Through the window

The sun shines forcefully past the curtains and through netting of my window this September morning.  Its golden rays strike the back wall, highlighting my faded wedding photograph that captured a poignant event of 45 years ago.  It catches the side of my face too as I turn my head away from the picture and its distant memories, and look out through the netting, past the curtains and through my window on to a little slice of suburbia.  Sitting here in my chair, as I have done every day for the last seven years, I realise it must be warm outside this morning.  People are going by without jackets or jumpers or hats.  Some are shading their eyes, whilst others are turning to face the sunshine and smile at its unexpected warmth.  It makes me wonder when did I last do that, walk out in the sunshine and look up to feel it full upon my face?  I look down at my useless legs, clamped in a framework of metal that is supposed to help.  And from there to the walking frame that I need to shuffle awkwardly from this chair in one corner of the room to my bed in the other corner; a little room with its bay window that is my world, my bedroom, my living room, my dying room.

Back out through the window I see people walking and jogging by or getting in to their cars to drive off and join a queue of London traffic somewhere.  A little girl with a head of curly brown hair skips by, pulling her mother along with one hand as she waves at me with the other.  Such energy and fluidity in her movements, so in contrast to my own.  Oh just to go out and walk down the street, to nowhere in particular.  To go see ‘a man about a dog’ as my brother-in-law used to say as he strolled out the door.  To be the mum restraining her energetic child.

Instead my only trips out for the last few years have been in a wheelchair, from my room to an ambulance waiting in the street outside, and then to hospital for yet more tests, in another vain attempt to find out what is wrong with this painful old body of mine.  Meanwhile, I look out my window at this little slice of the outside world that I can see and live each God-given day, often vicariously, putting myself in an imagined life of those that walk or jog or skip by.

My pains have been more extensive and more persistent than late.  Today I have yet another appointment at the hospital to investigate causes.  The ambulance arrives and I am being wheeled out in to the sunny autumn day that I had only just been contemplating through my window.  As we pull away, something makes me I glance back at the window and am struck by how it looks from the outside, and for no particular reason, I wonder when I’ll be seeing it again from the inside.





PS - dear reader, she never did; she died in ICU two days later