Lizzie and I are changing the sheets on our bed.
That hardly sounds newsworthy in itself… except these days we don’t change the sheets as often as we used to (when Lizzie was ill) and I’m going to have to come clean (sorry for the pun)… they’re not exactly looking pristinely white.
Maybe I’ve been living in Warwickshire too long, but Hamlet’s words about his mother Queen Gertrude’s bed suddenly pop into my head:
‘The rank sweat of an enseamed bed… the nasty sty.’
Yuck. OK, that description of the Queen’s bed is way too over the top (and Oedipal) to describe our double king size… but, still, we definitely need to change the bed linen more.
Having got halfway through replacing the sheets (forsooth, it’s boring), I pull away the bedside table next to Lizzie’s half of the bed and hoover behind it. It’s dusty and frankly rank.
I’ve noticed that the bed rail Lizzie connected to her side of the bed, in the midst of her cancer, is still there… ten months after she’s been given the all-clear.
‘Shall I remove this?’ I say to Lizzie. I mean, she hardly needs it anymore, does she? She needed the rail when she could barely move, during chemotherapy. But she can move just fine now.
Lizzie screws up her face. ‘But I like having it there!’ she cries.
Lizzie enjoys lying in bed, watching shows like Married at First Sight (Australia), more than pretty much anything else. And if having the rail adds to the overall comfort of this experience, I can understand why she doesn’t want to let it go.
But still… I have a mental image of Lizzie over the next ten, twenty, thirty years… still having her bed rail… until she finally grows to an age appropriate to having such a thing constantly by her side…
Eighty.
Perhaps Lizzie clocks my mild look of pity… even disdain… because she immediately back-pedals.
‘Actually… take it away,’ she sighs, barely hiding her reluctance. ‘I don’t need it, really.’
I shrug… then start pulling the bed rail away from the bed. There’s a flat metal frame attached to the rail at a right angle, to hold it in place, and the frame slowly slides out from where it’s been hiding between mattress and bed base.
The metal support frame keeps coming… and coming… blimey, it’s long. But eventually it finishes sliding out… and bed rail and bed give up their mutual embrace of each other… as Lizzie prepares to give up her embrace of this part of her past.
I glance over at Lizzie. Is this an important moment of closure for her? A symbol of her moving on?
But Lizzie’s far too practical to wallow in sentiment and general navel-gazing like that.
Instead, she’s removing our disgusting pillowcases one by one.
‘These are RANK!’ she sniffs. Like Hamlet’s mother Gertrude might have said, if she’d been a lot more self-aware.
And for those of you who (for some strange reason) want to know what Lizzie’s bed rail actually looks like… here it is.
April 2023
P. D. Clifton 
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