Catherine Mayer

Catherine Mayer

Love can be as frictionless as silk.

I love, without restraint or qualification, Andy, my husband of three decades. I have nothing but love for my stepsister Sarah and my stepfather John; for Maurice, integral to my sister’s life and our family for seventeen years; for close friends Sara and Barbara. I used to love the NHS unconditionally, as an ideal. Then, six times it failed me, six times over the past four years. In neglecting to save Andy and my stepsister and my stepfather and Maurice and Sara and Barbara, the NHS transfigured six vital, protean relationships into one-sided adoration, boundless but hopeless.

Alone in self-isolation, I mourn the exquisite messiness of living relationships. It is no comfort that my feelings for the NHS have come to incorporate some of that vanished complexity.

Sara erupts into the corridor, dragging her drip stand, a boat broken loose from its moorings. She pleads for morphine. The previous shift missed her prescribed dose and cancer grinds at her bones. The duty nurse shakes her head; she cannot override the automated system. Later the same day, a few floors above, my stepsister smiles in welcome, too weak to raise her head. She has asked me to visit, to receive her parting thoughts. I pull shut the curtains around her bay, lean close, but the bleep and clatter of the busy ward steal more than a few of her precious words.

My stepfather will survive several stints in the same London hospital before the last, when they hang a sign of a swan at his door to remind themselves to leave him, and us, undisturbed. That’s the thing about the NHS: call bells routinely go unanswered, yet once the patient is beyond help, attention can seem overabundant. Six times I have observed this, the impulse to adjust the angle of the bed or essay a cheery conversation, as if such courtesies could make any difference to the dying. Barbara, at the hospice, yellowed and hollow, has not eaten for days. Even so, every mealtime, they trip into her room, singing out the menu.

All this I could forgive and do. I struggle with a sharper betrayal. Andy, admitted to intensive care with pneumonia, is expected to make a recovery. ‘You’re the healthiest person in ICU,’ the doctors tell him. (The longer he’s there, the better we comprehend how low that bar is.)

Five and a half thousand miles away, Wuhan is in lockdown. Reports seep through of European infections. Andy visited China recently, so the doctors decide to test him for the new virus. The test proves negative but Andy’s condition deteriorates. A tense narrative unfurls in coloured lines on the screen behind him. In those first days, I am a child, sounding out its first words phonetically. By day ten, I have learned to read the lines with ease and, anyway, I read faces. I understand that things are precarious.

So why do I allow the nurses to persuade me to go home? He is stable, they tell me. Get some rest. This will be a marathon, weeks if not months before he can be discharged. I withhold these prognoses from Andy. He still talks of touring with his band in the summer. From his hospital bed, he issues instructions for mixes of an album, like its creator, entering the final stages.

Sleep well, my sweetheart, I say. I’ll be back early in the morning, and I am. As I text him from the hospital entrance – does he want a coffee? – a nurse calls. She says they have placed him in a medically induced coma, on a ventilator. All at once I am running, along hospital corridors, not waiting for that stupid lift, up the stairs, more stairs, using all the breath, all the breath Andy needs. No matter how fast I run, it will not be fast enough. He will never speak again, though he lives for another five days.

It is not their betrayal, those nurses. It is mine. I knew he was sinking but flinched from the knowledge. Now another piece of knowledge curls around the edges of every waking moment, making my eyes sting: that I squandered the opportunity to hold Andy’s hand one last time and feel an answering squeeze, to talk with him rather than at him. (Believe me, I talk at him every day.)

No blame attaches to the NHS. Over four years and those strange and terrible fifteen days in ICU, my relationship with this extraordinary institution has been tested and sorely tried, emerging as a love based on intimacy. I have seen the flaws and failings but also the care. I have seen dedication, exhaustion, the toll that daily exposure to human tragedy exacts and the commitment to carry on regardless.

The critical care staff looking after Andy were exceptional, but they are not exceptions. They drew on specialists and their own deep expertise, deployed new treatments, explored every option to give all of their patients the best chance possible. I have seen similar excellence in other NHS hospitals, in specialist units and on general wards. I have seen bright successes against odds stacked by years of under-resourcing and bad policy. There are and will be many such successes.

I have seen that small courtesies might do nothing for the dying, but mean everything to those of us lucky enough to be with our loved ones when they die.

The end is near.

A consultant and I reach this decision on the final day of January; one more night and then a withdrawal of life support. Outside, protestors with candles keep vigil for the European Union. Inside, family and elective family take turns by Andy’s bed. His bandmates curl on the window ledge. At dawn, someone brings in the first edition of a broadsheet; its Brexit headline is ‘The Day We Said Goodbye’.

And so we will. First there are arrangements to make. Family and friends have dispensation to remain, despite their numbers. I choose a piece of music, not one of Andy’s galvanising compositions, but a classical piece that he liked to hear as we drifted to sleep. It would be cruel to pull him back towards consciousness. Even so, I accept an offer from one of the nurses to shave him.

She does so tenderly, omitting only the section of his upper lip obscured by the ventilator’s mouthpiece. He cannot die with a Hitler moustache, I protest. She agrees and prevails on a second nurse to hold the plastic out of the way so she can complete the job.

Small courtesies.

It is time now. Now there is no more time. I tell Andy, again and again, that I love him. I stroke his beautiful face.

Love can be as frictionless as a freshly shaved chin, as sharp as a razor.

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