If, before, you had said to me: imagine yourself in this situation. How would you react? How would you spend each day when you have been told your child is going to die? I didn’t know what I would have said. Perhaps I would have imagined long evenings of tears, of beating our fists on our chests, of begging, cursing God on our knees, and praying, praying, praying for a miracle.
It wasn’t like that. It was the mundanity of it all that crushed me. The way that things that once glittered were now rotten, steeped in tarry grief. I could not watch Jack pushing his fish fingers around on his plate or see him mouthing along to Peppa Pig without feeling an inordinate sense of loss.
It was the little things, always the little things. Seeing food in the freezer that I had made when Jack was healthy. My antivirus program asking if it should run a full-system scan, because who cared if I had a computer virus now. Sullen old people in the street, scowling as they lugged their tartan grandma carts up the hill. Did they not realize what they had? The luxury of old age.
Anna had taken leave from work and Jack was off school, and we waited on him, played board games, made endless rounds of cheese on toast. Surely, surely, there was more than this? Fish fingers and Peppa Pig. Shark in the Park. Marathon sessions of Guess Who and Hungry Hippos. Shouldn’t we be doing something, anything, not this?
As I opened the laptop, there were some tabs open in the browser, one of them a Google results page. The string was still in the search box: “How do you tell a six-year-old he is dying.”
I read it out loud, almost without thinking, and Anna glanced up from her book, a puzzled look on her face.
“Your search.”
“Right,” she said.
“So is that what you think we should do?” I said softly. “Tell him he’s dying.”
“I don’t know, Rob, that’s why I was Googling it.”
I tapped my fingers on the arm of the sofa. Could she not even discuss it with me? Sometimes she was so infuriatingly straightforward about everything. “I don’t think we should tell him anything,” I said, “especially when we don’t know anything for certain. There are still options. We can’t just give up on him.”
“We’re not giving up on him, Rob,” Anna said, turning her body away from me. “But we have to face reality. And you keep talking about options, but what options are there?”
“Well, there are cancer clinics all around the world, places I’ve been reading about. And then there’s the trial Dr. Flanagan mentioned...”
“Please, please, don’t start on about the Marsden trial again. We’ve spoken about it, and I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“I wasn’t going to actually, Anna,” I said, my face and neck prickling with heat. “What I’m saying, if you’d just listen to me, is that I still think there are options out there. I think we’ve only really scratched the surface with the doctors we’ve seen. There are other kids out there who’ve had what Jack has and have been cured...”
“Don’t say that word,” Anna said, looking at me angrily. Her eyes were dark, opaque. “There is no cure, Rob, there is no chance of a cure, not in cases like this. You don’t think I’ve been researching this, as well? I’ve also read about the new drugs, and the trials, and at the moment there is nothing—nothing, Rob—to suggest that any of this would work for Jack.”
A deep crimson flush spread across Anna’s cheeks. She turned sharply toward me, nearly spilling the wine in her glass.
“And before you interrupt me again and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s not just me saying that. It’s the doctors, Rob. And before you accuse me of not caring, or ‘giving up,’ I’m happy to go for a third and a fourth and a fifth opinion if that’s what you want, but they’re going to tell us exactly the same thing.”
“But we can’t know that.”
“We can’t know that? Well, we can’t know anything can we, Rob? Dr. Kennety, Dr. Flanagan, they’re two of the leading specialists in the world on pediatric brain tumors, and they have both told us the same thing. God, Rob, Jack isn’t something you can program. He’s not a machine you can hack. You can’t just waltz through this like you do with everything else...”
“Why are you even bringing that up? It’s not about that...”
“Yes, it’s not, it’s about Jack. It’s about Jack’s quality of life now. It’s about making sure he doesn’t suffer on some trial that has almost zero chance of working. Just so we can make ourselves feel better, that we did something.”
Anna saw the rage on my face and stopped and took a deep breath. “Sorry, that wasn’t fair. I didn’t want to imply that you would do anything to hurt Jack. I just don’t see any other way. There’s nothing they can do, Rob. It breaks my heart just as much as yours, but we have to listen to the doctors.”
Listen to the doctors. Anna always had an inordinate amount of respect for the professions. The doctors, lawyers, teachers of the world—the type of person you would ask to countersign a passport photo. Because in those people, she saw herself. Hard work, prudence, judiciousness. There was, she thought, a nobility to these professions, and to question them was unthinkable. Where I grew up in Romford, those people were
