Today is my wedding anniversary

Mr and Mrs Bedford

Today is my wedding anniversary.  Four years ago today, I married Mr Bedford in a hospital side room, and became Mrs Bedford.  It was a hot, sunny day, all our families crowded into the hospital room in their best clothes and though there was much light and joy, it was also the saddest day.  The groom, Mr Bedford, had six weeks and one day left to live.  We knew he did not have long, but none of us really thought it would be so soon; we must have guessed deep inside though, because of the haste in which we arranged the wedding.  The side room in the hospital was transformed with balloons, an afternoon tea with bone china and dainty cakes, and bunting.  The tiny room had to double up as a registry office and party venue and so I made my vows to dear Mr Bedford with my eye on a lavish cream tea just feet away. It is common knowledge that I love cream teas.  That is why his family, my new in laws, provided it.  

Mr Bedford and I had been together for over eight years.  We thought often about getting married, but never quite got round to it, we somehow managed to evade the seriousness of it.  Of course, we knew we would end up married but every time we tried to think about it, one or other of us decided we needed more time.  Life was full enough as it was, without weddings to think of.  I would have been his third wife, and he would have been my second husband.  We had done it all before, it did not seem terribly urgent.  And, of course, we used to argue like mad.  Are we right for each other? we would think after we had disagreed about the millionth thing that day.  Is this the right person for me?  But there was a bond of deep friendship that could not be overlooked.  Our arguments were always resolved, mostly because Mr Bedford had the courage to address difficulties and insist we talk them over.  I liked to flounce and sulk, which was water off a duck's back to Mr B.  Tell me how you are feeling, he would say, and I learned that it was safe to do so.  Tell me the truth, said Mr Bedford, and I found that he respected my opinion, and took me seriously if I told him whatever truth I had, even if it was hard to hear.  Mr B was a proper grown up.  No amount of pretending I was fine when I was not would fool him.  I learned that it was safe to speak my truth, and that of all people in the world, Mr B would respect it. Even if he did not like it, he would respect it, as long as it was the truth. 

 We were exact opposites to each other, we were so very different that when we could not agree on something, it was like talking to someone from another planet.  But when we were in harmony, due to our deep underlying friendship, we were unstoppable.  He was a detail man.  He liked to read the small print, and he was forensic in his thinking and analysis. He needed to be, he wrote serious case reviews on some dreadful child abuse cases, and his detective skills, his interview techniques, and his ability to research, remember and apply the law was astonishing.  I on the other hand, am a fairy.  I live in a world of imagination, creativity and instinct. I made plans as I went along, I took risks and did not care about rules.  I was extroverted, he was introverted. I looked up at the sky, marvelling at the clouds and space, and he looked down, fascinated by the detail of the stones and pebbles on the path ahead.  We would take each other by the hand and show each other our worlds.  Look!  he would say, at this fascinating detail here on this path, look at all the millions of things to study.  I would point up to the sky.  Look! I would say, at all the space up here, the stars and the clouds, look at all the magic.  

When Mr Bedford became ill, he was stoic.  He had been an NHS man for most of his career, he managed hospitals, he was a trouble shooter when things went wrong, he became a specialist in managing super bugs in hospitals, and spent time trying to improve waiting times in A and E departments all over the country.  But when his health began to deteriorate, no one picked up the symptoms.  It's your heart!  They said, and in fact, it was stage four cancer.  It was picked up in hospital almost by accident.  Mr Bedford, the NHS man, did not fight.  He took his diagnosis on the chin, so to speak, and began to put his affairs in order.  Part of this was to propose to me.  

The tennis champ, refusing to give in.

We went on a tennis holiday just after he knew he had cancer, or rather, I joined him on his tennis holiday because he was beginning to struggle with his energy.  As a dedicated tennis player, he needed to be on the court, as one of the team, and to not give in.  His colleagues cheered him on every time he got up to play, and he displayed his iron will in not letting the exhaustion stop him.  He was a star, they all loved him.  But back in the hotel room, his face grey with the effort, his legs giving way, he lay down and slept where no one could see the toll it was taking.  But he would not give up.  I loved him very much on that holiday.  He was so brave.  He did not complain once.

Alan had cancer.  By the time it was discovered, it was too late.  He tried chemo but it made him so ill that they would not continue.  His decline was very fast. Then, on the 18th of August 2016, from his hospital bed on the ward attached to drips and lines and tubes, after a gruelling operation that did not entirely work, he proposed.  Marry me, he said.  Of course!  I said, and we burst out laughing together, all our differences forgotten and the giddy joy of having finally agreed to get married making us giggle and hold hands.  It is the only time I saw Mr B looking bashful.  

The bashful Mr B.  Engaged at last. 

Alan's delightful family took over from here. Somehow, they made a side room in the hospital into a paradise of colours and festivities.  They organised the whole thing, while I rushed off to arrange the fastest appointment I could with the registry office.  We arranged to be married in three days time.  August the 22, at the hospital.  Yes, the registrar said, we have done urgent weddings at the bedside before, we will be there and all will be well.  I found wedding rings, but had to buy a chain for Alan's ring as his hands and fingers were so large, nothing would fit and we could not wait to order a special wedding ring.  So, he wore his wedding ring on a chain around his neck.  On the day he died, I took it from his neck and wore it myself for months.  We both knew I would do that.

The wedding tea

Oh, on the day, on our wedding day, Alan's brother David got him dressed in the ward with the curtains around the bed.  Everyone on this and the surrounding wards knew he was getting married, it was almost heartbreaking.  They were so happy for him.  Alan wanted to wear a smart shirt and trousers.  Control and dignity were important to him. He wanted to walk into the room, but could barely stand, and so had to accept a wheelchair.  His iron will could no longer keep his body in check.  I tried to wheel him into the wedding room, thinking it would make a brilliant entrance, but I couldn't control the chair.  I kept wheeling him off at right angles into the wall. This annoyed him and we nearly had one of our arguments, but I could not deny that it wasn't very dignified to have him wheeled in backwards with plaster all over his smart clothes.  He asked for me to get a nurse, he didn't want us lurching into the room like drunks, and so a nurse wheeled him in gracefully and everyone cheered.  After we said our vows, he could not keep himself upright in the chair, and was wheeled back to his bed, a married man, while we all stayed and had the cream tea. Mr Bedford found it hard to keep his head raised and his eyes open when we said our vows.  "Look at me!" I said to him, "I will not marry a man who cannot look at me!" and so he did.  He gave one of his little private smiles, and I knew he loved it. 

Later, when everyone had gone home, and I had dropped guests off at the station to get their trains, I went back to his bedside, where I spent the rest of the afternoon in my best dress sitting beside my new husband as he lay motionless and exhausted, holding his hand.  The sun was shining, the balloons and bunting were removed and my new wonderful in laws quietly took everything away so that I did not have to.  I was deeply happy that day, I had married my Mr B, I was Mrs B, and I had gained his family, his most excellent family, as mine too.  I had in laws to boast about, I had a husband to love and to be proud of, and I had a job to do.  The job, we both knew, was to see him out of this life, and to go with him as far as I could, with his brother David and his son Chris.  But that was not today, that was not on the agenda on the 22 August 2016.  That day was my wedding day.  

Six weeks and one day later, on the 23 October 2016, his brother, his son and I held him as he died.  Mr Alan Bedford and I, Mrs Antonia Bedford, had had six weeks and one day of a perfect marriage.

Happy Anniversary Mr B.  Love from Mrs B. 

The wedding afternoon, holding my new husband's hand.

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You're going to die.

Some older zombies 

I know this.  You know this.  We all suspect it, but we don't let it in if we can help it, and quite right.  Once we experience a death we see that life is finite.  How can we stop living, we ask? How on earth can we accept such a thing?  And yet, no matter what we think, say or do, at some point, we will, as my mother used to say, push off.  

Life takes on more meaning once we accept it will end.  It is a strange old journey, life.  Every time we think we have it sussed, something happens and we realise there is more to learn, more to experience, more to do.  Life keeps throwing us curved balls, but we have to keep going.  In amongst the curved balls are times of real happiness too, like when we love someone who loves us back, or when our children are born, or when things go well for us and we can pay our bills or perhaps when our achievements are all that we hoped for.  We plod on, but whatever life we have, and choose, death is the final state.  Death puts life into perspective.  Once we get over the shock that it is real, we can get a grip on our lives and make those decisions, do those things, be that person that we have been putting off.  Our lives are in our hands.  How will we live?  Who will we be?  

No one ever said life was easy. But it is amazing.  It is up to us to make it work, and take risks.  We may not end up with the thing we wished for, but the journey we took to get there will have been a whole lesson in itself.  Realising that we have only so much time can focus us brilliantly on how we are actually living.  It has a way of forcing the issue. I argued with and had a huge dislike of my husband Alan's political views.  It seems that I was locked into being right at all costs and unable to concede an inch.  I understood, after he died and it was too late to tell him, that I did not have to agree with him.  It was not so much that I disliked his politics, it was that I could not be wrong.  As part of my missing him after his death I made myself look at his views, remember what he said, and recall how he behaved in his life.  I also remember his saying that he was once as rigid and uncompromising as me, and that he understood what I felt.  I hated that at the time, but it makes sense now.  He was a lot older than me, and had the gift of being able to change his mind if the arguments were good enough.  The risk for me here was humility.  My husband would never have laughed at me if I had listened to him and changed my mind a bit.  He would have admired me.

Risks.

Probably don't take this risk

We can't avoid risk, things could always go pear shaped, that nice safe job that we took because it didn't ask much of us and stretched out over the years in secure and peaceful anonymity may suddenly tell us we need training in bomb disposal and single armed combat.  That wasn't what we signed up for!  We all know about the risks of being rejected, disliked, got rid of, abandoned, shown up, humiliated, shamed and so on. To some degree, these are present both in the tiniest of things, like making a phone call, to large things, like being shown up in public.  But there is also the risk of things going well.  We may take a risk and succeed with happiness, success, belonging, achievement.  We may fear going to the doctor when we know something is wrong.  When we do take the risk of being told we are in a bad way and we have only months left to live, quite the opposite happens and we not only have a clean bill of health but we marry the doctor.  

I think, as with all things, it all comes back to how well we know ourselves, how much we like ourselves, and how much of our power we have given away.  If I am afraid, my fear is likely to dictate how I act and react.  That may feel like survival.  Everything feels risky and a challenge.  If I decide to take a risk first, and then I feel fear, like working for an exam, an audition, an interview, my fear is part of the process but not the instigator of it.  If I know myself well, if I am self aware, I may make informed choices and understand risks to myself, my work, my surroundings a bit more - I may be able to pick myself up if it does not work out, and not give up completely.  At the moment, I am seeing such huge aversion to risk, real or perceived, that I wonder if we have all lost the plot. 

What are you afraid of?

My friend is a long term cancer survivor, a palliative care nurse, and over sixty.  Over the past few months she has faced hostility for going to work, and returning home.  She is

•  vulnerable because of her cancer long ago, and the complications that are part of her life now    
• working with people who are going to die in the hospice, some of whom are old 
• old herself.

The hostility she has been dealing with is so strangely illogical and so unreasonable that it has left her sad.  The main concern is that by going to work she meets people who are not only elderly, but moribund.  By being outside in the air too, which is so buzzing with a single virus, she is perceived to be carrying with her this single virus that will kill not only her (which she asked for, she shouldn't have gone out), but all the neighbours and those in her village.  She should know better than to put them all at risk by leaving her house to carry on supporting the dying, and herself an elderly cancer survivor too.  The people who are angry with her are safe, well, solvent, and locked into a paranoid self concern.  My friend knows herself well, is unlikely to put herself or anyone else in danger, and does not make unwise decisions where health is concerned.  Over forty years a nurse, she has worked out what is practical and what is not.  She has carried on working and has probably helped some of their relatives and friends die with a friendly hand holding theirs, because not only are they not allowed in to visit, but they darn well wouldn't have gone anyway.  Too dangerous.  Every person for themselves. 

She had dealt with this with grace and courage.  She has begun to ask people what they are afraid of.  It is her belief that they are all afraid of death.

At the moment, I wonder if death is our number one fear.  Our fear of being ill right now is not just about having to rest for a day or two, it is about death.  It is the certainty of death.  We have linked the virus to our own death, and it is coming to get us.  We do not know much about it but we know an awful lot about the risk it poses to us, to our families, and to the whole world.  We know that the risk is too big to manage, and that we are encouraged to be terrified of each other, ourselves, and all known surfaces. 

Our deepest fears of survival are triggered.  I wonder if we are acting from our lizard brain, the oldest part of our brains that governs such things as survival, being territorial, hunger, thirst and habits.  I think our need to survive this one virus has frightened us into a complicit isolation where our safety is so threatened, we have forgotten who we are. I do not blame anyone, the narrative we have is very frightening, and would challenge the most easy going person.  But somehow, underneath it all, is, I think, a fear of death.  As someone I know says, we have lost perspective, we are all OK and we will survive.  And as someone else I know noticed, most people are more afraid of what others think of them if they do not join in the public dance around not getting the virus, than actually getting ill.  I met with a friend a while ago who was delighted to meet me but not where anyone else could see.  No, she said, she wasn't in the least concerned about getting ill, she just did not want anyone to see her and judge her.  So perhaps it is not all about the fear of death, it is about the fear of social disapproval too.  Heavy stuff. 

We are all going to die.

That was quick

When my friend has enough answers to her question, "What are you so afraid of, " I will publish them.  It will be good to see what people say, it will help me understand why we are so lost in our fear. 

Until we do die, we are very much alive.  I looked online to find an alternative view to the narrative on the pandemic, and could not find anything beyond the fact that all those who question it are Brexiteers and climate change deniers.  That made me feel a bit misunderstood.  And so I am back to my main thought.  We are all going to die.  If that is so, and I believe that it is, I am going to take a risk and get on with my life.   I do not see you as a threat.  I do not believe that if you pass me by on the street, in a shop, on a bus, that either of us will fall to our knees and pass away (unless we get shot, or have a heart attack). I am not going to wash my shopping bag if it touches yours, or put my shopping on a sterile mat for a few days before unpacking it.  I will shake your hand if you offer it.  I will hug you if you want it.  When you are fearful and alone, I will come and visit if you ask me.  What are we afraid of?  I am certainly not afraid of you unless you want to hit me over the head.  In our day to day lives, I am not afraid of you, and I am not afraid of this virus.  I am taking the risk and celebrating life. 

I am celebrating my birthday this year with a reggae disco in my garden. I will be dancing to 
the Jolly Boys here, the oldest reggae band in the world. 

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On not conforming, being creative and needing a platform.

Being creative and needing a platform. And not conforming because I booked this theatre slot before I had written the show.  Doing it all backwards.  

A few years ago I narrowed down my whole personality to three points.  They are

• I do not conform
• I am creative
• I need a platform.

Everything about myself is covered by these three explanations.  I was delighted at the time to have discovered my own formula.  What is more, I liked the formula.  I still do like it, and am going to add another that has come to my attention in the last year or so.  A number four.  Here is it is -

• I am a teeny bit rebellious.

I do not conform.

From an early age, having been born a fairy, I was at loggerheads with convention.  It was as if I had an inbuilt alternative agenda which made me look at the world with surprise.  There were rules, and there was a right way of doing things but, they were so obviously not applicable to me that I was

Me as a fairy.  

constantly astonished when I was told off.  Growing up, I was attracted only to the wild, naughty children.  I myself wasn't really one of them, I just thought they had a better way of looking at things and so I tagged along.  I liked how they challenged the rules and seemed to do what they wanted.  Many of them had very difficult home lives, and I did not. I had a lovely family in a nice big house where our dad used to read Dickens to us and Mum made lamb stew with pearl barley from scratch, and we had it in special blue plates inherited from lovely Irish aunts.  I knew many of the naughty children were responding to family difficulties, and sometimes I wished I had a nice alcoholic mum, or a dad in prison or something that would give me a reason to be naughty.  As it was, I simply drifted to the bad kids like a puppy, and thought they were all wonderful.  They all thought I was a hippy.

I always knew I was an artist.  In order to live as an artist, I had to stick to my guns and simply ignore the opposition.  There was plenty of opposition.  Getting a proper job and earning a living was the goal and I was encouraged to think of ways my art could be channelled into something practical and conventional.  I had a go at that from time to time, but it took the light out of me and never worked.  I am an artist and I have to follow a different path, one that allows me to step off it and experience life from outside.  Of course this freedom also enabled me to make appalling decisions and make a complete pig's ear of my life but, I survived.  And now, it is all worth while.  I am an artist, I am an artist extraordinaire, and I still have no intention of conforming.  (But I am very nice and well behaved, you don't always know I am not conforming until later when you think about it.)

I am creative

Being creative is not enough.  We need to express it.  People who either say they are not creative or who are ignoring their creativity fear that it is a messy business.  They fear it means getting covered in mess, in paints, in feathers, staying up all night chasing the muse, and dressing badly.  It is a challenge, a problem, and causes upheaval. It is about going outside our comfort zone. Once we understand that creativity is just about expressing ourselves, the pressure is off.  It does not have to be anything we don't want it to be, but it does need us to stop judging it, and just play.  And actually, it is quite safe to play and get a bit messy.

I am creative.  It isn't just about painting, or writing, though those are excellent ways of expressing myself.  It is about enjoying colour, putting lights and little statues in my garden, it is about wearing pink and matching it with pink earrings and lipstick.  It is about sitting and making sure everything in my line of sight is beautiful, it is about cooking all the things left over in the fridge, and tying my recently late father's shoe to his grandfather clock in my house, as a memorial to him.   

My creativity does not always wait for inspiration.  Sometimes, I let ideas work themselves out for a while but as it is me who will use them, I am proactive and at some point start work and enter into the unknown, the creative process, whether ready or not.  My creativity does not sit outside me, and I wait for it to show up so I can try and use it.  It lives inside me, it is me, and so I have access to it day and night.  It does not have to be perfect, it rarely is anything like perfect, but it will do.  I know I can use it and it's very nice to be such friends with it.  I will just add here that it gets better with practice.  I have to work for the finished product, it doesn't just happen as if I have no part in it.  I work very hard for my results, and that is part of the process.  If it goes well, then creativity and I have done well.  If it doesn't go well, it does not matter.  I will try something else, and have a cup of tea.

I need a platform

I do need a platform.  Oh I absolutely do.  What is the point, I say, of me painting and writing and thinking the way I do without you all knowing about it.  I am not a shy and retiring artist, I like to launch my stuff into the world and wait for you all to tell me how wonderful it all is.  Of course, that is not a given, you may hate what I do and wish me to get a proper job and a sense of propriety.  It does not stop me writing, painting and making videos though.  Here I go, lobbing You Tube videos at you, inviting you to exhibitions, writing books and blogs and, of course, creating daily Instagram and Facebook stories of my life.  

Speaking at an end of life conference.
Sounds like none of us left the
building after the conference, doesn't it?  

The platform I seek though is not simply about my work being seen and read.  That would be nice but, I am motivated by a great deal more than that.  How do we look at, articulate and explore difficult things?  There are times when we need to be challenged, inspired, comforted, entertained, reminded, or encouraged. I use my creativity to explore how we deal with death and dying and recently, how we cope with addiction; those are my difficult things.  I explore and share my experiences and I need, use and have platforms to reach as many people as I can.  I am compelled to do this, and to keep the things I talk about and paint authentic and truthful.  Using platforms to put my work out into the world is a good way of keeping myself in check.  There is nothing more sobering than the opinions of all the people out there who have access to what I do.  The platform I seek is a relationship with everyone who comes across my work and who may resonate with the experiences and stories I use.  It is not a "me and you" thing, it is a "we and us" thing.

A teeny bit of rebellion

This has evolved as I get older.  I have noticed other older people simply not doing things they don't believe in.  My Irish grandmother, a small lady, would wear my very tall grandfather's huge overcoat when coming back from a visit from Ireland to the UK.  She would stuff the pockets with ham, whiskey, sausages and beer and clink her way through customs with some of her seven children.  Just before customs she would clip one of the children around the ear and the resulting chaos would mean she would get past customs without being checked.  Another time, when my boys were about six and nine, my mother smuggled them into France on a pilgrimage bus bound for Lourdes.  She hadn't time to get them passports.  Leave it to me, she said.  The arch bishop was on that bus, and mother shoved my boys behind him as he walked past customs, saying that they were with the bishop.  They got in.  The bishop had no idea he led two little boys into France illegally on his way to a holy pilgrimage to Lourdes, where Saint Bernadette saw and spoke to the Virgin Mary.  

And now I am on my way to the same kind of behaviour.  I can't give you examples because I will possibly get into trouble, but in each case I believe common sense and humanity has triumphed over silly rules and face saving protocol.  There.  That's a bit of rebellion for the common good, but I have yet to smuggle legs of lamb and children across borders.  

Not my actual grandmother but same approach to life.

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As Mother Lay Dying, the book.

My book will be available on YouTube chapter by chapter.  More below.

RIP Vanessa's Dad.

Vanessa, my PA who helps me with my newsletter and so much more besides, lost her father two

Vanessa's mum and dad on
their wedding day in 1967

days ago.  For this reason, there is no newsletter on Tuesday.  

Vanessa moved into her parents' house at the beginning of lock down to work, help look after her father and to support her mother.  I do not know the family, but I do know that her parents were married for a very long time and that the whole family is close and loving.  Vanessa's father died peacefully the day before yesterday as I write this, and, I think, quite quickly, with Vanessa and her mother, and maybe other family members present.  It was good, she said, it was even wonderful.  And so, the blog this week begins with a small memorial to him, in solidarity with Vanessa over a father's death.  My own father died, as many of you know, five weeks ago.  We both had wonderful fathers and my heart goes out to her, she really loved him and, I believe, he really loved her.   

RIP Errol John Stagg.  My you rest truly, and joyfully, in peace.

As Mother Lay Dying.

In 2015, my mother was given six weeks to live, with a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.  I shut down my life in an afternoon and moved in to be with her, to walk as far as we could together for this final journey, both knowing she would have to do the last bit on her own.  Time changed for all of us then.  The family and friends coming in to say goodbye to her, the days and nights of her gentle breathing declining and the memories of all those gone before her, all this kept us in a space where there was no future, just the past and the present.  

I had been helping to support people facing the end of life for a good few years then, but now with this sudden realisation that my mother was dying, I did not know what to do.  My mother knew me better than anyone else in the world.  I could not sit beside her, listen to her speak, and then go home.  I could not hold her hand for a while, and then hand over to her family, I was her family.  We lived in the same house now, for the duration.  And I looked like her.  I sounded like her.  Our relationship had never been easy and now, watching her die, I imagined that we would talk about our painful differences and resolve them through words.  Instead, nothing was said.  The peace that had eluded her all of her life settled on us both, and in the end, love was all there was.  Just love.  

The book of this time, of waiting of watching and of witnessing, is now finished.  I have called it "As Mother Lay Dying".

Part one “The Dying”, accompanies my mother as she faces, day by day, the end of her life.  The house is full of people and flowers, and at night, when everyone has gone home, the silences seem too long and too dark.  Part two, “The Bereavement”, talks of the strange emptiness after the wake and the funeral are done, and my mother's house is silent.  I do not know what I feel, and I can’t find her anywhere. I go back to my world and find that I miss her.  In part three, “The Recovery”, I talk about grief, and the many ways it manifests.  For this part I draw on my own observations, stories and experiences of working with people at the end of life. It is hard to articulate grief and our actions can speak for us.  This section explores some of the different, and surprising, ways I have seen grief manifest while working in the community with end of life.

Below is the first page.  There is a reason for sharing this, and I hope the extract touches you. I aim to read the whole book on my YouTube channel, one chapter at a time, and upload it over a week or so.  It will then be available for anyone, at any time, to hear it read and to listen to as much or as little as they want. 

As Mother Lay Dying

CHAPTER ONE

Last week there was no diagnosis. This week there is terminal pancreatic cancer, and I have been uncharacteristically swift and efficient.  I have sorted out my own house and moved into my mother’s house with just a small suitcase, until I am no longer needed here.

I am waiting in a chair at the end of my mother’s bed, so that we can see each other when she wakes. The big comfortable chair that I put next to her bed can’t be seen if she is sitting up.  She would be looking ahead in that case, and talking to a disembodied voice behind her.  I will leave that first chair, the big comfortable one, till later, when she is near to death, and won’t know where I am sitting, only that I am somewhere near her.  At least, that is what I intend.

There were times when her face fell into itself today.  Her mouth drooped and her chin dropped.  When she is feeling able, she is in control and very present.  When she drifts off to sleep, which she does all the time, her energy is gone and the power is diminished.  Her small frame is vacated.  Her face is pale, her mouth is dry and uncomfortable, and her stomach hurts.   Mum’s face is soft to kiss, and hot and smooth.  I smell bad, she says, but I tell her she doesn’t smell bad.  Not at all.  It is just that she needs to use the loo so much and can’t keep any food down.  I think she feels smelly, but she really isn’t.  Mother is fragrant.  Since word of her illness has spread, she has been inundated with beautiful scented soaps and creams; she washes in the most wonderful rose scented, honey extract, vanilla infused bath oils, and she is truly fragrant.

I am sitting in one of her lovely little Regency chairs, at the end of her bed, downstairs in her dining room. Mother’s home sits high up above the Sussex Downs with a conservatory overlooking the Shimmings below, the green and gentle countryside of the Shimmings stretching out for miles just beyond her front door.  Mum likes to sit at her breakfast table in the conservatory watching the tiny horses in the fields and copses miles away, and the clouds and sky moving and changing over the landscape.  She likes to spend time at her little table by the window there, looking out over it all and feeling peaceful.  I am here in her house to look after her while she dies, I have moved in for as long as it takes.  I am learning how this experience of dying is different from others I have witnessed.  I am still not the one doing the dying, I'm not medically trained and I don’t know about the drugs that can help her symptoms, I am not a stranger coming in to offer my little piece of time and love.  I am my mother’s daughter; I am my brothers’ sister and my children’s mother.   I belong to the people directly concerned with this dying person, I am in the middle of it and even if I walked away wanting to have nothing more to do with it, all this dying that Mum is doing is known and felt throughout my entire extended family.  The whisper of it is in everyone’s bones.  She is the next one, it is her turn now.  Each of the old aunts and uncles, each of the grandparents, each of my mother’s siblings that has died, have managed it.  They faced it and got on with it. We all watched and visited those we could visit, and regretted and wondered about those we didn’t visit because they died quietly without anyone there, and we cried when they had gone.  We wondered how they were doing it, those that we did see, and we all hoped that we didn’t have to do it ourselves for a long, long time.  If ever.  We loved the aunts and uncles that have gone now, remembering how they had made our childhood magical.  They were young and strong then, when we were children, my brothers and my cousins and me. 

 Please have a listen.  It may be something you are going through right now, it may be something for the future.  It may be something you are very interested in, and want to know more about. You can hear the first chapter here, chapter one As Mother Lay Dying

Another Addiction painting finished

I haven't been painting much recently.  There is much still to do, but I have not felt very focused.  Last

Marie as the crazy party lady

week, I decided that if I made a YouTube video about finishing the current picture, that had been patiently sitting in the studio for the past month or so twiddling its fingers and not complaining, then I would have no excuses.  It was a grand way of actually doing some work, in that it was much more complicated having it be the subject of a video, but it worked.  The painting is done, and I have a video about it too.  You can see the video here .

These paintings of Marie show her as she was, when she was taking drugs, and now, when she is not.  She has come a long way, and I wanted to show the difference between then and now.  The crazy party lady, with wild jaundiced eyes looks amazing, but a bit mad.  The painting of her now is filled with dignity, peace and calm. I know Marie as she is now, and understand how much she has achieved.  She is, it is worth saying, a magnificent artist herself.

Calm and serene Marie now

I will begin the next painting for the Addicts And Those Who Love Them exhibition this coming week.  It is of my friend Michael, and his once long suffering partner Martin.  For many many years, Michael was an alcoholic, completely out of control, and without boundaries.  Martin stayed with him, somehow, throughout, and now with Michael clean and well, they are inseparable. This painting will be joyful.  It will be the two of them together in each others arms, it will make us all smile.  

And one day, perhaps, when the madness ends, we can have this exhibition, and show all the paintings, all the words and all the stories together on one place.  Hang in in there, friends.  Even if I have to show it all in my house, we will have this exhibition. 

And so 

Keep an eye open for the next chapters of the book As Mother Lay Dying.  I will try and upload a chapter a day for the next couple of weeks.  There are twenty chapters.  I am so enjoying doing this, and I hope you will enjoy and be moved by the book.  Please let me know what you think, and either leave comments here on this blog or directly on the YouTube comments section below the videos. 

As My Most Beautiful Mother Lay Dying.

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Death. There's a lot of it about.

There's a lot of it about.

Deaths

A young plumber came to mend a leak in the kitchen after my husband Alan died in 2016.  "Death," he said with a shake of his head, as if this was unreasonable, "there's a lot of it about."

I don't think he had experienced many losses, I don't think that dying had happened in his world, and so when he heard of other peoples' experiences, it seemed that death was just getting a bit above itself.  Slow down, he seemed to imply, just one at a time and in an orderly fashion. 

We all know that death is a part of life, that death doesn't follow a protocol, that death will do what it wants when it wants.  We all know that it happens, and though we know theoretically we will have to die one day too, we don't really believe it.  Not really. And yet, people we know die. Even people we love go, and sometimes, family members pass on and so, yes, there is a lot of it about.  I remember when my partner Steve was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, saying we will beat this, and somehow, because I loved him I thought we would.  It was inconceivable that such a thing as love could be bested by such a thing as death.  Light and dark, I thought then.  Light always wins.  But Steve did die, and watching him fade away despite my love and despite it being unfair, changed my world for ever.  In a way, I had to grow up.  I had to experience something beyond my comprehension in order to show me a deeper more profound version of this life.  Steve's death was the single most traumatic event of my life, and probably still is.  I was thrown into a grief and confusion that marked the beginning of the rest of my life, and my decision to work with endings and dyings in the way that I do.  That grief was so mind altering, so hard to bear, that all my understandings of this world had to change.  But it also unlocked my gift, and though I did not want that gift and would have thrown it back if I could have in the beginning, I am grateful for it now.  I often say that Steve came, gave my my job to do, and left.  

So now, deaths.  What good are they?  I absolutely do not know, but the thing is, they happen twenty four hours a day seven days a week.  Making or finding meaning in them, is an ongoing process for most of us.  I have seen many deaths through illness, I have experience of suicide deaths, and I have personally experienced miscarriage.  However, there are many, many ways for us to die. Here is a list to be going on with. 

Illness, suicide, murder, accident, miscarriage, abortion, war, execution, euthanasia, act of God                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Most of these I have no experience of, and though I accept that death is a given, such things as

Help. Don't make me do it.

execution, war and murder really scare me.  Perhaps it isn't the fact of death so much as the manner of dying.  Murder, war and execution seem to involve cruelty and suffering from the hands of other people that is entirely avoidable, man made and inhumane.  And yet, what I have been trying to do is, where I come across it, to make the manner of dying more calm, more loving and more acceptable.  I have a terrible fear of visiting a death row, an execution, and hope to goodness I never have to do that - it is indescribably unlikely in my little life here in Bognor Regis, but I have learned that the world is utterly unpredictable and just because you fear something does not mean you are safe from it.  Though I imagine I am safe from this.  But you never know. Help. 

Dyings

Over the years, I have learned to occupy very little space in the room of a dying person.  I remember when I began learning about how people go and what they do, and what I should do, feeling that I should be doing something, I should somehow be indispensable.  It was up to me whether they died well or not. I worried that I could fail at this, and that everyone would see that I was a fraud and did not know what I was doing.  (I did not know what I was doing in those days, absolute fact.) I knew there was a place for people like me, who were drawn to make a small difference to the dying process, but I had no idea how.  For some reason, I felt I ought to know instinctively and that it was all about me making them feel better.  It was about me doing a good job.  It was about me.

Fast forward and this is how I see it now.  Unlearning the above was a valuable part of the process.  It is not about me, and I do not have to get anything right.  I just have to do my best and if it is not what is needed, I can leave.  Mainly, the dying are doing their own thing.  Our job, if we can, is to create a harmonious and loving place for them to do that.  And often we don't have a choice about where that is.  It could be anywhere.  (When I am asked where I would like to die, which I sometimes am, I say I have no intention of dying at all.  But if I have to do it, and as a well person I chose a nice meadow in the sunshine, I may at the time prefer a hospital with all the right equipment.  I may not want to die in a tea shop having afternoon tea because it will be messy, though right now I think it would be a lovely way to go.  My point is we don't know, we can only guess.  And fate may mean we have little choice anyway).  If it isn't about me at all, then I am relieved of the burden of success and failure, and I am relieved of my ego.  It is not all about the dying person either.  It is about all of the people in the room.  If others are there, they bring their energies and beliefs into the mix.  If someone is struggling, they need support.  If the dying person is struggling, they need support. If no one is struggling, then the family or friends there will manage.  They dying person will manage.  Where someone like me comes in, is to support whoever needs it.  When someone is dying whether over a long time or a short, difficult questions will come up.  Unwelcome emotions will arise.  We may have profound conversations and we may have some wonderful, enlightening moments.  We may be unable to resolve old hurts, and we may argue and fight.  We may do a mixture and all other things in between.  And if for example, the illness changes the dying person's personality, then the whole dying process may be unpredictable and difficult.  A man I knew of with a brain tumour became very aggressive and took over the ward.  The police had to be called.  I don't recognise this person, his wife said, this is not him.  A few days later, he died.  And the moment of death, that moment many of us feel we have to witness for our loved ones, may just happen when we are not looking.  The moment of death, that last breath, may well be so silent that no one notices it.  

I held my mother, and my father, and my husband as they died. Steve died just before I got there, and my brother Dominic died when I left the room.  It was really lovely to be there for Mum, Dad and Alan's last breath and a bit sad I wasn't there to witness Steve and Dominic, but because it is not, actually, about me, I can let that go.  People die when they die.  I thought Dominic was actually dying a few days before he did, and I told him to let go and go when he was ready.  I was convinced he was on his way, and after a while, when he didn't go, I felt a bit foolish and went and had a cup of tea.  Sorry, Dom, I said.  When he did go, a few days later, it was on his own terms and in his own time, and it was when he was alone.  

Here is an account of how dying involves loved ones too.  

As a volunteer on the local hospice wards, one of my roles was as a patient companion when there were no family or friends for a dying person.  One afternoon I overheard an exasperated lady talking about how her neighbour's husband was deeply reluctant to come and see his wife, ever, and now she was actually dying.  I jolly well made him get into the car, she said, and forced him.  He's outside her room now, she said angrily, not going in.  I give up. 

 I remember thinking that he must be very frightened and being angry with him won't help.  I was worried and went looking for him.  I found him sitting on his own looking terrified, lost and small on a chair near his wife's room.  I began talking with him, and he talked about everything and anything that he could, but not ever about his wife, dying in the room next to him.  After a while, I said to him that I knew his wife, and that I had had many good conversations with her.  Would you mind, I asked him, if I went and said goodbye to her?  After a pause, he said that he would take me to her.  And he got up and  walked into her room.  Surprised but delighted, I followed. "Hello dear," he said and bent over her. "It's your favourite husband.  I have Antonia here who wants to say goodbye to you."  With that, he walked around her to the chair beside her bed on the other side, and sat down.  I said goodbye to her gently and thanked her, noticing that the husband who had been so afraid, was now sitting and holding his wife's hand.  I left the room, and she died a little while later, her husband with her.  All he had needed was someone to be kind to him. 

Was the angry neighbour right to force the husband into the hospice?  Was the ending a good one?  In the end, she was instrumental in helping the husband to overcome some very deep fears, but what if he had remained panicking, alone, outside her room and missed her death?  We just cannot know.  What I understood from this experience is that the dying wife was fine, all that could be done for her was being done.  It was the husband that needed the helping hand.  It was, for a while, only about him.  It was a happy ending in that all things came together, the wife died with the husband holding her hand, and he no longer isolated and afraid.  

Dad.

Dad died three weeks ago today.  It feels as if eighty eight years have gone in the blink of an eye, and here we are already three weeks into his eternity.  Every time someone I love dies, I get lost in the not knowing.  Same now with Dad.  Where did he go?  I don't know.  Why didn't he wait to die here like I had planned?  I don't know.  Why did he have to suffer cruel and avoidable isolation and loss from us, and then die on a stretcher?  I don't know.  What does it all mean?  I don't know.

It is up to me to make my own sense of this.  I am not grief stricken.  Dad was dying for a long time with Alzheimer's and Dementia.  I had years to say goodbye, and now that I have said it, I feel alongside the sadness of losing him, a feeling of freedom and expansion.  I miss him, but I feel lighter.  He has done it.  He has gone, shooting off on the tails of a radiant, blazing star, up to Heaven where everyone is cracking open the red wine, waiting for him to join the party.  There is nothing more for him to do here, no dying no death no waiting.  No living.  He has gone to join his friends and family and I have waved him goodbye.   I will plod on down here, living and doing my best but I still have it all to come.  I have no idea when it will be, how it will be or where it will be.   One thing I do know, other people have not paused in their dying because Dad has gone.  Hey ho.  There's a lot of it about.

Still happening. 

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A world wide panic and a father's death. How has it come to this.

Dressed as a smurf, for my father's dying.

Before I begin, I want to state that the home looking after our father was one of the very best.  It was never their choice to isolate and keep people apart.  They did not want to do that but they had to follow the rules.  Their care and kindness makes our father's death easier to accept because we trusted each one of the carers, staff and nurses.  This is not about them.  They remain the shining lights in dark situation, and I imagine there are many like them all over the country, doing the best they can in impossible situations.

Dad died last week.  I should have known it, I should have seen it coming but I refused to do so.  I thought I could keep him here with me at my house until I was ready for him to go.  Things did not go as I had planned, and I rushed at the last minute to his nursing home to sit with him as he was dying and told him to wait, he was supposed to come to my house where everything was set up for him, to die with us, with family.  Dad did not do that, he could not, and I saw how we can never anticipate our reactions to a death, nor how it will go.  Dad showed me that the dying he was doing was something I had no part of, despite my wish to be involved.  It had nothing to do with love, loyalty, relationships or me.  It was part of the grander scheme of things, far beyond my understanding, and rightly so.  It was simply Dad's time to go, he had done all the work for it, he had arrived at his exit point, and who knows what forces were there to bring him light, and peace and courage.  Who knows?  I felt my brother Dominic with me all that day, perhaps Dominic came and helped Dad leave.  He would have gone like a shot if that were true.  My and my brothers' task was to witness, accept, love and release.  As if it were up to us to release!  We needed to let him go for our own sake, because he was going whatever anyone said.  Our part was to love him, thank him and stand back from the process. 

Last week, the care home that had looked after Dad so well called me.  He is now palliative, they said, and you can come in for one hour.  I went, and I saw our father looking as people do when they are on the last leg of their journey.  He was unconscious, mostly.  His face had fallen into itself but his hands remained the same.  I held his hand, a warm, comforting hand, and felt it close round mine so tightly that I had to prise his fingers loose for comfort.  He did not wake, he did not say anything, but his hand on mine was strong and told me he knew I was with him.  The tight hand hold lasted a minute, before his hand fell away.  He had no more energy. 

In order to see him, I wore a gown, an apron, a mask and gloves. 

Psalm 15, his favourite, the
gentelman's psalm, he called it.

No one had been allowed to see him for three months and now, I had my hour, in a disguise that if he could have seen it, would have upset his Alzheimer's mind.  He had been a magical, imperfect, kind and private father.  He was creative, intellectual, eccentric and witty.  He was educated, curious and loved poetry.  At his school, he said, instead of writing lines in detention when the boys were being punished, they had to learn a poem and recite it.   This spoke to his creative, artistic soul, and he
began a love affair with poetry then.  I never asked him if he was often in detention in order to be given this access to poetry, and I do not know.  One of the wonderful things we all did as his illness progressed over the years, was to read him poetry which would spark his memory, and he would mouth the lines as we read them.

Here I was, then, having my hour with our father.  My brothers were not allowed to come, just one person. They had to be satisfied with my account of the visit.  My hour.

There is something deeply wrong with a system that finds it acceptable to keep the elderly, the vulnerable, secluded in fear behind a wall of protocol.  There is a deep injustice in this draconian effort to prevent death at all costs, from people who have no rights to disagree.  The wall of  isolation that kept my brothers and me from any contact with our father creates in our hearts anxiety, guilt, fear and anger.  How can we tell an old man with Alzheimer's that we have not forgotten him?  When our actions tell him that we have. How can we make peace with our old father who cannot understand why he is alone and where all the poetry has gone?  He would not complain, and never did.  He gave us the benefit of the doubt when our pre-Covid visits were sometimes far and few between.  But there was always the choice to make it up to him, we knew we could come to him and spend more time with him when we could.  And we did.  And suddenly, we were gone.  That was it.  The message was, you're on your own Dad.  Everyone around him disappeared behind blue gowns, blue hats, face masks and plastic gloves.  It was dangerous to go into the rooms in the home without proper reason, and there was supposed to be no touching, no contact and no connection.  Everyone was a risk, everyone was at risk, and in order to protect the home, the staff, the visitors, fortresses of fear were set up.  The bleakness is worth it, we were told, in order to protect us.  The unspoken side of this was, all these people locked behind this fortress of fear are a different kind of collateral damage.  They won't die of Covid 19, not if we can help it, but they will die of other things anyway and unfortunately, they will have to do it alone and be part of the fall out of this madness.  Can't be helped.  Rules is rules.

One of the seemingly hopeless
Face Time calls. 

The result of this cruelty, this hysteria, this dysfunction is that we who lost our loved ones carry a complicated grief and a terrible burden of guilt.  There are millions of us, families who had let their loved ones go as if into a war zone and were powerless to tell them it was not our choice.  Absolutely powerless to be anywhere near, and some of our people were left for months without the light of comfort and relationship from those who knew them best.  Like our father, he is just one, left to be a statistic in the worldwide fear of a pandemic.  He is just one person claimed by this massive tsunami of reactive panic and fear and not actually killed by the virus we are so sure is swirling around longing for us to touch each other and leap with lethal vengeance into our bodies.  He is just one person who was left without understanding it, in a room that no one could come into without a jolly good reason, and silence from the people to whom he belonged. His sisters.  His friends.  His family.  His remaining children, my brothers and me.  His beloved youngest son, our most wonderful brother Dominic, died in 2016.

On leaving the home after that first visit, with such anger and resentment for whoever makes these decisions to isolate and terrify people into mass overreaction, I decided to take our father out to die at home with me. My brothers and I put things into place and a date was arranged for a private ambulance to transport Dad to my house.  The room Dad was to come to was downstairs with doors opening into the garden with all the flowers and colours that heal our failing souls.  Everyone, the home, the district nurses, the carers, the GPs were on board.  They understood and helped make this happen within days.  All was ready, our father would not be isolated in a room without us any more.  And then the home called.  He may not make it, they said, and you can come now.  So I, unwilling to concede defeat at this late stage, called everyone involved and arranged, by a miracle, on a Sunday, a private ambulance to come that afternoon and bring him here.  He will be here, I said to myself.  I will make it happen. The carers, a palliative care nurse friend and her husband, a priest, were on hand to be here and make him comfortable so he could do his dying here with me.  With us.  My brothers were coming, my daughter was coming, his sisters and his friends would know he was here, all would be well.

A lovely man, our Dad

I made it to the home.  My oldest brother Ralph waited outside, my younger brother John was on his way, two hours away.  I had to wear an extra piece of equipment now, on top of my gown, my gloves and my mask.  I had a blue hat.  He is not breathing well, the nurses said, and I went in to see him.  I took the mask and gloves off.  His breathing was rasping, his face was sunk and his eyes were in another realm.  Hold on, I told him, hold on.  You are coming home with me. I called my daughter on Face Time, and she spoke to him.  The ambulance arrived, his breathing slowed to a gasp, and I said to the staff, get my brothers.  In no time, my brothers came with their gowns half on and no time to put on hats or gloves.  Dad was on the stretcher beside his bed, ready for transport, and it was obvious he was not going to stay.  None of us wore a mask, they got in the way of us from telling him we loved him. The ambulance crew, the staff, all melted away, closed the door, and left us to hold our father strapped on the stretcher, beside his bed, as he took a few halting breaths, let out a long sigh, and died.  Bless the staff and ambulance crew for that.  It just shows, they do not like this situation any more than I do, and they gave us those final important moments alone.

Later, when we left him, back in his bed, I put a sprig of foliage from the plant in his room, onto his pillow.  I always put a flower, or a symbol of love, on the pillow of someone who dies when I am there. With my husband Alan, there were no plants in his room so I put his model aeroplanes onto the pillow.  For a treasured old lady I was looking after, I covered her pillow with fresh lavender that she loved.  For Dad, I broke a piece of greenery from a pot plant in his room, and put it on his pillow.  Bye, Dad, we said, and no one cried as we left him alone again, and went outside into the sun. Later, alone in our own homes, we cried.

Here is my conclusion. 

We forget that life is unpredictable, and so is death.  Especially death. It is in our nature to want to understand things, to be in charge of things, and we do whatever we can to make a dying make sense to us.  Our father's death was caught up in a worldwide panic.  I do not say pandemic, I say panic.  It is beyond our control.  His dying was in the end, as beautiful as it could be.  It was not what we had wanted and it was not what I had organised and there, in that sentence, is the truth about death.  It is not what we wanted, not what I had organised.  Bringing Dad home would have been perfect.  It would have helped all of us no end, giving him a suitable send off.  It was not though, in the end, about us.  Our father left when he did because that was his story and he had to leave when he was ready, on his terms, not ours.  And if he was to have died in a soft hospital bed in my dining room, with the doors opening onto the garden and the breeze blowing and the birds singing, I would have loved that.  But it is not relevant, in the end, to what was happening to him.  In the end, we were with him.  His three remaining children were holding him, looking like giant smurfs in our blue costumes, as he took his last breath.  We made it.  That, in the end was what we all wanted.  He did not die alone, though it was on a stretcher beside his bed.  The final moments were with us, together, and that is all of our gifts to each other.  His to us, and ours to him.

The templates of our lives

The revelation

I had an insight the other evening, as I drove home down the country roads here in West Sussex.  I was leaving an late volunteering shift at our local hospice, and thought - so many of us feel we don't fit in.  So many of us suspect that other people have the answers to life, and that we do not.  It makes us feel vulnerable, it makes us doubt ourselves.  Most of the time we say to ourselves that yes - it is those other people who have it right and yes, we are wrong.  We have it wrong.  It takes courage and life experience to realise that we are barking up the wrong tree.  What suits others does not have to suit us.  And perhaps, there isn't just one right way, but many, and we have not found ours yet.

But if we don't feel we belong, it makes sense for us to think that other people, all of whom may look as if they are having a great time and belonging all over the place, they must have the answer.  It takes time, experience and self knowledge to realise that those others may feel as out of it as we do.  And we don't know if they feel they aren't getting it right, they don't let on.  In which case, maybe other people imagine we have the answers, and have our lives sorted.  Oh it gets complicated.  We just do not know.  But we feel, and feel very strongly.  And often, we feel very badly about ourselves. 

The insight that I received on the way home from the hospice that evening was that we think that there is a template.  A template of a correct way of being, and that we have to fit into it.  The template holds it all together, we feel, and if we fit ourselves into it we will be safe.  We will be one of those belonging, comfortable, enviable people that surround us.  We will feel good about ourselves, because somehow, we will be right.  We will be safe, and all will be well.

I imagined this template as a flat, person shape, made of light with a grid pattern inside. Each of us wants to lay down the image of ourselves onto it but only very few of us fit.  Our arms are too long, our legs too short, our shape all wrong.  Instead of the fit being perfect like those children's toy shapes that slot perfectly into the correct hole, we lay our image down and we are all over the place.  We do not fit.  What is wrong?  The template, or us?  So we look at this mismatch and blame ourselves for being wrong, and keep it to ourselves that we don't fit.  No one must know, we would be so ashamed.  We keep trying.  One day, we say, we will manage to fit our own image onto this perfect template of life, and then all will have been worth while.  And then I wondered about the template at all.  We all have one, a template to show us what we think we should be, how things should work, and what is right.  There is probably a general template in our culture about what is right and wrong, about how to proceed in our society, general rules of behaviour and expectations, and what not to do.  That template is big enough for us to fit ourselves into it, and flexible enough for it to mould itself around us, so that on the whole, we know what is expected.

The difficulty is the other template that we aspire to, that we believe is the right one to be in, the one
that try as we might, we cannot ever quite fit.  The one that we use to make ourselves feel bad about ourselves.  The one that we feel would make everything better if only we could lay our image down onto it and find a perfect match.  Oh dear.  And if we can't do this, we blame ourselves and feel we are the odd ones, and that something is secretly wrong with us.  We keep quiet about it because we feel ashamed.  And we just keep plodding on, trying to fit ourselves into the template we have for ourselves, the one that never quite works.

Everyone else has it right

The revolution.  

What if we realised our template was unrealistic, and threw it out?  What if we got fed up of not ever fitting into it, got rid of it, and created one that was tailor made for us?  Can we do that?  Yes.  There comes a time in life when we think, oh to hell with things.  What is all this struggle for anyway?  We lose patience with the lifestyle we aren't quite having, with the narrative in our heads that tells us we are not good enough, with the longing for things that are just too much trouble to get, and we rebel.  Damn it, we say, where am I in all this?  What do I really like doing?  And we are shocked to realise that we do not like pleasing people all the time in case they a) notice we feel inferior b) might give us something we think we need c) we might miss out d) we really don't know how not to.  We are stunned and relieved to admit we like lying around in shell suits on our days off eating cheesy chips and drinking orange squash.  We don't want to improve our minds with Tolstoy, we want to read Agatha Raisin.  We do not like doing good and neighbourly things for everyone all the time, even though everyone else thinks we are fabulous.  In fact we hate it and we would rather watch Great British Bake Off on telly every time.  Oh lord.  Perhaps our template needs to be more personal, more creative, less driven by other people.  What if everyone laughs at me, we may think at first.  What if I put on weight, and what if I don't get promotion, and what if all those other people (who we believe do fit the template we are struggling with) do really well and everyone loves them, and what if I just stop caring?  Well, what if?  If these things bind you (mustn't put on weight, mustn't miss the promotion, fear everyone else will do better than you etc), and make you unhappy, and never change, then they aren't for you.  One door closes, they say, and another opens.  Time to make your own personal template for your life, and have it fit you so well, and be so flexible and forgiving, you do not know why you didn't do this before.

I visited a dying lady recently, and noticed pencils and a pad on a table near her chair.  I asked if she liked to draw, and she was silent for a long time.  Maybe the question upset her, I thought, and prepared to leave her in peace.  But she spoke and replied that she had not used her art stuff since the 12 September.  That was the day she received her diagnosis, and was given a short time to live.  She stopped wanting to draw on that day.  But she said that for the first time she can remember, she is content.  She is happy.  No one in her family understands it, she said, but all of the pain and difficulties in her quite traumatic life, have gone.  Who would have known, she said, when my life was so hard as a child, and I was looking for any kind of happiness, that I would get it when I have a terminal diagnosis, and I cannot move.  She said that she had been trying in all the wrong places, with all the wrong people, all of her life.  She had been homeless, in prison, and had felt driven to find answers and to fight.  And now, like a paradox, with everything taken from her, she has found peace and a sense of who she is, and every day she is grateful.  She doesn't know how it happened, but it has.  And now, she says, she knows who she is.  She's sorted her funeral, her will, found a God that speaks to her, and she has found peace.  It was after this conversation, driving home, that I had my insight.  She has found, created, got, the right template for who she is.  She no longer needs the old one. 

Ditch the template! 

The realisation

I had an unrealistic template for most of my life.  As a child I felt I didn't belong, and that there was a proper way to do things that bypassed me completely.  I didn't understand why I had to try to be someone else. Who I was, I felt, was not quite acceptable.  I hated this, I felt trapped and restricted and wrong but I had to find a way to adapt.  Of course, I rebelled, and was torn between trying not very well to please everyone and trying to assert my real self.  I realise now that my real self was perfectly fine. I was a fairy, a free thinking, alternative, creative non conformist little dumpling but my mother wanted a well behaved, tennis playing, clean and tidy obedient little girl.  My poor dear mother.  She had struggled all of her life with rejection and invisibility and in a sad twist of fate, in trying to prevent me from ever having to suffer as she had, created for me exactly the same experiences. 

On the journey back home from the hospice the other night, when I had the idea about templates in our lives, I saw clearly the template my mother had created for me, and how it had never, ever been right.  I saw her own template for herself and how damaged that had been; how little kindness and expectations she had for herself.  Though I had given up the imposed template successfully over the years, some of the fear of rejection and being unseen and unheard remains. 

I don't want to wait until I am dying to find peace.  I had the image of this person shaped hole, with a grid inside, that I had taken from my mother, and how I had never wanted to lie myself down on it, had always fought against it.  I had never thought of it all like this before.  Now, I imagined myself lifting off of this wrong template and creating a new one, where I could lie myself down in it and feel at home, have it fit me, and feel safe and contained by something supportive and affirmative and light.  I can give up all this stuff that doesn't work, I don't have to deal with it a moment longer.  I am creating a new template where I do belong, and where being a dumpy fairy is a good thing. 

Peace at last.

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