Two days before, out of nothing, in the middle of something else: what will you have on?
And I said I had not thought about it, and she said — very lightly — that navy photographs well.
I wore navy. Of course I did.
She dressed the photograph. She dressed both of us, eleven weeks out, from a bed, and she did it in eight words.
And she held her hand up to the camera to show off the ring.
For that one afternoon she was not a patient.
She was a beautiful, happy bride, and there are nine photographs and in eight of them she is looking straight down the lens.
PART 2
She passed peacefully a few weeks later.
Eleven days after that photograph went up, and about four hundred thousand people had seen it by then.
I did not tell her that.
Not once, in eleven days, in about nine visits.
And I have gone back and forth on whether she ever knew, and I have landed on yes.
Because on the Friday — four days after I posted it — a nurse called Bettine mentioned, in passing, that Wilhelmina had asked her that morning whether people had liked the photographs.
Whether people had liked them. Plural. To a nurse, and not to me.
She knew I had posted it. She knew within four days. And she asked somebody else, because asking me would have made it a thing between us, and then it would have stopped being mine and started being hers.
I had been told the funeral would be very small.
She had no family. That is what the hospice had on file, and it is what she had told me herself, and there was a line in her notes about next of kin that was simply blank.
So I expected me, and a few of the nurses, under a grey sky.
It was not small.
There were more than twenty people at that graveside. Three of them were nurses.
The rest were strangers.
A woman from two counties away who had driven three hours. A man in his sixties who did not speak to anybody. Two young women who stood at the back and left before it finished.
Somebody had brought flowers with a card on them from a florist in a town I have never been to.
That is the detail I keep. Not the phones.
A person somewhere ordered flowers, by phone, for the funeral of a woman they had seen in a photograph on an afternoon in October, and paid a delivery charge, and wrote a card.
I have not been able to find out who and I have stopped trying.
And at least four of them were holding up phones.
They were there because of the photograph.
Because I had posted it.
I stood on that grass in a black coat and watched about twenty people attend the funeral of somebody they had never met.
And what I felt, standing there, was proud.
That is the truth and it lasted about four minutes and I have had two years to look at it.
I looked at a graveside with twenty people at it and I thought: I did that. She would have been so pleased.
It took me until the drive home to work out what I was actually looking at, which is that not one of those people could have told you her name without checking their phone.
Every single one of them was there because of an image that I had put on the internet at twenty past eight on a Tuesday evening.
As the nurses walked back to their cars, a man in a dark suit came over.
He introduced himself as her solicitor. Ferris. Sixty, glasses, a leather case that has clearly been resoled the way shoes are.
He offered his condolences, properly, and then his manner changed.
He said: can we speak somewhere.
And I said I would rather stay where I was, because I did not know that man from anybody and there were twenty strangers on that grass.
I thought he was going to tell me I was in trouble.
That is genuinely what I thought, standing on that grass: solicitor, funeral, envelope — somebody is about to tell me I should not have married a patient.
I had been half waiting for it for eleven days. The hospice had been fine about it and the chaplain had been fine about it and I had still been waiting.
He checked over his shoulder. Then he got hold of my wrist and said it loud enough for a good many of them:
Not here. Not in front of these people.
Nobody moved. Somebody put an order of service down on a chair.
He did not let go. He leaned in and said: please. Not here.
Then he said: I need you to see this.
And then: she didn't choose you by accident.
PART 3
There was no will in that envelope.
There was a file. On me.
Thirty-one pages, in a plastic wallet. A printout of my volunteer registration form. Two photographs I did not know existed, taken in the hospice garden, from a distance, by somebody standing at a window.
Dates. A list of my shifts going back to the previous March. In a different pen from everything else, which means it was added to over time.
There is a note beside the fourth Thursday in the July. It says: good with the Persaud woman.
Mrs Persaud was in the bay opposite. I sat with her twice while her daughter went for a cigarette.
I did not think anybody had noticed and I certainly did not think a woman four beds down with months left was keeping a note of it.
And a photocopy of a death notice from 2014, with my mother's name on it, from a local paper that folded in 2019.
There is a pencil mark next to it. A tick.
