When Heather was dying, questions formed in my mind that I had never entertained

There are three immovable orange objects in my house.

One is very soft, but I never touch it. One is very comfortable, but I never sit in it. And the third … what can I tell you about the third? It is a cheap piece of plastic that contains another piece of plastic. No one would give it a second thought, except me.

What made them immovable was the passing of my wife in September 2023, 20 months after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The orange chair and orange bottle.

The soft object is a beanie that sits on the top of the coat rack by our front door, above my hat and that of my teenage son. To remove it would somehow be to concede that the trio of my great happiness is ended, and I am not able to concede such a thing.

The comfortable object is a chair and footstool, her birthday present to me. During my first bout of COVID-19, unable to lie down in bed without coughing uncontrollably, I spent five nights sleeping downstairs in it.

When Heather knew she was dying, but still wanted to be at home, there were a few days before the hired hospital bed arrived when she slept on our sofa (she could not climb the stairs). I would sleep in the orange chair pushed hard up against the sofa so that if she moved in the night, I would be there to attend to her or prevent her falling off the side.

Maher Mughrabi, Heather Shipp and their son wear beanies on an aerial walk in New Zealand in 2019. 

Since that September, I have not been able to sit in this chair. Instead, I put things on it when I need to remember to give them to people or to mail them. I don’t want the gift without the giver. But I won’t be parted with it.

Then there is the reusable drink bottle. Once it was truly a bottle for water, accompanying me and my son on excursions, before being pressed into a quite different kind of service.

As Heather’s cancer worsened, the removal of her gall bladder, part of her pancreas and her duodenum led to bile building up in her liver. It became necessary to insert a biliary drain, which emptied into a bag attached to her body. But this external attachment would leak, and so it became my task to drain it. Was there an old drink bottle I could use?

I was asked to measure the volume of bile, using a plastic syringe. Today, that syringe sits inside the bottle, on top of our dryer in the laundry. When my son and I left the house in the care of a friend to visit my parents in Britain, I decided the bottle and syringe needed to be removed from sight. It was the first time I had touched them since Heather’s death. When we returned home, I put them back. I haven’t touched them since.

Bile sounds awful, and it doesn’t look very good either. It is a brown colour with a greenish tinge. As we found when the external bag leaked, the stains on bedclothes become dark green after a time. But bile doesn’t smell of anything. Once when I washed the sheets, they came out of the machine with a ghostly yellow mark still visible, but to my surprise hanging them in the sunshine saw it disappear.

One morning I was draining the bile, sitting on Heather’s side of the bed, and as I closed the tap on the bag, my hand slipped and the contents of the bottle spilled onto our bedroom carpet. I looked at the stain, about the size of my hand and the colour of balsamic vinegar, and swore out loud. Questions formed in my mind that I had never entertained: why is this happening to us? How the hell did I end up doing this?

“What is it, Maher?” Heather asked. Her back was to me while I drained the bag and she couldn’t turn to see what had happened.

What is it, indeed? I thought. It’s a stain the size of my hand in a carpet that was here in this house when we bought it in 2007. What if the stain could not be shifted? Once you might have used the word “ruined” to describe the carpet. But now?

Now, all I could think was that the voice that had asked me “What is it, Maher?” was only months or weeks or days away from leaving this world, and I would have to live without the laughter and the thoughts and feelings it expressed – the surprises it gave just to me – for the rest of my days. That was the ruinous truth.

The stain came out. The bottle cannot. It sits there and I glance at it while I am washing my hands in the laundry sink, seeing the syringe and wondering how much of what is precious to us we don’t measure properly or carry carefully enough. Until the bottle is empty and our only measurement is in tears and memories.

Maher Mughrabi is an editor and senior writer. He is former features editor and foreign editor.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.