The last message

Sandra Watson

It was Hazel who first emailed me to tell me about Anita having terminal lung cancer. She was 42 years old for god sake and I hadn't even known her as a smoker. How the hell could that happen? Should I phone her now? We hadn't seen other since I'd started working abroad which was over 5 years before but I still considered her one of the special people in my life. I had always known instinctively what Anita was really feeling even though she could fool most of the people, most of the time. In my head I could hear her reassuring people around her that she was OK because that's what she did. Hazel had told me that she was coping remarkably well and seemed to be accepting her diagnosis with a dignified stoicism but was temporarily off work and not in communication with anyone.

Thank god she'd found a good man to be in her life. I'd never met Philip but in the few email exchanges we did have and information from other people, she professed to have met the man of her dreams, finally. They had bought a flat together in Edinburgh and she seemed deliriously happy biking around Scotland at weekends with him. The thought of Anita on the back of a motorbike with a helmet on and the damage that could inflict on perfectly coiffured hair was just too funny for words. I'd regularly give her a hard time about her fastidious grooming schedule.

My first text to her was done with great speed and I really can't really remember what I said. I do remember however, asking if I could phone her to speak to her and that I knew she might not want calls at that moment but that it was I that needed to speak to her. I knew she would listen to that and respond positively. If I told her that it was me who was needy, she would let me phone. I've always been the kind of person that responds forcefully, zealot like in a crisis. I'm sort of possessed with this demonic persistence that propels me straight into the heart of the drama, whether I want to be or not. It's on the day to day things that I'm crap with and visibly wilt, shying away from intimacy and any real conversations. Where on earth did I get that from? This was my time. I could do this and help her through it; I knew I could.

I delighted in the fact that her reply came the day after I sent the text. I was right. She would speak to me. In her text she was very upbeat as predicted and said she was just coming to terms with the news herself but was lucky that she was surrounded with good people and that telling others was the hardest thing to cope with. She hadn't directly mentioned me phoning her but the speed of her reply was very encouraging.

I read and re-read her message carefully before saving the message to my fancy new mobile phone. I knew every piece of communication now would be precious and I would allow myself to savour them at a later date when she was no longer around. I waited till the next day to reply giving myself time to rehearse what I would say and how I was going to respond to what she was telling me.

Emboldened, I again sent a text directly asking her if I could phone and that she was to give me a time that was good for her. I also said casually that I was thinking of coming back to Scotland at Christmas and would love to see her.

What was surprising was my reaction to hearing nothing back from her. Nothing from my second, third or numerous other texts sent after that. I decided not to phone her. She clearly hadn't wanted me to be with her. I can't deny I was disappointed and slightly hurt if I'm honest, but Hazel had told me she wasn't really speaking to anyone but Philip and her family and that her health was deteriorating rapidly.

Even though I had been expecting the email telling me she had died, when it came, it hit hard. I made the decision not to go to her funeral. I hadn't seen her ill, so how on earth would I cope with her dead?

As I sat in a busy restaurant in Hong Kong on the day of her funeral, I couldn't get the thought of her or my memories of her out of my head. I had chosen to go to my favourite restaurant, calculating the time difference so that as her funeral started in Edinburgh, I could be alone with my thoughts. As I was regretting my decision not to go, I looked again at the one text message she had sent me and for some reason, decided for the first time to scroll down other message functions on my not so new, but still complicated phone and found a button that said barred numbers. I pressed it and stared in stunned disbelief when 6 text messages bleeped loudly, one after another in rapid succession, from Anita. The hairs on the back of my arms stood on end. Anita was texting me now? I think I let out a strangled scream after reading just the first two. She had been texting me for months asking me to come over and see her for Christmas then for Easter and my phone had been putting them in this barred messages file. She had been receiving mine but hers were held in limbo in this stupid, ridiculous phone.

That night, I sent Anita a last text message saying goodbye and explaining why I hadn't come to see her and how sorry I was. I should have just taken a chance and phoned her. Who'd have known that I was the one who really needed to speak to her?