Other stories to tell

People did not know how serious was Dig's illness: he kept it well-hidden.

But over the years, his presentation of himself grew more fragmentary. This person would appear in one place at one time and speak to people who listened. He came home and was different again. Defiant, vulnerable, weak, strong. His many presentations of himself was, to his way of thinking, not deceit, but an essential tactic. Illness and long-term medications whisper of chaos and fragmentation, of misjudgements and unreliabilities. Who can admit to those and stay whole? Who can get work? Who can go about the world as if complete, when all your life stories are escaping control?

A long-term Crohns sufferer, Dig was held together, at times, with steroids, codeines and chemical combinations of pain relievers. The steroids grew not rages but fantasies and imaginations. Life became more profound in places it was shallow, and less careful in places that needed more care. Cracks appeared; Dig covered them over with a silver tongue.

But it was all breaking down in the final months. Sitting with him at the hospital, I would watch him respond to a message on his phone, a shallow Wechat voice hectoring him for his lack of involvement on this enterprise or chastising him for failing to honour another promise made in another time. To me, both with the need to tell truth and the need to tell stories, he said, 'She doesn't know'.

But Dig was ever a good story teller. I have learned, never trust a story teller. They beguile people in different places at different times, telling fictions of themselves and others. A story teller has plots and characters at their disposal; they set out villains and heroes, victims and perpetrators. They weave one plot with another, add voice and intonation, make meanings from fragments. They leave out essential details: they let the listener assume what they need. Good stories are useful to get in and out of situations: especially if you want to escape responsibilities along the way.

In the unkind times, Dig's narratives began to gently disentangle. He was given to misjudgements and fancies. They were accompanied by ferocious clarity and terrible self-awareness. At times, Dig grew confessional under the sway of his truth-telling drugs. He suddenly said, 'I have made a terrible mistake!' I would say, 'it's okay, tell me about it, we can sort it out'.

Yes, he made mistakes, he fooled around with absences, loves and loyalties; he was weakened to flatterers and whisperers; he bent to people with careers to pursue, agendas to forward, vulnerabilities to exploit. He was led into places where he could not say No. In moments of clarity, he knew it, and told me so.

Cancer is horrible, plain and honest truth. You lose some of the person you knew while another person takes their place. All the time, the stories that hold their life together become more unmanageable, more rambling. As the drugs took hold in the last few months, he was increasingly gripped by magical thinking - I will do DIY, I will mend the car, I will move to Milford Haven - and then would follow his profound and grateful recognition of reality. Here is home where all love is given by us all; a force of love, forced by no-one. Where he loved and was loved, without control, without condition, without boundary. We make our own world, and our world was made together. One of his final moments at the hospice was to laugh with delight and say 'I am home!' I answered, 'Yes, you are.'

This future, his real, long-term future - if ever he could have escaped the drugs and the madnesses - was home, here. To this point, to this place, he returned, again and again. In his heart, he loved living in this house, with this garden, surrounded by his ridiculous piles of old stuff. On his reflective days he was glad for the comfort of life at home. What gratitude there is in a calm and restful space of complete acceptance and complete welcome.

In the last year, he said, 'I want us to grow old together'. We created it in the time allowed. Each day we would lie in bed and watch the line of daylight slowly slip across the wall and ceiling of our room. Its intimacy and predictability was comforting. In the middle of uncertainty, daylight soothed.

The morning cuddle I miss: it was the sustaining moment of the day. He knew he could return to that point, and know that whatever happened next, whatever was said, whatever he did, whatever human stupidities were offered up again and again, he could come back to this point, this morning routine of Don't get up without a cuddle. Here, in this moment we made together, he was safe from all the mess outside. Once, in a misery of self-pity, I said, 'Who could love an old woman like me?' He answered, 'An old man like me'.

Now, in my new state, I am finding death is an efficient teacher of life. I am learning about anger and calm; freedom and restraint; truth telling and deceit; poison and balm. On the worst of days, as I face down my lesson, I walk and stamp my forward path into holes the size of craters. I blast apart the earth and I rage at common betrayals. In the worst hours, stolen things taunt me. Time, words, actions. Things that should have been mine - my ordinary every day moments with you are like miracles - the words I gave freely, stolen from me, like my futures, thrown away to undeserving nothings. These are the ordinary betrayals of life and death, love and loss.

But I have the best of days, too. I break and I mend. Ahead is all new. I can walk my own path: I can construct my own reality. I need accept no stories from any other. I can see things clearly and I stare with vision learned from years. I can assess the past landscape with its borderlands and shadows with my detached eye. I can see better works ahead made of real substance. I gain balance and perspective. The borderlands are vanished and the shadows are transitory. Insubstantial, they slither away; they have gained nothing. I still have my own values to live by - honesty, integrity, vows made unbroken - and they stay, to guide my forward way.