Last Friday Afternoon, All I Could Do Was Make A Cup Of Tea

I couldn’t find the teabags. I was in my own kitchen, opening cupboards like I’d never seen their contents before, like I didn’t make a pot there every single afternoon when boredom, apathy and an urge for sugar launch their three-pronged attack around 3pm. When I poured the boiling liquid into the cups, it was too weak and too watery. I was too shaky. It dribbled its insipidness all over the worktop. He didn’t speak, just picked up the dishcloth, leaned over, and mopped it up.

Later, around twenty-seven hours later, when the shock had eased and we were walking and I was initiating 95% of the conversation, I would say to him that I’d known him for a quarter of a century, but in those hours, I didn’t know him at all. We would talk about how I process everything externally, how he only ever does it internally, how he never has to ask me what I’m thinking.

The situation hadn’t seemed that bad at first. Just a mid-morning notification on my Apple Watch on a Friday, while I was perfecting my backhand, to tell me my father-in-law had fallen on the ward the night before, a week after a heart attack and a sudden admission to hospital. He’d just finished a round of golf, stayed for coffee in the club house, let the pain get worse, driven home. He had been feeling tired recently, could only manage nine holes now rather than eighteen. It was maybe because he had two blocked arteries. The fall was an unfortunate setback while he waited for bypass surgery. A cut arm, sore ribs, a bump to the head. He’d been in good form on Thursday when his only child, my only husband had phoned him from London. It had been a short chat. He was enjoying the food. “It makes a change from my mum’s cooking,” said my only husband.

I was getting used to my husband’s travelling again, the boarded, on time, landed WhatsApp messages. When I heard his footsteps on the gravel in the driveway, it was 28 degrees, the window was open. I was ready to greet him. But he didn’t come in. There was no shout up the stairs, no “Hi honey, I’m home”. Instead, there were snippets from outside, lots of oks and thank-yous. I put a load of laundry in the machine and met him at the fridge. Later, I would attempt to reconstruct the transfer of information in those moments, but I could only remember the long, long hug, how I stood on my tiptoes to reach him, how reaching someone when there is bad news is the hardest thing in the world. Later, I’d tell him the bits he had left out, how I’d had to piece it together myself. There had been another fall, a scan, a massive bleed in the stomach. They couldn’t get it stopped. The plan was to ‘blue light’ from the smaller hospital in Coleraine to the bigger hospital in Belfast.

“Can I make you a cup of tea?” I said. “Yes, please,” he said. We were just two people being polite and trying not to think about outcomes.

When I moved my laptop to the table opposite his laptop, because there was nothing else we could do, I watched him put his AirPods in and out, try to join a meeting, leave it, take different calls, tap his keyboard. I’d hear his cousin ask him, “are you ok?”. I’d hear my mother-in-law’s voice at the other end of the line. “They’re still working on him,” she said. The reception was poor. I’d spin the washing and in those twelve minutes as the cycle did its thing, I went round each of my daughters’ bedrooms. I sat on their beds and prayed. I prayed to everyone – God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Mary. I didn’t follow the rules, seek access through intermediaries, use proper beginnings and endings, a structure, any fancy language. I didn’t ask for God’s will to be done. I begged and pleaded. I was direct because sometimes we just need to ask. I prayed for no traffic, for everyone to be heading to the sea rather than the city on a hot day, for four bars on a mobile instead of three, for a miracle. I prayed on Alice, Lucy, Ella and Lydia’s behalf because I wanted them to have a few more hours of blissful ignorance.

Later, when I would relive that terrible, terrible afternoon, I would recall things that made me cry, that made my throat contract until I reckoned, I’d never be the same person again – the elderly brother who sat with his elderly sister in a waiting room because she was told to bring someone with her. Her son was somewhere in the air and there was no one else within a fifty-mile radius. I was grateful for sisters and brothers, for not being an only child, for my own sibling who had set her work aside to reassure me that making a cup of tea was a great thing to do. I would give thanks for the NHS, for the four medical experts who worked tirelessly together to save an 80-year-old man, for the doctor who, had they not managed to stabilise him, would have travelled in the back of a vehicle, providing care on side roads, main roads, the dual carriageway, the motorway, ending up far away from their own home. I’d break down when I thought about a wife getting that unexpected phone call. I’d think about how we may not always believe in religion, but we can always believe in prayer, that often all it takes is a solid focus. “All we can do is pray,” said my mother who never sets foot in a church. I would remember how I had stared at my iPhone like it held the answers, considering who I could call upon, who my praying people were because it was them I wanted most. I would over-analyse why I had typed then erased a message in a group of ministers who could have been a decent bet, but I didn’t know them that well and I would realise that I had lost a lot of the groups I used to be part of, and I really wanted them back complete with their praying emojis.

Later, I would provide an account to each of my children, one they could cope with. We’d discuss how I’d switched to practicalities around 3.30pm, checked where they all were and ensured they had enough after-school activities to keep them away for as long as possible. The request to buy pizzas for dinner would make sense. I wouldn’t be cross with the youngest who had somehow managed to take a change of clothes yet forgotten to tell me she was going for ice cream, that there was providence that day in acting first then seeking forgiveness. I’d be relieved she hadn’t lived through any of it when I saw the fear in her eyes. “Where’s Daddy?” she said when she eventually returned and noticed his car was missing. “I thought Granda was getting better,” she sobbed. I’d explain to the one who needed more facts about blood-thinning medication and clots and transfusions and know that when she gave her own blood the following Monday, that it would have a solid focus, that somehow, she’d believe it could go directly into her grandad’s veins.

And later, I’d decide to write this and wonder if I should, and I would because we still wait for surgery, for outcomes and because if you’re a praying people, it’s a really good way of asking for your prayers. You’re kind of my group now.

Last Friday afternoon, I guess all I could do was make a cup of tea and pray.