She said she just wanted to wear a wedding dress.
She wanted to know what it was to be chosen, even once, before her time ran out.
She said it badly, which is the part that got me.
She did not deliver it. She went red and looked at the window and said about four words too many at the end, and then she said ignore me and asked about my journey in.
A woman who could describe a bus queue for eleven minutes fumbled that sentence.
I have thought about it a great deal since I read that file, and I have arrived somewhere I can live with, which is that a person can plan the shape of a conversation for eleven weeks and still not be able to say the line.
The sentence was prepared. The going red was not.
By then she was one of the people I cared about most in that building, and I am aware of how that sentence reads now and I am leaving it in, because it was true when I thought it.
So I found a simple white gown in a charity shop in town for forty-one pounds, and had it taken in by a woman who would not let me pay her.
I arranged for a chaplain to come in. I asked the nurses. I brought flowers from a supermarket.
It took nine days to organise and I did all of it on my phone in a stock room at work.
The hardest part was the ring, which sounds absurd and which is true. You cannot buy a wedding ring quickly without it looking like a wedding ring you bought quickly.
I found one in the end for eighteen pounds and it is the single best money I have ever spent, and it is buried with her, and I did not put that in the post either.
On the day, she had one of those rare bursts of energy that people in that building get and that nobody can explain properly.
She was able to stand. Right beside me, absolutely radiant.
There is one detail about that afternoon that nobody has ever asked me about and that I now understand completely.
She asked what I was wearing.
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.
