At the start, I think us long-termers frighten them. The fear is written across their faces as clear as day. They see us, and get scared we are their future. They’re not told about our individual stories or our past. Why would they be? Our past, like their fear, is on our faces too. We are all victims to it.
I think people look at me with pity now. Pity is somewhat easier to take than hate. There are those who still avoid me, still look on me as a child killer, a woman capable of the worst crime imaginable. I know the question a great many of them want to ask when they see me. It is something I would ask myself if the situation were reversed. Why doesn’t she kill herself? Why does she choose to live when her child is dead? I understand why they think this, because I’ve thought the very same thing.
At the beginning, or at least when I arrived at St Michael’s, no other option seemed open to me. Losing my life was something I would have welcomed. At the very least, it would have taken me away from all the anguish and the pain. I’d even thought about the afterlife – how, if I killed myself, there might be a chance, despite everything, that death would bring me closer to her. I had no fear of death, no fear at all. In many ways, there was no other way forward. What was there for me to live for after Amy was gone? I’d no interest in the sham of a life I’d been living, and despite how I felt about Andrew, what we had would never have been enough. I would have always known that the two of us being together was in some way responsible for what had happened. Even if it wasn’t, happiness was something I neither sought nor wanted any more. Happiness would have been impossible to bear.
The decision to stop eating was an easy one. After my failed attempt to kill myself in the fire, they decided I needed to be watched day and night. So there was no other option open to me. It would be slow, but it was an effective way of dying. It was when they moved me from here to the main hospital that Joe visited me. It was the last time I saw him, barely conscious by then, my body tied up with tubes and machines.
I heard the nurse tell him I might not be able to hear anything. That helped him, I think, to clear his mind of things he might otherwise have held back. He displayed all the emotions I’d expected – anger, pain, a complete lack of understanding about how I could have done such a thing. His words were a way of saying goodbye to everything that had gone before, rather than looking for any real answers. I had gone beyond listening to people, but when Joe came into the room, I knew I owed him that. He had lost Amy too.
When he spoke, he sounded different from how I remembered him. A man who has lost everything doesn’t speak with the same voice; his grief deepens everything. What I hadn’t expected was how his grief had left him with little room for hating me. I think by the time he was able to build up his resolve to come and see me, he had taken on much of the blame too. Just like me, he turned inwards. Perhaps he asked himself questions, ones that ensured his sleepless nights would be filled with waiting for answers, filling the loss.
He spoke about how he didn’t understand how sick I was, chided himself for doing nothing. I could have tried to convince him of the truth, I could have made a last-ditch effort for him to understand that it wasn’t me who killed our daughter. But then I realised. I realised the truth would hurt him even more. He would have worried about how Amy might have suffered, how afraid she might have been. Either way, when he came into my room that last evening, the only thing I knew for sure was that I owed it to him to listen.
He stopped talking halfway through his visit, as if he had run out of words but could not bring himself to leave. In the corner of my eye, I could see his shape sitting like a large heap on the hospital chair. When he told me he had come to say goodbye, I felt more sadness for him than for myself. He planned to go to Canada, with Andrew. He hadn’t wanted to leave, but everywhere he went, every person he met, they all seemed to know who he was. The sadness in their eyes was too much for him. He said he didn’t hold out much hope, but at least if he was someplace else, he might be allowed deal with his grief alone, not feel like it belonged to others. In part, I think, I preferred him angry. When he was angry, he had some fight left in him.
Again, he asked me why I had done such a dreadful thing. It was pointless. Even if I thought about denying it, what would it have achieved? How would it have helped him? I guess he thought if he understood, he could move on, but I doubted it. All of us cling to our own desperate methods of survival. I knew the truth, and it was a truth I would not be sharing with Joe.