It has been a month since Kamalashila was here at home with me. It is still strange to be here on my own now. I am sitting on the yellow couch again. Only this time it is my couch. The sky is grey. The concrete building facing us (or rather me), the one I am determined to like because it is called Holland Rise, looks flat and dull. My legs stretched out in front of me. I am wearing his merino woolen socks and one of his jumpers. The colours match, which is a coincidence. The socks are wet. We would be making lots of jokes about socks. Wet socks are the pits. They are wet because I have been spraying the bodhi tree with water containing a splash of vinegar. I am still trying to bring the tree back to health.
A friend kindly came this morning to help with some admin around KS’s death. We will have to do multiple rounds to finish it all. Just now I went through a pile of hospital papers he had received since being hospitalised at the beginning of April. Discharges. Medication lists. Consent forms. Appointments for visits, scans and blood tests. I added these to the already quite bulky file of past appointments. Problems with his lungs, skin, teeth, kidneys, hernias, MS. A few days before he died I was lying awake in the night thinking about all the different doctors, specialists, nurses, porters, physiotherapists and other medical staff members he has seen in the past half year. There must have been hundreds. So much care and compassion. But at the moment I feel precisely nothing. Perhaps a touch of cynicism. I am not enjoying this. The lymphoma team sent a condolences card. I just hope this means they will stop phoning. Last week Kamalashila’s phone rang. I thought I would pick it up. It was someone from the medical centre offering him a vaccination. I bluntly said: he is dead, he won’t be needing that. The person phoning was deeply shocked. I was not enjoying that either. My brain doesn’t allow me to realise he is dead. Which is just as well.
