Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
“ C ole?” Hearing the obstetrician’s questioning tone drew me out of my daydream.
I glanced up from the floor and his worried expression sent fear coursing through my body. As I scrambled to my feet, my throat tightened and the crushing pain in my chest felt suffocating at the thought there may be something wrong with Grace or our child.
“Breathe,” the doctor coaxed in a gentler tone than he’d used before, and I suddenly snapped out of the panic attack I was having. My anxious eyes frantically searched his face as I waited for him to update me.
“Yes?”
Anguish darkened his expression as he drew in a deep breath and held it, and my heart stalled. Averting his eyes from my gaze he shook his head, and I grew more impatient, my eyes riveted to him.
“Shall we have a seat?” he asked, gesturing with an outstretched hand at the row of blue plastic chairs lining the corridor.
Meekly, I sat down without taking my eyes off him and he did the same. Turning his body to face me, he placed his hands in his lap and gave me a sympathetic stare. I almost screamed because of how unhurried he appeared .
“First, you have a baby daughter. She’s fine, vitals are all good, but as you know she’s a few weeks early, so she’s going up to the neonatal unit for observation for a short time. We’re always cautious for the first day or two with our premature babies because those last few weeks can make a difference to their adaptation from the womb.”
“And Grace?” I asked concerned.
The doctor rubbed his brow before he looked me square in the eye. Taking a deep breath, he shook his head. “There’s no easy way to say this, Cole. Grace has cancer.”
Initially I thought I’d misheard him. Then a wall of shock blindsided me and my heart sank to my stomach and my heart stalled again. “Wh… No… Bullshit, you’re wrong,” I argued, “you’re a liar. How can you say something like this?” My tone was sharp—aggressive—and I sprang to my feet, my heart thudding faster than I’d ever felt it before. I ran my fingers through my hair then grabbed two clumps of it in my fists.
My stomach lurched and the taste of bile in my throat made my stomach roll again. I began to walk away as anger, aggression, and instant denial built up inside, then I turned and strode back to challenge him.
“Dude, we’ve just had a baby, she can’t be sick,” I scoffed. “This is bullshit. I won’t hear it. You saw Grace; she’s the picture of health. We came here to have a fucking baby.”
“Cole, I need you to sit down because there is much more I need to tell you and it’s important you hear what I have to say,” he ordered in a much sterner but quiet voice.
“When I examined Grace, I knew immediately her cervix was unhealthy. I couldn’t confirm a diagnosis until I had pathology results to support my clinical findings. However, when we operated, I’m afraid it was much worse than I had imagined, because there was no mistaking what we found when I opened Grace’s abdomen.”
For a moment the doctor fell silent, then he sighed heavily, like it was killing him to tell me this news, almost as much as it was killing me to hear what he had to say. I immediately sensed disappointment in the way he exhaled.
Gripping my upper arm, he shook his head again. “Cole, what I’m saying is Grace’s cancer is so extensive and far advanced its inoperable. I’m at a loss as to how she didn’t collapse before now. Grace may only have weeks, if not days, left to live.”
My breath hitched in fright even before his devastating words sank in. Shock then made my deflated lungs heave for air, and in that horrible moment, it felt as if my ruptured heart had stopped beating… yet still I breathed.
“The spread has ravished her body, affecting her rectum, bladder, the anterior wall of her uterus, small bowel and liver. Probably why she’s been having so much pain during the past couple of weeks.”
“But they implied at her prenatal checks the pains were normal toward the end… never mind, how soon can she have treatment?” I asked, still clinging to hope.
“No, Cole, you aren’t taking in what I’ve told you. There is no treatment. In fact, I am telling you here instead of with Grace because I’m not sure how, or if she’ll recover from the surgery.”
Turning my head, I glanced down the clinical setting of the hospital corridor and watched people at the far end wandering around, attending to their normal business, while I stood trying to imagine the nightmare of my future with a dying wife and a new baby girl to take care of.
There had been plenty of times in my life when I had thought life was cruel, but the full horror of the countless situations I’d heard of in life had never truly hit home.
Tragedies mostly happened to other people, although there had been a few times in my personal life where heartbreak had struck, like when my father had died. Back then there had been a period of adjustment for us beforehand.
My father’s death had been a gradual process, allowing my mother, my brother, and me time to accustom ourselves to living without him. By the time he’d died we’d been resigned to his fate as we watched him decline and fade away. It was nothing like what I faced alone in the sterile corridor as fate hung in the balance with our future at its mercy.
“At the moment, Grace has been moved to our Intensive Care Unit and is very heavily sedated. Your daughter, like I assured you, is doing fine. You can see them both as soon as they have been made comfortable upstairs.” I noted there were no congratulations like there would usually have been when a child was born.
“Is there someone we can call to be with you?” When I didn’t respond, my mind numb from the news, he spoke again. “Let’s walk down here to the relatives’ room and I’ll explain what’s going to happen.”
Following behind him, I walked half the length of the hallway and entered a small box room. It looked comfortable in pastel shades of green and I immediately associated it with bad news. It was a carbon copy of the décor at the hospice my father had gone into.
Holding his palm out, Dr. Ken gestured for me to take a seat, but I chose to remain standing. “Tell me,” I urged. Again, he persuaded me to take a seat and at his insistence I sat.
“As I explained before, there are metastases or secondary cancers in many of her other organs. We had a few complications with the delivery because of Grace’s condition, but the baby is quite well, breathing on her own, and warming up nicely.”
For a long moment I couldn’t think, and then the enormity of what he’d said threatened to make me lose control, but I knew I couldn’t do that. “Tell me what to do,” I whispered, as tears rolled down my cheeks as the full impact of my helpless situation became overwhelming.
“Grace is dying, Cole. There is probably very little time; especially now she’s been compromised further by the surgery. She is going to be extremely weak when we reduce the sedation and if she wakes up she’ll be in a lot of pain.”
If she wakes? Springing to my feet again, my lungs felt so tight, as if they’d burst right out of my chest at any second. A wave of fear and despair at losing Grace brought one lump after another into my throat, and I fought the sickening sensation of losing my grasp on reality.
“Please tell me this isn’t true,” I begged, anger swelling inside until I was suddenly furious at the injustice of life.
Placing his hand on my forearm, his sad gaze was filled with sorrow. “Cole, I wish to God I could tell you differently, but I can’t. Grace will deteriorate rapidly from now on. We’re doing everything we can to make her comfortable. Do you have anyone we can call to come and be with you?” he prompted again .
Digging in my back jeans pocket, I took out my cell as the doctor continued to try to inform me about their excellent palliative care program. His hard sell on how they could give Grace a good end wasn’t something I wanted to hear, so I ignored him completely and called my mom.
“Mom, it’s me. I need you to come to the hospital.”
“Has Grace had the baby?” she asked with all the bubbly excitement of an expectant grandmother.
“Yes, she’s here, but Grace is sick.” Closing the call out before she could ask any questions, I stuck my cell in my jacket pocket and the dreadful reality about Grace hit me on a whole other level. The painful truth of all the information the doctor had told me ran over me like a dump truck.
To be frank, I don’t recall the next few hours after that, but I do remember someone giving me a shot and I guess I blacked out for a while.
When I finally came to, I initially thought I’d had a horrendously bad trip but, unfortunately, I hadn’t dabbled in drugs for over six years. Clocking an oxygen flow gauge on the wall I remembered where I was and realized I was lying in a hospital bed. The nightmare I thought I’d escaped about Grace had followed me into my devastating reality.
For the first twenty-four hours my dying wife lay unconscious; heavily sedated as she recovered from her surgery. I trudged back and forth; torn between needing to be at her bedside and learning my duties as a first-time father in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit or NICU. Thankfully, the Adult Intensive Care Unit and this were on the same floor.
When my mom showed up, the sense of relief I had expected to feel when she walked through the door never happened. There was no escape from the impending misery and heartache I faced.
I believed no one else could possibly understand the depth of despair I felt. This was my walk to walk. Only I knew what I felt in my heart, and to say I was disappointed to learn this didn’t even begin to cut it .
I barely remember some fragmented moments of going through the motions in the hospital. Flitting back and forth between Grace; who was lucid for small periods of time, and the baby care unit, to carry out the endless routines of feeding and diaper changes of the too tiny, helpless infant in my care.
The only thing that stood out in my memory was when the pediatric nurse placed Layla’s semi-naked body under my T-shirt, against my skin. During those few brief minutes the hurt I felt in my heart temporarily dissipated. I sighed deeply when Layla squirmed contentedly as she soaked up my warmth when I cradled her protectively against me. Then, when I felt her little heart beating close to mine through her teeny bony chest, I choked up with the indescribable distress I felt, and my tears fell again.
From that moment on, I tried to block out any and all attempts to share my grief. Despite my family’s many attempts to help me face a future without Grace, I couldn’t bare my heart to them, preferring to shut down. For a while I refused to participate in life because I felt if I did, it meant I would have accepted it would be without Grace and I was neither prepared or ready to do this.
However, no amount of denial could take away Grace’s silent killer. No matter how hard it was to accept, five short ugly days after Layla entered this world, my beautiful wife, Grace, left it. I was a mess, yet she was devastatingly brave and serenely calm at the end when her life was abruptly stilled at 7:48 a.m. in the morning.
Dr. Ken had been right; the open surgery had exposed the extent of the cancer and the proliferation of the disease after this completely overwhelmed her body. Words meant in comfort about Grace having seen Layla and holding her in her arms before she died infuriated me.
There were no words of condolence I found comfort in and they were crass remarks borne out of unempathetic ignorance because five fucking days was no time to give a lifetime of bonding to our baby before her mom was gone forever.
Staring numbly at Grace’s lifeless body it was difficult to comprehend that she had been so full of sass, and vitality on our last night together. Less than a week later our happily ever after had been ripped from our grasp by some stealthy form of terminal illness. And I was left furious at the world.
The circumstance forced upon me was unfathomable, but this was my new reality. Neither of us could ever have imagined when Grace waved that simple piece of plastic with those two thin pink lines in my face, her body had already been preparing her goodbye.
The swiftness of Grace’s death didn’t grant us the privilege of time. No part of me was willing nor able to accept how quickly she was taken from me. There hadn’t even been the time or the clarity of mind to think of all the things I had wanted to say. It left me with tender loving feelings I wished I had told her about when I’d still had the chance.
Pity those thoughts only came to mind after she’d passed, because they were very intimate and heartfelt sentiments, which now remained trapped inside my head and my heart and with nowhere to go now. We were robbed of what so many couples took for granted; to watch each other change with the passing years, to raise a family, and to grow old together.
However, what I was most incredibly bitter about was how Grace would never see the beautiful precious child she gave her life for, robbed of watching her daughter blossom from the tiny bud she had left behind.
“The vultures are circling outside, Cole. Thank God, Mom and I have never been in the limelight with you so they’re not looking for us. Although, I did see a couple of photographers lurking in the foyer by the elevators on the ground floor.”
The press was incidental to what was happening, and I shrugged off my brother, Dorian’s comment. Preparing to leave the hospital the day after Grace died, with our six-day-old baby, was soul crushing. Supported by my mom and my brother, I had no choice but to go home.
Seeing my normally youthful looking mom appear old and haggard—her face etched with the strain of grief almost as much as mine— made me feel sick. She had arrived at the hospital from our hometown in Delaware the day Layla was born, and I vaguely remembered her prompting me to eat. Being so absorbed in my grief, I’d only fleetingly considered the impact on her and how she’d carried me through every step of the way as Grace lay dying.
There wasn’t a single minute during the day when Grace or Layla didn’t have either one of us in support. Mom had been right there, traveling the same path of tragedy beside me, and I’d hardly noticed her.
It had never occurred to me until that moment, as we were leaving the hospital, how she must have felt as she left me behind each night, wondering how to prepare the house for my baby daughter’s homecoming.
Due to my fame, word had gotten out about Grace, like it always did when there was some juicy new information about Cole Harkin, lead singer from SinaMen. But I was so overawed; I couldn’t begin to concern myself with their intrusive lack of decorum.
The hounding press was a breed of desensitized people with no morality for the life changing situations of others, and news of Grace’s death was a huge deal to them. As such, my bandmates had been stalked incessantly as soon as the story had broken.
Sensationalizing my wife’s tragic demise, they focused on her type of cancer and speculated as to whether I was to blame by way of my previous promiscuity, insinuating this could have been a possible contributor to the development of the disease.
Their presumption was the lowest blow because I was clean. Ironically, I’d never been with any girl without wrapping up first, apart from Grace, and I’d been regularly tested. Apart from this, after being faithful to Grace for the two years we’d been together, this media assumption had come as a major insult to me. Their negativity of the man I was sat heavily with me, and I found their damning judgmental assumptions of my character degrading.
Unlike me, Grace had a history of unprotected sex with several partners and was on the pill when I met her. She had also been in three long-term relationships.
Too grief stricken to fight this point on my own, my brother Dorian took up the mantle, incensed they would target me on such a day and in this way.
From my perspective, I felt ashamed for the reporters who hadn’t focused on the real story. There was the unspoken sadness of the child who’d lost her mother and the man who had lost his beautiful wife. Instead they had chosen to pitch their story on the seedy side of cervical cancer and apportioning blame on me.
Stepping out into the cold, gray day, I was instantly reminded of the intrusion and brutal lack of morals among the press as a hungry pack of reporters huddled around me. Anticipating this, I had covered Layla’s car seat with a white knitted shawl, obscuring her identity from them.
Walking in time with me, camera bulbs flashed as insensitive questions were hurled in a cacophony of jumbled noise. No one appeared to care how devastated I was by the shock of my sudden loss or my concern for the tiny baby I carried. Someone even waved a grubby cheap notepad in my face and asked for my autograph.
Squaring up to them Dorian let loose calling them a tirade of names and a whole bunch of more degrading terms I thought were too good for them.
Personally, I didn’t even acknowledge their presence; instead securing Layla’s car seat in the back of the car, and focusing on getting the hell out of there to keep my baby safe. For most of my time in the public eye I had been relentlessly scrutinized. I knew if they drew a reaction from me it would give a new story legs for them to run with instead. This was why I chose to treat them with the attention they deserved—indifference.
Even after we had driven away my mom sighed in relief and expressed her disgust at how they’d behaved. I was so bereft at leaving Grace behind in the morgue I couldn’t even muster the strength to respond.
Dorian had flown in from Maine and when he saw the mess I was, he immediately got together with my mom, Derek, my manager and Angus and Dinah, my wife’s parents, to plan her funeral. Everyone tried their best to get me involved, but I was too heartbroken to deal with the practicalities of it all .
As Grace’s husband, I knew I should have done better, but I felt utterly overwhelmed any time anyone brought up the subject. The thought of saying this final goodbye to my beautiful young wife slayed me.
My wife had passed on what her final wishes were to me, and I understood her need to have the last word on this. Her request for privacy was a given, due to the way the press had constantly invaded it whenever we stepped outside the house.
Being buried on our property meant we had some control. Derek had the funeral director sign a nondisclosure agreement and her casket was delivered in an unmarked van.
Paul and Stuart, two of our estate managers, rigged up a wooden trailer they used for transporting hay and harnessed two black stallions Stuart had hand-reared from our stables to take Grace from our house on her final journey to the meadow.
Diane and Peter, our landscape gardeners, had draped the old wagon trailer with ivory sheer material panels, then decorated it with ivory calla lilies, vine leaves, and lilac wisteria from Grace’s favorite parts of our gardens.
The final effect looked stunningly elegant and fitting for someone as beautiful as Grace. As horrible as the day was, my wife would have been happy with what her family and friends did out of love as we lay her to rest.
Heavy rain pelted the manmade lake surrounding us. The droplets bouncing in a noisy musical roar in the otherwise quiet pasture. The island and lake had been designed by Grace and landscaped by Diane and Peter with a working crew from town in the months after we moved.
When I recalled how excited Grace was when our landscapers brought her design to life, what she’d called her ‘reflective serenity concept’ it made my heart clench. The south section of our property ran along the intersection between the Reed Creek and New River, so it hadn’t been too difficult to redirect some water to flood a small amount of acreage on the lower part of the meadow.
Grace had romantic visions of it being a place for us to escape to away from our kids for the night when our teenagers became too much. I never thought for a moment, when I agreed to the plan, it would become her final resting place.
With her casket safely transported from our pontoon boat onto the island, I stood bewildered at the thought of how I’d cope with the enormity of bringing up a female child alone. A Roman Catholic priest delivered the final sermon over her open grave before her mahogany-colored coffin was lowered into the ground.
As we stood by her graveside under the large willow trees on the tiny island, I hated everything surrounding me and I struggled for breath. Flanked by my brother, mother, and Grace’s parents, we each threw a single yellow rose down into the hole where she lay and said our silent goodbyes.
Layla was back at the house and my mind turned to my poor tiny child. At least she’d been spared the sight of laying her mother into the ground. Apart from this, the only comforting thought I took away with me that day was I’d achieved the request she had asked for, no prying eyes of the press.
Grace’s last request was for me to sing a song for her after everyone had gone. I sang, “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin and almost choked on every word. Then Stuart brought the pontoon boat back and picked me up. I was soaked to the skin by then, but he hugged me anyway, then he quietly led me home.