Negotiating for one more day with the person I loved and lost

On grief and the endless barter for time

Eleven years have passed since Rob, my late husband, died. But grief loves to stir madness into your head when you least expect it. Below is a decidedly one-sided conversation with Rob asking for some time with him because it is the very least he could do. He has yet to reply.

Credit: KTB Wedding Photography

Can I have one week? Is that too greedy?

They said ask for what you dream of the most. I didn’t want to ask for too much in case it broke the wish with its weight and longing, but I don’t think 168 hours is too much, when measured on the scales against the love I had for you, have for you, and will continue to have until the last breath.

What is a week, really? A blur of mid-week dinners and hurried lunches and breakfasts while standing up. The phonecalls that can wait because I’m busy, so busy. Watering the plants. Finding time (and failing) to stretch my limbs. The catch-ups and 60-minute work calls, and trips to the gym and a slug of TV and then it’s gone, dissolved along with the things I could have and should have done.

I could just steal that week from someone who isn’t squeezing the drops of sweetness from it. Someone who might be stuck on an auto-pilot, putting off each day as if there is an endless supply, or spending so much of their time worrying about their future that they aren’t even noticing the present passing anyway.

But if I could have that time with you, if no one else is using it, if we could tuck it into some pocket of time where no one will miss it, I don’t even want one of the good weeks. I’ll take the week when both of us were ill and by day three the dog was bouncing off the walls until you shivered into a jacket and walked her on the common, returning with diamonds of rain on your shoes.

If I had the choice though, I would love the week when we stayed on the beach in a small hotel in Malaysia with a powerful ceiling fan and cheap beer and a proprietor that looked as if he was running from the law. The week that you proposed and it was just the two of us and our engagement was christened with a flock of hornbills cutting across the jungle as sunset dripped across the canopy. But I know to ask for that week is greedy.

Okay, okay. Your silence says it all, a week is too much. Can I instead have one day? No one will ever know it is missing. Think about how careless people are with 24 hours. A whole day spent working, slipping life force in between binary code and pockets of time between meetings. A day spent hoovering cat hair and snipping dead leaves and cobbling together a meal from whatever is not wizened and sad in the fridge.

I repeat my offer again. It doesn’t have to be one of the best days. It can be the day we spent in bed with thunder circling our fancy hotel room, trees kissing the ground while we watched Firefly and ate crisps and whatever else we could take from the minibar. Or the day we drove to the hospital to see my sister when she gave birth to Leela, and the gearstick of our car literally broke in two while we were on the motorway and it was held together by prayers and your meaty paw trying to clasp it together in one piece.

I’ll even take a fight day. We didn’t fight often, I know. And perhaps that was part of the problem. I couldn’t bear to see you upset, you couldn’t bear to make me cry and we fell into the trap of keeping the most important words unsaid. But remember that day when you were coming back from a party, and you turned up six hours later than you said you would, with a dead phone, belligerent, the shade of some drug working its way through your body? The day I looked at you and felt as if you, my husband, who I loved above all else, were a stranger in our home? I hated that day, and yet if it was offered, I would take it.

You’re still silent.

Fine, what about an hour?

What about one of the hours when our lives slid back into each other after being apart all day? When I’d come home and you would kiss me and tell me how you’d spent the day working and marinating fat stubby ribs, and did I want barbecue? And how I’d be delighted because to me, barbecue was always something I did at someone else’s house - a party, a gathering, and here it was, this special little thing in my back garden on a Tuesday, just the two of us.

Oh! What about the hour when you were finally free from heroin, and you could bear your skin to be touched again, and you let me cling onto you in the swimming pool like a koala? And I saw you close your eyes against the sun and smile, and I saw it for a moment, you in true happiness, sober, glad to be alive?

To tell the truth Rob, I would take a minute. Or even less. I would hold tightly onto the ten seconds it takes to say I love you and look into your eyes and feel everything drop away but that love and connection.

And even then, I would end the world for a second. One fragment to see you again, because I miss you and I love you and it never ends.

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