Category: Death and Dying

New Seasons and Sick Bowls.

9 Comments

I fucking hate spring. I used to love it. The joy of a new season. The green shoots. The blossom. Daffodils. New life. 

The last few springs have brought new life for our family, but not the one we wanted. In spring, they told my husband that he had a very difficult cancer to cure, but they were going to try. The following spring, they told us he was terminal. The spring after that, he died. Every spring, we’ve walked out of hospital grounds, as daffodils poked through the earth, feeling as though our own earth had been shattered. Spring hasn’t shown us its beauty for years.

This spring, the same pattern begins for me, but most probably with a more positive outcome. I’ll see next spring, and several after that. This spring marks almost a whole year without my husband, and I’m trying to make sense of this first, but surrounded by the same ingredients which took him away from us forever. Ingredients I never thought I’d associate with myself, or with any kind of future, come to that. But in an unusual twist of fate; without them, I may not have one at all.

Sickbowls. Hair clippers. Ondansetron. Epirubicin. Daffodils. Cyclophosphamide. Aprepitant. Palmar Plantar. Metoclopramide. Cannula. Mouth like the bottom of a bastard birdcage. Docetaxel. Constifuckingpation. Flowers. So many beautiful fucking flowers.

Side effects I’d forgotten my husband had had, are now mine. Side effects I’d wanted to forget – because, you know, it was too much to watch from the sidelines – are back in our home in full force. In fact, I think it’s easier for me now than it was then, because I understand it all so much better, and at least I don’t need anyone to hold my hair back when I’m throwing up in the night. I haven’t got any. (Although I still seem to need to shave my bloody legs. Where’s the actual justice?)

Yes, spring is a new beginning, alright. Every year, the start of a new life. A different life. I’ve always been one to embrace change with open arms, but – for fuck’s sake.

My husband and I had a fairly significant age gap, which was rarely a problem because we fell in love with each other’s minds, and the occasional discrepancy in physical stamina was our only real issue. But it did mean that, from an early stage in our relationship, we’d accepted the fact that – should life run its natural course for both of us – I would be left on my own for quite some time. There was never any question, at all, that my husband wanted me to move on, should he die first, and I felt the same about him, should I die early. You know, from cancer or something. We loved each other too much to wish lonely widowhood on the other, although we did often recognise the disappointment that neither of us had had the foresight to marry an octogenarian multimillionaire with a heart condition, instead of the skint and scruffy person we’d actually fallen in love with, 25 years out of sync. (But that was the point. We were in it for love. Nothing more.)

Telling the person you love that you want them to move on, should you die, is easy. It’s actually quite heartwarming, when you’re sitting in the garden, or on a hotel balcony, chatting over a glass of wine, and talking of an imaginary scenario years into the future. You know, when you’re not actually dying. When you’re completely full of life.

When that prospect becomes reality, it is heartbreaking. My husband held my hand, in his final days, in the makeshift hospice of our sitting room, and asked me to see his death as a new beginning. His beautiful blue eyes looked into mine, and he told me he loved me; that he always had, and that he’d be up there, sitting on his cloud, strumming his harp, watching us move forward, with love. He didn’t want to be missing from our future family portraits any more than we wanted him to be, but grudgingly accepted his time to go. All he asked was that, whoever it was, any future husband would be kind to his darling boys. That was a given, though I couldn’t picture a future husband at all.

I can’t imagine being with anyone else. Perhaps, under normal, non-cancerous circumstances, I might have been thinking about a different future by now, as the seeds of new life grow outside our window, because the lack of adult companionship, day in, day out, can be lonely and isolating. Especially now. But in my heart, I’m still married to my husband, and still faithful. Our bedroom hasn’t changed at all – except for the thermometer which has moved from his side of the bed to mine, with the Chemotherapy Hotline number still inscribed upon it in my husband’s hand. He and I are inextricably bound to each other by our children, who fear for a future without their last surviving parent. We’re still bound by those memories of a cycle of treatment which goes on and on. And on. And on. In some ways, these memories help my husband to hold my hand through it all, in the only way he can; from his celestial cloud (with the other hand strumming his harp.) Nobody else could take his place, because this is his place. He holds me through the treatment in my veins. The pills I take every day. The hair falling onto the sheets. The blossom falling from the tree.

He is still with us. Our hopes and our new beginnings are not what we ever imagined them to be, but he is still a part of them. Every spring, and always.

Love Fanny x

With every new spring, new sickbowls appear…

The Only One-Titted Widow in the Village.

14 Comments

Today is World Cancer Day, apparently. A day to raise awareness, though some of us are painfully aware already, thank you very much. I agree with it, in principle. Read their literature and educate yourself. Know the signs. Early detection is key, so don’t be afraid to visit the doctor. As a friend or relative, understand how you can help people who are going through treatment, or are recently bereaved. Avoiding the issue won’t make it go away, and not every cancer is treated with chemotherapy – many cancers are easy to get rid of, and the earlier they’re found, the better. 

My recently bereaved eleven-year-old son has been using cancer to his advantage (and not just by wandering over to the pastoral centre at school every time he wants to get out of a lesson he’s not particularly keen on.) Having realised that my NHS-issue prosthetic boob, even with the stuffing removed, was too big for my bra, he’s been profiting from this problem, and was spotted wielding it at school and charging 5p for a feel. His daddy would be proud of his entrepreneurial spirit in the face of adversity, but would undoubtedly have charged a hell of a lot more. It used to take at least two bottles of wine and a night out to get me to whip my tits out, when they both existed, so 5p seems like a bargain. At the blood donation centre, my husband and I used to snigger every time they asked if either of us had ever paid for sex. We wondered if the Audi or the new coat from Karen Millen counted.

I doubt that anyone will be paying anything to see what’s left of mine now, which is fortunate, because the man who loved them the most is dead, and today – as every day – I fall between two very shitty stools, as a widow with cancer.

On the internet forums, the cancer widows seem pretty quiet about World Cancer Day, and I can’t blame them. They probably feel like I did, when my husband died. Why raise awareness about it now? Why fundraise for research or support? It’s a bit fucking late for us. Cancer Research funded the unit where my husband and I went, week after week, dangled on a string of hope, when there wasn’t any hope at all, and they knew it. I know this now too, because he’s dead. So, instead, we fundraised in his memory for people who would have given anything to trade places with us – to die in a warm bed, safe and surrounded by loved ones, rather than spend their lives shivering in the cold on the streets of Manchester, or fleeing bombs and persecution in war-torn Syria. My husband knew which side his bread was buttered on. He had been lucky. Having said that, I don’t want to die of cancer, any more than he did. Cancer is a horrid and lingering way to go. It’s why, every day, I tell my kids how much I love them; it’s why I’ve written a will, and why I’ve given my important passwords to someone I trust. I’m hoping that an aneurysm will get me instead, many years from now, quite suddenly, but not so suddenly that I haven’t yet got around to throwing away the sex toys that are gathering dust in the back of the wardrobe before the children come across them when they’re sorting out our stuff.

Yet now, as a cancer patient myself, things have changed. Suddenly, I’m grateful for the research into cancer treatment because I know that it will give my children the best hope of keeping one parent alive, even if it didn’t work for the other. I’m not suffering in the way I saw my husband suffer. The pain of the bereavement is worse than the pain in the wound where my left boob and lymph nodes used to be (which is still fucking painful, by the way,) but it isn’t so all-consuming that death would come as a relief. Of course, there are no guarantees that I’ll survive, but there are no guarantees that I’ll make it alive to Sainsbury’s tomorrow either, given the way that some people drive. My surgery results are in, though, my margins are clear, and the chemo I’m about to have is – like most post-op chemos – precautionary. My husband’s wasn’t. His margins weren’t clear, and he endured several rounds of palliative chemo. I probably won’t die, as long as we mop up all those stray cells before they’ve the chance to settle anywhere and grow again, and having hope (I mean, real hope) is something I’m incredibly grateful for. Those impending few months of baldness and nausea are a means to an end, and I’m damn well taking them if that’s all I need to do. I can do six months on chemo. My husband did four times that, on and off, and still worked full time until two weeks before he died.

I don’t feel much of an affinity with the internet widows any more, because I can’t remember how it felt when bereavement was the only worry I had. But, the breast cancer forums are far worse. Oh, fuck me. The Breastapo. They’re all warriors, that lot. By definition, these groups are mainly populated by “survivors” and don’t we know it. The Goddamn memes they post about how they’ve managed to get through something they thought would kill them, and how fucking clever they are. Well done. They – like me – turned up to some appointments and let highly qualified people do what they needed to do to cure their (in many cases eminently curable) cancer. It doesn’t make them brave. It makes them normal. Don’t get me wrong, they did the right thing to go to the doctor, and having cancer is as scary as shit, and I am thrilled that they’re OK – not only for them and their families, but because it gives hope to me and my children that I will be, too. But just as much respect for the people of all shapes and sizes who’ve dressed in pink and limped, waddled or run like gazelles around their local park to raise millions to make sure the research has been done to find a cure. So many of the posts I read are Titty Top Trumps. So how big was your tumour? Just four centimetres? Only three lymph nodes? Amateur. The pats on the back for their survival and bravery are, to a cancer widow with stage three breast cancer, pretty hard to read. And today I realised why. For many of these women, breast cancer is the very worst thing that’s ever happened to them. But it’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. One thing I will say for the widows, nobody tries to make out that their husband or wife is deader than anyone else’s.

It is great that so many people survive. It really is. But less than a year ago, I watched my husband die, and he didn’t bloody well want to. The research isn’t as far on for oesophageal and gastric cancers just yet, and he missed the boat. Yes, it’s reassuring to feel solidarity from people who’ve trodden the path before you. But, going through treatment isn’t actually brave, so for fuck’s sake quit with the high fives and the smug memes. Going through treatment is necessary. Accepting that you need to give up treatment when there’s no more hope at all is what’s actually brave. Choosing a suitable spot to place the bed you’re going to die in is brave. Writing letters to your beloved children, when you’ve only got a few days left, and you’re going to miss most of their entire fucking childhood, is brave. Collecting your husband’s end-of life drugs from the chemist is brave. Agreeing to a DNR is brave. Letting the nurses insert a syringe driver is brave because you know it’ll only be taken out once the vein it’s pumping into has stopped working. Kissing your daddy’s dead bald head is brave, and watching his body being carried out of his beloved home under a fucking blanket when you’re only ten years old is really damn brave. Having to choose what coffin and flowers and funeral songs your husband should have is brave. Signing the form to say they could shove a pipe up his arse and embalm him is brave, as is providing the photograph and the clothes which will help the undertakers to rebuild him into some semblance of normality before they take his body to be burned and ground to ash.

Do you know what’s not brave? Turning up at a hospital as a grown adult with responsibilities, and accepting the drugs which will almost certainly make you better, because – you know – responsibilities.

A friend, and my husband, died from cancer in the last few months. My friend was dismissed over and over when she turned up at her GP with symptoms, and she died. My husband’s GP was his best friend, and gave him the best attention and care that he could, but he still died. Neither could be saved. Those two wonderful people, who were physically strong; who adored and protected their kids, and who were fiercely loving of life and their families, both died – with levels of medical care at both ends of the spectrum. Did they not fight hard enough? Yes, they absolutely did, but sadly their cancers weren’t as treatable as mine.

If you’re lucky enough to be able to post one of these stupid memes on the internet about how strong you are, well done, but don’t forget the ones who can’t post anything, on account of their being too dead. I hope, one day, I’ll be lucky enough to be able to post one, too. But I won’t be posting anything, except gratitude for those who did whatever they could to fund or do the research which made my survival possible, whether they’re strangers running across parks in pink tutus, or friends turning up with sets of hair clippers and comedy wigs to keep the tumour humour alive. But I also hope I’ll never let this year of treatment define me as some sort of warrior. Once the hair grows back and the left tit is stuck back on, I want to move on, buy a new bikini, and barely mention it again. I’ll always advocate early detection, and support friends going through cancer in the future, but I’m so over it.

Some battles can be fought, but this one is indiscriminate. Without any weapons in our arsenal, we’re never going to win, no matter how “bravely” we face the oncoming hordes of bad cells. For now, I remain out of place as the only one-titted young widow in the village, with my husband’s ashes in one hand, and my kids holding tightly to the other. Thanks to all who’ve done their bit to make breast cancer a more survivable illness, I don’t have to free my hands to grab onto a white flag instead. I hope I’ll never have to.

Happy World Cancer Day, to those who are no longer here. We miss you like hell.

Love Fanny x

Just a little amendment to a smug fucking meme. You’re welcome.

The Sphincter of Destiny.

1 Comment

I think we can all agree that 2016 has been the most monumental wank sock of years in recent memory. As the final piece of festive loo roll is wiped across the sphincter of destiny, my heart is ready to break. Unlike the rest of the world, and despite everything that’s happened, I don’t want this year to end. I’m not ready to leave my husband behind. 

This year, I had him – at least, for one third of it. I tell people that he died in April. Soon, he’ll have died last year. Last April. A couple of years ago. A few years ago. With every day, month, or year that passes, he’s slipping further and further away from everybody else. He is, and always will be, a part of 2016. But that’s where his story ends. With every celebrity death this year, we move on to mourn the next, and with alarming frequency. I console myself with the rising death toll, and decide that my husband is in the most wonderful company. I imagine him – having died a few days before Victoria Wood – standing at the Pearly Gates with a wicked grin, a wink, and a rolled-up copy of Woman’s Weekly.

For the boys and me, he hasn’t left us yet. We can’t really accept that he’s gone. Christmas Day with friends was perfect, but for the hours we spent at home it was was fucking awful. I wasn’t expecting it to be, but as the day came around, none of us wanted to celebrate. I’d planned to go to the midnight service at church, but since I always struggle to go up for communion and pass the spot where my husband’s coffin had lain, I figured that doing it on Christmas Eve would be way too much for me to take. I assumed that God would understand, and hoped He’d forgive me for putting on my pyjamas and hitting the Baileys instead. After our younger twin had emptied his stocking and told me that the only thing he wanted for Christmas was his dad (although nonetheless still managing to accept the ruinously expensive guilt-laden presents I’d bought him,) I went into our office, sat on the floor with my husband’s ashes, and sobbed. I wished a merry Christmas to a brown box with his hated Sunday name on it, in a dark green gift bag. When I picked up his remains (a word I hate) back in April, I did wonder why the undertaker had put him in a gift bag, but at least on Christmas Day he looked quite, well, Christmassy. He’d certainly made more of an effort than the rest of us.

The feeling of loss and pain lingered all day, but I’m glad we hadn’t cancelled it. That would have been an admission of defeat, and would have pointlessly intensified our misery. My husband never gave up, and nor will we. We’ve done it now, and next year will be easier, if only because we’ll be able to celebrate my survival, even though celebrating that will always feel wrong. This year, for sure, we can’t yet celebrate anything much at all.

Despite the fact that I don’t want to move forward without him, I am optimistic for the future. I have to be. This time next year, I’ll still be alive, and that wasn’t something my husband could say with any certainty. Instead of tearing my hair out and thinking how the fuck I’m going to manage when I’m ill, I remember my husband’s words to me a few days before he died. He told me to see his death – though neither of us wanted it to happen – as an opportunity. A new beginning, rather than an end. He didn’t want to leave me, or picture me with anyone else, but made it clear that he loved me too much to want me to be on my own forever (but I’m not ready for that, and can’t yet imagine a time when I ever will be.) Those words only confirm to me how remarkable and brave he was, and give me hope that, through losing him, a new door may one day open in the most unexpected of circumstances. But not yet. Knowing that we should begin afresh, and wanting to do so, are two entirely different things. He’s still very much here. His coat still hangs in the hall. His shoes are in the basket by the front door. Our bedroom is still ours, not mine. I realise, too, that those joint parenting decisions now have to be mine alone, and the more time that goes by – the more the boys change and develop – the less I feel I know what he might have said or done. The more I feel that I need to handle them my way, even though I don’t want to have to. In fact, I’m not sure I know how to.

By definition, he has never known his beloved sons while they’ve been truly grieving. He’s never dealt with their anger and tears as I have, these last eight months, and he’s never known me with breast cancer. He wasn’t there to see them finish primary school, or to discover a new country on holiday, or to rant about the world post-Brexit and Trump. He didn’t see the boys begin high school, or watch them score goals on the football pitch this season, nor did he see them perform in the latest show with their drama group. He hasn’t met our new widow or school friends, and those new friends don’t know him. I wonder if these people will ever understand how great the boys’ dad was; how much it matters to us to remember him. I can’t help feeling that these new friends have missed out enormously by not being able to get to know my husband, because he was brilliant, and I hope the boys aren’t difficult to make friends with now, because they’re so mixed up and worried inside, through no fault of their own. Now is the time we all need friends the most, but I don’t want people to know just me on my own. I want them to remember us. To know us. I wonder if, as the years pass, we will change and develop into people that he wouldn’t recognise, or worse – that he wouldn’t love. All we can do is try to keep going; to remember him, to honour him, and to do our best to be as brilliant as him, but without him. And to hope that he approves.

Time telescopes when you’re dying. A day becomes a year, and an hour becomes a lifetime. The only things you really want to say can actually be said in seconds. At some point, though, you have to accept that time cannot stop, and unhook your fingers from the person you love as you let them go. I cannot stop 2017 from coming around. If I could, I’d still be holding my husband’s hand.

Much like the year before it, I can’t help but feel as if 2017 can fuck right off, before it’s even begun. As the rest of the world believes that things can only get better next year, I’m not so sure. We have a whole new mountain to climb, and although my husband’s memory has given me all the tools I need to weather any storm life throws at me, I desperately don’t want to leave him lingering behind me in the foothills as I fight my way to the top. I’ve let him go once before, and I’m not ready to do it again.

Love Fanny x

The final piece of festive loo roll, ready to begin its journey down the toilet of 2016.

Full of Christmas Fear.

2 Comments

Christmas can fuck off this year. Yes, I know what the true meaning is, and it’s not really about fairy lights and presents, but our God hasn’t exactly been my best friend for the last few years. Still, I’m massively overcompensating for the children’s sake by putting fairy lights EVERYWHERE. None of us is really feeling it at all, though, and just want this difficult time of year to be over.  

We often used to go abroad at Christmas. We were self-employed business owners, and those two weeks from Christmas into January (when bugger all business happens) were a sort of enforced holiday with little – if any – money to be made. Neither my husband nor I really liked the over-commercialisation of Christmas, and preferred to use the time to be together as a family, rather than blow hundreds of pounds on gifts. Since my parents are divorced and my husband’s two adult children refuse to speak to each other, it suddenly made perfect sense for us to take ourselves out of the equation, and spend our present budget on heading off to sunnier climes instead. For the last three Christmases, though, this one included, we’ve had to cancel our planned trips abroad, and are staying put at the Costa del Cancer.

Last year, my husband was waiting for news of a clinical trial which could have prolonged his life by several months. This year, I’m waiting for a mastectomy and further treatment, and probably won’t have a reconstructed boob until this time next year, if not later. Christmas has been shit for quite some time now, but I have to remember that it’s not Christmas’s fault. Still, when your husband needs to have scans done and get himself signed up for clinical trials, it’s pretty frustrating to have his life hanging in the balance when the world shuts down. When you know, with all certainty, that the new year you’re meant to be celebrating is the one which will be written on his headstone.

Last year, my husband was told that he’d know by New Year’s Eve which trial drug he’d be getting – the brilliant new one, or the crappy old one – and then at noon on New Year’s Eve the fucking randomisation machine broke down so we had to wait four more days, only to be told he’d got the shit one anyway. The year before that, he’d spent New Year in hospital, with an infection that his chemo-ridden body couldn’t fight off. Christmas Day last year was hard work, too. My husband knew it would be his last, and – with his inimitable good humour – made it clear that presents would be fairly pointless, but seemed to take genuine pleasure in the fact that so many people would have benefited from money donated to various charities on his behalf instead. He cuddled and comforted us on the sofa in the kitchen as the boys and I cried, when it should probably have been the other way round.

And now, to this year. I’m lucky. Firstly, because I found out a couple of weeks ago that my cancer is still contained. It hasn’t spread, and I’m not terminal. So that’s a good, but strange feeling. I’m not celebrating this news, because my husband never could, but I’m pleased to be able to bring up our boys when he didn’t get the chance to finish the parenting job that he loved. I’m lucky because the boys, my Mum, Stepdad, and I have been invited to spend Christmas with dear friends who live up the road – one of whom helped to carry my husband’s coffin into church only eight months ago – and who didn’t want us to be sitting around the same old dining table, but with an empty chair, on Christmas Day. I’m also lucky because people have continued to send us Christmas cards. This may not seem like a big deal, but judging by the posts on the widows’ forums that I read (and yes, there are such things,) bereaved people seem to be forgotten at Christmas. People don’t know what to say, so to avoid the issue, they say nothing.

THIS IS THE WORST FUCKING THING YOU CAN DO.

Did you know, you can actually get bereavement-specific Christmas cards? Nor did I. Well, you can, and we have several. We’ve also had lots of little messages inside ordinary Christmas cards, from people who want to say that it must be hard; that they’re thinking of us. Not all of them know about my diagnosis – they just know that it’s the first Christmas without my husband, and wanted to tell us that he – and we – are in their thoughts. It may have taken them five seconds to write; it may have taken them several attempts to find the right words. I’ll never know. The point is, though, that they took the time to say something. It matters.

We can all feel lonely at Christmas when it seems as if the rest of the world is being swept along by the excitement, the hysteria, and the figgy fucking pudding. It’s probably mainly bollocks anyway, and in the same way that people only put the edited highlights of their shitty mundane lives on Facebook, these “magical Christmases” are usually the same old crap with people they can barely tolerate, filled with gifts they’ll quietly put on eBay next week, but with an extra portion of pigs in blankets. Knowing they’ve still got their awful bloody families, though, when yours has been ripped apart, is still really hard. In my case, I’m petrified of leaving my husband in 2016. While we still live in the same year, I feel he’s still here. When we move forward, I’ll be condemning him to history, and that’s the last thing I want to do.

If you know someone who has been bereaved, either recently or a long time ago, Christmas and New Year will be a bit tough for them. It just will. If you haven’t sent a card, or a Facebook message, or a text, to say that you’re thinking of them – please, just do it. It will mean the world to them. There’s only one thing worse than saying the wrong thing to someone who’s grieving their way through the tinsel and the sparkly wrapping and the fairy lights. And that’s being too afraid to say anything at all.

Love Fanny x

A card from one of our favourite neighbours. A lovely idea to show bereaved families that they’re being remembered at a difficult time of year.

In Praise of My Tits.

14 Comments

I’m quietly proud of this photograph. It was taken on holiday when our boys were about four months old, and I’d asked my husband to get a picture for posterity. It’s never been in the family album, but not because I care if people are offended by a photo of my tits doing the job they were designed for (hell, I’d tandem feed anywhere – once, I even propped up the children against my nipples on the window ledge of an overhead walkway at a service station on the M6, having fed them earlier that day during church communion.) I didn’t give a shit as long as the boys were nourished, but I simply couldn’t bear for anyone to look at the photo and think I’d chosen the hideous fabric on that sofa.

I’ve blurred out my face – not because I’m embarrassed, but because the two little generic-looking blond chaps sucking merrily away on my nipples might be, now that they’re in high school. 

Those boys are growing up to be fine, strapping, strong pains in the backside, and I’m proud of the role my breasts played in getting them there. I can take or leave my face and my arse, but I’ve always liked my boobs. Small, pert, and perfectly formed. My husband was pretty keen on them too, although (following our return from the IVF clinic, full of hope, progesterone and embryos) when my breasts almost immediately ballooned in size, he didn’t complain. In fact, he thought all his Christmases had come at once. Shame for him that I was also spotty, hormonal, sick and sensitive, and for nine months I pushed him away in case he got too close and knocked the babies out of place with his overenthusiastic penis. 

We’ve had some adventures, my tits and I. They’ve been on the front page of our local newspaper, having been signed by an entire cricket team on a drunken night out (and thereafter followed a somewhat embarrassing appeal to find their owner.) They’ve been on full display at a Middle Eastern water park; as the rest of the clientele donned burkinis, my skimpy top flew off half way down a Death Slide, and only a miracle and some makeshift communication in Tourist Semaphore saved me from being arrested. They’ve been bared in clubs when I was too high to care, and later they fed and nurtured our children. I like them. But, one of them has to go. 

It’s been a difficult couple of weeks. The day before I went in for my cancer-removal surgery (in which we were attempting to save my breast,) a friend for a decade – and who I’d used as a fine example to our boys of how breast cancer is NO BIG DEAL ANY MORE – died. Just like that. She’d beaten her cancer 18 months ago – a 9cm tumour, to be exact, so hugely bigger than mine – and had been complaining of stomach cramps for months, yet her GP seemingly hadn’t sent her for any scans or tests. By the time anyone really heard any alarm bells, it was too late. She had three beautiful children. SHE was beautiful, inside and out. Now, at 41, she is dead. None of us can quite take it in. I was choosing mastectomy bras in John Lewis (“would you like the fucking disgusting frilly white one with front fastening popper, Madam, or the ghastly peach one?”) when the call came in from a friend to warn me that she probably wouldn’t last the night. I couldn’t any longer concentrate on the wares within Foul Bra section. I decided to buy the first one I saw and sobbed all the way home.

Her little boy, who had been all the way through nursery and primary school with my two (who, seven months ago had followed their father’s coffin into church and read beautifully at his funeral) helped to carry his mother’s coffin down the aisle of the church, as he said a final farewell. I couldn’t decide if it was wonderful that he was tall enough to do so, or an absolute tragedy. I was glad, but sad for her, that I had “Cancer Lite.” No chemo, just a bit of surgery, and maybe a little radiotherapy. Mine was really no big deal. It was never going to kill me. I felt a bit guilty to even be put in her awful, elite club. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, my little world fell apart, yet again, before I’d even finished rebuilding it. It was 11.50am. The last appointment of the morning. In the absence of a living husband, Team Tits ‘n’ Fanny came to hold my hand. 

I don’t know why I even thought it might be OK. In the past, whenever we’d been into the cancer hospital with my husband, it was always bad news. Good news happens to other people. Not to us. The words would swirl around our heads: The scan wasn’t quite what we thought it might be. The operation results weren’t as positive as we’d said they were. When we said the tumour was all gone, we meant the visible tumour. Sorry, yes, there’s some cancer left in the margin. That means your survival prospects are low, but not outside the realms of possibility. Sorry, yes, it’s in your lungs now. Ah. Sorry. You might have a year. Or so. He actually had ten months, in the end. 

And thus, it came to pass, that it was exactly the fucking same for me. I had my operation. It was a great success. They drew all over my tit in marker pen (disappointingly, it didn’t make the paper this time and nobody bought me a drink,) and, as the tears rolled down my face, they stuck wires into my tumours during a mammogram so the surgeon could find them. They filled my veins full of radioactive fluid, sliced me open, and I woke up with a boob swollen to twice its normal size (and still no husband to enjoy it.) Much to the amusement of Team Tits ‘n’ Fanny, I had a faint blue tinge to my skin and was pissing blue fluid. They called me The Smurf. 

But, ten days on, WHOOPS. We thought it was three little tumours – nice and small, nothing to worry about, yes of course you can go to Center Parcs with the Merry Widows, just have it done when you get back – in fact, it was an eight centimetre tumour, with lymph nodes involved. I keep looking from my tiny tits to the tape measure and wondering where on earth it could have been hiding. Either way, I now definitely need a mastectomy. But first, a bone scan. And a CT scan. Then we’ll know the plan. But there’ll be six months of chemo. Then radiotherapy. They want to know if I’m in pain anywhere else, or if my joints are aching. I said I’m struggling to swallow, but I’ve assured them that it’s probably stress which just so happens to mimic my husband’s oesophageal nightmare. Who knows, though? Nobody is saying that it’s curable any more. Everyone is hedging their bets. I have to wait a week for the scan and another week for the results, and all of a sudden the grim memory has resurfaced of my husband skipping out of the hospital when they’d told him he was terminal, because at least we finally knew what we were dealing with. And I’m glad that I never got around to burying my husband’s ashes, because now I can picture us being shaken up together and placed in the ground with his hilarious idea of a headstone bearing the date of death and the words “Best Before” written above.

I remember what it was like, all of a sudden, for him. And for me. That desperation. Being just that little bit over the edge from “curable” with still a chance to step back to safety, even though falling off would be far easier. That fighting spirit. The Tumour Humour. When we looked around the house at all the changes we’d wanted to make, or had already made, and realised that the shitty bathroom tiles just didn’t fucking matter in the great scheme of things. I remember how I’ve cried buckets this week simply because it had made sense to finally switch off my husband’s computer. How a friend had to remind me that his computer wasn’t actually him (although, it kind of was, he tapped away at the bloody thing so often.) I can’t remember how it felt when grief was the only thing that was bothering me.

All of a sudden, I’m a mortal being. All of a sudden, it doesn’t matter how great my tits are, or what they mean to me, or meant to my husband. I want the left one off. NOW. Let’s not wait. It isn’t an adventure. I’ve cremated my husband and a friend has just died. We are all susceptible to death, and my kids are running out of people to bring them up. I want a hug, and to be told it’ll be OK… but the person to do that has already left before me. I desperately want to see him, to hold him, but not to do so yet, because that would mean leaving our beloved boys. I miss him so much that it aches. My son, meanwhile, sleeps wearing his Daddy’s dressing gown, with an urn full of ashes beside him on the pillow.  

I wonder if it will only be fair when the other twin has my dressing gown and ashes to comfort him, too. I dismiss that thought and vow to give it everything I’ve got. For now, and for many years to come, you can have all the bras you want, but that dressing gown is mine. 

Love Fanny x

The very last photograph of my left boob. Marked up, and ready to go.

Metaphorical Warts.

1 Comment

As I sit at the pool bar, I silently judge the figures of the women who walk past, and assume that the perfectly-formed ones must be as boring as fuck. I shuffle my cellulite between my tailbone and the barstool, and congratulate myself for being fascinating (despite being slightly generously-proportioned in the arse department) with another handful of nuts from the bar, washed down with a swig of the local brew. I wonder if I’ll ever enjoy exercise as much as I enjoy cake and wine.

The boys and I are on our first holiday without my husband. I was wary of taking them to a new place on my own, but in fact, all those trips we took as a family have paid off. They know how airports and hotels work, and (on the whole) how to behave in a foreign country. Apart from my son’s not-so-hilarious prank of changing his iPad home screen to a picture of Osama Bin Laden as we rushed through Frankfurt Airport Security on a quick connection, things have gone reassuringly smoothly so far. We’ve spent a few days by the pool, managed to hire a boat without a man in the family to take control of the entire transaction, and even indulged in a bit of culture (although too much culture usually ends up with a child suffering from some sort of life-threatening illness for which ice cream is the only known cure.) The younger twin tells his new friends that his dad is away on a business trip, which hurts, because it means he’s not yet able to accept the truth. On the other hand, I want people to know that I’m happily married more than I want them to know that I’m widowed. I’m certainly not on the market. I am happily married – it’s just that my husband is dead, which is why he’s not here. Even though he would have been, in a heartbeat. If he still had one.

The body and soul that we fall in love with and marry is not usually identical to the one that we die holding hands with. That’s part of the fun. We all evolve as characters, become more like each other, and kind of chill out a bit once we’ve had a slice of that great libido-killer, wedding cake. My husband and I had pretty much tried to stay the same size over the years, without doing any real exercise, and without quitting the wine, or the chocolate, or anything really. We did have a gym membership, and imagined the weight might melt off in the sauna or jacuzzi, simply because we’d made the effort to turn up. Our quitting smoking coincided with my pregnancy, and although my body changed while I ate for three, my husband raided the fridge every time he craved nicotine. By the time I was ready to give birth, either one of us could have passed for the one carrying twins. He didn’t have the luxury of breastfeeding two babies to ping him back into shape, and although I quickly slipped back into a size ten, he took eight years to really try to lose the weight, because, to be honest, he didn’t really try at all. With 25 years between us, I did recognise that it was easier for me than for him, but his lack of commitment to getting back into shape drove me around the bend. I asked if he wanted to look after his body enough to see his kids grow up. I was only being dramatic – I didn’t actually think he wouldn’t be around to see them grow up – I just wanted him to be a bit slimmer. To prove that he wanted me to find him attractive. To show that it mattered.

About four months before he was diagnosed with cancer, we went through a fairly difficult period. To get back on track, we traded searching for bachelor flats on Rightmove for a Slimming World subscription and a daily sexathon. That was an idea I found here, during a browse of an old Saturday Guardian, and it’s a technique I can highly recommend. I don’t mean flicking through the Guardian will save your marriage. I mean flicking… oh, never mind. Anyway, he lost weight, and so did I. We got on well, we laughed a lot, and we were happy. Not because we both suddenly had fabulous bodies, but because we loved one another enough to at least try to be attractive to each other again, and as extra little kindnesses automatically slipped back into the relationship, the pounds fell away from us both.

I don’t think his losing two stone was the be-all-and-end-all, but at the time, it mattered. I’m embarrassed to admit that now, because just over two years later, all that was left of the slightly unkempt and chunky fellow of before was a bald skeleton with spirit and skin, in his trademark brightly-coloured t-shirt, whose jolliness covered the physical and mental pain behind it.

The body is simply a vehicle for the soul. I didn’t marry my husband’s body. The body I married was a bonus fourteen years ago, but I actually married the laughter. The fascinating ideas. The pisstaking. The generosity. The intellect. The adventures. I also married the morning breath, the stubbornness, and the refusal to ever eat fruit. But they were all part of the package, and the package came within that body, which contained that wonderful, frustrating, hilarious soul. And he married me. Not for my lovely breasts (and they are bloody lovely,) or the bottom I’d never liked, or my dodgy complexion. The whole me.

And that’s why, without him, I’m petrified of having a part of me sliced off – a part he loved.  After his operation, he was embarrassed about his scars, but the boys and I had seen him through the surgery, seen how the scars had saved his life, and were grateful for what they represented. The scars had helped his wonderful soul to keep on going for a year longer than it should have.

My soul will not disappear just yet, as long as a well-qualified person in a white mask with a big fuck-off scalpel cuts off my left breast sometime soon (preferably while I’m asleep.) But, there’s a hole inside my soul – bigger than my C-cups, and even bigger than my husband when he was at his biggest, heaviest and cuddliest. It’s why I’m baffled that I still judge and compare and hate my body, because the heart that beats inside it is as whole and as full and as generous as anyone else’s, and I wish that my husband’s body – in any shape or size – was with us now. I wish that he was here to love my body, as the husbands of those ladies-of-all-shapes-and-sizes around the pool love them; metaphorical warts and all. All I have now is a box of ashes which I can’t bear to let go of and bury in the churchyard. But it doesn’t make me laugh or tell me I’m beautiful, or reassure me that it’ll all be OK, lovely boobs (or lack of) notwithstanding.  On the contrary, it tells me that I’m completely on my own.

If my husband had survived, we’d have laughed about this. We’d have called ourselves the Frankenstein’s Monsters and thrown some sort of Hallowe’en-themed party with extra added gore jokes to celebrate the ridiculousness of it all. But I don’t have my Partner in Pisstaking, and there’s nobody left to reassure me that I’m just fine being me, and to love me because of my flaws (and my soon-to-be bionic breast) not in spite of them. Not for the first time, I’m completely fucking petrified, and I miss him. Every wobbly, opinionated, unshaven, and infuriating last bit of him.

Love Fanny x

fanny-cremated

 

Remaining Buoyant.

3 Comments

I walked into the funny little side room where they’d ushered my friend and me, with the inevitable flowery wallpaper border in an awkward shade of peach, and the strategically placed box of tissues. Different hospital, but the same sort of set-up as it had been last year when they told my husband he was dying. They’re all as cheerless as each other, these rooms. The fact that someone’s tried to jolly them up with imitation flowers makes them all the more depressing, but that’s not the fault of the two ladies who were sitting there in their lanyards, smiling weakly – they’re healthcare professionals, not interior designers, for fuck’s sake. I wondered why there really needed to be two of them for something so routine.

I didn’t know if I should start the conversation with a general grumble about what a waste of NHS resources it is to bring in every bloody patient to discuss their results when a quick chat on the phone should have been enough to say that everything’s fine, but I thought I’d leave that bit for afterwards. I shook my head and apologised for wasting their time, but admitted to being just a little bit paranoid because my husband had died four months ago from cancer. I haven’t actually really accepted that he even had cancer, let alone died from it, I said. Silly, really, but it’s always best to get stuff checked out, I suppose. The pressure’s on to survive, because without me, our kids don’t have anyone left.

Sit down, they said.

So, to backtrack, my husband is dead, our kids are soon starting high school, I’m trying to single-handedly build an empire with the remaining crumbs of our once-thriving business, cook meals, walk the sodding dog, drive the kids to footy, drama and youth club, and we’re about to go on a summer holiday where we finally – for once – forget about cancer (but never Dad,) and start building a new life again, just the three of us.

I’m so excited about this holiday that yesterday I even splashed out on four new bikinis. Unheard of. I’ve had the same three bikinis for the last ten years.

Nobody in my family has ever had cancer, I told the boys the other day when the subject came up again. They’ve been worried for a while that they’ll somehow lose me, too. I don’t speed – ever, I told them. I don’t take unnecessary risks any more. I don’t walk down dark alleyways at night. I drink more wine than I probably ought to, but that’s about it. Who doesn’t? But I’m not going to die, lads. Don’t worry. I’m in rude bloody health, me.

It was the school holidays and I had nobody to watch the boys, so I dragged them along to my appointment and lied and told them I had to go in for a routine test that all ladies over 35 have to have, just to keep our boobies safe, and grinned and smiled and laughed through gritted teeth behind the curtain as they played on their iPads and I had six chunks of my left tit smeared into a Petri dish. Dad’s family is riddled with cancer, I said, but my side – no way. I didn’t want to worry them, or myself. I just knew I had to put my mind at rest and hear that these silly little lumps were as insignificant as I’d imagined.

But they’re not. My friend held my hand as my world fell apart again, and the nice ladies in lanyards told me that I have two tumours in my left breast, which is pretty bloody high achieving of me, actually. They’re still fairly small, and it seems that I did the right thing to alert my GP friend who turned up for a bottle of wine and a grope of my tits just weeks after my husband’s funeral. She wasn’t too concerned, but as a matter of course said she’d send me down to the Breast Unit. I didn’t even know there was such a place. My hubby would have liked to have had the opportunity to accompany me there, I thought.

I shook my head when the nurse asked if I qualified for free prescriptions, and she smiled and said “you do now,” while thrusting a form into my hand with the box I am a cancer patient already ticked.

I have leaflets, and scan appointments, and two booklets with cartoon superheroes fighting bad cartoon cancer cells to give to the boys (one each, so they don’t need to squabble over them.) I don’t yet completely know what the treatment will be. But I do know that I’ll need a mastectomy, and with that it’s curable. I think the timing is shit and my heart is ripped to shreds for our growing boys who have known nothing but a parent with cancer since they were 8 years old and need a fucking break. But, I also know that my husband was given a 16% chance of surviving beyond two years. Conversely, I’ve got about a 16% chance of dying, as long as we act fairly quickly. He fought for two years and several rounds of chemo to stave the fucker off. I know, therefore, that I am lucky, that this is but a brief blip, and that I owe it to him to take those odds, to use them to my advantage, and to not complain. Not too much, anyway. Two years ago, we would have given anything at all for the odds that I find myself blessed with, and it could be so much worse for me right now. Still, so much of me wishes that my husband could be here to hold my hand through this, as I held his, and another part of me is glad that he doesn’t have to, because the news would have crucified him anyway, not least because he’d always admired what he described as my cracking set of baps. It’s always harder for the carer, he said. Well, that’s OK, because mine’s already dead.

This coming holiday, I’m going to wear the fuck out of those four bikinis.  Soon, I’ll have half the number of buoyancy aids that I had before, but I’m damn well going to keep afloat. I’m all that our boys have left to cling on to.

Love Fanny x

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Small, but perfectly formed. And rising back to the surface… eventually.

I wrote this blog on 12th August 2016, the day I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and almost four months after my husband had died from oesophageal cancer. Now that we’re back from our holiday and I’ve told the boys, I can publish this, as they now know the full situation. They are, of course, upset, but understand that it’s completely curable, that my treatment will be nowhere near as gruelling or as long as my husband’s, and that I still plan to keep working, just as he did. With the help of some truly wonderful friends and family who will drag us over these next few hurdles, we remain very lucky indeed.

Life Ensurance.

Leave a comment

A few years ago, I read on Facebook that a woman named Desreen – a beautiful woman, though that’s probably irrelevant – had been knocked over and killed after leaving my auntie’s brother’s house. Her two-year-old son was with her, along with her husband. It’s a loose connection, but because I know and love someone who’d met her personally, I’ve read her husband’s Life As A Widower blog with interest and sympathy, never imagining that one day I’d be widowed too. Although my husband died in much less tragic circumstances, the end result is the same. A dead spouse. A new widow. A child or two to bring up alone, alongside the grief. A whole load of shit to shovel through the tears. I could say the same things to Ben Brooks-Dutton as people say to me. You’re brave. You’re amazing. I don’t know how you do it. And all the while, no doubt, like me, he’ll be grateful for the support, glad that he can release some of the pressure in his head by pouring words onto a page, and he’ll think, but I don’t really have any other choice.

One of Mr Brooks-Dutton’s articles resonated me with me recently, but probably not for the reasons he’d intended it to. It wasn’t long after my husband had died, and I saw that one of his blogs had been shared by WAY – a charity I’d joined fairly early on, for moral support. I was drowning under a pile of probate, trying to work out what the fuck I needed to do with the mortgage and the business, making spreadsheets of what I had to earn in order to survive, and sorting out which car I could afford to keep and which I’d have to sell. My husband had made it all pretty easy – he didn’t really have any savings (apart from the ISA we’d half-heartedly been stashing bits of cash into, in a vague attempt to reduce the mortgage capital when the time came) but he’d written a will and a letter of wishes, and things were as straightforward as they could have been. Nonetheless, it was still a nightmare for a grieving simpleton like me, who’s never really been all that interested in money or investments. We once thought we’d be clever, and invested my husband’s rather pitiful pension with a stockbroker. It was 2008. I probably don’t need to tell you the rest. In my life, I’ve gone from ordinary, to homeless, to comparatively rich, but the amount of cash in my pocket has never really determined how I feel about being me. I’d be lying if I said that losing the house doesn’t concern me, though, especially when we’ve already lost the one thing that money can’t buy. But it’s not everything, because we’ve already lost the one thing that money can’t buy.

Ben Brooks-Dutton had written about the concept of Love Insurance – and why, if you love your family, it’s important to take out an insurance policy to look after them in death as well as in life, as we don’t ever know what’s around the corner. (Actually, even when we’ve known what’s around the corner for two years, we don’t really know at all. We simply turn around and walk in the other direction, until we hit the final wall and it tears us to pieces anyway.)

I totally understand his point. When I was 26 and had just given birth to twins, we took out a policy which would see the mortgage paid off and my husband and boys looked after, should anything happen to me. My husband was older than me, you see. 25 years older (but not in his head.) Taking out insurance in your twenties is cheap, affordable, and something I’d encourage everyone to do as a matter of course. It’s just one of those essential life expenses, even if you don’t yet have a family.

We investigated a joint policy, and baulked (or laughed – I can’t quite remember) when they told us it would cost around £500 per month for a 52-year-old ex-smoker with cancer running through the heart of his family. He did have a few policies anyway, bought to pay off old mortgages from years ago, but they had been due to run out before too long, and having already had two divorces under his belt, his finances had never been quite straight. My husband had been a practically professional smoker for about 30 years. A joint cigarette break on the fire escape at work had brought us together in the first place, so we owed our entire relationship to Marlboro Lights, even though we’d both quit when the boys were on their way.

That £500 per month didn’t seem affordable at the time, and probably wasn’t. We shopped around, couldn’t find it cheaper, and decided not to bother.

My husband was the greatest Fuck-It Merchant on the planet. He wasn’t completely reckless or a total spendthrift (hello, we had an ISA!) but money burned a hole in his pocket. He enjoyed what he had, and loved to share it about. His inherent generosity towards the people he loved was one of the many things I found attractive about him. He never planned to retire, and if he had, at 25 years his junior I’d have been his pension anyway. We’d already decided that we didn’t like the local private school anywhere near as much as we liked the local state school (frankly, we were both a bit too left-wing to seriously consider it,) and justified every holiday with the fact that we would all learn more from seeing the world at first hand than our little boys would, stuck inside an expensive classroom.

That £500 per month (added to the theoretical thousands we were saving on school fees) paid for us to take our little boys all over the world – to the Pyramids of Giza, to tree houses in the national parks of South Africa, via Glastonbury Festival, the Acropolis of Athens, and sleeper trains through Thailand (that one almost ended in divorce.) Our kids have bartered for fake footy kits in Turkey, kayaked along the shores of Lake Garda, swum with turtles in Barbados, and picked out street jewellery in Tunisia. We’ve also done Disneyland at Christmas – I mean, come on. It can’t all be as wholesome as fuck. Our boys have no problem navigating an airport, but show them a bus and they probably won’t even know which side of the road to stand on to catch the bloody thing, but everything in time.

I’m glad that, when he died, I had hundreds of photographs of my husband in places all over the world, standing with his boys. They are smiling, and cuddling, and full of life. Even when he was dying. Especially when he was dying. The pride and love and happiness in that man’s face shines through, as it does in his children’s. I’m glad that we couldn’t choose which single memory summed him up the best, and in the end went for a montage of photographs to use in the order of service at his funeral.

Now that I’m the sole breadwinner, I won’t be stupid with money. I was always the more sensible one, anyway. Without a cushion, it’ll be a bumpy ride, but if those boys aren’t incentive enough to keep our business running now that it’s spluttering along at half the power, I don’t know what is. What would I do if we’d taken out that life insurance and now I didn’t have to work? Sit in our paid-for house and remember all those amazing times when we’d stayed at home, working? Meet friends for coffee? My friends all work full-time anyway. I need a push, and I’ve bloody well got it. I won’t fail. I can’t afford to.

Our age gap is unusual, and every family must do what they need to. I recognise that the sudden death of a young woman like Desreen is completely different from the expected death of a near-retired man, except perhaps inside the heads of the young kids they leave behind. Many young widowed parents and their children can only live as full a life as possible, because they’d taken out cover, and I’m glad Desreen was able to give her family that unwanted but nonetheless useful gift.

We chose life ensurance over life insurance. My husband hasn’t left us destitute – he’s left us with skills, with options, and with few regrets – except for the things we never got around to doing. He hasn’t left our kids with piles of money. He’s left them with the world on a plate, and with enough deposits in their memory banks to make them millionaires.

Love Fanny x

 

Dean Friedman, Domino’s, and Death.

5 Comments

People say “I just CAN’T imagine.” A lot. They say it a lot. I think I’m quite good at hiding what I’m thinking (which is WELL FUCKING TRY) with a shrug and a smile, and a “that’s OK. I hope you never have to,” because I really do. When they inevitably stroke my left arm in solidarity (it’s always the left one,) I let them, even though I don’t really know if I’m supposed to stroke theirs back, because I’m awkward and British, and I’m not entirely sure what stroking my arm will do to aid my husband’s return to life anyway. But it probably makes them feel better, and I’m OK with that. I’m sure I’d do the same if the tables were turned. What in the name of fuck DO you say?

People are really nice. I know they can’t imagine, because I can’t either, and none of this is quite how I thought it would be. It still isn’t.

Following any shitty medical diagnosis, people often describe a “new normal.” It’s not the life we’d planned, but eventually you get to grips with the chemo regimes or hospital appointments or where the best coffee is within a stone’s throw of the treatment centre (don’t go to the canteen – it’s shit,) and you build a new routine around it, or in our case, our entire working week. I remember, when my husband was first diagnosed (when it was curable – OH no it wasn’t!) imagining him about to spend months on end as an in-patient, shrivelled up and bald, when in reality – for the first three cycles at least – life was relatively normal except for the odd bit of retching into a bowl and a Number One on top. We went places, did stuff, and lived our lives. And he carried on working. Self-employed and uninsured, you see.

The difficulty ramped up, slowly but steadily. After the oesophagogastrectomy (or, “the op,” which is less of a mouthful,) he needed more careful handling, but life carried on and the boys got used to seeing him replace his jejunostomy feed at breakfast while they filled their cereal bowls. The feeding tube came out. He went back on chemo. The retching became worse, and he went bald again. He didn’t sleep at night and nor did I, but we carried on. Things got shittier, but we kept going. We kept working. We kept bringing up our kids, and loving each other, and pissing each other off. We kept going for two years, until he stopped.

When my husband was given two weeks to live, he was relieved. He’d thought he had hours. I’d been called in to the hospital urgently, late on a Friday afternoon to “discuss his scan,” and was told that the doctor would stay behind to see me. I asked if I should bring the children, and they said not yet. That was a fairly hefty clue that something was amiss, although it was April Fools’ Day, so there was a glimmer of hope. My husband held my hand. He wiped my tears, and asked me to promise just two things. He wanted to die at home, and he asked me not to let him die alone. I gave him my word.

He then went on to say that a Bag for Life would probably be an unwise investment at that point.

The few days after he came home from hospital, and before he’d lost his mind, we quickly shut down our business. He wouldn’t rest until I’d contacted all our clients with his “permanent non-availability”, as he called it, and sent the invoices out. The fucking invoices. Who gave a shit? He did. He needed to know we could afford to take some time off, so he could relax. And die. It felt as if we were about to go on holiday. In fact, by then, we were on holiday. We were at home, but not working. We ignored the phone. It was, somehow, lovely. We chatted. We held hands. Friends and relatives came over, but knew not to stay too long. He asked for a sign on the front door asking for visitors by appointment only, because the constant ringing of the doorbell was driving him mad, although some people ignored it anyway. I kept that fucker up for weeks after he’d passed. Some people still ignored it.

The day he died, I don’t think I knew he was going to. I don’t honestly think I ever thought he would. A friend had stayed in the spare room so I wouldn’t be alone and frightened on my makeshift bed beside my husband if he started to die in the night. He said good morning to her and asked after her husband, his friend. I don’t know what he said after that, but it was idle, mixed-up chitchat. There were no meaningful last words. He probably vaguely asked for a cuppa. He slept. The hospice came (for the first time, after a fortnight of chasing) to give him some nursing care, and a wash and a fresh t-shirt. They looked after him; he was clean and moisturised, and his teeth were brushed. I suppose, in hindsight, he was ready. I texted the vicar to say that I was worried he had barely moved and didn’t seem well, but didn’t hear back and thought nothing of it. I was too busy sitting by his side and listening to his iPod on shuffle (or “Dad FM” as he preferred to call it) and skipping past any songs he wasn’t keen on. No point in wasting whatever time he had left being forced to listen to shit music.

The boys came home from school; they popped in to say hello, saw Dad was asleep, and wandered back over the road to play with their friend. My husband’s best mate, our GP, called in after surgery to see how things were, as he always did, and said gently that he thought today may be my husband’s last. I put the kettle on and chose not to believe him. He offered to stay the night, but Marie Curie were supposed to be coming to night-sit for the first time, and I thought they could damn well do their bit at last. We returned to the sitting room where my husband was sleeping. His head had fallen to one side and his skin was grey. I thought he’d died, and was devastated that I’d broken the one last promise I’d been determined to keep – that he wouldn’t die alone.

Then, he breathed. I looked up to see our friend in tears, my husband still alive, and our boys out of the house. I didn’t know how long we could expect the breathing to keep going, but I managed to ring the boys and summon them back quickly. None of us really knew what to do, so it was a blessing to have our friend there (who had seen hundreds of deaths but never his best friend’s) as we all made our promises to my hubby and told him how loved he was. One of the boys became agitated about the music still playing on the iPod, and said it was disrespectful. I told him that Daddy loved music and would probably be enjoying listening to it. In fact, it was Dean Friedman’s Lucky Stars. I made a mental note to remember. I wondered if that was an appropriate song for his life to fade out on, but he did like Dean Friedman. He’d seen him play at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago, and the audience had all sung the girl’s part. I remember him telling me. He’d had a great time. Yes. OK, Lucky Stars was a good song, and I supposed the title was apt. Despite everything, he had been very lucky in many ways, I thought, but then an internal monologue of panic began:

It isn’t really about being lucky at all, though, is it? Isn’t it about a breakup? Not sure. It’s a bit inappropriate if it is. Oh, bollocks. Perhaps I should listen more carefully to the words, just in case. Shame it’s not Ariel. He loves Ariel. Maybe I should see if I can quickly find it. Shit, it’s still on shuffle. 8,493 songs, and I haven’t a clue how to use Search on this bastard thing. Does this one end or fade? Thank fuck – yes, it ends. Don’t want to play “fade out roulette” at this fairly critical point in all our lives.

It ended. I quickly pressed Stop, in case Agadoo came on, or the theme tune from Blockbusters. My hands were shaking. Then, we sort of waited. For a very long time – half an hour or more. We weren’t counting. He kept breathing. We kept talking, and promising, and wishing. The breaths came far less frequently. Then, he stopped.

Our boys were brilliant. They kissed their Daddy, and stroked his face, even after he’d died. One went to our home office and came back with my husband’s business card which he placed in his grey, waxy hand. I don’t really know why. He just did what he had to do. My husband was useless at giving out business cards – perhaps that’s why there were so many left. His best friend organised the practical things such as telephoning the undertaker, and letting Marie Curie know not to bother coming after all. He asked a colleague to come and certify the death – something he’d done a hundred times before for other people, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so for his best friend of over 30 years. I don’t know what certifying a death involves, but I’m guessing lifting eyelids and some such, and I wouldn’t have wanted to do that either. My husband had the most beautiful piercing blue eyes that winked and danced, and we loved them, but they would be glassy and empty by now, and we all knew it.

As had been planned the day before, some dear friends came round to take the boys to drama at 6pm, and we realised that time had stood still. The boys were holding their Daddy’s hand at the time we should have been putting the dinner in the oven. Our littlest twin asked if they could have the night off drama and order a Domino’s, and it didn’t seem a lot to ask for a ten year old kid who’d just come back from school to see his beloved father pass away. There were pizza menus and doctors and telephone numbers for undertakers being banded about, and then the vicar turned up full of apologies but he’d been in Wigan all day and only just seen my text message. He was so sorry. He and my husband were friends. He blessed his body and we said a prayer together, even though by then I knew that my husband had long since left the room, and so did he.

The undertakers came, and quietly began to do what they needed to do. I left the room, and started to make phone calls to relatives. There was a list of people in a vague order of importance, and two hungry children, and I needed to keep the conversations short as there were another twenty people yet to ring, but everyone needed a good cry and I didn’t have the heart to rush them. Even after several calls, I’d failed to master the technique. Words like “peaceful” and “blessing” were used as the doorbell kept ringing and the hallway turned into Piccadilly Circus with doctors and undertakers and small boys and friends. I laid the kitchen table. Someone poured me a glass of wine, I think. As my husband was being loaded into the back of the private ambulance, the Domino’s guy crossed paths with him on the driveway. We’d swapped the love of our lives for a large Margarita and a Veggie Volcano.

As the jalapeños burned my cardboard tongue, I walked into the sitting room and stripped my husband’s empty bed. I found his discarded business card on the carpet. I thought, don’t you know who he is?  I loaded the washing machine, just as I always did, several times a day. Life carried on for the rest of us, as it always does, but in a completely new direction. Even now, we’re still picking our way through whatever our new “new normal” is. The only thing that isn’t “normal” is no longer having him here by our side.

Love Fanny x

 

img_5639

Ariel, which I found in his record collection, along with Lydia. But not Lucky Stars.

My Son, The Asshole.

2 Comments

My son, who I love beyond all measure, is being a bit of an asshole. He’s so much like I was as a child – a loud, articulate, attention-seeker extraordinaire, unable to quite know when to stop. Unlike me as a child, he has the added bonus feature of having spent the last two years watching his Daddy die, slowly, right in front of his eyes.

Until D-Day, the dickhead qualities were always visible, but in a fairly endearing way. People would be bowled over by his confidence around adults, and his engaging personality. What he lacked in his twin brother’s fierce academic prowess, he made up for in articulate expression, and we’d always had him marked out as a leader in whichever field he chose to pursue. He was also, most importantly, fairly kind (except to his brother, obviously.) Over the last couple of years, we’d noticed the signs of anger bubbling up inside him, and had had the occasional call from other parents whose child had been on the receiving end of some outburst or other, but it was never that big a deal. People knew me well enough to tell me straight, and never expected anything other than my full attention and an apology, if necessary, from my son. They also knew that the poor kid had a lot to deal with right now, and that all this was a bit out of character. I do not breed Perfect Peters. We deliberately raised our kids to have spirit, to ask questions, and to stand up for themselves (verbally, not violently,) and on the whole I think we had been doing a fairly good job in the face of some monumental challenges, not to mention running a business and working around several 40-mile round trips to the cancer hospital every sodding week.

I’ve always believed that the one favour you can do for your children, and for their peer group, is to be realistic about them. Don’t expect behaviour miracles to come overnight, but also let’s quickly lose the rose-tinted view of how perfect they are, no matter how much effort it took to propel them from your vagina, because I haven’t met a single child in the boys’ class who doesn’t have a strong propensity to be a little shitbag from time to time. Most parent freely admit this with a cynical eye-roll, and usually we laugh and pour each other another gin. A sense of perspective with children is vitally important, and the violent, sanctimonious, immature little fuckers are still learning. They all make mistakes. So do I.

And I feel lost. Completely out of my depth. My wonderful, funny, lively, intelligent son, who is moving up to a lovely CofE high school in September but who still goes to sleep with his thumby in, and who loves nothing more than a cuddle and to rub the tips of his fingers along my fingernails for comfort, tried to throw himself out of his bedroom window yesterday. After he’d trashed the garden. And after he’d raced towards me with a metal spike. And called his brother a twat. (I obviously show huge signs of disapproval at the swearing part, as well as everything else, because parenting is 99% hypocrisy, and anyway, the boys don’t know I write this shit down.) He then made a dramatic exit out of the front door, and I found him 20 minutes later, cowering in a bus stop, sobbing. The amateur psychologist in me – no, wait, let’s not big up my part – the former childhood attention-seeker in me, recognises that none of these things were done seriously, and were all a bit half-hearted. I am pretty confident he was not about to board the next bus into the big city, nor was his bottom ever going to leave that window ledge. But it’s still awful to watch, and worse when you feel powerless to help and are the only adult in authority. But I don’t feel like I am an adult, or in any kind of authority.

Hubby and I were the ultimate team. We never quite intended for it to happen this way after we got married, but before we knew it we were living and working together, and bringing up our two sons completely in tandem. It was so easy to share the load. If he was working, I’d cook, or vice versa. If they were being little bastards, he’d give them a verbal bollocking. We’d both be there at school drop-off, pickup, bathtime, story time, bed time, and he and I just loved parenting them. They were his joy, but like me, he was fully aware of their faults, and would hold up a mirror to them whenever it was necessary.

The bollockings. I never really did them. I wasn’t all that good at discipline, and it didn’t matter because my hubby was there to jump in, snap his fingers, and get things done. I was too soft, and I know I was, but it feels as if now, I’m paying the price.

I went into school. I begged for help. I guess it wasn’t particularly convenient that my husband died a couple of weeks before SATs and now all the teacher wants to do is freewheel to the end of term. But, to give her credit, she’s sent through a referral to Behaviour Support (although she did manage to fill in the form with enough spelling mistakes to make this Grammar Nazi wince, and quietly wonder what the fuck she’s been teaching them all year.)

It’s not her job to be a grief counsellor as well as a teacher. I know that. I’m also told that their behaviour at school is completely normal for their age group and for the time of year. “End of Year Six-itis” was her diagnosis. She said they were all being cocky and difficult little fuckers, or something along those lines. But one child in particular is desperately sad, angry, and so consumed by grief that he’s taking it all out on the people closest to him, and his twin brother is trying so hard to forget his grief that he won’t discuss it at all. I don’t know which is worse – loud-mouthed drama queen, or insular nerd. They’re both as heartbreaking as each other, but the noisy one has my full attention just for now. I don’t know how to throw him a lifebelt when I can’t see one anywhere, but I know I need to get hold of one quickly before he grabs our hands and pulls us all down to the depths with him.

Love Fanny x



My son’s Fathers’ Day card. His twin brother has made one too, but he wants to hide it in his memory box so I haven’t seen it. Neither of them are assholes – just very, very mixed up little boys who want their Daddy back. And so do I.