Contents Cover About the Book About the Author Title Page Dedication Prologue STAGE ONE: Famous Last Words STAGE TWO: Well-Placed Protection STAGE THREE: The Shared Experience STAGE FOUR: Just Keep Going STAGE FIVE: A Final Resting Place? Epilogue Acknowledgements Copyright About the Book How do you go on after the unthinkable happens? Sudden death is rude. It just wanders in and takes your husband without any warning; it doesn’t even have the decency to knock. At the impossibly young age of thirty-seven, as they were making love one night, Lucie Brownlee’s beloved husband Mark dropped dead. As Lucie tried to make sense of her new life without Him, she turned to writing to express her grief. Life After You is the stunning, irreverent and heartbreakingly honest result. About the Author Lucie is based in the north-east of England (Newcastle) and recently won Best Personal Blog at the Blog North Awards. Her short story ‘T-shirt Weather’ was shortlisted for the Guardian’s 2010 short story prize, while ‘Late Night Final’ was shortlisted for the GQ / Soho House ‘City Stories’ competition. She has also written for The Independent. For Mark, wherever He is. Prologue Bad news travels through letterboxes and under doors like a noxious gas. By lunchtime on the day after my husband, Mark, dropped dead aged thirty-seven, there were at least three casseroles on the doorstep and a dozen sympathy cards on the mat. Representatives from both sides of the family who never met except for on ‘occasions’ had gathered in Mother’s hot little living room. My brother, Dan, had turned up first. At 8.30 in the morning, he screeched up to the house an hour after receiving the news, having driven sixty miles cross- country. He walked through the front door and held his arms out to me. It was a long time before he spoke. Everyone was looking at each other, or me, or staring out of the window, and all the while I tried to justify to myself and to them why I wasn’t crying. I tried to summon up the feelings I thought I was supposed to have. I repeated the mantra, Mark is dead, over and over again and waited for the moment when I would collapse, distraught, in a heap on the carpet. Nothing. Meanwhile, our three-year-old daughter B played the bossa nova demo on her Bontempi keyboard to this new captive and catatonic audience, and guzzled the sweets they’d brought her. She asked once where her daddy was and I told her he was at work. She knew I was bullshitting but she had Haribo so she let it slide. So while they nursed their coffee and their grief and listened to the bossa nova on a loop, I sat in the centre of the blast and calmly opened the Rioja. STAGE ONE Famous Last Words DAY 1: SATURDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2012, 8.13 P.M. I knew He was dead. His pupils were shot, and fixed on a point beyond me. He had no pulse. His face was pinkish-grey and doughy. But as the paramedics pounded up the stairs into the bedroom where He lay, I honestly believed they would bring my husband round. I had been doing CPR for twenty minutes on a dead man, but didn’t allow myself to believe it was the end. We’d been in the middle of making love – in my mother’s bed. We were there for the weekend for the funeral of my grandma, who, in an unfortunate twist of fate and tragi-comic timing, had died five days before Mark. We were making love in Mother’s bed because we were trying to conceive (she was out at the time, I hasten to add). Those who become embroiled in the complicated world of conception know that there is a ‘moment’ during the month in which all systems must absolutely go – you have a thirty-second window before the egg explodes and the sperm shrivels or something – so needless to say this wasn’t going to be the Barry White of sessions. It was business. We’d lost a baby in September and this was a last-ditch attempt to have another. And besides, Take Me Out was starting in ten minutes so we had to be quick. ‘You’ve still got your socks on,’ He’d said, climbing on top of me. Hardly the Humphrey Bogart of last words (his were reputedly: ‘I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis’). Seconds later, He crashed on to the pillow next to me, heavy as a felled oak. I slapped His face and told Him to wake up. He was breathing, heavy, laboured breaths into the pillow. I wondered if I should bother the emergency services with my call. Surely He would come round and I didn’t want to cause a scene in the street outside. Our daughter, B, appeared in the doorway, woken up by the screaming – I must have been screaming but I don’t remember – and she was crying and peering in. I told her the ultimate adult lie; that everything was all right. The voice on the phone told me to roll Mark over and begin compressions on His chest. I manoeuvred Him, with difficulty, on to His back and started in time with the voice: 1… and… 2… and… 3… and… 4. B was by my side now, crying and asking me why Daddy wasn’t waking up. I remember feeling conspicuously nude – except for the socks, of course – and considered where the nearest shroud of decency might be found when the paramedics arrived. (Towel… bathroom.) His lips were turning blue. I opened one of His eyes and it stared through me. I felt His neck for a pulse. His skin was already beginning to get cold, vital signs shutting down one by one, like lights in an apartment block. A nerve in His left thumb twitched. I wouldn’t believe He was dead. But I would later learn it had been instant. There was nothing anyone could have done. After the paramedics had arrived, I’d glimpsed Mark one final time. I needed to call Mother but the phone was where I’d left it after making the emergency call, discarded in panic on the set of drawers in the bedroom. I stepped in to get it and my eyes fell to where they’d moved Him on to the floor next to the bed. His arm was propped against the radiator. They’d placed a mask over His face and all I could hear were the faint beeps of machinery. My call to Mother went something like this; ‘Mark’s collapsed… the ambulance is here… they’re upstairs with Him now… you need to come home…’ She was just around the corner babysitting at my sister Beth’s house, and while I didn’t really register her response, I knew that she would be arranging care for the kids and with us within minutes. B and I sat at the kitchen table and waited. B looked at me over the rim of a cup of milk. ‘I’m frightened of something,’ she said. ‘What are you frightened of?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘No need to be frightened, love,’ I told her. But a cold shard of terror had lodged in my guts. We listened to the beeps and creaks coming from the room above us; each one part of a last-ditch attempt to save her daddy. When the paramedics came down the stairs after forty minutes, grim-faced and exhausted, and one of them uttered the words: ‘Mark’s died’, you might forgive me for my response. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right.’ I suddenly, inexplicably, felt frightened of the body upstairs. Did I want to see Him? No. I regret that response now. A chance for a last cuddle before He went Him? No. I regret that response now. A chance for a last cuddle before He went truly cold. ‘But whereabouts have you left Him?’ I asked. ‘Is He on the floor?’ ‘Yes. With the blanket over Him. I’ll come up with you if you like…’ I shook my head. ‘What will happen now?’ The paramedic prodded at his electronic notebook with a stumpy digit. ‘The police will be here shortly. Then they’ll come and take Mark.’ ‘Are you leaving now?’ I asked, watching as the team filed past carrying their arsenal of life-saving equipment, now redundant, back to the ambulance. ‘Please, don’t leave.’ ‘They are,’ he said. ‘But I’ll stay until the police arrive.’ 10.05 P.M. ‘Was it your… husband?’ asked the younger, more ample-eared of the two policemen who were now sitting in Mother’s living room drinking tea. ‘Yes…’ The other one, clearly an old hand at incidents of sudden death, took notes and handed me a photocopied leaflet, ‘Coping with Sudden Death’. ‘Have you decided if you want your husband cremated or buried?’ Mark hadn’t been dead two hours, yet the policeman seemed surprised that I hadn’t considered the options for His disposal. ‘Tell me this is a dream,’ I pleaded with Mother. ‘I’m afraid it’s not.’ The Old Hand pressed his fingertips together and brought them up to his mouth. ‘We have all night,’ he said. ‘Take your time.’ Policemen, up close, in your living room, have a kind of other-worldliness about them. On the whole, they’re taller than you would imagine, and their uniforms are straight out of the BBC costume department. Never having had a proper encounter with one before, their presence seemed to add to the theatrical quality of the evening. ‘Cremated,’ I suggested. I didn’t know what the significance of my answer was – I still don’t – but I was prepared to agree to anything to avoid all night in the company of these two. This seemed to have satisfied his line of questioning. For him, the bureaucracy of death was complete. He sipped his tea and reassured me that he wouldn’t leave until the undertakers got there. Small-talk doesn’t come easily in situations such as this (‘Been busy tonight?’ ‘Is this your first sudden death?’) so I stood by the window, willing the undertakers to arrive. It occurred to me that perhaps I should make some phone calls. But should I