The moment I knew: in his hospital bed, he ripped off his oxygen mask and said he loved me

Rhodri and I were alternative music-loving kids in our 20s when we met in Sydney in 2005. Two of my friends had moved into his share house and I was instantly drawn to his well-defined arms and sarcastic humour.

One day we all attended a free local music festival and afterwards I went back to the share house with one of my friends who lived there. She got into an argument with her boyfriend and when they retreated to her bedroom to “make up”, I was left alone in the living room watching a DVD.

Soon after, Rhodri came home from the festival and joined me on the couch. An impassioned discussion about which bands had played best that day slowly escalated into flirty banter then giggling about where my friend and her boyfriend had disappeared to. Emboldened, I asked Rhodri if he wanted to kiss me. He gave me what I would later understand to be the signature Rhodri eyeroll and muttered, “So gratuitous!” But then he smiled and leaned in.

From the start, there was a bit of hesitancy on both our parts: I had recently exited a long-term relationship that had ended poorly and was reluctant to rush into anything serious too soon. But Rhodri appreciated the more intense parts of my personality; he made me see the lighter side of life and laugh like I hadn’t in years. I increasingly looked forward to our late-night conversations, but we spent the next six months doing that thing young people so frequently do: torturing ourselves by trying not to admit how emotionally invested we were.

Then, one day, Rhodri nearly died. He presented to hospital with abdominal pain that turned out to be a ruptured appendix. It was left to me to call his parents and introduce myself, then tell them they needed to make the three-hour drive to Sydney immediately as Rhodri’s situation was dire. The call was awkward, but the urgency clear.

I spent most of the next 24 hours in the hospital waiting room in a state of shared anxiety with Rhodri’s parents and siblings, none of whom I had previously met. It was surreal to watch Rhodri’s facial expressions float across the face of his concerned father. We were all far too worried to make small talk so the long time we spent in the waiting room was quiet and tense.

Rhodri was in surgery for seven hours; his surgeon later said it was the second-worst case of peritonitis he had ever seen. During the surgery he developed septicaemia, which spread to his lungs. When they tried to wake him, he wouldn’t breathe on his own and had to be resuscitated. He was then moved to ICU where the team spent another few hours stabilising him before we were allowed to see him.

He spoke to his parents first, then asked to see me. He looked so pale and sickly. When I approached his bed, he locked eyes with me, pulled off his oxygen mask and, for the first time, told me he loved me. It took me a moment to register what he’d said as I immediately smacked his hand and insisted he put his oxygen mask back on. But then I held both his hands in mine and smiled: “I love you, too.” It was a bolt of clarity after the stress and sleep deprivation of the last 24 hours. All the insecurity about letting him know how I felt melted away.

I’d had a lot of time in the waiting room to think about what a life without Rhodri might be like, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to our laughter and late-night conversations. For Rhodri, his brush with death had given him perspective on what really mattered. That was nearly 20 years ago, and since that time, we’ve been virtually inseparable.

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Many years later I found out it was also the moment Rhodri’s mother knew. Before she left the hospital, she’d had a private word to him. She told Rhodri that after seeing how I dropped everything to be with him in the hospital, she would approve if he ever decided to marry me. It took him another eight years to do so, but we had our celebrant tell this story at our wedding.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if things had gone differently that day in the hospital. Nearly losing Rhodri made me realise I never wanted to let him go.