Back to a hospital, back to a cancer centre, but purely for professional reasons this time. I wander around the back of the hospital for a while, the bit I like the best - cages of laundry and boxes of shrink-wrapped equipment in the sun, all the functioning innards that show this place is working correctly - before I head into the beautiful Maggie’s centre. My meandering route brings back the dizzy, detached, hurrying, comfort-eating horrors of last summer, spent at a different hospital while Cancer Dad was sleepily swelling and shrinking and sealing up for good. I see the point of these places. Warm and bright, full of voices and comfort, soft lighting, soft cushions, space, and time. You could sit there all day, eating biscuits and talking to other people about lymphoedemas, or their childrens’ jobs, or a courgette cake recipe, or the knitting you’ve never quite mastered, or the cities you’ve lived in across the world. I think of the cups of coffee and slices of cake we’d eat in the John Lewis cafe, anything to get away from the hospital (everyone in a dressing gown or in tears or both) and how we’d talk only to each other, going around and around in circles, never really saying anything.
On the way home, a song on the radio reminds me with such Proustian heaviness of a single particular day from my teenage years that I’m amazed I can drive the car at the same time as remembering. It makes me think that maybe the reason I haven’t cried since his death is simply that his not being around any more is a great deal less sad that some of those days when he was.