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Ray Noseworthy is a tall and slim man of seventy. In a perfect world, he’d be enjoying a comfortable retirement by now, surrounded by the fruits of his labour and the love of his family, but that wasn’t to be Ray’s story.
Two years ago, a week after paying the final instalment on his thirty-year mortgage, Ray’s wife tried to take her own life after learning that she had an aggressive form of dementia.
Having thrown herself down the stairs, she’d survived, but when she came out of hospital she was paralysed from the waist down.
Two hours after she returned home, Ray found her in a pool of blood in the kitchen. She’d slashed her wrists with a bread knife.
‘I won’t be a burden,’ she’d whispered to him, with the knife still in her hand.
‘You’ll never be a burden, dear,’ he’d replied, taking it away slowly.
After four pints of blood and five more days in hospital, Ray asked Annie to put an end to her death-wish.
‘I won’t let you do it, Annie,’ he said, gripping her hand with a tight smile.
She said nothing and then looked away as she felt his touch.
The GP considered letting her return to the house, but decided that it would be too dangerous, and so he saw to it that she was placed at a nursing-home for the elderly on a temporary basis, giving Ray the time to put a plan in place for her ongoing care.
The GP had offered another way but it hadn’t worked.
‘I’ll try to have Annie fully funded at the nursing-home, Ray, but you’ll have to section her first,’ he said, pursing his lips.
Once he’d explained what a section was and how the system was forced to put hoops in place to justify full funding for cases like Annie’s, Ray declined the section.
‘She’s not crazy,’ he said. ‘She just wants to die.’
The doctor kneaded his forehead. ‘I know, Ray, but it’s the only way to get funding for full-time care, and she does need it.’
But Ray wouldn’t listen.
Instead, he decided to part-sell the house and now part-rents it back from the building society.
Annie lives in a very good little nursing-home some six miles away.
Although she’s bedridden, she has all of her favourite pictures and trinkets in a comfortable room, from which she hasn’t set foot since arriving.
Although she can’t tell who he is, Ray visits Annie three times a week. He used to go every day but slowly learnt to accept the need to try and get on with what’s left of his own life.
He still loves Annie as he always has, but he was never one for long goodbyes. Reaching the awful conclusion that his daily visits were only diluting his lifelong love, Ray decided to make the journey on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays only.
He sits for an hour or two and strokes her hand, then he kisses her on the cheek and leaves.
Sometimes she doesn’t move a muscle.
While Ray wants to remember her with pride, each deathly visit causes his fond memories to remove themselves one by one.
His own memory isn’t the best, but he’s a keen crossworder and sets himself to the task of reading one book per fortnight, as he has for the last twenty years.
As head gardener at Kneesup Hall, Ray leads an active life.
Financially, he gets by on very little.
Annie was unable to give him children but he has good old friends and family members who love him dearly.