Thank you for the
days…
And so Helen died.
I’m sorry these blogs were interrupted six months ago, but I
was a bit preoccupied. I was determined that this wasn’t going to be another
“living with cancer” blog, but it turned out that there wasn’t time for that
anyway. Four months after diagnosis (on general election day, of all days)
Helen died, rather to the shock of everyone looking after her. It had been
concluded four days earlier that there was no more that the Charing Cross Hospital
could do, and so they arranged for her to go to the excellent hospice in
St.John’s Wood. I was expecting to meet her there on 4th September,
but instead found myself called to the Charing Cross
where she was fading away.
I was very sorry that she had to die in hospital, as she
really wanted to be home, or in the hospice. She wanted to say goodbye to
Casimir, our cat, who is still a bit confused. You could see that he was
expecting someone else to come through the door whenever I came home. But apart
from that I can say with confidence that she made a good death. In the last few
days Helen was in a better place psychologically and spiritually than I can
ever remember, which was very good. She had made her peace with her mother, and
explained to her brother how their mother had blighted her life. She forgave me
for everything. She had found a real sense of the presence of God, and really
said her prayers. A week or so before she died she, the most sceptical of
people, had a vision. This wasn’t morphine (she wasn’t on much and didn’t see
anything else) nor was it a dream. She saw Jesus, standing in front of a tree,
accompanied by the Blessed Virgin Mary and Blessed Mother Teresa; she knelt in
front of him and he put his hands on her shoulders and asked if she wanted
life. She said, “Yes” in reply. That was it. She was entirely at peace after
that.
“I don’t want anyone at my funeral,” she had always said,
and repeated in the last weeks, but finally she explained that she meant that
she didn’t want people coming to the crematorium; she accepted that some people
might want to come to the requiem in church. Indeed they did, some three
hundred or so of them. The fact that she had received a hundred and fifty get
well cards had actually got through to her the fact that people cared about her,
she finally accepted that people meant their good wishes and weren’t just doing
it out of a sense of duty, which was what she’d been taught to think. I think
we gave her a good send-off; she had asked that Fr Bill Jacob, the recently
retired Archdeacon of Charing Cross, should take the service and preach, which
he very kindly did, and our old friend Jonathan Baker, now Bishop of Fulham,
presided in the old fashioned way. Our excellent organist, James, got in a
soloist to sing the pieces Helen wanted, and we sang the hymns she asked for.
It was a High Mass in white and went beautifully. As a piece of liturgy, it
worked.
So now, I thank God for the days we had together, and
especially for the fun we had in the last months. There were simple pleasures, but
there were also a couple of outings, when she allowed herself time off, because
of course she kept working up until the end. We went to Birmingham to see BRB dance “The King Dances”
which was a brilliant spectacle and which she thought was a very successful new
ballet. Then a week before she went into hospital the last time we went to stay
for a night at a hotel in Hertfordshire and went to Paradise Wildlife
Park where she so enjoyed
seeing the big cats, especially of course the wonderful snow leopards.
There’s a poem by Pablo Neruda, which translates as “Tonight
I can write the saddest lines” but actually I still find writing these words
very hard. That’s a poem about a lover who left, and the Kinks’ “Days” (in my
title) is the same; I find them curiously suitable for the loss of a beloved to
untimely death.
