I accept my brave Lynda is dead... but she still talks to me from the afterlife
and all the trimmings. She wanted to shop for the stockings in November. ‘Then I’ve done everything I set out to do,’ she’d say.
‘The good thing about dying like this is that you can plan.’
At the end of September, The Mail on Sunday serialised Lynda’s memoir revealing that she was dying.
Lynda gave lots of interviews insisting that she was not frightened. But in the early hours of Saturday, October 11, she woke me up saying I’d have to take her into the hospital because she was in horrific pain.
I stayed with her that week, sleeping on a camp bed beside her. On Wednesday I was sitting at her bedside when she suddenly grabbed hold of me and started sobbing: ‘Michael, I don’t want to die.’
It was the first time she had ever said it outright and it came as a real shock. (It was the only time she said it, too.) I choked back my own tears and held my very brave wife tight, kissing her over and over again.
All she really wanted was to die at home, but she was in too much pain and I couldn’t legally give her the painkilling injection she needed if she was at home.
She slept all Friday and, when Saturday arrived, she was still really tired. She’d stopped eating and drinking. I sat and watched her sleeping. Around 11.30pm I slipped out to a little church nearby to pray to God to save her. The doors were closed so I sat on the steps outside and prayed and cried.
Lynda been waking every night because of the pain but she slept right through Saturday night.
As it was, she never woke up again. I woke early on Sunday morning and knew as soon as I saw her that things had changed.
By 11am she was so poorly that I was back in church, this time saying to God: ‘You’ve got to take her.’ I didn’t want her to suffer any more. It was time to let go. Back in the hospital, I sat holding Lynda’s hand. Hearing is the last sense to go so I carried on talking to her. As I slipped her gold and diamond wedding ring off her finger and on to mine, I told her I loved her.
I was at one side holding her and her friend Nickolas Grace, the actor, was at the other when it happened.
Suddenly she looked up as if she was staring into a light and she smiled. It was exactly 7.50pm.
I kissed her, told her I loved her again and again and again, and she left. You know instantly when the soul has gone. The body of my wife was lying there, but Lynda Bellingham had left the building. The Good Lord had taken her out of my arms. It was peaceful and she was not in any pain. Outside in the corridor, the nurses were so kind. The day staff, who should have finished at 8pm, wanted to stay on to prepare Lynda, rather than letting the night nurses take over.
Around 9.30pm they’d done their job and I went back in to sit with Lynda alone for another hour or so, telling her how much I loved and would miss her. Then I took our clothes, her handbag, the cards and kissed her goodbye.
I cried non-stop all the way home. And now, nearly a year later, not a single day goes by when I don’t cry.
I think the worst moments are when somebody in the street recognises me as Lynda’s husband and tells me how sorry they are for my loss. That’s when I really lose it and the tears come.
They say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and I have to agree. But I wish to God I hadn’t had to lose you. You gave me the best ten years of my life. I love you today as much as I did yesterday. My lover, you will be in my heart until the day I die.
© michael Pattemore, 2015
My Lynda, by Michael Pattemore, is published by Simon & Schuster on September 24, priced £16.99. Order from www. mailbookshop.co.uk for £13.59, with free p&p, until October 4.