Brownlee - Life after you : a mothers true story of life after loss

Contents

How do you go on after the unthinkable happens?

Sudden death is rude. It just wanders in and takes your husband without any warning; it doesnt even have the decency to knock.

At the impossibly young age of thirty-seven, as they were making love one night, Lucie Brownlees beloved husband Mark dropped dead. As Lucie tried to make sense of her new life without Him, she turned to writing to express her grief. Life After You is the stunning, irreverent and heartbreakingly honest result.

Lucie is based in the north-east of England (Newcastle) and recently won Best Personal Blog at the Blog North Awards. Her short story T-shirt Weather was shortlisted for the Guardians 2010 short story prize, while Late Night Final was shortlisted for the GQ / Soho House City Stories competition. She has also written for The Independent.

For Mark, wherever He is.

Bad news travels through letterboxes and under doors like a noxious gas. By lunchtime on the day after my husband, Mark, dropped dead aged thirty-seven, there were at least three casseroles on the doorstep and a dozen sympathy cards on the mat. Representatives from both sides of the family who never met except for on occasions had gathered in Mothers hot little living room.

My brother, Dan, had turned up first. At 8.30 in the morning, he screeched up to the house an hour after receiving the news, having driven sixty miles cross-country. He walked through the front door and held his arms out to me. It was a long time before he spoke.

Everyone was looking at each other, or me, or staring out of the window, and all the while I tried to justify to myself and to them why I wasnt crying. I tried to summon up the feelings I thought I was supposed to have. I repeated the mantra, Mark is dead, over and over again and waited for the moment when I would collapse, distraught, in a heap on the carpet. Nothing.

Meanwhile, our three-year-old daughter B played the bossa nova demo on her Bontempi keyboard to this new captive and catatonic audience, and guzzled the sweets theyd brought her. She asked once where her daddy was and I told her he was at work. She knew I was bullshitting but she had Haribo so she let it slide.

So while they nursed their coffee and their grief and listened to the bossa nova on a loop, I sat in the centre of the blast and calmly opened the Rioja.

I knew He was dead. His pupils were shot, and fixed on a point beyond me. He had no pulse. His face was pinkish-grey and doughy. But as the paramedics pounded up the stairs into the bedroom where He lay, I honestly believed they would bring my husband round. I had been doing CPR for twenty minutes on a dead man, but didnt allow myself to believe it was the end.

Wed been in the middle of making love in my mothers bed. We were there for the weekend for the funeral of my grandma, who, in an unfortunate twist of fate and tragi-comic timing, had died five days before Mark. We were making love in Mothers bed because we were trying to conceive (she was out at the time, I hasten to add).

Those who become embroiled in the complicated world of conception know that there is a moment during the month in which all systems must absolutely go you have a thirty-second window before the egg explodes and the sperm shrivels or something so needless to say this wasnt going to be the Barry White of sessions. It was business. Wed lost a baby in September and this was a last-ditch attempt to have another. And besides, Take Me Out was starting in ten minutes so we had to be quick.

Youve still got your socks on, Hed said, climbing on top of me.

Hardly the Humphrey Bogart of last words (his were reputedly: I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis). Seconds later, He crashed on to the pillow next to me, heavy as a felled oak. I slapped His face and told Him to wake up. He was breathing, heavy, laboured breaths into the pillow. I wondered if I should bother the emergency services with my call. Surely He would come round and I didnt want to cause a scene in the street outside. Our daughter, B, appeared in the doorway, woken up by the screaming I must have been screaming but I dont remember and she was crying and peering in. I told her the ultimate adult lie; that everything was all right.

The voice on the phone told me to roll Mark over and begin compressions on His chest. I manoeuvred Him, with difficulty, on to His back and started in time with the voice: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

B was by my side now, crying and asking me why Daddy wasnt waking up. I remember feeling conspicuously nude except for the socks, of course and considered where the nearest shroud of decency might be found when the paramedics arrived. (Towel bathroom.)

His lips were turning blue. I opened one of His eyes and it stared through me. I felt His neck for a pulse. His skin was already beginning to get cold, vital signs shutting down one by one, like lights in an apartment block. A nerve in His left thumb twitched. I wouldnt believe He was dead.

But I would later learn it had been instant. There was nothing anyone could have done.

After the paramedics had arrived, Id glimpsed Mark one final time. I needed to call Mother but the phone was where Id left it after making the emergency call, discarded in panic on the set of drawers in the bedroom. I stepped in to get it and my eyes fell to where theyd moved Him on to the floor next to the bed. His arm was propped against the radiator. Theyd placed a mask over His face and all I could hear were the faint beeps of machinery.

My call to Mother went something like this; Marks collapsed the ambulance is here theyre upstairs with Him now you need to come home

She was just around the corner babysitting at my sister Beths house, and while I didnt really register her response, I knew that she would be arranging care for the kids and with us within minutes.

B and I sat at the kitchen table and waited. B looked at me over the rim of a cup of milk. Im frightened of something, she said.

What are you frightened of?

I dont know.

No need to be frightened, love, I told her. But a cold shard of terror had lodged in my guts. We listened to the beeps and creaks coming from the room above us; each one part of a last-ditch attempt to save her daddy.

When the paramedics came down the stairs after forty minutes, grim-faced and exhausted, and one of them uttered the words: Marks died, you might forgive me for my response.

Right, I said. Right.

I suddenly, inexplicably, felt frightened of the body upstairs. Did I want to see Him? No. I regret that response now. A chance for a last cuddle before He went truly cold.

But whereabouts have you left Him? I asked. Is He on the floor?

Yes. With the blanket over Him. Ill come up with you if you like

I shook my head. What will happen now?

The paramedic prodded at his electronic notebook with a stumpy digit. The police will be here shortly. Then theyll come and take Mark.

Are you leaving now? I asked, watching as the team filed past carrying their arsenal of life-saving equipment, now redundant, back to the ambulance. Please, dont leave.

They are, he said. But Ill stay until the police arrive.