❦ WINNER OF THE RIVETING WRITING CONTEST ❦
OLIVER IS DYING
With only months left to live at just seventeen, Oliver spends his remaining days of endless tests and debilitating drugs in the St. Andrews paediatrics ward planning his impending funeral...
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It's been a month since the doctors broke the news to me and my family that I'm well and truly dying.
It didn't hit me at first. Everything felt like things were going back to normal. I even exceeded the docs' life expectancy expectations of another month, even with my shitty lungs.
I thought I was going to make it. I thought I was going to make it past twenty and spend the next decade painting and stargazing and travelling the world.
To spend the next decade with Nick.
But it wasn't until last week that all that hope was extinguished like blowing out a candle.
Things were going well until I fell in the hallway on my way back to my room from the gardens. I don't know what happened. One minute everything was fine. The next, I couldn't breathe. The coughing got worse and worse until everything got foggy and then went black.
I remember Nick catching me, telling me everything was going to be okay, holding me and stroking my hair. I woke up in my room a couple hours later with the worst case of raw throat, a terrible cough, and plenty of mucus.
Chronic Bronchitis.
There's no doubt about it now.
I'm in the endgame.
And I can't help but feel so guilty about how agonizing that reality is for Nick.
He tries his best not to show it. He tries to act like everything's okay, like the end will never come. He tries to smile through the pain I know he's feeling, not just about me, but his family as well.
We don't really talk about that touchy topic no matter how much I try to get him to open up about it. We do it in stages and at times when he's most comfortable, which is not a lot. But when I am lucky enough to get him to open about everything, it ends in tears. I'm proud of him about that—I'd rather him let it all out in a bawling river than trying to keep it all in like a bottled hurricane.
His father won't speak to him. Nick tried to foster a conversation with him. He tried to explain. He tried to mend the broken bridges and he tried to have some kind of relationship with him. But Richard Beauregard has made his choice. He's made it very clear that, as Nick puts it, he is no longer his son. It was a punch to the gut I could clearly see on Nick's face when he told me; I felt it, even. But he says he's accepted that. He says he'd rather have no father at all than one that would never accept him. It's a lie, but I don't push the issue.
His mother, though, is...She's something else. I don't know how to explain their fragile relationship nowadays. Nick tried reaching out to her. He called her and she'd picked up, but they spoke for no longer than a few minutes before Richard came home. From what Nick has said, he reckons there might be a chance of repairing their relationship, but he doesn't know where to start; Susan is too far under her husband's thumb. Whatever happens with his mother, I'd be by his side through all of it. I'd make sure to be alive for that.
