I still can’t believe all that happened

Love and death in the time of Covid

It’s October 2022 and my life feels serene, happy and exciting in most ways. Nevertheless, I feel a heavy sense of emptiness, almost meaninglessness, and I’m a little numb.

Here’s what happened since May 2019 that completely reshaped my world, leaving me in some ways a better man, and in some ways bereft and hollowed out. I hope this account may be helpful to someone experiencing grief, loss or enduring sadness.

In 2019, my youngest brother Simon called from his home in London, together with his wife, Sophia. They sounded subdued, and that was because of the dark news they were about to share. Simon had been diagnosed with progressive bulbar palsy (a form of ALS) and had about a year to live, according to doctors. He was 53 and super healthy, fit and an outrageous athlete.

In the coming months we shared incredible experiences including a Land’s End to London bike ride, with brother Paul and son Freddie, and were joined by many friends for a day or so along the way. We were greeted on arrival at Simon’s home by a couple of hundred friends, cheering us, crying, yet smiling. I went with my beautiful wife Debi to spend a week in Greece with Simon and Sophia and my sister Katherine. That was the last time I saw him.

In October, Debi was taken to hospital with a serious-sounding headache or brain incident. It turned out to be a hemorrhagic stroke, and the bleed was significant enough to surely kill her unless emergency surgery could be done in time to remove skull bone and allow the swelling to happen without further brain trauma. This was done, but the damage to her brain tissue was already extensive. Debi remained in a coma for 9 days and when she regained some level of consciousness it was apparent we were in for a battle to help her back to any kind of decent quality of life. She was paralyzed on her left side, had a 40% vision field cut making her left-side blind, and had lost sensation in most of her left side, not to mention her cognitive and processing skills which were way off baseline. She was discharged from hospital over three months later, still unable to walk unassisted, feed herself or dress herself. I had faced complications as Debi’s sons in young adulthood were floundering, struggling…