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Some say that when you die your life flashes before your eyes. The question I always asked in response to that was, How did they know?

Well I'll tell you something now – they're wrong. You do see some memories – bits of the past that you held on to and preserved because they were painful or precious. But they don't whiz past like children on a fairground ride, oh no. They stay. They captivate you, hold you in the moment, each second dragged out and extended, giving you more pain or pleasure than you ever thought could be felt. Each sight sharp with colour and clearer than sunlight on snow. You remember the musky scent that made you shiver every time he was nearby. His hands, rough and calloused from years of honest living. You remember exactly how soft their skin was when you held them in your arms for the first time, and the sound of their laughter years later. The glitter of setting sunlight dancing on the surface of the Pacific coupled with anticipation as he bent to kiss you in the glow of the dying light. Moments that you could never forget if you tried, each one pushing and tumbling over the one before it in the attempt to be re-known. In between all of that – the colours, the sounds the sights, the smells, the taste of the air, there is something else, something constant. Something patiently waiting its turn.

I never got to know what it was. They brought me back too soon.

If you saw me now, you would have no idea that I died that day. There is nothing in my face to suggest so – no otherworldly wisdom in my eyes, no eternal serenity etched into my features.

Instead they tell my children I'm just sleeping. That's why mummy looks so calm and quiet. She's just sleeping.

In the mornings before it happened, they used to run into our room and bounce up and down on the bed to shake us awake. And that's what they continued to do to me until the nurses found out. They had to settle with just shaking my shoulder after that. A while later they were told it was pointless and that they had to stop. They weren't even allowed to kiss me goodnight or goodbye anymore. But what pained me most was when he stopped holding my hand during his visits.

He still talks, still updates me on the ins and outs of his life and how big they're growing. But he never touches me, never even gets close. On a good day, when he reminisces about the 'days before...you know' he may draw up a chair and I can feel him, feel his breath gently blowing my hair, tickling my face. But that's as far as it gets.

It's been too long. But something keeps me here, and I know full well what it is. The desire to be touched. Not the gentle hand of a doctor lifting my eyelids to check my pupils, or a nurse turning me over to wash me. These are all well and good, but they're impersonal. Clinical. There's nothing in them, no affection, no emotion. Please, just one more time, will someone squeeze my hand? Or stroke my hair, my face, my arm? Then finally. Finally I'd be able to find out what was being so patient.