Community & Connection

Hello everyone,

I lost Amanda, my soul mate of 30 years and wife of 21 on Jan 02 2023. Happy new year! A phone call from the hospital to tell me she'd had a 2nd catastrophic brain hemorrhage overnight. It took a few more days for her to be clinically dead, she was mostly healthy and not unfit, her body did not want to shut down. But her wonderful, witty, highly educated, funny, clever, talented, humorous mind was gone.

The first hemorrhage was a few days earlier, she just popped up the shops less than a mile away like we each had a thousand times except this time she didn't come home. Ever.

I worked overseas at the time and first knew of it in the early hours of Dec 30th, a phone call from Bristol hospital critical care dept to tell me Amanda was with them and it was serious. I am grateful to the company I worked for at the time, it was a 36 hour journey to get home in normal times and they got me here in 48 over new year in a Muslim country that utterly shuts down for new year. Christmas there passes barely with comment but absolutely everything shuts down at new year until the 3rd Jan. Oh, and my passport was away for visa renewal in an embassy shut down until the 5th. The strings they must have pulled and favors called in...

There's hours of typing just in that hellish journey home but all that matters is I got to Amanda's bedside on the evening of Jan 1st, held her hand, listened to her descriptions of the weird shapes passing her eyes the past few days (pressure on the optic nerve). She was an artist, modernist and abstract, educated to MA level, the highest anyone in our family to known extents has achieved. Not that it bothers the many lifelong teachers in that circle at all (So proud). I weep for the paintings and sculptures she didn't get the chance to create inspired by those images. She was inspired by everything. I held her hand, stroked her forehead and smiled through the gentle tears clouding my eyes. She wasn't 100% Amanda, she was a little out of it which is no surprise. But her humor, intellect, sharpness of wit, curiosity with all life presents and all round Amandaness were all still there, bruised but intact. All of her survived that first hemorrhage. I was assured she would be better in the morning, my sister in law and mother had been with her every day since I phoned them on the 30th and they had seen her be better in the mornings. Singing with her sister, laughing, joking and generally being Amanda but getting tired and less animated as each day wore on. So I could go home, sleep for the first time in 3 days and come back on the 2nd to a brighter, more Amanda, Amanda.

Except that isn't what happened. Instead I got a call at 07:30 to tell me of the 2nd hemorrhage. The major artery inside her brain they'd tried to fix with stents had torn creating excess pressure in the cranial cavity which had shut off blood supply to many areas of her wonderful brain. They minced their word of course but it was clear right then, everything Amanda about Amanda was gone.

I was taken to the hospital and steered zombie like to the ward to find her bed away. She was having an MRI to confirm what the CT had already shown. All doubt and vestiges of hope were shattered when we (myself, my mum and sister in law) were gently guided not to her cubicle but to the 'family room'.

There's a lot more story to tell but I'll leave it there.

I'm still an emotional wreck though not all the time like I was. I loathe the phrase 'you are not alone' as much as I did the first time I saw it on a glossy pamphlet pressed into my hand.

The situation I find myself in was not my worst nightmare because it was inconceivable. I'm the one with lifelong health issues, I'm the one who picked up every bug going. Amanda was just solid, my rock. To say I was utterly unprepared (read: naive) doesn't scratch the surface.

Thanks for 'listening'

Julian