To have and to hold

Approaching the one year anniversary of Toby's death

This time last year, my husband, Toby, went to the hospital and he never came home.

In my sleep, where the veil between dreams and reality is thin, I relive his death. I see the same hospital room, the same garish floor tiles, the same bed. I feel him dying, and I can’t do anything to stop it.

In these nightmares, some part of me is trying to do what I couldn’t in life: save him.

Toby had cancer, and it was not the slow, languid kind. It was the kind that announces itself suddenly and aggressively.

It was as though he just woke up with it one day. That’s how it works, isn’t it? If you simplify it, I mean. One moment, everything is as it should be. But then, somewhere down beneath your threshold of awareness, an error is made. In a dark, microscopic corner, something switches itself on. Something doesn’t die when it’s supposed to.

Some cellular domino tips over.

There’s no warning, but it’s already too late. The collapse is spreading, invisible and undetected.

I look through pictures of us in the months before Toby began to feel that something was wrong, and I wonder which ordinary day it was when that first mutated cell took hold inside him.

Did he have cancer in his picture?

Toby. Photo taken by the author.

What about here?

Toby. Photo taken by the author.

Did he have it when we were on this hike?

Me and Toby. Photo taken by the author.

What was going on the moment it happened?

This question gnaws at me, even though I know the answer.

I couldn’t protect Toby from the stressful things he was experiencing just before his cancer started. No one could. I know this, and yet my mind wanders around in a past I cannot change, looking for something I missed.

I remember the day we found out. Toby came home from work, heavy with the news. Bewildered. They told him over the phone, per our request. We had been living in a diagnostic grey zone for weeks, but I knew it was cancer at the screening appointment. It was on the doctor’s face and in her demeanour when she said, “I found something. We’ll have to wait for the biopsy results before we can say what it is.”

But she knew, and so did I. It was Christmas Eve.

Toby was formally diagnosed a few weeks later, six months before we were to be married.

All these stupid words they have for things: spot, nodule, lump, mass, lesion.

Tumour.

How could this happen with no warning signs, no risk factors, no missed screening appointments?

Toby was young, healthy, and fit. He was strong.

But the cancer didn’t care.

Years before the cancer came, I was plagued with worry that Toby was going to get it somehow. I went to a few different therapists for help with my worry. One asked, “Does Toby have any risk factors?”

“No.”

“Okay... well, is there any evidence for this worry?”

Besides the cancer statistics that estimate almost 50% of us will develop it?

“No. It’s just a bad feeling I have.”

I get a lot of bad feelings about a lot of different things. Always have. It probably has something to do with all the death I’ve experienced—I lost my dad in my teens, my sister in my 20s, and Toby in my 30s.

Toby knew what I’d gone through. He’d endured more than his share of trauma, too. When my worries came, I would pour them out of my body and into his arms. He’d listen and hold me and say, “Everything is going to be okay. We’re going to figure this out together.”

Being with Toby felt so right, so complete, that part of me felt like I had gotten away with something. I had this amazing man, and we had all this joy and love and fulfillment, but when had I been allowed any of those things?

Loving Toby and being loved by him was the easiest thing in the world, but I wasn’t used to the world being easy.

I was used to death and ruin. And because of that, a part of me was waiting for him to be taken away.

And then he was.

Did our happiness stick out too much? Is that why this happened?

I still can’t believe he’s gone. I held him as he died.

To have and to hold. But not to keep.

And not to save.

Here I am, my future stretching out toward the horizon. It was supposed to be fun and full and intact. But it’s not.

Without Toby, the world feels like an airless terrarium.

This is not what I imagined for myself or Toby. But I know how this works; I know I’m stuck under this glass dome.

Somehow, almost a year has passed. More years will follow—this, I remember from my sister’s death. And my dad’s. Grief keeps its own time, you see. And it does something funny to it in the process—something that doesn’t feel normal.

Time here moves fast, but I don’t move at all. So the days just sit there, ripped from their calendars, collecting dust on a high shelf.

I watch the weeks and months stack up around me like pieces of paper with nothing on them.

White and blank.