Weather for Ducks

"Lulu, did you see that?" He grabbed my arm for support.

"What? What did you see?" We were walking in the rain in the darkness of mid-winter to find a video our little family could watch together. It was a week or so after being told that Simon's brain was full of tumours. Brain tumours! Six of them, ranging in size from golf balls to tennis balls, somehow left space for him to play music, remember quotes from books he'd read years ago. Not enough space to see everything. Nor to understand everything he could see.

"Ah don't worry, it must have been a hallucination!" he explained. How could he work out what was real and what wasn't? More importantly, "What did you see?"

"A silver man came out of the road from behind that car wheel over there. He was pretty cool!"

"Is he still there?"

"No. He's gone now." He wasn't ever worried. It all seemed perfectly rational to him. In fact he seemed to enjoy what he got to see during that last July of his life.

I just got back from my walk beside the river. Tonight I don't remember seeing it, any of the gums, or any other person exercising themselves or pets. I do remember the cold wet wind chilling my cheeks and blowing through my trouser-legs. It was dark. And I wasn't afraid.

I thought about how Simon and I walked that way as 'the long way around' to buy wine. "When I've gone, you'll keep walking here Lulu, won't you?” he urged. “Now I know why you love it so much," he said on a sunny morning walk. "I should have come on more walks with you. It's beautiful up here!"

By this time, he was pretty heavily drugged to manage the ever-escalating pain in his back and his legs. At least his brain didn't hurt him too. The doctors had given him some medication to control the natural swelling caused from the damage done by the tumours. Dexamethasone! Everything raced when the dose in his body was at his highest. He spoke in rapid breathy stanzas like an excited little boy waiting for his dad to come inside from the garage. His excitement was infectious. How could we be anything but grateful that we could still have him with us? Yes it was crazy. It was completely mad. We didn't always know who this guy was. Our daughter found it frustrating and a little frightening. In a strange way, it was fascinating for me to watch what he could do, and what made no sense anymore.

Tonight I thought about wine. It doesn't taste as good without him so I changed my mind and came home. My memory of us coming out of that warm bottle shop into horizontal sleet-like rain, three years ago, still makes me smile. Simon was a bit excited that day and the lady in the bottle-shop wasn't very understanding or particularly kind. All the same Simon continued to chat away to her, even though she didn't respond warmly.

Back outside in the weather, he leaned in and asked me at the top his voice, "Lulu, did she have a yellow duckbill?"

"Nope. No duckbill!" I smiled up at him.

"I am so glad I didn't say anything to her about it then!"