Free The Order of Things by Graham Hurley Page A

yesterday.’ He took Lizzie lightly by the arm and guided her across to the window. ‘She’s down there by the gazebo.’
    ‘You buried her in the garden?’
    ‘I did. In a wicker coffin she designed herself. My daughters wove flowers into it for the celebration. Very hippy.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘I visit her every morning. Take little gifts. We talk to each other. I find it helps immensely.’
    To be frank, he said, the Church had been a disappointment, and the same was true of their GP. After countless tests, Julia had been diagnosed with a variant of the disease called progressive bulbar palsy. PBP, he said, was something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. It attacked the nerves in your face and throat. You started to drool. You couldn’t swallow properly. You had difficulty breathing. And as it got worse, you lived every day in terror of not being able to breathe at all.
    ‘Then there was the crying,’ he said. ‘Julia was always the strong one. She could stand pain, disappointment, despair, everything that life throws at you. In that department she always put me to shame. But towards the end she simply couldn’t cope. She’d cry and cry, and that, of course, only made it worse. My poor, poor love. You’ve no idea what that does to a man. There’s a sense of utter helplessness. You’re together day and night. You do your best, of course, but deep down you both know there’s absolutely nothing you can do.’
    He turned away from the window, shaking his head.
    ‘Your GP … ?’ Lizzie asked.
    ‘Absolutely useless. Nice enough man but wouldn’t begin to entertain what we both had in mind.’
    ‘Which was?’
    ‘Ending it. May I call you Lizzie?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘It wears you down, Lizzie. It wore me down, and dear God it certainly wore my darling wife down. There’s help out there if you want it. Physiotherapists. Reflexologists. Dieticians. You name it. But after a while you realise you’re at a place from which there’s no coming back. The only absolute certainty, the only thing you can rely on, is that this disease, this hideous stranger, is here for keeps. Until one morning he decides to end it all. His decision. Not ours. That’s the moment when you start getting angry, the moment when you realise that both your life and your death are beyond your control.’
    ‘So what did you do?’
    ‘I’d met this young man.’ His eyes settled on Anton. ‘One of my daughters teaches at the university. She bumped into Anton one day and they started talking. Normally she wouldn’t dream of sharing these kinds of confidences, but it turned out that Anton was something of an expert in the field. His mother had elected to die in Switzerland. You’re aware of the Dignitas people?’
    ‘Of course.’ Lizzie was looking at Anton. ‘You never told me.’
    ‘You never asked.’
    ‘Your mother was ill?’
    ‘She had pancreatic cancer,’ Anton said. ‘ She was very brave but sometimes courage isn’t enough.’
    ‘Precisely.’ Ralph reached across and patted his arm. ‘Absolutely right. And so young Anton here became part of our little family for a while, which was wonderful because he started to teach Julia German. Me too, when I could get my brain into gear.’
    Lizzie shook her head. Another surprise. ‘And learning German helped?’
    ‘Anything helped. Anything that could take Julia’s mind off it. I’d use the term therapy but that would be misleading. Therapy implies cure, and with MND there’s no such thing. At that stage we were thinking about Zurich, about Dignitas. That’s why learning German made so much sense. But the worse things became the more we agreed that it had to happen here, in a place we both loved so much.’
    Anton, he said, had mentioned a GP he’d heard of through a friend, someone who’d be prepared, at the very least, to visit and to talk to them both, and to listen. Listening, he said, was absolutely key. Very few professionals, very few people,