AllFreeNovel
Share Us
To be frank, I don’t recall the next few hours after that, but I do remember someone giving me a shot and I guess I blacked out for a while.
When I finally came to, I initially thought I’d had a horrendously bad trip but, unfortunately, I hadn’t dabbled in drugs for over six years. Clocking an oxygen flow gauge on the wall I remembered where I was and realized I was lying in a hospital bed. The nightmare I thought I’d escaped about Grace had followed me into my devastating reality.
For the first twenty-four hours my dying wife lay unconscious; heavily sedated as she recovered from her surgery. I trudged back and forth; torn between needing to be at her bedside and learning my duties as a first-time father in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit or NICU. Thankfully, the Adult Intensive Care Unit and this were on the same floor.
When my mom showed up, the sense of relief I had expected to feel when she walked through the door never happened. There was no escape from the impending misery and heartache I faced.
I believed no one else could possibly understand the depth of despair I felt. This was my walk to walk. Only I knew what I felt in my heart, and to say I was disappointed to learn this didn’t even begin to cut it.
I barely remember some fragmented moments of going through the motions in the hospital. Flitting back and forth between Grace; who was lucid for small periods of time, and the baby care unit, to carry out the endless routines of feeding and diaper changes of the too tiny, helpless infant in my care.
The only thing that stood out in my memory was when the pediatric nurse placed Layla’s semi-naked body under my T-shirt, against my skin. During those few brief minutes the hurt I felt in my heart temporarily dissipated. I sighed deeply when Layla squirmed contentedly as she soaked up my warmth when I cradled her protectively against me. Then, when I felt her little heart beating close to mine through her teeny bony chest, I choked up with the indescribable distress I felt, and my tears fell again.
From that moment on, I tried to block out any and all attempts to share my grief. Despite my family’s many attempts to help me face a future without Grace, I couldn’t bare my heart to them, preferring to shut down. For a while I refused to participate in life because I felt if I did, it meant I would have accepted it would be without Grace and I was neither prepared or ready to do this.
However, no amount of denial could take away Grace’s silent killer. No matter how hard it was to accept, five short ugly days after Layla entered this world, my beautiful wife, Grace, left it. I was a mess, yet she was devastatingly brave and serenely calm at the end when her life was abruptly stilled at 7:48 a.m. in the morning.
Dr. Ken had been right; the open surgery had exposed the extent of the cancer and the proliferation of the disease after this completely overwhelmed her body. Words meant in comfort about Grace having seen Layla and holding her in her arms before she died infuriated me.
There were no words of condolence I found comfort in and they were crass remarks borne out of unempathetic ignorance because five fucking days was no time to give a lifetime of bonding to our baby before her mom was gone forever.
Staring numbly at Grace’s lifeless body it was difficult to comprehend that she had been so full of sass, and vitality on our last night together. Less than a week later our happily ever after had been ripped from our grasp by some stealthy form of terminal illness. And I was left furious at the world.
The circumstance forced upon me was unfathomable, but this was my new reality. Neither of us could ever have imagined when Grace waved that simple piece of plastic with those two thin pink lines in my face, her body had already been preparing her goodbye.
The swiftness of Grace’s death didn’t grant us the privilege of time. No part of me was willing nor able to accept how quickly she was taken from me. There hadn’t even been the time or the clarity of mind to think of all the things I had wanted to say. It left me with tender loving feelings I wished I had told her about when I’d still had the chance.
Pity those thoughts only came to mind after she’d passed, because they were very intimate and heartfelt sentiments, which now remained trapped inside my head and my heart and with nowhere to go now. We were robbed of what so many couples took for granted; to watch each other change with the passing years, to raise a family, and to grow old together.
However, what I was most incredibly bitter about was how Grace would never see the beautiful precious child she gave her life for, robbed of watching her daughter blossom from the tiny bud she had left behind.
“The vultures are circling outside, Cole. Thank God, Mom and I have never been in the limelight with you so they’re not looking for us. Although, I did see a couple of photographers lurking in the foyer by the elevators on the ground floor.”
The press was incidental to what was happening, and I shrugged off my brother, Dorian’s comment. Preparing to leave the hospital the day after Grace died, with our six-day-old baby, was soul crushing. Supported by my mom and my brother, I had no choice but to go home.
Seeing my normally youthful looking mom appear old and haggard—her face etched with the strain of grief almost as much as mine—made me feel sick. She had arrived at the hospital from our hometown in Delaware the day Layla was born, and I vaguely remembered her prompting me to eat. Being so absorbed in my grief, I’d only fleetingly considered the impact on her and how she’d carried me through every step of the way as Grace lay dying.
There wasn’t a single minute during the day when Grace or Layla didn’t have either one of us in support. Mom had been right there, traveling the same path of tragedy beside me, and I’d hardly noticed her.
It had never occurred to me until that moment, as we were leaving the hospital, how she must have felt as she left me behind each night, wondering how to prepare the house for my baby daughter’s homecoming.
Due to my fame, word had gotten out about Grace, like it always did when there was some juicy new information about Cole Harkin, lead singer from SinaMen. But I was so overawed; I couldn’t begin to concern myself with their intrusive lack of decorum.
The hounding press was a breed of desensitized people with no morality for the life changing situations of others, and news of Grace’s death was a huge deal to them. As such, my bandmates had been stalked incessantly as soon as the story had broken.
Sensationalizing my wife’s tragic demise, they focused on her type of cancer and speculated as to whether I was to blame by way of my previous promiscuity, insinuating this could have been a possible contributor to the development of the disease.
Their presumption was the lowest blow because I was clean. Ironically, I’d never been with any girl without wrapping up first, apart from Grace, and I’d been regularly tested. Apart from this, after being faithful to Grace for the two years we’d been together, this media assumption had come as a major insult to me. Their negativity of the man I was sat heavily with me, and I found their damning judgmental assumptions of my character degrading.
Unlike me, Grace had a history of unprotected sex with several partners and was on the pill when I met her. She had also been in three long-term relationships.
Too grief stricken to fight this point on my own, my brother Dorian took up the mantle, incensed they would target me on such a day and in this way.
From my perspective, I felt ashamed for the reporters who hadn’t focused on the real story. There was the unspoken sadness of the child who’d lost her mother and the man who had lost his beautiful wife. Instead they had chosen to pitch their story on the seedy side of cervical cancer and apportioning blame on me.
Stepping out into the cold, gray day, I was instantly reminded of the intrusion and brutal lack of morals among the press as a hungry pack of reporters huddled around me. Anticipating this, I had covered Layla’s car seat with a white knitted shawl, obscuring her identity from them.
Walking in time with me, camera bulbs flashed as insensitive questions were hurled in a cacophony of jumbled noise. No one appeared to care how devastated I was by the shock of my sudden loss or my concern for the tiny baby I carried. Someone even waved a grubby cheap notepad in my face and asked for my autograph.
