We knew it would be our last year together — so we made it our best one ever
A shock diagnosis. A family’s routine shattered. And the humbling lessons for us all in a bereaved husband’s devastatingly raw story...
THE phone was ringing; our GP calling on a Friday afternoon at the end of May 2015. ‘Mr Dillon? We’re trying to get hold of your wife, Nicola Thorold.’ She’d been to the surgery that morning. In the past couple of weeks bruises had appeared on her legs, as if she’d knocked herself. She ignored them until I bullied her into visiting the doctor, who’d taken a blood test.
We’d always been so lucky — until that phone call. She was 50 and I was 53. We’d suffered no catastrophes or bereavements. We came from happy, stable homes, loved our children, Martha, who was 21, and Joe, 18, and earned enough to be comfortable.
Time had rolled by in a dependable sequence, the years passing as solidly as stones on an ancient path.
But the GP was insistent. We were to go straight to A&E.
Later, I sat hunched on a hospital chair and watched as Nicola’s torment began. The consultant told us what they suspected: acute myeloid leukaemia (AML).
We knew nothing about it. Nicola sat up against the pillows, smiling and lucid, her courage fuelled by adrenaline. ‘Our son starts his exams on Tuesday week,’ she told him. ‘I think I ought to delay treatment until afterwards.’
The consultant shook his head. ‘I have to tell you,’ he said, ‘that you are in a life-threatening situation.’
Overnight, we slowed from endless activity, from days of work and evenings seeing friends or going to shows — Nicola was a theatre producer — to the monotony of illness. Our days were punctuated by unpredictable tests, incomprehensible results.
Together we counted down Nicola’s twice-daily chemo until her first cycle was done, though in some ways the hardest part was still to come.
Her neutrophils — the measure of her immune system — would fall as the chemo drugs did their work, then rise again to return her to safety. For as long as she was low in neutrophils, she was as vulnerable to infection as a newborn baby, and imprisoned in hospital.
But neither of us gave in to panic or despair or gloom. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ we repeated to each other, and it wasn’t mere bravado.
OUR new routine was this: on weekdays I visited Nicola each lunchtime. Hurrying from the office where I worked as an architect, I stopped to buy her a newspaper before we met in the courtyard at the hospital.
At 1pm Nicola would always be waiting for me, with a blue headscarf and a cardigan against the cold. She would be with me for one hour, like a princess held captive by an ogre.
When her blood counts started rising again, it seemed like proof that AML was curable; that one day Nicola might resume her normal life.
And ‘normal’ was what we both yearned for to begin with. We wanted to wake up in the morning lying next to each other. I wanted to hear the sound of my wife brushing her teeth; the rhythm of light switch and tap — so regular, so unchanging.
After that first cycle of chemo, we celebrated with a trip to a posh hotel. Perhaps it was then we realised how much cancer was changing us. Alone among the hotel guests, we had no future we could count on. We had the hope there would be other evenings like this, perhaps many of them. But there was no longer any flow or expanse to the space we lived in.
It was mid-way through Nicola’s second cycle of treatment that, suddenly and unexpectedly, we found we were actually happy.
In the clamorous routine of our lives before illness, we had hardly ever stopped.
But all that had vanished now. Eyes on one another, we took one step forward, and then another. Nothing mattered but the next step. Living in the moment was cancer’s gift to us in our last year together. We were alone together, and at peace.
Martha came to visit from university; Joe Skyped between revision periods. His exams went past, one by one.
As the summer warmed up, friends took over our garden, trying to keep things in order.
In hospital, I took notes: she wanted her tapestry, comfort reading, hand cream, the grey top without sleeves… The summer drained away. Nicola came home briefly in August after her third cycle of treatment, but perhaps we had become too cavalier about immunity and, within days, she was back in hospital, her temperature soaring: an infection, unresponsive to the ever increasing doses of antibiotics.
Long days and nights followed, watching her temperature ebb and spike on monitors.
Gradually, Nicola’s immune system juddered to life again. The storm was past, but she was damaged.
Her thighs had withered from lack of use. When, at last, she swung her legs off the hospital bed, they were too weak to support her. When I put my arms around her, I could feel her ribs.
But we were free to leave hospital again. In celebration, we took a trip to my sister’s holiday cottage in the country where, 28 years before, a tentative new couple, Nicola and I, had both realised something special was happening.
This was the place our story began, and it was laced through our lives together.
Every evening, we sat on a bench and watched children play in the stream where Martha and Joe had waded on holidays past. The council had built a new jetty, and we watched an elderly couple set off along it to their moored dinghy, carrying hampers of food, a kit bag, oars. That would be us, we still thought, in old age.
On the way back to the cottage we talked about cancer. How it had enriched us. How much closer we were now, even though we had thought it impossible we could ever be closer.
We talked about the perspective it gave, how the peripheries of our life had come into focus. The centre, which drained away so much energy — careers, meetings, the daily slog; the rush to get home when a meeting overran, or to a concert or play — all that had fallen away on the day Nicola was diagnosed. Other things mattered more: our family, our friends, ourselves.
Martha came down for the weekend. We’d warned her Nicola had little energy. She got that straight away, and slipped into a quiet mood alongside us.
From the very beginning, she seemed to have an instinct for what to do, what to say. Like Joe, she could hold fear in check. Love mattered more.
We had books, a laptop for music. We talked about working less, perhaps going down to four days a week. We talked about retiring, something that, a year ago, had seemed far off.
Nicola and I had both been ambitious and worked hard, assuming that a successful career equated to a successful life. But it didn’t seem like that any more. The only thing that mattered was each other. That, more than anything else, filled and illuminated our world.
I’ve changed since Nicola fell ill. I understand sadness, which is the sky I live under. I’m not asking for sympathy; it’s the simplest of facts. Sometimes a friend complains how unfair it is, but I don’t understand that. I don’t believe some conscious will controls who falls ill, who gets well. The cancer cells multiplying in the darkness of bone marrow have no purpose. They neither single out the wicked, nor allow a cure to someone because she is beautiful, intelligent and good.
The miracle to celebrate is that she almost lived. The miracle is in the work of medics who knew what was wrong with her; who knew how the cells multiplied; who knew, from opaque signals in her blood, what end was likely and what might be done to divert it.
For in the middle of that last year there was a brief reprieve. After four cycles of chemotherapy, we were told Nicola needed no further treatment. Cuttingedge tests showed she was gloriously free of cancer.
Tears flowed freely. We could scarcely believe it.
‘Stop thinking about it,’ said her doctor. ‘We’ll check you every month, but for now, no more treatment.’
FOR a while, normality did return. With Christmas approaching, we planned our children’s presents and bought a tree.
On Christmas Day we went to church. None of us was a believer, but we wanted something special: music, the vault soaring above us. Friends shared lunch and afterwards we walked along the river.
Barely six weeks later, Nicola’s monthly test showed something stirring in her blood cells. She had just gone back to work three days a week.
The doctors wanted to repeat the test, but we both knew that the cancer had returned, that the storm was rising, that the few months of freedom we had enjoyed were just a painted
backdrop hung in a theatre, a last wish, a moment of grace.
For the first time, Nicola began to feel scared. She would need a bone marrow transplant and a long time in hospital while donor cells rebuilt her wrecked immune system.
At 2.06am, in late May 2016, I woke up suddenly, aware my phone had been ringing. There was a missed call from the hospital. When I rang back, they told me Nicola’s breathing had got worse. They’d decided to take her down to Intensive Care.
When I found Nicola, her headscarf had come off. Her head looked small on the pillow.
‘We’ll see how she does in the morning,’ the consultant said, and left me to say goodnight to her.
I found a hand under blankets and wires, and squeezed it. Nicola seemed reassured to be in the ICU. ‘I’ll be fine. You need to get some sleep. Go home.’
Nicola was the thread that tied my life together. Our home was silent and cold, as it is today. Everything that mattered to me lay in that hospital bed. She was my home. I squeezed her hand one more time and left.
Sedation was the doctors’ proposal to stabilise her and relieve her tiring lungs. The consultant explained it to us: they would put her to sleep, then ‘intubate’ her — pass a tube down her throat to help her breathe.
The long-term aim was to wean her off oxygen support, get her breathing fully for herself. ‘Sounds great,’ joked Nicola. ‘Send me to sleep and I’ll wake up well.’
Of course, we all knew she was in danger. We didn’t say goodbye — that would have been admitting how near we were to the edge, and still we were sure she’d get better.
That was the moment we told each other, in words we’d used so often before, but were never stale, how much we loved each other; what our life together had meant.
‘I love you’, repeated again and again. She said: ‘You’re everything.’ I said: ‘You’re everything.’ I went out and saw the team waiting in their green scrubs.
‘You’re everything.’ They were the last words she ever spoke to me, or to anyone.
Something went wrong. She reacted badly to the intubation, or maybe just lurched downwards, like a sinking ship shuddering as water pours into its hold.
Nicola’s body teetered on the edge. It was on a Monday morning that the consultant told us there was no more hope. He asked whether we wanted to let her go slowly, or whether they should switch off the machines.
Martha and Joe sat either side of me. I looked at them for confirmation, then said: ‘Just give us time to say goodbye. Then let her go.’
One by one the nurse switched off monitors, closed syringes.
I traced my finger along the line where her hair had fallen out. I touched the mouth I’d kissed so often. The line of her jaw, her ear — I wanted to imprint them forever on my eyes, so I could always see her. I reached down to kiss her forehead and it was like pressing my lips to ivory.
NICOLA was never a sad person, and I don’t mean this to be a sad story. In the last months of her life, cancer was a storm raging furiously around us, and love was the hut in which we found shelter.
Much later, I spoke to a friend who had nursed his wife through terminal illness, and he said: ‘Caring for someone you love when they’re dying is the biggest thing you can give them.’
I now know far too young, what old people know — how to live life looking only backwards.
But writing this, I can’t feel angry. Sure, sometimes nothing makes any sense. My wife, my children’s mother, is dead.
But at the same time, everything is sharp in my memory: the year we had together; the text messages we sent every day; the quiet room in which Nicola died, my lips touching her forehead.
While Nicola was alive, we loved each other perfectly.