Book Club: Complex emotions of living when the one we love the most is about to die

They are married, have moved to Milan and are beginning to settle into their new life together – then husband is diagnosed with a terminal cancer.

It’s serious, but they try to go about their lives as best they can. But while the husband doesn't want to talk about the possibility of death, our narrator wants complete, raw honesty.

In less than a hundred pages, travelling from Milan to Venice to Mexico and back to Milan, Ørstavik uses a very direct first-person voice to address the complex emotions of living when the one we love the most is about to die. After the success of her earlier mother-son novel Love, Sheffield press publish Ti Amo this month and it is available to buy now from all booksellers, including Sheffield's independent bookshops Rhyme and Reason (Hunters Bar) and La Biblioteka (Castlegate).

Extract from Ti Amo

You’ve a pain specialist, a cancer specialist, a consultant and your own GP. I love you, you say, as you come in and sit down beside me on the sofa to eat. Now and then, you close your eyes, fork still in hand, and are gone for a moment, before you snap back again with a jolt and look at me as if you’re afraid I noticed. After eating, you lean back into the sofa and I can see your face has taken on a more jaundiced hue, sicklier than before, I think I remember reading that it means the liver is failing, the cancer cells spreading inside it, but the thought of making a search and reading things through again exhausts me. The average life expectancy after the operation is fifteen to twenty months. We’re at fifteen months now. I don’t want to lose you, I sometimes find myself saying. I can say that, because it’s something I could say before as well. I don’t want to lose you. And tears well in my eyes, and I know that you see them, but we don’t talk about death. You’re not going to lose me, you tell me then. Never, never, never.

But I am already losing you. There’s not much time left. It’s what the cancer specialist said when I asked him, the moment you were out of the room the last time you had your chemo. It was between Christmas and New Year, and the doctor came in to say something to you, only you’d just gone out, I was on my own and finally able to ask without you listening. Can you tell me? I ask. Just me. You mean, how long? Yes. Can you just tell me? And he looks at me, young and handsome with long, dark curls and wide, earnest eyes, in his white coat. He looks like a shepherd boy in the Bible, from meadows outside Bethlehem. A year at the most, he says, no more than that. What does that mean? Three months? Maybe six, he says, but not a year. Not a year? Is that from today? Yes, from today, he says, and I’ve no longer any idea what we’re doing, all I know is that I need to know something, something firm, even if it’s when I can expect you to be dead. I need him to tell me, to give me a straight answer, give it to me, tell me, instead of all this avoidance, this mealy-mouthed pretence. But don’t tell him, the doctor says, and fixes me with his big, brown eyes, stepping closer, standing right in front of me and lowering his voice. He needs hope, something to cling to, he explains in rapid Italian, so fast that all I can do is nod and say, yes, thank you, and a second later he’s gone.

[…]

Not a year left. It’s the day before New Year’s Eve and I’m still standing where I stood when I spoke to the doctor, at the foot of the bed in the little treatment room on the seventh floor of the National Cancer Institute on the Via Venezian, not far from the Piazza Piola, when you come back in, and I look at you and I can’t tell you. And you smile at me, your head so small and odd-looking now, like that of a dithering old family member no one quite knows what to do with any more, you sit down on the edge of the bed, it’s just before noon, we’re waiting for the chemo to arrive so the little bag can be hung up on the stand and the catheter can be inserted into the digital port you’ve had implanted under the skin of your chest, and the infusion can begin. Why can’t they tell you? Why don’t you want to know? You want us to throw a party this New Year’s too. Tomorrow. It’ll be our fourth New Year’s Eve together.

More Information here https://www.andotherstories.org/ti-amo/