I Had An Ominous Fear About My Husband That I Kept Secret For Years. Then It Came True.

I’d go into the bathroom of our home office, turn the light on, and start the noisy fan so I’d miss the screech of tires and the impact that I was terrified was coming. Then I’d hear him stroll back in. 

He once said, smiling, that he thought I’d like him best wrapped in cotton wool and kept in a drawer. 

In my defense (thin, but true), Simon had a terrible cardiac record and had been in some strange accidents. Our only skiing holiday ended after two hours, when we found ourselves in the hospital, where I tried to erase the vision of him heaped in snow and wrapped around a wooden post, blood trickling from his forehead. A complex shoulder operation followed. 

Soon after, he fell backward while playing tennis. He suffered three breaks in his wrist and we spent the night in the emergency room before he underwent surgery. 

Such events, interspersed with “routine” procedures on his arteries and his knees, oddly strengthened my resolve to stop worrying. He always survived, and was showing me, beautifully, how to live. 

When the pandemic began, Simon suggested I keep a diary.  

April 2020, he’s safe and the world is at a standstill. By June, he’s breathless. The last entry, from July, is a promise to myself: Once he’s OK, I’ll get help. Psychiatrist, therapy, whatever, to shift the fear he’ll die, so I can fully enjoy our life.  

He was diagnosed in July with “stage 4 lung cancer in a non-smoker.” When we were told 25% of people with this diagnosis and the suggested treatment “do well after six years,” I was inexplicably sure he’d be among them. Seeing his confident smile in a photo taken on my birthday that year, as he held his favorite ice cream following his only treatment, now shreds my heart.