The Morning I Thought I Might Lose Chris

It was the morning I realised how deeply a shared life can become woven into one’s own, and how fragile everything suddenly feels when its continuity is uncertain.

Chapter 1 — in Lists The Long Road of Love

When Chris lay in that hospital bed in 1999, surrounded by machines and silence, I did not know if he would ever wake again.

The doctors spoke carefully.
Gently.
As doctors do when they are trying not to remove hope entirely.

But hope felt fragile that morning.

After so many years together, I suddenly found myself facing the possibility of life alone.

It is a strange thing to sit beside the person who has shared almost every chapter of your adult life… and realise the story may be nearing its final pages.

Chris had been in a coma for three weeks.

Every day I sat beside him.
Every day I spoke to him.
Every day I wondered if he could still hear my voice somewhere beyond the stillness.

And so I began to write him a letter.

Not because I knew he would read it.

But because I did not know what else to do with everything I was feeling.

When you have loved someone for most of your life, the thought of losing them is not simply sadness.

It is disorientation.

Who are we, without the person who has walked beside us for decades?

Who are we when the witness to our memories is suddenly no longer able to speak?

As I sat beside Chris’s bed, memories came to me in fragments.

A boy in India has a quiet dream about Australia.
A birthday party.
A ridiculous game involving a pile of girls’ shoes.
A bicycle ride.
Three simple sentences that would change everything.

It seemed impossible that all of it could end in this silent hospital room.

I realised then that our story had not begun in the hospital.

It had begun many years earlier.

With a boy.
A girl.
And a future neither of them could have imagined.

This memoir is the story of how that future unfolded.

And how love — quiet, imperfect, enduring love — can carry two people across a lifetime.

Chris had been in a coma for three weeks when I sat down to write him a love letter.

It was autumn in 1999 on the Central Coast of Australia, and a drizzle softened the garden outside my study window in Gosford. Chris had built that garden himself over the years. Every shrub, every flower, every stubborn plant that insisted on surviving through the driest months had passed through his hands.

Rain always made it look brighter.

From my window, I could see the fountain at the centre of the courtyard — a graceful statue of a woman holding a lotus flower, water flowing gently into a bowl at her feet. Chris had placed her there years ago, saying every garden needed a quiet guardian. He named her Virginia.

The birds certainly believed she belonged to them.

Billy, the red wattlebird, was already at the window demanding breakfast — two-minute noodles with cheese. Jack and Jill, the rainbow lorikeets, hovered near the fountain waiting for bread scraps, while Buddy, the white cockatoo, perched on the railing like an impatient landlord, screeching loudly for his seed tray to be filled.

It was Chris’s little kingdom.

And that morning, watching it all unfold as it always had, it was almost impossible to believe that the man who had created it was lying motionless in a hospital bed.

For three weeks, I had walked the same hospital corridor every day, hoping that each morning would be the one when he opened his eyes.

The nurses knew me well by then.

“Good morning, Mrs Roberts,” one of them would say, her smile warm, her eyes carrying a quiet sympathy she didn’t need to explain.

Everyone in that ward knew how close we were to losing him.

For thirty years, we had lived side by side.

Not perfectly — no marriage ever is — but fully.

We argued about small things.
We laughed about even smaller ones.
We built a life that somehow carried us through business failures, heartbreak, and losses I once believed would break us completely.

And now I was sitting beside his hospital bed, wondering whether our story had finally reached its ending.

Chris was never a man of many words.

Once, when I asked him how much he loved me, he paused for a moment, thought very carefully, and then said, quite seriously:

“About one thumbnail.”

That was Chris.

Not poetic.

But completely sincere.

My mother-in-law, Marge, understood us better than anyone.

“When two people argue,” she once told me, “it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other. And when they never argue, it doesn’t mean they do.”

She had a way of seeing things clearly, without dressing them up.

For thirty years, she had been more than a mother-in-law to me. She stood quietly beside us through every rise and fall, never interfering, never judging — simply present in a way that made everything feel steadier.

When she died at seventy-two, I felt as though I had lost the one person who truly understood me.

Now, sitting beside Chris’s bed, holding his hand, her words came back to me.

His breathing was slow and measured.

The machines hummed softly beside him.

Three weeks earlier, he had been full of energy — planning work events, talking about new projects, still driven by the same determination that had carried him halfway across the world when he was only twenty.

And now he lay silent.

A friend once said something to me that came back to mind that day.

“We weave the tapestry of our lives with threads of heart, energy and will.”

Looking at him lying there, I wondered whether his threads had finally reached their end.

I took out a sheet of paper.

And I began to write.

My Dearest Chris,

When you once said, “You are a part of me,” I didn’t reply.

But today I want you to know something.

You are in me.

For thirty years, you have been my husband, my companion, my teacher, my best friend. You stood beside me through every success and every failure. Through the loss of our first child. Through business struggles. Through heartbreak, I never believed I could survive.

You never blamed me for the things life took from us.

You loved me more.

Everything I have learned about courage, loyalty, and resilience, I learned from watching you live your life.

You carried us both for so many years.

Now it is my turn to carry hope for both of us.

Come back to me.

Stephanie

I folded the letter carefully and placed it beside the glass of water on his bedside table.

Then I sat quietly, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest.

Thirty years of marriage.

And in that moment, something became very clear to me.

If you want to understand the man lying in that hospital bed…

You have to go back much further than this.

You have to go back to a boy growing up in India — a boy who once decided, with the absolute certainty only young men possess, that he would travel to the other side of the world.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stop him.

Chris had always been like that.

From the very beginning.

I did not know, sitting beside that hospital bed in 1999, that the memories returning to me would unfold into a story stretching across continents, heartbreak, laughter, risk, and devotion.

Love stories do not begin at the altar.

They begin long before that — in the quiet shaping of two lives moving toward each other.

To understand how Chris and I came to share more than fifty years, we must go back to the beginning.

Back to a boy growing up in India with an impossible dream about a country he had never seen.

Australia.

Continue reading:
Chapter 2 — Chris: The Boy Who Dreamed of Australia (coming next week)

If this story resonates with you, you can continue reading the memoir The Long Road of Love here on Medium, where each chapter is published as it unfolds.

The Long Road of Love — Memoir Series
A true story of love, resilience, and a marriage that unfolds across decades, continents, and life’s unexpected turns.

Begin here:
Chapter 1 — The Morning I Thought I Might Lose Chris

New chapters are added regularly.

You can follow the series by visiting the List:
The Long Road of Love

Thank you for reading, dear friends ღ.

© Stephanie Roberts