mistakes

7th June 2011

The blood was gurgling from his blue lips; the rosy alcohol-induced tint in his cheeks had now drained away; the room was filled with silence as everyone looked upon the dying man who was currently slumped in a blood ball on the floor. Everyone looking at each other for a reaction, a reason to how this had just happened. The night started off so well the celebration, laughter the flow of champagne mixing through their bodies. At what point in the evening did anyone think this would happen, that this man they had shared the evening with would now be in a heap dying on the floor. I watched like a statue while I saw my daughter's face drain with colour while her boyfriend stood covered in blood holding the everyday kitchen knife that was now the reason for killing this man. I stood and watched as children, and yes I mean children, as young as 13 piled onto the lifeless body and kicked him repeatedly, while the floor covered more in his deep penetrating blood. I stood there as useless as my daughter was at this point because there was nothing I could do, there was no way to stop this, no way to make anyone listen to me, and god had I tried, because I was dead and all I could do was sit and watch.

21st March 1998.
“There no easy way to say this, but I’m afraid you have cervical cancer” there was a pause in their air like he was giving me time to digest the information before he hit me with the bad news.
“I’m afraid its stage four cancer and there isn’t really a lot of treatments for this progressed stage” my mind was still trying to process the word cancer let along stage 4, what was stage 4?, what did this mean?.
My hands began to shake, and I could fill the sick rise up through my body. I had to ask the obvious question the question that no parent to a four-year-old wants to know how long have I got?
“It’s hard to tell in this case it could months, or it could be a year it’s just a waiting game." A waiting game I thought to myself this was no game this was my life, the life of my child’s I wanted to see her grow up; I wanted to see my grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. Oh god I thought, How was I going to tell Annabel, how could you even start to begin telling a four-year-old that i was about to die? She wouldn’t understand she wouldn’t be able to digest that information. If only I had gone for the smear when I was supposed to, then maybe I would have caught this in time. There were too many if onlys thou, and I had to deal with it. It was my own fault no one else’s. I choose to ignore the signs; I chose to ignore the repeated letters from the doctor informing me that my smear was well overdue I was the one to blame, and now I was the one to blame for why my 17-year-old daughter was carrying a bloodied body out of a room, trying to discard him like a piece of meat, because if I had the smear, her life could have been so much different if I had still been alive.