Buttercup Weed

Wednesday 5th January

Day 259

I’m still in bed.

‘It’s Professor Duhickeybob,’ says my husband, handing me the phone.

‘I said I’d let you know your husband’s prognosis,’ says our favourite neurologist.

The pussy cat chooses this moment to wake up and pushes his nose at my pen so it swerves across the paper as I try and write what I’m hearing.

It’s better than we feared. He says he falls into the fifty percent category of those people who will live beyond the average eight years.

My husband is hopeful. Although no-one ever suggested it to him, he thought he might die in two years. I live with a different story in my head - it’s not the dying but the living which is squeezing my heart. Living into a future with my husband who bit by bit is drifting away from me like buttercup weed on the surface of a slow river.

But today I am buoyed up by the constant care of the Dearly Beloveds in my life who hold me with a great tenderness while I hang over this dark abyss.