Tender

Day Three: Friday 12^th September

There’s a ‘two-by-the-bed’ rule in Intensive Care and, when they come to insert the chest drain into my son’s side, my daughter and I are the ones.

‘They’: a crowd of ten or so medics in various shades of scrubs depending on their role.

‘You can stay,’ they nod reassuringly, ‘No need to go.’

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure I want to see this, but by now there are so many of them between us and the exit, it feels rude to move. Anyway, it feels like we should stay. So, we sit to the side, as far back as we can, clinging to each other while the medics introduce themselves one-by-one.

Then the sedation comes. Something beginning with K, more normally heard of in horses and shady back streets. A safe version, they assure us. I watch as the procedure gets underway with quiet calm efficiency. As they work their wonders, there’s a slight moaning from my son. I take shaky breaths, wiping away tears I had vowed I wouldn’t let leak. He is blurred and weary and…

Is he ok? Is he trying to say something?

A deep rumble is coming from my son’s partially open lips. Is it pain?

It comes again.

‘Oh – I – aybee… ‘

There’s a pause.

‘Ohmyaaaybee…’

‘oh ay… Oh..my’

‘I think…’ I begin, ‘Actually… is he singing?’

It’s no more than a slurred grunt, but suddenly I recognise it. It is too far a stretch to call it a tune, but the cadence is familiar. Suddenly, within all the dry darkness, laughter bursts from my mouth, like the gush of a broken tap.

‘He’s singing Blur! It’s Tender!’

‘Ohmybaaaby’ his head is turned towards the Northern Irish nurse specialist who is inserting his drain and she smothers a giggle behind her mask as he continues this serenade. Soon, the ICU consultant is singing along. Then, the nurses start asking for requests and, in his muffled half-awakeness, he complies as far as possible.

Tender.

It is so appropriate. Tender is this time. Tender is the love. Tender is the reality of having had all your normality ripped away. Like a plaster on too long, it is agony when it goes.

And it goes so quickly. We are so raw. So raw. Everything feels tender to me now.

How do people do this? Balancing this raw-edged tenderness with the need to function in the world? For these first days and weeks after diagnosis, we live in a kind of twilight, straddling the world others inhabit and the hospital ward. Living on the outside of normality.

Gradually, Tender becomes the soundtrack for those early days of our son’s illness. One week later, in the Royal Marsden’s teenage cancer unit, I come back from the canteen to find two music therapists at his bedside. One is playing the ukelele and singing Tender as I’ve never heard it before. I smile. I know it’s because he’s asked for a Blur song, but that doesn’t explain how I’m hearing it everywhere now.

I’m still hearing it, a month or so into our son’s treatment, as things settle into some kind of routine, as normality begins to grow back that extra layer of skin over the tenderness.

I want this normality. Oh, how I want it. I am grasping at it clumsily.

And yet, it feels a little false, because really, nothing is normal.

It’s good for my sanity, numbing me with its ‘business as usual’ stance, but the busyness of trying to fit normality in alongside all the un-normality, the nowhere-even-close-to-normality, is confusing.

When we first received the diagnosis, it was all we had to do. As normality creeps back in, there is less time, less space for such feelings. The raw tenderness can get patched over by our need to keep going, muffled in the bustle of all that needs doing. Weirdly, I miss it. Not the pain, not the panic, but that beautiful clarity of what really matters in life. The belief that you will never forget these priorities you’ve learned.

Because, beneath that skin of ‘keeping going’, there is a softer version of ourselves. Without this layer, we find ourselves more real, less concerned about life’s fripperies and status, because really, what do they matter? They just don’t.

When we are that tender it is hard to manage day-to-day life. But there is a strange beauty within the tenderness that gets buried when we decide we have to ‘just get on with it’.

How can we hold the two things together? The gentleness of a bashed up heart with the need to survive in a slightly relentless world?

How do we gratefully grow back normality without losing the sensitivity that came with the pain?

Tender.

It’s still popping up everywhere, on the radio as I drive us to appointments, on TV, in shops. Like it’s saying, ‘Here I am!’ This tenderness that doesn’t seem to fit into normal life is somehow sitting side by side with normality. As if it’s trying to remind me that somehow, it is possible. We can hold both together. We can do normality without losing that gentleness, without forgetting the priorities that hit like lightning when we first heard the words.

As we travel this strange road, gradually we find ways to live between the two worlds, holding everything with hands that now know exactly how fragile it all is.

How utterly precious is life.