I expect a few of you may be aware that a few years ago a string of sudden and shockingly early deaths affected me, my family, close friends and colleagues. What followed was shock and after shocks; bereavement and grief; depression and anxiety; coping mechanisms and gallows humour; grimly dull death admin became commonplace.
Those of us in the blast zone for the first time were changed, our characters and those of our friends revealed to us. I remember thinking that anyone who hadn’t experienced such loss was just walking in dense fog not knowing that the big guy with the scythe was right in front of them.
Trying to think of something to write about my Dad today, who three weeks ago I thought I would be writing a eulogy for, is tough. As the platitudes go he’s had a good innings but he’s slowly and inexorably hitting his last six which is surely getting caught by scythe-man on the boundary.
For inspiration for what to say today I turned to a half remembered phrase from a pioneering book written by Susan Sontag back in the 70s. ‘Kingdom of the sick’ was the dim and distant phrase I could remember and I have visited there to see my Dad a lot in the last few weeks. There are tubes up noses, down throats, papery yellow skin, cardboard bowls full of frightening stomach contents and a cast of characters that inhabit both kingdoms of well and sick.
I have sat by Dad’s bedside and googled ‘stents in a duodenum’, diets for Pancreatic cancer, looked into hospice care, fought to think of cheery upbeat things to say and to keep alarm off my face. Delia, my Step- Mother, and I discuss the benefits of the Nutri-Bullet but the elephant in the room is now ‘when’ he’s caught out not ‘if’ he’s going to make his century. Apologies for the torturous cricket analogies but it’s been Dad’s lifelong passion and I’m working on my material. That would be the gallows humour…
The one striking thing I have found by going onto various Pancreatic Cancer charity websites is that it a particularly hard cancer to detect, hard to treat with incredibly low survival rates that have not improved at all in the last 40 years. One can be as rich as Steve Jobs and as well known as Patrick Swayze and it will have no influence on science and medicine’s ability to cure you.
Much like my shared survivor experience of sudden death, which taught me not to look away from the grieving and to look at the body in the coffin, my experience with Dad, my conversations with friends who are hospice workers and charity fund raisers is that it is important that the fear of cancer and death doesn’t stop us looking at it straight on.
As Susan Sontag wrote nearly 40 years ago;
“Now it is cancer’s turn to be the disease that doesn’t knock first before it enters, cancer that fills the role of an illness experienced as a ruthless, secret invasion—a role it will keep until, one day, its etiology is as clear and its treatment as efficacious as those of TB have become.”
Today is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness day but I am not about to start swinging a collection tin in front of you. I will support better fund raisers than myself like Nicola Tait of Team KC who raise £10,000s for Woking and Sam Beare Hospices and Mary Skipper of St Catherine’s Hospice in their efforts to make brilliant palliative care more accessible to all. As good as we are at hypno birthing, having hand holding doulas and are all terribly mindful about pregnancy there is a long time to go before the Mumsnet millennials bring this sensibility to the inevitable experience of death.
This is hardly cheery reading for a wedding blog but I am going to grab my audience where I can. My Dad gave me away once in the 90s and has survived that husband. He was well enough to make my wedding this year. His constitution is ox-like, born from a diet of childhood rationing, a lifelong addiction to home-grown vegetables and sport, sport and more sport. There is a lot I have learnt from my Dad in life, not all of which is virtuous. I would like to bang on as he reaches his final over (sorry!) about what I can learn from his illness and palliative care and to ultimately make his passing as peaceful as possible.
The tough old goat is confounding medical science once again and has improved this week. A Costa coffee request to start; knowing him it could be a round of golf next week.
Today we are going purple for World Pancreatic Cancer Day for my Dad and for the wider discussion of the last great adventure.
Visit www.worldpancreaticcancerday.org to find out more.
Emma x
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