Roopa Farooki - Everything is True: A junior doctors story of life, death and grief in a time of pandemic

After you have read this story of great misfortune, you will blame the author for your own insensitivity, accusing of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy.

But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction.

Everything is true.

Honor de Balzac, Le Pre Goriot

Quarantine: originally defined as a period of forty ( quarante in French, quaranta in Italian) days of isolation to prevent the spread of contagious disease.

Contents

your sister tells you that shes dying, at her kitchen table, with the sunshine streaming in from her expensive wall of French windows, and theres not much you can say to that.

A little bit of you wishes that you hadnt turned up so dutifully, that youd made any feeble family-avoiding excuse, because she wouldnt have told you in a text message or on the phone. Not again, anyway. Shed done that before, a couple of times, actually, about matters of life and death, and it hadnt gone well. Sadly, spiralling dark news comes out as weirdly comic when youre separated by a screen. Holding a handset. Shed called you one morning, sixteen years earlier, when you both worked in Berkeley Square in big offices that were minutes from each other, and came straight out with this:

They said Dads dead. A glittering thread of disbelieving humour in her voice.

They said what? Matching disbelief in yours, admiration, even, that your dad had managed to fake his death and saddle some poor corpse with his debts. You both didnt think that he would do anything so mundane as to die.

Dads dead. Sure. Youd both laughed, and you had never since admitted that inappropriate laugh to each other. Youd kept a guilty, conspiratorial silence. No need to think about that again, youd written about it before. And its not about that, anymore.

Ive got breast cancer, shed messaged you, ten years ago. Theyre taking off my boob.

Youd just had twins. Shed known about the cancer weeks before she told you, but it was towards the end of your pregnancy, so she waited for you to deliver the babies before she delivered her news. Drop babies, drop the headline. Breaking water, breaking news. Like that was logical. Like it was better. For you or for her.

Youd read her message between three-hour feeds, the babies squalling with open mouths like beaked birds in a nest.

When she didnt answer your frantic calls and you got emotional on Messenger, she texted tersely back.

You need to chill. Its not about you.

That was ten years ago. The first diagnosis. That was then, and this is now.

So you knew already. About her dying of breast cancer. Of course you did. And were all dying, right? Just some faster than others. You both only give your mum another seventy-five years or so. But her saying it out loud means it is happening faster, not slower.

Youre a doctor, and thered been warning signs big enough to see from space. Shed switched from popping pills at home to weekly chemo in the hospital, hooked up to the meds, sitting in a deep chair like a throne. Her skin was polished smooth of hair. Her lungs were being regularly drained of fluid.

Im dying, she says.

Shes dying. Its like the countdown on a bomb. She knows that. Shes always had a flair for the dramatic that explodes out of her at inopportune moments with the heady exhilaration of a wine glass smashed into an exs face. Bubbling out and burning like porridge from a pot. She doesnt even need a drink to release it, its always there.

When you were kids you used to goad her about wanting attention. You accused her of performing for the grown-ups at dinner parties, you said they wheeled her out for entertainment like a belled monkey at a circus. You used that phrase. You were seven years old, and you even wrote it in your diary. She was eleven, and thumped you over the head with her textbooks, and wrote in her own diary, gleefully, that she had hit you and you had cried.

She showed you the entry with pride when you were friends again. Roopa cried BUCKETS!

Friend is too big and small a word for what you were. You had shared a long, thin room, a divide across the middle like a belt. She got the window and the record player and you got the door and the bookshelves. You were generous with physical affection and violence. Long childish cuddles on the sofa. Casual childish slaps and scratches and kicks and punches. You told her shed go to jail if she were a man, for hitting you the way she did. You said shed hit someone else when she was grown-up and really go to jail, and she was so upset you had to hug her better.

And you both want to laugh, again, inappropriately. But shes dying.

She has that smile. Those eyes. That direct gaze.

Yes, you reply, smiling back. Yes. Youve got my attention. Yes, Im chill. This moment, this everything. Its all about you.

How long? you ask. That countdown. Years, months, weeks, days, tomorrow, today, teatime, now.

Christmas, she says, an apologetic shrug.

You know what she means. Why do people always say things like that? Things like, She might make it through Christmas.

Were Muslim. Christmas just means buying more plastic crap for the kids and trying to work through the mince pies that our mum has bulk-bought. Christmas doesnt mean shit.

Except that from today, this day of kitchen table dying declarations, Christmas is less than twelve weeks away.

You both know that even death wont change the plastic crap for the kids, or the mince pies. Maybe death doesnt change everything as much as love. The pouring of endless tea, that sharing of fruit cake, these deep tyre tracks of tradition are ground into our soil.

Youre not sure its a comfort to know how little things will change when we pass, that we wont leave a mark that wasnt already there. Youll be angry later, so angry, at how quickly she dissolves, when its over. When her small body is gift-wrapped for God, in blank white cloth, boxed up and buried under great clots of mud. Ripples slipping away in flattening circles, leaving the pond still and frozen.

You thought youd both have more time. Fuck knows what you thought youd do with it. Ten years came and went and for a long while she was clear and cancer-free and then suddenly she wasnt, and youre sure she spent most of that time being vaguely pissed off with you for being you. Youre pissed off with you now for the same reason.