Читать книгу Stray Dog - Gareth O'Callaghan - Страница 3

I loved him more than life itself. I often heard people say that about someone they had lost. But I never understood how anyone could love another person so much. Now I can. It’s been three months since I lost John. And, yes, I know now that he was everything to me. With each day that passes, I realise that more and more.

We sat close together and held hands the afternoon the doctor gave us the awful news. John’s cancer had gone too far for us to have any hope. He had less than a month to live, if he was lucky.

He lived for six months, which meant we were both lucky. It also marked the start of an amazing journey, which I now know has given me the strength and understanding I need to carry on. It is a journey that has given me more hope than I could ever have imagined.

We sat in heavy traffic that evening on the way home from the hospital. We took turns to hide our tears. I tried to hide my shock and disbelief. John reached across and squeezed my hand. He said, “It’ll be OK.”

I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. “What the hell do you mean ‘it will be OK’?” I felt sick. My heart pounded. I wanted to scream at him for the lack of respect he had just shown me with his silly, simple, careless words. I turned the key, pulled it out and threw it at him. I flung open the door and jumped out into the heavy traffic. I cried and banged the roof of the car.

John was standing behind me before I realised he had got out of the car. He put his arms around my shoulders and hugged me tightly. “We need to keep our heads. We need to be united on this, Jo. Please get back in the car. Let’s go home.”

His words made no sense. How could they? I had four weeks left with the man I had spent almost half of my life with. He was going to die, and he was telling me we needed to be united?

But then, that was my John – the man I had come to know. He was always the calm, reflective one in our relationship. He thought things out. I just lost the head. He always looked at choices. I never thought I had a choice in most things I did. What really scared me now was the prospect of life without him.

John had always believed he would go somewhere better after his life here. I had believed for most of my adult life that there was nothing beyond what I had been given. At that moment, I wanted to believe so badly that there was something beyond the word “goodbye”, something that might give me a lasting connection to the man who had been my cornerstone for over twenty years.