Watching it happen to Stacey from my perspective wassomething no one else could possibly understand.
As she regressed towards her first birthday, she lost theability to walk and talk. She could still smile and giggle as I played with herduring the first year of her life, but even that stopped eventually in the lastfew weeks before her birth.
It was very hard seeing her as a newborn, oblivious topretty much everything, reduced to crying for her basic needs, nappy changesand suckling on Sarah’s nipples.
She was around six months of age when Sarah and I married.We didn’t have a lavish wedding, just a registry office and a quiet receptionat a village hall a few miles outside of Oxford.
The fact that we’d had a baby together hadn’t been the mainreason behind our decision to wed. I am pretty sure we would have marriedregardless; we must have both known we had found the right one. Apparently I’dproposed the day after Stacey had been born, so I made sure that I playedthings out exactly as they were meant to.
At least I didn’t have to worry about where to get the ringfrom on the day of the proposal: it was already conveniently waiting for me inmy coat pocket.
I knew that once Stacey was gone, she would exist only in mymind. There would be no photographs, and no one to reminisce with about her.She would simply cease to exist. My beautiful daughter, who had nursed methrough my cancer and been ever-present by my side for so many years, would begone forever.
It was a very depressing thought, and I had to make theutmost effort to seem excited for Sarah’s sake as she went into labour.
I had grown used to things disappearing forever, but theyhad been mostly material objects up until now. They were things that I’d learntto live without.
My mobile phone got downgraded every year, getting biggerand clunkier each time. 4G and 3G were long since gone; the last phone I’d hadthat could access the internet had something called WAP on it, which waslaughably poor.
The latest one even had an aerial that I had to pull out tomake a call. From home I found that I could only get a signal on it by leaningout of the bedroom window.
Music was a big part of my life which was gradually beingtaken away from me piece by piece. I used to plug my iPod into my car via theUSB port on long business trips, or listen to it through the headphones when Iwas flying abroad.
I loved the indie rock bands of the mid-2000s like TheKaiser Chiefs, The Kooks and Keane, but by 2003 they were all gone from thedevice. I could still hear the songs in my head, but that was the only placethey existed now. The bands had not even written them yet.
On the plus side, the day was rapidly approaching when I’dnever have to hear Westlife on the radio ever again, so there were someconsolations.
As for the iPod itself, I saw it for the last time onChristmas Day 2002, my present from Sarah. After that I had to make do withCDs.
These were minor annoyances, though, all of which I couldlive with, insignificant in comparison with the loss of my daughter who wasirreplaceable. Coming into the world at 1am, I had just three hours to saygoodbye, before I was whisked away by my 4am curfew, my days as a parent nowover.
If having to deal with the fact that I would never see Staceyagain wasn’t bad enough, I also had to face up to the fact that, in less than ayear, Sarah would be gone, too.
July 1998
Sarah and I had met on holiday in Ibiza in July 1998,proving the exception to the rule that holiday romances never last. Nick,reeling from the break-up of his first marriage, had persuaded me that weneeded to go on a Club 18-30 holiday while we were still young enough.
I doubt whether I would have needed much persuasion at thatpoint in my life. I knew that I had been single for over a year before I’d metSarah.
As I travelled back through the nine months prior toStacey’s birth, I managed to piece together the details of how we’d gone fromholiday romance to doting parents in so short a time.
When Stacey had been about a year old, we had moved housefrom the modest starter home I’d bought on the Greater Leys development to theeast of the city. The starter home was a tiny, one-bedroomed place, referred toby Sarah as “the Shoebox”.
It was fine when Stacey was a baby, but as she grew weneeded to find somewhere bigger. I was a rising star at Head Office by thistime, acquiring the role of Senior Market Research Executive before I turned 30,enabling me to easily afford the new house in North Oxford which had been myhome for over a quarter of a century afterwards.
As winter 1998 turned to autumn, at four months pregnant,Sarah had moved into the shoebox with me in time for Christmas.
Her Welsh accent was much stronger in those days than inlater years. All those years of living in England had softened it considerably.One of the first things I’d fallen in love with was her voice, and that hadnever diminished: her lilting Welsh tones never failed to thrill me.
After we’d met in Ibiza, we’d sworn to keep in touch. Ourholidays had overlapped by a week on either side, so she didn’t fly back untila week after I got home. During that week, she had sent me postcards every day,none of which had arrived back in the UK before she did.
We were in the early stages of the mobile era now, and quitea lot of people didn’t have them yet, Sarah included. As for landlines, callsto and from abroad were
