Katherine May - Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Some winters happen in the sun. This particular one began on a blazing day in early September, a week before my fortieth birthday.

I was celebrating with friends on Folkestone beach, which juts into the English Channel as if reaching out to France. It was the start of a fortnight of lunches and drinks that I hoped would allow me to avoid a party and see me safely into the next decade of my life. The photographs I have of that day now seem absurd. High on a sense of my own becoming, I snapped the seaside town bathed in the warmth of an Indian summer. The vintage-looking launderette that we passed on the walk from the car park. The pastel-coloured concrete beach huts that stack along the coast. Our combined children jumping over the shoreline together, paddling in an impossibly turquoise sea. The tub of Gypsy Tart Ice Cream that I ate while they played.

There are no photos of my husband, H. Thats not necessarily unusual: the photos I take, over and over again, are of my son, Bert, and the sea. But what is unusual is the blank in the photographic record from that afternoon until two days later, when there is a picture of H in a hospital bed, trying to force a smile for the camera.

At the idyllic seaside, H was already complaining that he felt sick. It didnt signify much; I have found that parenting a young child brings one long succession of germs into the house, which cause sore throats and rashes and blocked noses and stomachaches. H wasnt even making a fuss. But after a lunch that he couldnt bear to eat, we walked up to the playground at the top of the cliffs. H disappeared for a while. I took a photograph of Bert playing in the sandpit, a rope of seaweed tied to the back of his trousers like a tail. When H came back, he told me that hed vomited.

Oh no! I remember saying, trying to sound sympathetic, while privately thinking what a nuisance it was. Wed have to cut the day short and head back home, and then hed probably need to sleep it off. He was clutching at his middle, but that didnt seem particularly troubling under the circumstances. I wasnt in any hurry to leave, and it must have shown, because I have a very clear memory of the sudden shock when our friendone of our oldest ones, whom we knew from our schooldaystouched me on the shoulder and said, Katherine, I think H is really ill.

Really? I said. Do you think so? I looked over to see H grimacing, his face sheened with sweat. I said Id go and fetch the car.

By the time we got home, I still didnt think it was anything more than a dose of norovirus. H put himself to bed, and I tried to find something for Bert to do, now that he had been robbed of his afternoon on the beach. But two hours later, H called me upstairs and I found him putting on his clothes. I think I need to go to hospital, he said. I was so surprised that I laughed.

H sat in a plastic waiting room chair, a cannula in his hand, looking miserable. It was Saturday night. The place was brimming with rugby players admiring their broken fingers, drunks with lacerated faces, and elderly people hunched in wheelchairs, their carers refusing to take them back to their residential homes. I had dropped Bert off with neighbours and promised to be back in a couple of hours, but soon I was texting them to ask if they wouldnt mind his staying over. By the time I left H, it was after midnight, and he still hadnt been moved to a ward.

I went home and didnt sleep. Returning the next morning, I found that things had gotten worse. H was vague and hot with fever. The pain had built up through the night, he said, but by the time it was at its peak, the nurses were changing shift, so nobody could give him the medication to make it bearable. Then his appendix burst. He felt it happening. He screamed out in agony, only to be scolded by the ward sister for being rude and making a fuss. The man in the next bed had to get up to advocate on his behalf; he called through the curtains to us, saying, Terrible state they left him in, poor fella.

There was still no sign of an operation. H was afraid.

After that, I was afraid, too. It seemed to me that something dangerous and terrible had happened while I had deserted my post. And it was still happening; the nurses and doctors appeared to be drifting around as if there were no hurry at all, as if a man should lie back and allow his internal organs to rupture without a whimper. I felt, suddenly and furiously, that I could lose him. He clearly needed someone at his bedside to defend him, so thats what I did. I planted myself there, ignoring visiting hours, and when the pain got unbearable, I trailed behind the ward sister until she helped him. Im usually too embarrassed to order my own pizza, but this was different. It was me versus them, my husbands suffering versus their rigid schedule. I was not going to be beaten.