Category: Looking Back and Moving On

Living in a Box.

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Who in their right mind looks forward to cancer treatment? Me. I need a break. I can’t physically find the time to fit everything in, and the idea of lying in a hospital bed waiting to get my cancerous bap sliced open and stuffed with silicone, saline or pig fat is suddenly not without appeal. I’ve come a long way in a few weeks – before, the idea threw me into a blind panic, but I’m so tired, and so ready to accept offers of babysits, dog walks, and help around the house, that I give up. I’ll trade anything – even my left breast – for a good night’s sleep and some time off work and away from the boys, who are in the throes of grief for the third year running. They’re sapping every last scrap of energy I have, and testing my patience to its limits. I adore them, and sympathise, but fuck – it’s hard.

It was all planned quite nicely. As nicely as planning cancer treatment can be, anyway. A few months ago, very soon after my husband had died but before my diagnosis, the boys and I had booked to go to Center Parcs on WAY – Widowed and Young’s annual holiday, as I thought it would be useful for us all to get to know some other bereaved young families. After discussions with the surgeon, we agreed that the boys’ need to meet other like-minded children was probably greater than the risk of postponing the surgery for a couple more weeks. We rescheduled the operation for mid-November – much later than we’d wanted, but the earliest they could find two slots, three weeks apart, for the type of surgery I’m having – and were instructed to go away, relax, and enjoy ourselves. But I hated almost every minute of it.

It wasn’t because of the charity itself, or the lovely, like-minded people I met there, who had similar tales of missing their spouses and a reassuringly heavy obsession with wine. It wasn’t the bicycles or water slides (which my husband would have loved) or the activities on offer – all organised well. It wasn’t the fact that I’d walked into the tail-end of the WAY Hallowe’en party with my wonderful villa mate (whose husband had dropped dead from a cardiac arrest the year before) as the DJ played “Jar of Hearts.” (We wondered if “Stayin’ Alive” or “Living in a Box” had made it onto the playlist earlier.) It wasn’t just that my children had, over the last few weeks, begun to become an angry pair of little shits, petrified of losing me as well as their beloved Daddy, and increasingly more furious with me every time I dared to cry, or to mention how much I missed him. I hated the WAY weekend, simply because it was just too soon for me to accept that I’m a widow.

As we became lost in the stupid bastard forest on our way to some ridiculously bereavement-inappropriate shooting game, I lost it. Completely. The smug twatting non-bereaved families of four, with their little trailers and flags and polka dotted Joules wellies who walked along holding hands as I raced past on my bicycle, screaming at my children that a fucking mastectomy would have been more fun after all, may well have been somewhat bemused, but I couldn’t have given less of a shit if I’d tried. They had what I’d had. They had a happy family, and I didn’t any more. They were probably the sort of people who’d try to helpfully say that I’d “get there eventually,” wherever the fuck “there” is. Where is it? I was there. I had it. All of it. And now I don’t. So, fuck you, and your stupidly jolly chunky knitwear. Just fuck the fuck off.

My husband should have been there. Here. With us. At Center Parcs, or wherever. We shouldn’t have been there just so we could meet other widows and widowers, and identify people who were “just like us” by their trademark blue WAY hoodies. As a family of four, we used to stay in five star hotels in exotic locations and meet people “just like us,” but suddenly a glorified swimming baths in a wood outside Nottingham was where we belonged instead. Had we been there as a family, we’d have loved it, I’m sure. And we should have been there as a family. A whole family. Unfortunately, I didn’t meet anyone as newly qualified into widowhood as me, and found it difficult to see old friends laughing together – people who’d lost their partners years ago, who had begun to rebuild. People who talked about being widowed the way my friends and I might talk about giving birth – never forgetting the life-altering magnitude of the situation, but perhaps more able to discuss it freely without being automatically wrenched straight back into the searing pain of it all. I didn’t resent them – I just couldn’t ever imagine being ready to move on, and these Merry Widows seemed as alien to me as the non-bereaved Chunky Knit Brigade on the outside, playing happy families in their identical little boxes in the woods, wondering what all the blue hoodies were in aid of. A new friend of mine had been asked by a Perfect Family what WAY stood for. She explained, and the inquirers shuffled and turned away.

The veteran WAYers were still widowed, and (mostly) still young, but in a different place from me. Not necessarily a good place – just different. No doubt, they’ll have felt like I did when they first came – in fact, a few people (who picked me up from the floor and wiped away my tears on many occasions over the course of the weekend) said the first time is always awful, and begged me to come back and try again next year. I suppose it’s that slow and horrible acceptance that you’re part of a club that nobody wants to join, and perhaps I’m just not ready to admit that I’m a member yet. For so many, the earth on their partner’s grave had settled, and had given them a more solid foundation upon which to start building new friendships and memories, but my husband’s memory is still so fresh that my heart sinks into the earth every time I think of what we’ve lost. For many old hands, that annual trip to Center Parcs has become an event to treasure, not to dread, and I hope that next year, we’ll have the same positive experience. Maybe Widowed and Young won’t be for me until I really start to accept that I’m widowed. For now, I’m still married. It’s just that my husband isn’t alive any more.

Love Fanny x

 

 

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Happy fucking nuclear families, totally unaware of how lucky they are. Copyright centerparcs.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Positively Mental.

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It’s World Mental Health Day today. And do you know what? I’m happy. I’m not happy because my husband has died, or because I’m about to have my left breast removed. I’m not happy that my children are about to watch me become ill just six months after we’d held their daddy’s lifeless hands and promised we’d love and miss him forever. And we do. We always will. I’m not happy that they saw him go from a healthy, happy man to nothing at all, or that they can only visualise the same thing happening to me (even though the same thing won’t happen to me.) I’m not happy that they can barely remember a Christmas in their short lives where they haven’t had a parent on cancer treatment. I’m not happy that today I can’t stop bloody well crying, for no particular reason, except for those reasons outlined above, which are probably reason enough.

I’m happy because, well – I’m happy. And that’s my husband’s doing. Not because he made me happy, specifically (like most people with a penis, he acted like one a lot of the time,) but because he’d been through years of depression and complicated relationships, sought help, became a different man, and then met me. He encouraged me to get some help. He couldn’t counsel me, because we were married, but he did point me in the right direction and pushed me to do the work myself (which really pissed me off, because a lot of the time I couldn’t be arsed, and was a bit frightened of change.)

I’d been depressed for years. For as long as I could remember. I’d had a relatively difficult childhood and celebrated my sixteenth birthday in a young person’s psychiatric unit following an overdose of paracetamol and barbiturates, having lost three stone in as many months. Nowadays, my main parenting goal is to see my kids celebrate their sixteenth birthday in the local cricket club. You know, like normal people do.

But I did do the work. Not with my husband, but with several different counsellors over several sessions across several years, and I found my way. I screamed at empty chairs, I wrote letters to the people who’d wronged me, I found the answers for myself, and within them I found happiness. I found myself. I got to the stage where, just like my husband, I hadn’t had a wholesale change in personality, but I had completely changed my attitude, and my outlook. I’d become somebody I liked. I’d handle a problem or a conflict head-on, instead of chewing over it and worrying. I became inherently honest instead of making lame excuses. Things still pissed me off, and life wasn’t perfect because life never is, but my husband and I were happy with ourselves and with each other. What other people thought of us was pretty much irrelevant, because we’d stopped caring about that, but we always made an effort to just be kind. Shit still happened, our kids were little bastards a lot of the time, but I wasn’t depressed, and I’m still not. I’m sad. Very, very, very sad. And grieving – partly for that brilliant partnership which was based on truth, openness, understanding, and a LOT of good humour. Achieving that state of mind was a real battle, and I’m proud to say that I won it.

Now, I’m battling cancer, apparently, which is a term that gets right on my tits. Lots of people battle disease, or disability. My husband never gave up, and really did fight his cancer to the end. It got him. It doesn’t mean he failed. He did as much as he could. He couldn’t have tried harder, and seeing inspirational memes on Facebook from people who have “kicked cancer’s arse” or “won the battle” are a little bit hard to swallow for those who didn’t win theirs. It’s not a fucking competition. Nor has any of this been a punishment – he was just bloody unlucky, and I’m slightly less so.

Let me be clear about something. I’m not battling anything. I’m just sitting here, usually with a glass of wine, carrying on with my life, screaming at the children, and wondering when my next appointment is going to be. Yes, I have major wobbles over my forthcoming boob job, but I’m lucky because my sort of cancer is one that they know all about, and if it turns out that I need chemotherapy (still unlikely, but we’ll find out for sure after the first surgery,) I’m fortunate enough to live in the sort of ghastly northern town where badly drawn-on eyebrows and dodgy hairpieces are very much de rigeur, so I’ll fit right in.

Breast cancer, according to pretty much every medical person I’ve spoken to recently, is no big deal any more. They know what they’re doing, and unless it has metastasised, they can usually cure it. Sadly, I know there are exceptions to the rule – and although there are no cast-iron guarantees I’ll survive, I’m fairly sure that I’m more likely to die as I navigate my way to the end of our cul-de-sac, because I drive like a complete wanker. Losing a breast is horrible. Going through any kind of treatment is horrible. But for most women, it’s a blip, and all over and done with in a few months. Hair grows back, but breasts – and I bloody love mine – don’t, but they’re an appendage that every woman can do without, if they have to. Put it this way, no matter how much it’s upsetting me to lose one, if I had a choice between this, MS, Parkinson’s, Motor Neurone, or any so far incurable and debilitating condition, I’d reluctantly choose breast cancer every day of the week. And I’d certainly choose breast cancer over a deep and lingering depression.

When my doctors looked at my scan, and my boobs, and the biopsies they’d taken, they knew what to do. The options might not have been ones that I liked very much (I mean, who wants a mastectomy, radiotherapy, and then the joy of taking Tamoxifen for ten years with all the thrilling side effects that come along for the ride? Not me,) but just because I don’t want them doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have them. I’d be a bit stupid not to, with no surviving parent to bring up our children, and I don’t want to die. They can cure my cancer, and I’m going to let them. They can cure it. They know what to do. Six months from now, in theory, I can move on from this, and while the mental scars will take time to heal, I hope they eventually will.

Mental health is a different beast altogether. Nobody really knows what to do. It’s all trial and error – drugs, talking, therapy, different drugs, crashes to earth – and there aren’t any easy answers. I see close friends who suffer with these silent, invisible illnesses, and I wouldn’t trade places with them for all the tea in the Co-Op. They don’t know how to help themselves, and much of the time it seems that nor does anyone else. Sure, I can give advice, I can listen, and I can hug. But the happiness has to come from within, and finding the end of the string to unravel it all can be a monumental task. Nobody can walk into a psychiatrist’s or counsellor’s office and be told precisely how quickly their cure will come, if it ever does. What works for one person may not work for someone else.

One in eight women will get breast cancer. To the population at large, when it happens, it’s the end of the fucking world. And it is, for a while. I’m not downplaying it – it’s bloody awful. Yet, the majority of us will walk away from our treatment with the rest of our lives ahead of us (if not an intact set of tits,) just as we did before. One in four of us will have mental health problems at some point in our lives, and to the population at large, when that happens, nobody fucking cares. Mental health patients, on the whole, are the ones truly “battling” illness. I’ve been there, and I promise you – it’s so much worse than cancer. Those of us who are fortunate enough to turn up to our appointments and be handed our cure on a plate should spare a thought for those whose cure eludes them. We should count our blessings, because it could all be so much worse than this.

Love Fanny x

Life Ensurance.

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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.

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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

 

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

The Life and Soul of the Party.

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Hey, you!

Yes – you. With the husband.

I can see you sitting there, either with him, or maybe with other friends as he props up the bar with a merry band of dads. I can see your son come up to you and pester you for money for a fizzy drink, and watch as you direct him over to his dad because your handbag is empty, or because you’re deep in conversation with another of the wives, or because he’s just mildly pissing you off anyway because he’s a ghastly, sweaty, overexcited, pre-teen shitbag more interested in sliding along the grass outside than impressing the girls. Or because your daughter is taking her role on the dance floor far too seriously, and you’re quietly thinking to yourself (having spent the first part of this Godforsaken evening watching her apply glitter to her face and being forced to plait her hair,) to calm the fuck down and to stop obsessively doing every bloody dance move because you’re eleven for Christ’s sake and not about to try to get laid. It’s the Year 6 Leavers’ Party at the local golf club, not the bastard Hacienda. And anyway, all the boys are outside and only interested in getting mud on their knees.

You’re being really kind to me, as you always are. You were always happy to offer help while my husband was ill, and I guess I probably owe you. But these days I’m a bit aloof. No longer one of the MILFs. You say hello, and a few people shuffle their chairs along so I can sit down. You’re too polite to say that my make up is smudged, even though one of you saw me in the car having dropped off my own two excited, sweaty, pre-pubescent boys, and seeing that I didn’t follow them in straight away, peered through the window to see my head against the steering wheel, stifling a mental breakdown. Nobody tells anyone else that this happened, of course. Not in front of me, anyway. We all make the right noises about how time passes so quickly and how we never thought the day would come that they’d be leaving primary school. Is yours ready? we ask. Oh, yes! we agree. Little shits, aren’t they? Need a new challenge. Nice kids really, though. It’s been a lovely class.

And then your husband waves at you from the bar and asks you what you want to drink. Oh! And me, too. Yes, I’d love a drink, thanks. I’m getting properly shitfaced tonight, I think to myself.

It’s not your fault, you woman with the husband. He’s lovely, but he wouldn’t have been my type. My husband was fascinating. He never wore a suit. It made him look, and feel, like a twat. He would never have been comfortable in a safe, sensible job like your husband’s, but always respected your husband’s right to his, and liked him very much. Mine was, like your husband, a total pain in the arse at times. But, unlike yours, mine is dead.

He’s not here to see his beloved boys finish primary school. He was there at every open day, assembly, Christmas concert – in fact, if you could gain health and longevity from attending every bastard school event, he’d have outlived the lot of us. Your husband did his best but was often at work selling stuff, or accounting things, or quantity surveying, or whatever it is that he does, but mine was there every damn time. And now he’s not. And it isn’t bloody fair. Not that I wish it was your husband who’d died. Of course I don’t.

Like your marriage, ours had its ups and downs. Like yours, my husband also left his wet towels on the bed, never cleared away his coffee cups, and had an opinion on every fucking thing (whether it had been asked for or not.) He never shut up, or got off Facebook, and he died having apparently never discovered where we keep the Hoover. We didn’t argue often, but when we did it was monumental and one of us would slam the door with a dramatic flourish, although it never stayed shut for long. In fourteen years, we had three nights apart (once, I even booked a room at a Travelodge three miles down the road, because I was pregnant and hormonal, and he was a cunt. But then, by morning – and quite miraculously – he wasn’t.)

We even had a spell of marriage counselling when the boys were toddlers, because we were too pissed off and knackered to go near each other for months. The ethnic skirted counsellor lady was so worthy and unctuous that we almost died of boredom in the session, took the piss out of her in the car all the way home, got into bed, and bonked each other’s brains out. Our marriage was saved that day, but in the most unorthodox way, and we were proud of how hard we’d fought at times to get ourselves back on track. We always did. It was worth fighting for. We loved each other.

I suppose, like yours, ours was just a normal marriage, with its highs and lows, and, like yours, he was just a normal bloke, with all the revolting traits that blokes have – but balanced by fairness, kindness, and a wicked sense of humour to appease me when he needed to.

Before he died, my husband told me that he knew he was leaving his treasured boys in my very capable hands. I wonder if he is watching over us and shaking his celestial head as one kid screams in despair and the other kid holds us hostage in the porch, and if he realises he’s left too soon but it’s a bit fucking late now because he’s already been cremated. And anyway, all this shit has only started since he’s died. I wonder – no, assume – that you’re judging me too. That you think you know how hard it is to be a single mum, because you’ve got friends who are on their own, or because you’ve been there yourself, before your lovely new husband came along. Yes, I’m very bloody single. No, I don’t want a replacement model. My husband’s departure is a bit fucking permanent. He doesn’t pop back at weekends to feed them inappropriate numbers of sweets, or take them to the park while I go for lunch and bitch about what an arse he is. We didn’t choose this. As the boys are busy trying to twat each other over the head, I wonder why my husband doesn’t intervene right now, like he always eventually did. Why he can’t just show me what to do. Tip a whole sky full of white feathers over the boys, for fuck’s sake, if only so they can’t do each other any more harm. He always had all the answers, and just as we need them the most, he’s gone.

So, if you see me over the next few weeks as our kids join in with all the parties and meals and concerts which herald the end of their time at primary school, and you wonder if I’m being a bit monosyllabic (when for years I’d have been the life and soul of any PTA party,) just remember, it’s not me. It’s you. My feelings towards you transcend anger or jealousy, but I wouldn’t wish any of this on my worst enemy, and certainly not on you. Seven years ago, we all began a journey together. For reasons I simply can’t fathom, you and your kids have the privilege of moving on with the one travelling companion my boys and I so desperately wish we had, too.

Love Fanny x

 

First DayFirst Day 2

The Hierarchy of Hell.

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I think we’re all still reeling from the horrific murder of Jo Cox. I know I haven’t stopped thinking about her and her family all week. Regardless of the political or mental health reason, or both, that led to her death, that woman went to work the other day and didn’t come home. Her life was snatched from her in the most brutal of ways, leaving her young family broken.

When I’ve heard of other people who’ve recently died, I’ve tried to assess it in my own mind. I’ll weigh it up and wonder if their family will be grieving more than we are, and even silently ask myself if they have the right to. There’s a part of me that gets a bit pissed off with people banging on about their father-in-law who was a bit of a miserable old bastard anyway, and who sadly passed “unexpectedly.” Unexfuckingspectedly? Oh, do me a favour. He was 87 and smoked and drank all his life, I chunner to myself. Get a grip. My kids’ daddy is dead, I think. They’re ten, you’re 56. Get over it, I think.

But, I know these are the irrational thoughts of a grieving woman who’s trying to make sense of her newfound place in the world, even though she doesn’t yet know where that place is. Of course people are entitled to their grief, but actually, yes – there is a hierarchy. There has to be. Sometimes it can be quantified.

When my husband died, we knew it was coming. It was bloody awful, but he did at least know that he could choose where he died, and who he spent his last days with. He saw the people he wanted to see, and wrote some loving letters to the people he didn’t have the strength to face in person. He said what he needed to say, and heard what he needed to hear. Nothing was left unfinished, and we all knew how much we loved each other. He was grateful to have had a comfortable but too-short existence, and appreciated that his end would come in a warm bed, and not on a battlefield or in a refugee camp. He got seriously pissed off with the rolling news coverage when David Bowie died because – although he’d been a lifelong fan – he didn’t see the death of a sixty-something successful bloke as a “tragedy,” any more than he saw his own demise as one. There was far worse shit going on around the world, he said. It’s bad, we don’t want this to be happening, but it could always be worse.

So, when Jo Cox was gunned down and stabbed the other day, for reasons we don’t yet quite know, of course it was a tragedy. Here was a mother – a mother (and we always consoled ourselves with the idea that a child losing a mother is the ultimate tragedy, after a parent losing a child,) whose children would grow up without her. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Tragically.

When I was 18, one of my best friends was stabbed to death by another friend – his brother-in-law. It happened after a night out, shortly after they’d dropped me home in a taxi and gone back to theirs. The shock of finding out it had happened, and then seeing my darling friend lying lifeless in intensive care – his nose the only identifiable part of his body beneath the tubes – has never left me. I remember screaming. Screaming all the time, for weeks. I would have given anything to have brought him back, to comfort his family, to make everything OK again. It was horrific. I didn’t sleep for months, and I doubt his family did either. I remember those long, desperate nights, unable to breathe because of the sheer shock, and how every year the anniversary of his death threw me into a deep emotional black hole which would take days to climb out of. I ran away to the sun, I came back home, I clung on desperately to an unhappy and controlling relationship, and life was grim for a very long time. Although I have since sought help (with some serious support over the years from my husband,) am generally contented, and now use his anniversary as a day to do something positive – a day I now almost look forward to – not a day goes by when I don’t think about my friend, and remember him. And wish.

Multiply ad infinitum those feelings of shock and desperation, and that’s maybe where Jo Cox’s family are, and the families of anyone whose life is snatched away from them because of someone else’s sheer evil, madness or recklessness. I simply can’t imagine how much more grief it’s possible to bear than that which I endured as a teenager, but my God, it must be so much more painful for them. I only had a friend. Jo Cox’s husband had a wife. Their children had a mother. How much worse can it be than that?

To feel desperately sad that my husband died from cancer is quite understandable. The grief is ever-present, but it’s nothing that can be compared in any way to the shock which follows a murder. Our boys are struggling emotionally, but they had two years to get used to the fact that their daddy might leave them, and to somehow prepare themselves, not that you ever really can. They held his hand as he left us, and promised him they’d be good boys. Jo’s sons probably went to school on Thursday, and before the bell had even sounded for morning break, their mother would have already given them her very last kiss, cuddle and ruffle of the hair.

Is there a hierarchy of hell? Yes. And the Cox family is pretty damned close to the bottom right now, in a place where nobody ever deserves to be. Whatever path our little family’s journey of grief takes us on, Jo Cox’s murder reminds me that we must always be grateful for the chance to have said goodbye, and that one of us simply slipped away quietly, surrounded by love, and at peace.

Love Fanny x

Letter

Part of my husband’s final letter to me – which he wrote about a week before he died. His mind was starting to tire, and he wasn’t sure what to say. I told him he didn’t need to write at all, because he’d said everything already. But, he’d already written to his children, and was determined to do the same for me. I’m so glad he did. Not everyone has this luxury.

Emotional Baggage.

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I’ve been meaning to start writing this blog for months, but you know how it is. Life gets in the way – and I’ve been busy.

Still, as I sat here tonight in my nice, warm, comfy house, I was jolted into action by a Facebook post from a friend of mine who happened to mention this:

The Rucksack Project – Go to charity shops, get a rucksack, sleeping bag, flask (fill with hot soup), spoon, gloves, hat, fleece, undies, socks and extra food, take it out and give it to a homeless person. That’s it. As it says on the Facebook page, it’s really simple, costs very little, and should only take an hour of your time.

It struck a nerve. I’m sitting here in my nice, warm, comfy house, and some people aren’t.

We all see sad stuff on the TV and in the news, and we all think sad thoughts for a moment or two about those poor bastards out on the street in the cold. Then we shrug, wander off, and pour another glass of wine. The reason I was stopped in my tracks is because I could have been one of those people. I guess we all could, but seriously, I nearly was one of those people. Yet, here I am. Gorgeous family. Decent business. Big house. Audi. Seriously – how the very fuck?

I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of it here and now, but I was a very troubled teenager. Nothing a few years of counselling couldn’t eventually sort out, but let’s just say that those in charge of my upbringing made some mistakes which meant (at the time at least) that they were a right set of dickheads. They’re OK now though. We’ve all learned a lot, forgiven each other, and moved on a fair bit.

So, in about 1994, my broken home was no place for a troubled teen, so off I fucked. Thank God for the YWCA. Had it not been for their fantastic hostel in the middle of a rotting council estate at the arse end of the city – which had a space and took in what was left of my thin, broken, anorexic, panicked frame – I would surely have ended up on the streets. I stayed in the hostel for almost a year while I finished my GCSEs, got an education no school could provide, hostel-hopped a little more, and eventually, after some help from the Powers That Be, found and moved into my own flat. While the other residents had all come from a variety of different – troubled – backgrounds, I was known fondly as “the posh one” and it was there I realised that having a smattering of blue blood didn’t make me any better than anyone – especially when you’ve run out of food and the only option is to walk back into town to the soup kitchen and share a polystyrene cupful of warmth with people who really did have it tough. Suddenly, being one of the lucky ones with a roof was all the posh we needed to be. As we sat huddled together at the back of House of Fraser, trying not to notice the winter coat collection adorning the senseless bodies of the stiff, lifeless mannequins in the window, those people who could barely even afford elbow patches were my friends. Good friends.

That winter, a representative from a local superstore turned up at the hostel out of the blue, with a Christmas hamper for all of us, full of winter essentials, as well as a few treats. I’ve never forgotten my sense of astonishment that people who didn’t even KNOW us were prepared to give up their time and money to give an amazing gift to strangers – and the fact that some of us had had a difficult time was immaterial. I’ve never felt more grateful for anything in my life, because it was a gift that didn’t have to be given, and nothing was expected in return. At a time when we desperately needed it, that gift gave us all a sense of worth and the feeling that maybe there were good people out there. I’ll never say that the hamper changed my life (insofar as the contents only kept me going for a few days but didn’t include the tools I needed to completely start from scratch,) but that feeling of somebody caring was enough to make me carry on and fight on through. I’m not even saying that’s why I’ve gone on to make an apparent success of my life, but that gift was certainly a key factor in changing my view of the world – no longer an enemy, but a potential friend.  This is why the Rucksack Project is important, but it’s why any giving is important.

I’m not saying that giving a rucksack full of warmth will change someone’s life forever. It won’t. But that moment of kindness – karma, paying it forward, Christianity, whatever you want to call it – will make somebody’s life a little bit easier, especially over the winter months. It’s for reasons like this that I’m a member of my local church. Not to listen to all the old biddies in the choir bleat on about whether or not they sang the anthem correctly, but because of the worker ants in the congregation helping out at soup kitchens and sending shoeboxes full of loving gifts to places that really need them – thus displaying the true meaning of Christianity, which (in my opinion) is merely about friendship, fellowship and love, rather than some invisible deity (and if He exists at all, by the way, MY God has a bloody good sense of humour and thinks swearing is hilarious.)

When my family and I fill our rucksacks and our shoeboxes, I hope the people who receive them get the same feeling from our little gift as I did from that hamper in 1994. I still have that hamper here – a constant reminder of where I’ve been, and where I’ve yet to go.

Love Fanny x