We Own the Sky(53)
And then we saw Kirsty again, now with a short crop of blond hair, sitting up in bed and talking to her father on Skype. She had good news, she said, her voice cracking, her eyes filling with tears. “It’s working,” she said, swallowing her sobs, “it’s working, Dad.” Then, Kirsty again, a few years later, whizzing around with a toddler on a roundabout, her husband in the background cradling a newborn infant.
I watched another, the mother of a boy, Ash, who had an advanced brain
tumor. An American, she was filmed in her living room. The lighting was pale, and it was like a front room from the 1950s, pristine but unlived in, and I thought that the boy must have died. But then the filters changed, and it was as if Ash’s mother had been made over, like the before and after shots in a trashy weekly mag. And there was Ash, gorgeous little Ash, running around, looking older, healthier, not knowing or caring why he was being filmed because there were trees to climb and creeks to jump.
It was too good to be true. There would be a catch, a caveat, something that wasn’t obvious at first.
Subject: Re: Jack
Sent: Tue Nov 11, 2014 8:33 am
From: Rob
To: Nev
Dear Nev,
I don’t know if you’ll remember me but we were briefly in touch a couple
of months ago.
I’m afraid we’ve had some bad news. Last time I wrote to you, Jack was doing well after his operation. Unfortunately, his tumor has come back in a more aggressive form. Jack now has a glioblastoma with additional seedling tumors throughout his brain. The doctors have said there is nothing they can do.
I have been reading about Dr. Sladkovsky’s clinic in Prague and I wondered if you could give me more information.
Also, and I hope you don’t mind, but can I ask exactly what treatments
Josh had? Not just at Dr. Sladkovsky’s clinic but everything. And to be clear: Josh had grade 3 glioblastoma multiforme, right?
I hope that’s not being too intrusive. As I said, I have read your blog detailing Josh’s treatments but I want to be 100 percent sure I understand correctly.
Sorry to be writing to you out of the blue like this. I hope you understand.
Best Wishes,
Rob
box hill
mommy was away for the weekend with work so we took a day trip, out of
london and into the countryside. it was amazing that day, jack, blazing hot, and we drove up the windy road to the top of box hill and then sat at the lookout point and ate sandwiches and jaffa cakes. i remember how you liked to nibble the chocolate, jack, and then scrape the jelly off with your teeth, just like daddy showed you. chocco first then jelly. chocco first then jelly.
15
We could only ignore the phone calls, the emails, the Facebook messages for so long. The people who just wanted to check in because they had heard Jack had been taken ill. The friends who offered to pop around, just for five minutes, to catch up on our news.
Anna suggested sending another email to all of our friends. That way, she said, they would leave us alone. I shrugged, said that I didn’t care either way.
The replies came quickly, filling up our in-boxes. They couldn’t believe it, they said. They were crying, shaking, couldn’t think about anything else. Why was this happening to us, they asked, why oh why? And was there anything they could do? Could they bring us food, help clean the house, anything really, anything, because they just felt so helpless.
And how was Jack? How was he taking it all? Such a terrible thing to happen to a little boy, because they knew how much we treasured him. They knew because they knew how much their own children meant to them. God, they
couldn’t even begin to contemplate what we were going through right now.
Then I saw the status updates on Facebook. Friends, friends of friends, people we didn’t even know so well.
Just received some very sad news...
Devastated, blown away...
Sometimes you get reminders that life is so terribly short. Never forget to hold on to what you have.
I counted: Jack, by proxy, was the recipient of 126 likes. Just as I was thinking how to respond, the posts in my feed were no longer about Jack.
RIP David Frost.
So sad right now: RIP Sir David.
*Crying now* this man was a genius. RIP.
Within minutes, Jack was forgotten. Gutted, they said, absolutely gutted.
Because Frost/Nixon had always been their favorite movie. Because they don’t make journalists like that anymore, a true gent, integrity to the core, better than Murdoch and his phone-tapping hacks.
“Too soon,” they all wrote. Too soon. Those two little words bounced around in my head. Too soon. He was seventy-four. He’d had his three score and ten.
David Frost had probably spent more time on the toilet than my son had been alive. Too fucking soon?