Page 89 of How Much Wine Will Fix My Broken Heart?
Tom, I don’t know what this letter is. I think it’s a last-ditch attempt to tell you not to leave me. Don’t go travelling. Stay with me. Here. We can rent a small flat in Bristol and just keep living here like slightly older students. I’ll do my accountancy training with the uni and we can get you on a teacher training course and then buy some house with a yellow door and get a cat called Juno. I’ll even let you have a shelf for all yourStar Warscrap. You’ve given me all these reasons for why you want to travel, why you need to get around the world but the bottom line is I don’t want to be without you. And you can call me sad and poke fun at that all you want but the thought of being without you devastates me.
I love you, you absolute bastard. Please stay.
I love you, G xx
‘Is this comfortable?’
‘Well, I am dying so I’m not sure how you’d describe comfort at this very point in time.’
I puffed the pillows around his head. In those last days, he wanted a fortress of them and the hospice provided generously. It was a wonder they had any left for anyone else. I used to put the brushed cotton covers on as he liked them and I curled up at the bottom of his bed like a cat. They had wheeled in a cot bed for me but it creaked every time I rolled around and, in any case, I wasn’t sleeping very much by that stage.
‘You’re very droll.’
‘Even in the face of impending death. I will take that as the ultimate compliment. Can you put that on my headstone?Funny even when dying.’
‘I thought you wanted to be cremated.’
‘Just put it on a plaque, in a place where it can be seen.’
‘Like in the loo.’
‘Yes, as you take your morning dump, you can remember how funny I was, until the very end.’
I propped the laptop up on the table.
‘Are you thirsty?’ I asked him.
‘For alcohol.’
‘That would mix well with your morphine.’
‘You’re such a spoilsport. I watched an episode ofThis Is Uswithout you today when you went to get coffee.’
‘I can’t believe you. I can’t watch now. I’ll have missed a whole hour.’
‘You can catch up when I’m dead.’
‘Is there a point when that stops being funny?’
‘No… Just lie here, watch it with me. Please, Gracie.’
He patted the side of the bed and stuck out his bottom lip. At that point, he’d lost a lot of colour and the fullness to his face but the eyes never changed. The illness never took away that twinkle in his eyes. I curled up in the same position I always did and we watched that show until we both fell asleep. Except he never woke up. That was how our last moments played out.
The next morning, Emma arrived with some coffee and fresh clothes for me and a nurse came in to check on him. I just thought he was asleep. He had slipped into a coma and that was the last time we spoke. I didn’t believe her. Emma caught me as I fell to the floor. He’s not gone. We didn’t get to the end of the season. We don’t know what happens. This was not how it was supposed to end.
I think of this moment now as I look at the plaque attached to the wall of the new wing they’ve built in Tom’s honour.
The Tom Kennedy Wing
In Honour of Tom Kennedy
Teacher, Colleague, Friend
1990–2018
Should read:Funny Even When Dying. Joyce did good work, though; it’s stately in both font and finish. The wing itself is modern and I’d say it’s up to Tom’s exacting standards. They haven’t brought back the blackboard but I like the sofas and the bright murals that adorn the walls. One shelf holds books with the word Tom in their titles: everything fromTom GatestoTom SawyertoTom Jones…andGoodnight, Mr Tom. Nicely done. There’s a picture of him as you enter, with words underneath. I’ll go and read that in a while. I hope it’s not in Comic Sans.It’s a font for clowns and kids, Tom used to say, not even realising the irony that he was kind of both.
The ceremony has been going on for fifteen minutes now and I feel like I’m not here at all. It’s like I’m just looking down, on autopilot, because if I think about any of this too much then I’ll collapse in a heap. I need to stay upright for the girls, for Joyce. I can’t break down and make a scene because today isn’t about me. It’s about Tom. I push down all that feeling to a place where I can just put one leg in front of the other and function. Smile. Don’t take in too many words, just smile. After a month of scattered meetings with all these international visitors, they are now in the same place, in this courtyard. They all hold programmes and plastic glasses filled with warm wine. I don’t even know half of them, some are faces I remember from the funeral, but I don’t know you. Or you. And there’s a band. They’re all in school blazers and I feel for the young lad trying to balance his tuba. Could we get him a chair?
