Tag: Death

Full of Christmas Fear.

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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.

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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.

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

 

 

 

 

 

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.

My Son, The Asshole.

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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. 

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.