We won the Champions League - I should be happy I guess?

On this day last year I was watching Liverpool win their sixth European Cup. I was sat in a holiday lodge in Somerset watching on my tablet while Roz slept in the bed a few feet away from me. She had driven us down to Somerset that afternoon, was on very strong antibiotics and totally exhausted. Between Saturday and Tuesday, when we left, she probably slept for around forty hours.

Her exhaustion had been brought on by a round of new, supposedly more gentle chemo tablets that caused such an anaemic reaction that it almost killed her. After a week in hospital with two large plasma injections - oil changes as she referred to them - she was able to leave and we were able to go on a small holiday.

So there I was, watching my beloved Liverpool play a sloppy, boring game of football for the greatest prize in the world - a prize they had gotten so close to reaching the year before - and I didn't really care. 

In 2005, after watching the Miracle in Istanbul, I sat in total elation and disbelief in a local pub with a friend and felt the closest I have ever felt to total peace in my life. It seems silly to say something like that about 22 men kicking a ball around some grass but the team I followed almost obsessively achieved something I was unsure would happen again in my lifetime with a new manager and a team that was nowhere near talented enough to pull it off - Djimi Traore is a Champions League winner. Need I say more? The way they achieved it only made it even more unbelievable. So my friend and I sat in dumb silence occasionally looking over to each saying "We won the European Cup" half-expecting the other one to correct us and bring us back to reality.

In 2019 the achievement was met with a smile and a shrug. I remember Roz being upset that I didn't really care. She knew how hard life was for me and desperately wanted me to be happy, even for a brief moment, but I couldn't muster it. I watched the videos on youtube and social media of millions of Liverpool fans partying, of Jordan Henderson collapsing in tears of joy into his father's arms and just thought - I hope you never find yourself in my shoes mate. 

Instead I was in purgatory. I knew Roz was dying but nobody would actually say it. She was deteriorating rapidly before my eyes but I kept trying to convince myself that it was mainly due to the chemo she was on and, if she could only catch a break and build up her strength, then we could see out her final few months in a better place. In fact her depleted body couldn't hold back the cancer anymore and within a fortnight it would have spread throughout her liver, lungs and lymph nodes. I never would have imagined that in 31 days she would be dead.

I wonder if we had been given a terminal diagnosis and timescale whether I could have relaxed and enjoyed it more. I think I might have. We would have been able to inform others and the burden wouldn't only have been on my shoulders.

I guess I'll never really know.