I’ve been listening avidly to this week’s 15-minute drama on Radio 4 about a man whose wife suffers a brain haemorrhage. Usually I avoid these kind of programmes, particularly on the BBC, because they quickly irritate me in how unrealistic/over-dramatised/or just plain worthy they are. This one is different – it is so well-written and clearly based on someone’s (though maybe not the writer’s) direct experience. I am re-living every moment of Michael’s last few days as I listen – the bafflement, the fear, the absurdity of it all: daily discussions with well-meaning doctors in the ‘bad news room’, fraught with the contradictory desires to clearly understand what is happening and yet not to hear anything awful; the juggling of relationships with friends and family members in their reaction as events unfold. The sheer sense of unreality, of having been abruptly thrown into a parallel universe.

One thing I learned from the first episode, is the extreme unlikeliness that Michael could have recovered from what happened to him. Half of everyone who has an ‘intra-cranial bleed’ dies, and of the half who survive there is only a minute chance of complete recovery. The rest will be left somewhere between ‘able to live independently’ and severely brain-damaged. This comforts me a lot; I think I have always felt guilty (and I know that guilt is part of the landscape of bereavement) that I didn’t somehow fight harder for him to survive, that I too easily let him go – as if it were ever up to me what the outcome would be. I miss him every day and mourn his absence in my life and my son’s, but it would have been far far worse had he lived on without the capacity to be himself in all its weird and magnificent manifestations. A nightmare for him, and the end of our life as we knew it.

The big difference between this drama and our story is that Cath, the wife, does finally wake up from the coma induced after her brain is operated on, which of course Michael didn’t. I haven’t heard the last episode yet, and I suspect the ending will be somewhat upbeat but that’s OK; lucky them.