Emma'''s Diary
Jean and Alan
Two years ago, I was getting ready to end my marriage. We were getting through Christmas then one of us was going. Heartbroken, worried, and with nowhere to turn. Like strangers in the same house, we functioned for the sake of the children, all the while knowing what we knew about 2021 and the misery it was going to bring. Little did we know the catastrophe that the universe had planned and lay ahead. My mother-in-law was in the hospital, COPD had been slowly killing her for some years now and after several goodbyes, there was every chance this time it was for real. But surprisingly on Christmas Eve, she was allowed to go home. My seven-year-old daughter and my husband (her son) picked her up from the hospital and took her home. My father-in-law had been lost without her and we were glad he was getting his best friend home. They got as far as the hallway in her home and they had to lower her to the floor. She was still sick. As I sat at home with our two-year-old, wrapping presents, slowly drowning in the wine and misery the time began ticking. Eventually, I decided to ask a taxi driver friend to pick my daughter up and bring her home, after all watching her nan's demise in her own hallway wasn’t, I felt wasn’t something I was ready to go through with my child on top of everything else.
They took her back to hospital and she was too ill to make it home for Christmas. Christmas day was painful, both of us knowing this would be the last one together as a family and for my husband that he was going to lose his mum any day. Through gritted teeth and gut wrenching pain we watched our children experience the joy of Christmas like nothing was happening. The following day, hospital staff reported that my mother in law had COVID. As the family began to test themselves, positive after positive was announced. My father in law was the last one to get a positive result. Initially doing well and slowly but surely it began to wear him down. Another hospital admission. Two parents in hospital, separate wards. Mum not knowing that dad was there and dad not knowing just how critical mums condition was. I still to this day think he preferred to deny the reality. We knew they had to be together. Sixty Five years of marriage couldn’t end like this. There was despair. Stress and more despair. Conversations two and fro between my husband and the hospital staff. Eventually the news we had been waiting for, we could get them together for mum to pass away with the love of her life by her side
Gowned up and looking like something out of a movie my husband and his sister sat by their bedsides as they held hands, mum waiting for the angels and dad unknowingly waiting with her. Dad was on and off his oxygen, talking to my husband and my sister in law. He was struggling but we were all glad he was able to be with her and held out hope for a recovery. A short while later my husband and my sister in law got asked into a side room to give them an update on their mother, or so they thought. However what came next was nothing short of devastation. A blow beyond all blows. ‘It’s your father, he’s critically ill and we have made the decision to stop treatment. And when we do we stop treatment, you need to know it will be quick’ Speechless and desperate they made their way back to their parent’s bedsides. Their mum and dad still holding hands they watched as their father’s oxygen was removed and he was told that his wife didn’t have long left. I received that call of the news and had no words for what I was hearing. It was beyond words. I told my husband we would all be here waiting for him. I knew this was going to change our lives. .
HOLA SOBER | MADRID
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