he would die. Every morning when I woke up in those initial months, a silent voice would scream, ‘I’M GOING TO HAVE TO WATCH HIM DIE’ on repeat in my head. It was The Thing I was most terrified of, a torturous nightmare guaranteed to happen – when not if.

I continuously tried to conjure Greg’s last hours: what I would say to him, what he would say to me, his last breath. My most frequent scene imagined us lying in a hospice bed together, holding hands, all his close family circling around by dim light as if in an oil painting.

We go to great lengths to explain what birth looks and feels like. Women are told contractions feel like bad period pains (if period pains felt like ripping your insides out with a scythe), the ‘ring of fire’ will sting as the baby’s head crowns, the hands of a surgeon delivering a baby through caesarean will feel like you are a human washing machine. And yet, still, we can’t imagine what this is really like until we have either experienced or witnessed it ourselves. Imagine if we didn’t talk about waters breaking in labour or if delivering the placenta was a secret. Imagine how terrifying and traumatic it would be to experience and witness. It would be an ungodly horror show of blood and surprise but, quite rightly, we have framed it as necessary as billions of us give birth or will witness it. We need to know what is going to happen to us.

Before I gave birth to Dalí, I woke up in the night lying on soaking wet sheets. ‘It’s happening!’ I whispered to Greg in the dark. I wasn’t stressed by this; after all, I’d paid hundreds of pounds to attend NCT classes to prepare me for my waters breaking because This Is What Happens In Labour. I felt comfortable having an internal examination at the birthing centre, confident my baby was on her way.

‘No, sorry, you’re not in labour, that wasn’t your waters that have broken, it’s your back waters,’ said the midwife, her hand so high inside my vagina, it felt like she was tickling my tonsils.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.