Green fuse

I’ve been spending a lot of time at Plot 44, a place where I find a lot of solace, which has been much needed in the last few months. Because it’s five months now since Rach died, and her memory is still very much with me;  I hear her voice and I think about conversations we’ve had, and ones we’ll never now have. I’ve spent time making films to remember her, planted the Wollemi Pine for her, written her name on stone. For Rach.

One of the things that I am most happy about is that I took the opportunity to perform Rachel’s ‘celebration of life’ service in New Jersey. In those awful first 48 hours after I found out Rach had died, I had several Skype conversations with Gayle Sulik and when the possibility of me doing the service came up I wasn’t really sure if I could. I mean, how could I do that in my own grief? But to be asked by Rachel’s husband to do this, for her, it felt too important not to do it. And I’ve been to funerals which were OK, but not really ‘great’. I didn’t feel they ‘celebrated’ the person, they were too plain, too impersonal, and it felt wrong at those times that there wasn’t a good ‘send off’.

At the beginning of this year I’d been thinking about training to become a celebrant to perform funerals – services for life celebrations after death – in fact, exactly the sort of service we had for Rach. I’d even talked to Rach about it, she thought it was a great idea. I didn’t imagine for a moment that the first funeral I’d do would be hers.

So not right

February 2012. Flying to New Jersey to say goodbye to Rach.

On the way home from New Jersey I find myself in a window seat next to two British women on the plane. They were sitting in front of me on the way over and I remember them, they are happy, laughing, enjoying themselves. The inevitable ‘what did you do?’ conversation ensues. They’ve done ‘everything’ in New York, having travelled over to see Barry Manilow in concert (does he still play I wonder to myself, although the women tell me he wasn’t well and the concert was cancelled.) So when it’s my turn I just say I went to a funeral. ‘Oh,’ they say. ‘My friend died,’ I say. ‘Of breast cancer,’ I say. They look at me. ‘How old was she?’ they ask. ‘Forty-one,’ I say. ‘Oh,’ they say. ‘It fucking pisses me off good style,’ I say. I don’t mean to swear but I’m so angry. And all this last week I’ve been having very short conversations which punctuate very long silences which consist of few words, ‘This fucking sucks.’ Because it does.

I look out the window. The runway, we’re moving out now. ‘American?’ they ask. ‘No,’ I say, ‘Australian British.’ ‘How old?’ they say, again. ‘Forty-one,’ I say. ‘Yes, we know a girl‘, they say, ’27,’ they say, ‘with a daughter. Yes, she left a daughter behind.’

Oh, I think, so that’s worse than Rach is it?

End of life

Ronnie reviews a book on a subject all of us with a cancer diagnosis have most likely thought about.

“Death, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, may very well be what makes life so valuable, may well be ‘life’s change agent’. But we still don’t like to talk about it.

It’s a few of months back. Sarah, Fiona Shaw and I are all at the magnificent British Medical Association building in London (Designed by Edwin Lutyens, no less). The formal part of the event is over, Sarah has her ‘Highly Commended’ status for her book, and now it’s drinks and mingling in the crowded hall. But I notice a couple of women there with a large space around them. I remember them winning a special award for their book and go over to congratulate them, wondering why other people aren’t doing the same. ‘This is always happening to us,’ they laughingly explain, when I get to them. ‘People, even the medical people this room is full of, are terrified of our specialist subject. They can barely even say the word. The word Death.’

The two women are Mary Jordan and Judy Carole Kauffmann,  authors of the book ‘End of Life – the essential guide to caring’. Sarah and I have both read the book now, and both think it’s well worth recommending. Here’s why: