Tash

• Jeanne Neybecker, Grade 8, The French School
• Short Story
• 2017

Finalist in the 'Write Here Write Now 2017' competition

I was a pretty old man but still in a great state. I didn’t need a cane to walk, I didn’t have grey hair yet. At a very young age, I found the girl of my dreams, she was wonderful, beautiful, and she would always make me smile. Her name was Tash. She used to have long black hair but they were a little shorter and in a sort of greyish colour now. I was too shy to tell her I loved her so I waited till I was in my twenties. By then, we knew each other really well. So, when I was in my twenties, I asked her if she would marry me. She told me yes and we got married about a year later.
We lived happily together, but one day, she started becoming really sick. I told her she was going to be fine but I wasn’t sure. She had fever and she was always coughing. After a week like that, we decided to bring her to the hospital. They took her in charge directly and told me that it would maybe take some time. She stayed about a month in the hospital, getting tested, operated... After that long and rough month, she came back to our house but she still needed to take some antibiotics to stop it from happening again.
But after a while, she started becoming sick again. I took her to the hospital as quickly as I could. They gave her some sleeping tablets, before examining her. They told me that she had cancer and that she would probably die soon but I didn’t trust them. Tash was a strong woman. But I was really worried and past the whole night crying, alone.
Each day, I came to visit her. When I came in she would have a big smile; she still had hope, I could tell. And me too. But from the test results, she was getting worse and worse with the time.
After a month, the nurses and doctors told me that she wouldn’t bare the life in the hospital anymore and that we had to take away the tubes helping her to breathe. During all the night, I thought about that and the next morning, I had my opinion: we weren’t going to take the tubes off, even if she couldn’t bare the hospital anymore. I made this choice simply because I loved her and didn’t want her to die, a world without her would be useless. So they listened to me.
The following month, she was so weak she couldn’t even talk. The doctors decided to test something on her, she had one chance out of three to live and two chances out of three to die. I didn’t know what to think about this at that time.
But now I know, it’s been 8 years since that happened and not a single problem occurred, she’s next to me right now, watching me write her story.