Breaking grim news is no easy task. In the case of Richard Hoyes' father it was easier to tell virtual strangers than to tell his wife...
 Richard Hoyes |
My father walked into his local SPAR with a story."I’ve got three months," he told them. "That’s if I’m lucky. The doctor says take it a day at a time. Make the most of things. ‘Tidy up your affairs,’ he says, ‘decide what kind of a send-off you want when the time comes…’ "
Then my father broke down. "The hardest part of all," he told the shop girls who had crowded round him, "is what I’ve got to do now. I’ve got to tell the wife. I feel like I’ve let her down." They were thrown. They just didn’t know what to do, where to look, what to say. One started crying. One got the giggles, in shock, poor thing. One ran to the back and fetched the manager who came straight through.
"Just routine, you see. I thought it was just routine. I thought I was going for a check up. They took us in an ambulance and you’ve never seen so many Zimmer frames, walking sticks, wheelchairs – I was the only one who could walk! I was helping them. I even felt sorry for them. And it was them who should have felt sorry for me! I’d had this op. you see, for stomach trouble – I’d had some bleeding from my back passage…" The girls looked away but the Manager – she could handle it.
"Was it cancer, love?" He nodded."They didn’t tell me though. The kept on about this ‘ulcer’. I reckon that’s a nice word for ‘growth’. Today I went back, ‘just for a check-up,’ they said, ‘a post operative check.’" ‘You may as well get dressed,’ the specialist said. ‘I’m not going to examine you. There’d be no point. I’ve taken out what I can but it’s everywhere, you’re riddled with it. You’ve got three months. Go home and tell your wife and make arrangements.’"
"Tell the wife! How can I tell the wife? What do I say to her? Sit down and listen. It’s me; I’m a dead man just walked in from the ambulance. I’ve got three months. Is that what I tell her? What’s the wife supposed to make of that? What would she say? I can’t put her through that.
"All the way in the ambulance here I’ve thought of nothing else. How do I tell her? It’s like I’ve let her down, it’s like… like there’s somebody else, like I’ve betrayed her, like I’ve taken up with a mistress." And that’s what he said.
As far as I know, as far as a son ever knows, there was never another woman; he never took up with a mistress. But there was this. This ‘ulcer.’ This growth. This thing that lived inside him and he couldn’t tell his wife about, this thing we don’t discuss with our partners that means, however intimate we try to be, there’s always something there, a sadness, a dark thing, that comes between us.
Of course he did go home and tell her, but not until the people in the shop had counselled him. He always needed the company of women, my dad. When he was well he laughed, he basked in their company.
When they buried him I was amazed by the number of people who knew him and came to his funeral and how they described him. He was so different from the quiet, very private man I knew at home. "He was a right laugh at work, your dad," they said. And I felt robbed somehow. Cheated. Just as my mother would have felt cheated if she’d known he told the shop girls first.
