WE FOLLOWED THE nurse up the once-grand staircase to the third floor, where we crossed what looked like an enclosed bridge between buildings to the Intensive Treatment Unit, where we were shown into yet another waiting room, this one with slightly nicer furniture and a window (although at 2am we couldn’t see very much).  She explained that Mary Elizabeth had already been brought up and was now being settled in and as soon as they were done, we could see her.  So we had no choice but to wait.

This evening had taken such a bizarre and tragic turn of events that I was still having trouble processing it all.  Although I felt frightened, wrung-out and utterly helpless I also felt oddly complacent.  On one level I was terrified and overwhelmed with sadness and despair, but on a deeper level, I still had a certainty – a faith – that everything would be all right, or at least was unfolding as it should.  This didn’t make any sense of course, and my “intellectual” self would frequently challenge and out-shout this “faith” self in the coming months, but even in those darkest hours, there was a small, almost imperceptible certainty that everything would work out.  Call it faith, call it desperate hope, or call it delusion, but at some level it was a comfort. That night I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this, but nonetheless I felt it at my core, and it helped me hold it together for Charlotte, who was weathering this storm with remarkable resilience and calm.

What I felt most however was an incredible longing for Mary Elizabeth. We were always a team, and at times like this, we provided comfort to one another and as I mentioned before, found solace in conversation.  Now, she was gone and I didn’t know what to do.  I was happy to have Michael, Melanie and of course Charlotte with me, but without Mary Elizabeth I felt incomplete and ripped apart.

I let myself imagine what life would be like without her.  What were the difficult decisions I would have to make?  Were they talking about removing life support – pulling the plug?  Mary Elizabeth and I had talked about this many times and we were in total agreement that it didn’t make sense to prolong suffering unnecessarily if there was no chance of recovery.  But would I be able to actually do it?  And what about Charlotte – how would she feel? I didn’t want to talk about it since we hadn’t gotten to that point yet, but I was certainly worrying about it.  I also wondered about the practical considerations of returning to the states if the worst happened.  Mary Elizabeth had expressed a very strong preference for cremation.  I couldn’t figure out if this would be done before we left London, or after we got back to the states.  I assumed that her mother and others would want to see her so that seemed a better choice.  I stopped these ghoulish thoughts after a while and tried to focus on Charlotte and her needs.  But she seemed content to sit quietly, leaning against me and staring off into middle distance.  I tried to engage her a couple of times, but she wasn’t interested in conversations at that point.  So we all sat around in the semi-darkness with our thoughts, waiting to see Mary Elizabeth.