Page 9 of A Mother’s Last Wish

9

LOUISA

It’s been thirty-six hours since Mr Whitelaw broke the news that my cancer is incurable, and I’ve spent far too much of that time online. If I haven’t got any time to waste, I shouldn’t be spending it staring at a screen, but I’m searching for anything that might help. I’m not talking about cures that somehow my well-respected consultant hasn’t heard of, but some random person on TikTok has. I’m talking about something that might help me ensure my children’s lives aren’t ruined by my death.

Research is something that comes fairly naturally to me, having made a living as a travel journalist. I still do a bit of freelance writing, mainly for parenting stuff rather than travel, but nowadays people turn to Instagram and TikTok for content, far more than they do print. Having the peak of my career just before all of that hit always used to make me feel so lucky. I’ve always felt lucky, but it finally seems that my luck has run out.

Even before the writing jobs started to tail off, motherhood had already become my new dream. I was thirty-five and Tom was thirty-seven when we decided to start trying for a family. We’d been enjoying our freedom together, and with my childhood having been as disjointed as it was, I wanted to make sure I was 100 per cent ready to go all in. But for at least three years before we decided to start trying, I’d been having not so subtle reminders from loved ones and virtual strangers that I didn’t have forever. Devastatingly, it turns out they were right, but not in a way any of us could ever have imagined back then.

Over the age of thirty you might find it more difficult than you think to get pregnant . I hope you don’t discover that something’s wrong, because if you need help, you won’t have much time. If I was you, I wouldn’t wait around, especially after what happened to Holly . I must have heard lines like those a hundred times, often with the best of intentions, but sometimes they were said almost gleefully, as if the person delivering them secretly hoped this wouldn’t all just fall into place for me. Except my luck held. Florence arrived within a year of me coming off the pill, just in time to be guest of honour at Tom’s thirty-seventh birthday, and she was joined by her brother two years later. I knew from the moment they were placed in my arms that I could never do what my mother did, and leave them. Except it turns out that I won’t have a choice.

I would die for my children, but instead I’m dying for something far more futile, an overproduction of cells that’s poisoning my body from the inside and there’s not a damn thing I can do to change that.

Motherhood has been everything I wanted it to be and more, and I’d give anything to see it through, or even to start it all over again from the beginning and make sure I treasured every moment the way I should have done. There was a stage when Stan was a baby, when I didn’t own a single item of clothing that didn’t smell of vomit. Sometimes I dreamt of a quiet desk in an office somewhere, or a tube ride where no one would call for Mama’s attention, and even going for a wee without the company of a toddler seemed like an impossible dream. I still wouldn’t have swapped it for the world and, half an hour ago, when I looked down at my sleeping son, the ache in my chest was almost unbearable. I can’t even think about how Stan will feel on the day he calls for Mama and I don’t come. It hurts too much, a million times more than the gnawing fear in my gut that seems ever present since my diagnosis. It’s another physical reminder that there’s cancer in my body, growing untamed, and hellbent on destruction, like a weed choking all the good things it encounters. But I will take any level of pain if it means my children keep their blissful ignorance about my illness for as long as possible, and I know I might have to.

Last night sleep wouldn’t seem to come at all, and I suspect tonight is going to be the same. Every time I shut my eyes, I picture my children trying to understand where I’ve gone and why I’m not coming back, and the thought jolts me upright, the now horribly familiar sense of panic overwhelming me each time. So I’m back online, where I spent almost all of last night, looking for something that might give me hope that it will all be okay. I searched through posts of other people with cancer until my eyes burned. It felt as though I’d read about every possible scenario, but what I couldn’t find on one single site or forum, was any guidance on how to make sure my husband makes the right decisions for our children once I’m no longer around. After hours of googling, trying lots of different variations of the same question, I eventually found something: an article from a problem page, where a woman dying of a terminal illness wrote about how terrified she was of leaving her child in the care of her alcoholic husband, who had seemed incapable of being a properly functioning adult even before her illness. Tom’s nothing like that and he’d do anything for me and the children. But I also know that at just forty-five I don’t want him to be alone for the rest of his life. I don’t want him to have to give up the job he loves either. He’s going to be devastated enough at losing me. As brilliant as he is in so many ways, with his mind so often on his work, he needs someone by his side, and so do my children. The thought hurts my heart, because I want that someone to be me, but it can’t be. So I need to know that when he does find someone new, he’ll prioritise all the right qualities. Not just the things he might be attracted to, but far more importantly, the ones that are best for our kids.

When I couldn’t find anybody online who’d asked for advice on the same thing, I decided to post an anonymous question on a discussion forum for women with cancer, called The Grapevine. Giving myself the username @worriedmum1982 I typed out my message, deciding to tell a white lie about the type of cancer I have in order to make sure the messages couldn’t somehow ‘out’ me, or reduce the amount of advice I was offered. Most of the other women seemed to have one of three other types, so I decided to pretend I did too, a type I was all too horribly familiar with.

I’ve been told my breast cancer is incurable. I have two very young children and I’m trying to accept that at some point it’ll be down to my husband to raise them without me. The chances are he’ll meet someone else and I want him to be happy, but how can I make certain he gets it right? I guess what I’m asking is how can I have a say in who my husband’s future partner will be?

It was only once I started getting replies that I realised I hadn’t said enough in my post. Most of the advice was to talk to my husband, to be honest about my fears and to talk to him about what sort of qualities he thinks are important, so I could get an idea of what he might prioritise and find a way to steer him on that. It would be sound enough advice if I could persuade Tom to talk about anything apart from the treatment being some kind of miracle. Strangely for a person in a job as dangerous as his can be, he finds talking about death impossible. And he’s certainly not ready to confront mine. It’s only been two days since we were given the results of the PET scan and we don’t know how well I’ll respond to the chemo, so it’s no wonder Tom thinks I’m jumping ahead of myself. But Mr Whitelaw’s no-holds-barred consultations have made me face my mortality in a way I’ve never had to before, and I can’t leave it until I’m on my death bed to have these conversations; it’ll be too late by them. Although it turns out Tom isn’t the only who thinks I shouldn’t be having them at all. One user on the forum in particular seemed happy to give me a piece of her mind.

Wow @worriedmum1982 that’s quite controlling, don’t you think? Wanting to pick your husband’s next partner is a pretty weird thing to admit to.

I thought for a while before I replied, and I kept my response short if not entirely sweet.

Maybe it is @booblesswonder777 but having to face up to the fact that I won’t be able to see my children grow up is pretty weird too.

A response pinged back almost immediately, and this one felt more aggressive in tone.

On this forum terminal illness doesn’t make you special @worriedmum1982. A lot of us are facing the same prospect, but it’s no excuse for trying to control the lives of everyone around you.

I nearly fired back a two-word answer after that, but instead I closed down the webpage, trying not to wonder if she might be right. I couldn’t resist going back on the forum later on, and most of the messages on the thread were supportive, saying they understood where I was coming from, and a few of them called @booblesswonder777 out on her tone. But a handful of users agreed with her, and I’ve been questioning myself ever since. Part of me knows I should just trust Tom to do the right thing and any attempt I might make to manipulate that is crazy, borne out of the shock and terror of my prognosis. But there’s a bigger, far more powerful part of me that doesn’t want to listen to any of that. All that matters is protecting my children in any way I still can, and I don’t care how crazy or controlling that makes me seem.