The Last Love Note

by Emma Grey

A ponytailed woman in activewear brushes past me in a cloud of perfume and competence.

he’d crouch down beside Charlie and explain how it worked, Charlie would graduate from the conversation slightly more knowledgeable, and I would have one less thing to explain about the world. The thought of all the lost conversations between them makes my heart ache as much as it hurts my head trying to bridge the gap.

I usually say “dead.” Not “deceased.” Not “late.” Not “passed.” Once, in a stressful social interaction, I described Cam as having “left” Charlie and me, only to have a woman trash-talk him for ditching us.

I note that his blue eyes have dulled to that deep gray, the way they always do when he’s exhausted.

Never speak ill of the dead, Kate. It’s another impossible standard to which widows are held while they slip and falter across the unstable ice of grief, hoping it will hold.

Why must I always have an audience when things get so decidedly out of control?

I’m at the age where new professionals are starting to appear impossibly youthful,

That’s the problem with grief. It’s not packed tidily in a box that you can bring out in appropriate, private moments and sort through. It’s threaded inconveniently through everything.

that lingers even after he breaks away and walks across the road to his house, carrying my attention with him.

I’m meant to be a writer. Am one, at heart. But cannot possibly live the life of one—not even part-time. The way the cards have fallen, I can only grasp for words in stolen moments. Pull them onto pages in fits and starts around the very real challenge of keeping a roof over Charlie’s head until he’s old enough to do that himself.

With Cam, I always had the space to write. He ensured that. Even then, though, I clung to my day job, scared of really putting my work out there. Terrified of rejection. I even struggled to show Cam my work. An English professor, of course, so professionally equipped to judge it.

You can grieve a breakup, too, and grieve someone’s absence from your life, but when someone dies, it’s soul-deep. An impossible-to-grasp, endless absence not just from you, but from the entire world. You won’t run into them by accident in the supermarket. You can’t stalk them on social media. Your best friend won’t furnish you with gossip about their next steps. There’s just nothing. Forever.

It never stopped him from being supportive, but it’s hard to be totally at ease with a person who holds a secret my husband took to the grave.

They say it’s just like having a second child, falling in love again. That when you’ve lost a partner, you can eventually love two people at the same time. But the idea of that is so distant from me right now that I can’t accept it as true or understand how it would work. You’re allowed to notice other men.

I feel this immense responsibility to stay alive.

Charlie’s a genetic miniature of his dad. Dark blond curls, intelligent blue eyes. Same dimpled smile that Cam flashed at me in second-year uni, which Charlie now flashes at me when he should be asleep in the middle of the night.

This isn’t just about an embarrassing moment; those are a dime a dozen in my world.

I used to find fundraising hard. I was the kind of person who had to buy all the charity chocolates myself rather than sell them, because I hated asking people for money. But, over the years, I just found my way with it. Turns out it’s all about stories. People’s personal experiences, shared respectfully, drive up donations. The families I worked with felt like they were contributing in an area where they once felt powerless.

Having a baby really knocked the wind from my sails. It took us years of trying before Charlie finally came along. Infertility shredded my confidence, and eventually the complicated process of bringing a baby into the world just sort of swallowed me whole.

Accidentally getting pregnant is not in our playbook. Our narrative is that we struggle. We have to throw everything we have at the task, financially, emotionally, and physically.

Such perfect eye contact. Every time I glance at him, he lights up. Every time. He’s my greatest and most loyal audience, my most reassuring cheerleader. Nothing I do—no doubts I have—can stop him from loving me the way he does.

slightly exaggerating my application and constantly falling short of my colleagues’ expectations has kicked in even before I’ve been given my first task.

He seems nineteen again, and twenty-four, and thirty, and every other age I’ve shared with him, all at once.

It’s our future, coming at us in nightmarish slow-motion. Cam and I and Charlie, and our unborn baby. Every moment up until now collides with every future moment, as if we are warping time. He is not okay.

This accident is the universe’s way of forcing me to face facts. There is something very wrong here. We’re about to be put in two separate ambulances and carted off to the hospital and that’s when they’re going to find it: the thing in Cam’s brain that has been gradually stealing my husband from me, one little slipup at a time.

“I’m fine,” I lie. I’d like to think I’m overreacting, as usual, but every cell in my body seems to know this is not a rehearsal for some distant future diagnosis, decades from now when we’re old and tired and ready for it.

And I hate the compassion I meet in his eyes. Compassion is for people with something terrible going on.

take a seat and flick through pages of “inspiring” interviews with “brave” women who’ve made it through unimaginable tragedy. I do not want to join them. I’m not the heroic type. I’m more the falling-in-a-heap type.

When he smiles, it lights up the whole café. My body absorbs the light, desperate for the flicker of warmth.

His remorse over failing this test is the single most tragic moment I’ve ever witnessed. My blood runs cold as I feel our relationship slipping away from us already, ushering in a bleak new reality that’s dark and confusing and something I don’t feel remotely equipped to handle.

Hugh walks beside me and must be well aware of my crying but is doing nothing to cheer me up. It’s the perfect response. So many people can’t handle someone’s discomfort, but this gentle strength is exactly what I need right now. Of course that makes me cry even more.…

I doze on Cam’s chest, listening to his heartbeat. In each other’s arms, nothing can touch us. We’re safe.

“The doctors think it’s Alzheimer’s,” he says, and I watch as my in-laws are suspended in time. The laptop screen looks frozen but isn’t. They look at Cam like he’s still the six-year-old boy who used to climb trees in their back garden and trample mud onto the freshly mopped linoleum in the kitchen. Not the internationally lauded professor, near the top in his field.

Everyone is nothing but sorry, in every direction, and it makes no difference to how heinous everything is. People say, “I wish there was something I could do” and “I don’t know what to say” and that’s because this is The Impossible. This whole thing. Cam. The baby. Me facing a future without either of them. And now I feel guilty about Charlie. That he’s not enough. My innocent, darling child. Not enough to stop me from wishing my own life away.

“How are you so freaking together all the time?” I find myself sniping at him, very unfairly. “You always know what to say. You’re constantly doing exactly what’s needed. You cope with everything, no matter how hard. Your life is just this shiny, untarnished, extraordinary, seamless, easy experience and I am envious as hell.”

Hearing these words, I realize how utterly unfair this whole situation really is. One of these things alone would be almost too much to bear. But both? Now I’m pitying myself and that’s something I promised I would never do.

“You’ll take as much or as little time off work as you need. You’ll go back to your GP and see a psychologist. You’ll be a mum and a wife, and you’ll do things a mum and wife should never have to do and, even when you feel like you can’t go on like this anymore, you will, Kate. You won’t feel strong, and you’ll mess it up sometimes, but you’ll do this anyway, because you have no choice. Okay? No choice.”

I lie on the bed and a doctor checks for a heartbeat she can’t find and beams on a screen a blurry picture of how empty I am. Did this little soul take one look at the carnage it was entering into and beat a retreat? And then I succumb to a desperate grief I wish wasn’t so familiar.

“Remember this moment,” he urges me. “Burn this into your brain, that I adore you. Have always adored you.” His eyes fill with tears.

“Never doubt it,” he continues. “Never doubt us. I will never give up on you, Kate. I will always find a way to reach you. I want to remember you until the very end.”

It’s always slightly disconcerting seeing work colleagues in personal settings.

We’re both welling up again now. This is horrible—this grieving somebody while they’re still here.

We craved each other’s touch, even after life got hard. Especially then.

I don’t get to touch people anymore. I read something once about “skin hunger.” It’s an actual condition and, the more firmly I plaster myself to Hugh’s torso, the more certain I am that I’m riddled with it.

No matter how tired I get, or how supportive someone is, I always have to be switched on. I’m the only person in the world who loves Charlie the way a parent would. The only daughter Mum has. The only breadwinner. The only one doing the endless washing and cleaning and cooking. What I wouldn’t give for someone—I don’t care who—just to step into my life and take the reins, for even a second.

“You a writer?” Now my heart really starts hammering. Why is this question always so hard? Once you tell someone you’re writing a novel—feeling like a total fraud when you say it—they want to know what it’s about. They expect you to be the expert on a plot that feels so wholly out of your own control, it’s alarming.

instead, and there’s a quiet sense of regret. If I don’t believe in my own dream, how can I expect a publisher and future readers to buy into the fantasy?

This question is beyond his remit. It’s hard to admit just how long I’ve been tussling with this manuscript. How hard I’ve been fighting it, while words trip me up as they fall into the enormous gap between how I imagine it could be, if it was any good, and how it really is. “If you don’t tell people about it, the writing dream stays untested,” my grief counselor once told me. “It stays intact.” She went on to pronounce my relationship with words and literary rejection as “toxic.” “It’s gaslighting you,” she told me bluntly. “All this ‘What’s wrong with me? Am I really this bad?’ It’s not healthy.”

Fragile? Doesn’t he mean “strong”? Everyone else tells me I’m strong! I don’t know how you do it! You’re amazing! I could never be as strong as you! It’s an exhausting reputation to uphold. I’ve given up trying to explain that it’s not the way it seems. I’m not strong at all. I just have no choice. The idea of collapsing in a heap, drinking myself into a stupor, and retreating from the world seems like a fantasy, but I just don’t have that luxury. Every day, I have to get up and be two parents, even when every part of me wants to stay under the covers and hide from the experience that swept away my entire future.

Battle wounds of warrior spirits. Something within me longs to emulate that mountain. Wants to erupt with such violence and heat and force that the very foundations can’t hold. An inevitable collapse. A changed shape rising out of falling ash—scarred, strong, and with an afterlife so fertile and mineral-rich, luscious rainforest springs from the soil for millions of years … The knowledge that I’m not there yet—that I haven’t erupted and collapsed and cooled and grown solid after all this time—stings. I’ve worked so hard. Wanted so much to intellectualize and overcome my loss. I’ve read the literature. Joined support groups. Had counseling. Yet, here I am, years in, still pushing myself up the wrong side of this mountain. Car window down, I gulp warm air and blink back tears behind dark glasses. “Have you ever felt homesick for somewhere you’ve never lived?” Hugh asks, intruding into my thoughts as I head up the highway, watching for the turnoff to Ocean Shores. “This hinterland reminds me of Ireland,” I tell him. I sound as if I’m an authority on the subject, despite never having