My husband's last wish was to be an organ donor — as I was leaving the hospital, his doctor came running after me with something behind his back.
My husband's last wish was to be an organ donor — as I was leaving the hospital, his doctor came running after me with something behind his back.
Emlyn and I married in June of 2015.
We wanted a child from about the second year and it took until the October of 2018.
And on the eleventh of March, 2019, when I was six months gone, Emlyn was diagnosed with a glioblastoma.
They gave him three to four months. He had four months and ten days.
That evening we sat on the back step and he put his hand flat on my stomach and said:
"If I'm still any use when it happens, I want everything donated."
And I said, "Don't talk about dying while she's kicking."
And he said: "That's why I've got to."
And then he looked at my stomach and said: "If I don't get to watch her grow up, somebody else might get longer with theirs."
He went downhill faster than anybody predicted.
By the eighth month I was doing his buttons for him and pretending not to notice when he had to stop halfway to the bathroom and put a hand on the wall.
And from about the end of June, he started asking to see his consultant on his own.
Three times. Each time about forty minutes, with me outside.
And whenever I asked what it was about, he would take my hand and say: "There's something I have to arrange. Trust me on this one."
Emlyn Halloway had never kept one thing from me in eleven years. Not one. And he was completely immovable about it and he was too ill for me to push.
So I let him.
He died on the twenty-first of July, 2019, at twenty past two in the afternoon, in intensive care, with my hand round his.
He was thirty-six.
Our daughter was born nineteen days later.
And afterward I signed the consent.
I want to describe that properly, because I did not know and nobody knows until they are in it.
Being registered is not the end of it. The family are still approached. A specialist nurse sits down with you in a small room and goes through it — and she goes through it individually.
Not "do you consent to donation." Kidneys. Liver. Lungs. Heart. Pancreas. Small bowel. And then the tissue, which is the part nobody is ready for. Corneas. Skin. Bone. Heart valves. Tendons.
Fourteen items and she asked me about each one and I had to say a word out loud fourteen times.
I was thirty-three years old, eight months and eleven days pregnant, and my husband had been dead about five hours.
The nurse was called Delphine Osei and she was extraordinary and none of this is a criticism of her; she was doing the job exactly as it must be done.
I said yes to all of it and I cried onto that form so much that she had to get a second copy.
And then I went to leave.
I got as far as the doors on the ground floor and Dr Tomas Berhane came down that corridor after me at something close to a run.
Fifty-four years old, a consultant, and white in the face.
He had something behind his back.
He said: "Wait. Please."
And then he said: "Emlyn gave me this three weeks ago. He was very clear. You weren't to see it while he was alive."
Eleven pages, in a plastic wallet, in his handwriting.
And I read the first two pages standing in that corridor and I had to sit down on the floor by a vending machine.
Because the first two pages are the list.
All fourteen. Every organ and every tissue, one per line, in his own hand.
Kidneys — yes. Liver — yes. Lungs — yes. Heart — yes.
Corneas — yes. Skin — yes. Bone — yes. Heart valves — yes. Tendons — yes.
Every single one, individually, in his handwriting, signed and dated and witnessed by Dr Berhane and by a ward sister called Mairead Tunney.
And at the bottom of page two there is a paragraph addressed to whoever was going to be in that room.
I know it by heart.
"To the specialist nurse. I have set out my decision on every item above so that it does not have to be set out again. My wife is eight months pregnant. She may be informed of all of it. She is not to be asked to decide any of it. If she is asked, please tell her that I already answered and that this is a copy."
He spent three sessions and the last of what he had working out that his wife was going to be asked fourteen questions in a small room, and trying to make it so that she wasn't.
And I had signed it forty minutes earlier.
Dr Berhane had been in theatre.
He came out at about eight o'clock and was told the family had already been seen, and he went to his office and got the wallet out of his drawer and ran.
Forty minutes.
He did not manage it, and he has apologised to me twice, in 2019 and again in 2021, and both times I have told him the same thing, which is that there is nothing to apologise for.
That document would not have removed the conversation. Legally it cannot; the family discussion happens and it should.
What it would have done is change it completely.
I would have been shown something instead of being asked something.
Delphine Osei would have put a piece of paper in front of me with my husband's handwriting on it and said "he's already done this, I just need you to see it" — and I would have read fourteen lines instead of answering fourteen questions.
Same outcome. Completely different half hour. And it is the half hour that I still have.
Seven years, and it is not the ICU I dream about.
And then there are the other nine pages.
This is the part nobody expects and it is the reason I am writing any of this down.
They are not letters to our daughter.
There is not one letter to Clemency in that wallet and I did not understand that for about four years.
They are instructions for me. For the first year.
Emlyn was a logistics planner for an ambulance trust. He spent eleven years doing contingency planning for a living, and what he did in the last three weeks of his life was a contingency plan for his wife.
Eleven numbered items over four pages, and then the appendices, which are phone numbers.
I am going to give you some of them, because when I have read them out to people they always expect poetry and it is not poetry.
Item one. Ring Aoife at work before you ring anybody else. She has the pension forms started already and she knows. Do not let HR send you the standard pack.
Item two. Cancel the gym. It is on my card and it will keep going and you will find it in eleven months and it will upset you out of all proportion.
He was right. In the June of 2020 I found a charge for something else he had forgotten and I sat on the kitchen floor about it for an hour.
Item four. Boiler service is due November. Wilf Ockley. Number in the back. He does not take card.
Item six. My mother will want to be in the house. Let her come for two hours on a Sunday and not more. This is not unkind. She cannot hold it and she will put it on you and you will not be able to say no in the state you will be in. Say I arranged it. Blame me.
Item seven. There will be a moment, probably around week three, when somebody says something about how brave you are being. You are allowed to leave the room.
And then item nine, which is the one.
***"Nobody is going to be allowed to tell you that you have to feel good about the donation. You do not. It was my idea, it is my business, and you are permitted to hate it. If anybody says the word 'beautiful' to you about it, you have my written permission to walk out."***
He knew.
He knew that for the rest of my life people would tell me it was beautiful, and that I would have to arrange my face, and that I would never once be allowed to say the actual thing, which is that I did not want any of it and I would have preferred a whole husband in a coffin.
And he gave me permission in writing, three weeks before he died, and signed it.
I have used it twice. Once at a christening in 2022 and once at work, and both times I said "I've got written permission for this" and walked out, and both times the person had no idea what I meant.
The recipients.
Four people. A kidney to a man of sixty-one. A liver to a girl of nine. Corneas to two people. Heart valves banked for later use.
Three letters came through the coordinator, in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
I did not open any of them until September of 2022.
Three years. They were in a drawer in the spare room with the elastic band the coordinator had put round them.
And I want to be honest about why, because the honest answer is item nine.
I did not open them because I knew they would be grateful, and I did not want to be grateful back, and I had a written note from my dead husband saying I did not have to be.
So I used it. For three years. On four strangers who had done nothing to me.
I opened them at a kitchen table on the eleventh of September, 2022, and I felt almost nothing, and I have never pretended otherwise.
The one I keep is from the mother of the girl who got the liver.
It is nine lines. It does not mention God and it does not use the word beautiful.
It says her daughter was on the list for fourteen months, that the transplant was on the twenty-second of July, 2019, and that she is now back at school four days a week and doing swimming on a Thursday.
And then it says: "I'm not going to tell you how you should feel about this. I've read that some people find that hard."
A stranger, in 2020, who had no idea, wrote item nine to me without knowing it existed.
That is the only part of the whole donation that has ever reached me, and it took until 2022 for me to read it.
Clemency.
She is seven.
She has never met her father and she never will and there is no version of this where that is all right.
And item eleven is about her, and I got it wrong for five years.
***"Tell her about me when she asks and not before. Don't build her a version. She will want the real one and she will only ever get it from you."***
And I built her a version.
Of course I did. She was two, then three, then four, and she asked, and I gave her a man who was kind and funny and brave and who saved four people's lives, and every word of it was true and all of it was a cartoon.
I did it because the real one is a man who swore at the dishwasher, who was tight with money in a way that annoyed me for eleven years, who did not speak to his own mother properly between 2016 and 2018, and who was frightened for the last six weeks and said so.
And in the November of 2025 she asked me a direct question.
She was six. She said: "Was Daddy scared?"
And I said no. Straight away. Without thinking about it for one second.
And then I went into the kitchen and got that wallet out of the drawer for the first time in four years and read item eleven standing up with the fridge open.
I told her the truth in March, when she was seven, in the car, because that is where that child says everything.
I said yes. I said he was frightened for about six weeks and that he told me so, and that being frightened and being brave are the same thing happening at once and not two different things.
And she said "okay" and asked whether she could have the radio on.
That is what seven does with it. That is fine. That is what he meant.
And the last thing.
Item four.
Boiler service, November, Wilf Ockley, does not take card.
I have rung that man every November for seven years.
He is about seventy now. He comes in November, he does the boiler, he takes cash, he says the same four things about the pressure, and he goes.
He came for the first time in the November of 2019, four months after, when I had a three-month-old and had not been dressed properly in weeks, and he did the boiler and did not say anything about anything and left.
He has no idea that his name and phone number are on page six of an eleven-page document written by a dying man, between an instruction about a gym membership and a paragraph giving his wife permission to walk out of rooms.
He has no idea he is in it at all.
And every November when he goes, I get the wallet out and I look at item four and I tick it, in pencil, in the margin.
Seven ticks.
It is the single most stupid thing I do and I am not going to stop doing it.
Because that man planned his own wife's first year from a hospital bed with a tumour in his head, and he put the boiler in it.
Not a letter. Not a poem. Not something for her to open at eighteen.
May you like
The boiler.
And a phone number, and he does not take card — because Emlyn Halloway knew, in the July of 2019, that in the November his wife would be standing in a kitchen with a newborn and no cash in the house, and he thought that was worth a line.
