I married a man I met in a hospital so he would not die alone — a week later his solicitor put a green backpack in my hands and said he wanted me to know the truth.
My mother died in March of 2024.
I was twenty-eight. She was sixty-one. It took nine weeks from the first appointment.
And in the June I started volunteering at St Ansgar’s, because I could not be in my flat and because the training was on a Tuesday and Tuesdays were the worst.
The scheme is for patients who have nobody. You sit with them. You do not nurse, you do not advise, you do not pray at them unless asked. You sit, and you listen, and you are there.
Fourteen months. Nineteen people.
And on the twenty-eighth of July, 2025, they gave me Walter Pryce.
Seventy-two. Heart failure, end stage. Four admissions in eleven months and this one was the one.
He was the colour people go. He got tired eleven words into a sentence.
And he smiled every single time I came through that door, and he did it like a man who had decided to, which I did not understand at the time and do now.
We talked for eleven days.
About nothing. About the football results, which he did not care about and I do not understand. About my mother, twice, and he asked the right questions both times and did not say one stupid thing, which nobody else had managed in sixteen months.
And on the sixth of August he took hold of my hand and said: “Marry me, Tess.”
I said, “Walter. You’re dying. We’ve known each other nine days.”
And he said: “I’d rather not go out as a file number. I’d like to go out as somebody’s husband.”
Two days later a chaplain called Hanne Osei married us in that room.
I wore a yellow jumper because it was what I had on.
There was no ring, so Walter pulled the tab off a can of lemonade and put it on my finger.
It is on a chain round my neck and it has been since the fifteenth of August.
He died seven days later at about ten past four in the morning.
I was there. I had been there for most of seven days. His hand was in mine when it stopped and I have thought about that a great deal and I am glad about it and I am not going to describe it.
And then I sat in an empty room for about forty minutes and could not work out how a person I had known for eighteen days had left that much quiet behind.
