Last words

At the moment I find that photographs of Jen don't stir much emotion, but I'm craving messages from Jen. Ironically, Jen was the one who complained that she had very few letters from you, because we were never apart for long enough. I saw a news item a couple of days ago about a six year old girl who died, but who left hundreds of notes for her family hidden all around the house.

So I've been looking back through old cards from Jen - birthdays, Christmas and special occasions. Sometimes after we'd had an argument, Jen would write a nice card to apologise. I find that overwhelmingly the cards of course say the same thing in many variations and details: I love you. I treasure most the cards written in the last year, when we knew that time could be short, and we were determined to care for each other as much as we could.

This realisation intersects with another. Over the last day of Jen's life, in the stressful and slightly farcical process of trying to get home and then get her to hospital, I was so consumed with what I was doing, that I didn't stop to consider what I really wanted to say to Jen for the last time. At that stage I didn't of course know that she would slip into unconsciousness and never really speak to me again. For the night when she was in palliative care, I sat and talked to her from time to time, hoping unreasonably that she might have a moment of lucidity to hear my voice again and know I was there. That didn't happen, so our last normal lucid conversation was probably on the Sunday night we stayed in Lakes Entrance.

However I realised afterwards that what I wanted to say to Jen was the same thing we'd both been saying in many ways for a long time. After 10 months of knowing that Jen was going to die, we'd already said the important words over and over again. I was comforted to find that the last words were ultimately unimportant - what mattered were the words we said at least half a dozen times a day: "I love you". Knowing that people I love can die at any time and will die eventually, the challenge for me is not to leave the important words until last, but to say them every day.