On the evening of the Wolf Moon in January, 2020, my writing stopped. The precise moment happened when I was buying an ice-cream cake with my daughter for her son’s 10th birthday party. Her doctor made a last-minute call to her before heading home for his Friday-night dinner. He told her that she had Stage 4 Ovarian Cancer. Terminal. That day, I became her live-in carer, and my grandsons’ second mother.
On a clear morning in June 2022, her heart eventually surrendered.
People have told me that I should write a memoir about this experience – it would be good therapy they say. A catharsis for the tragedy that unfolded over the last two and a half years of my daughter’s life. Failure by her GP to recognise her chronic symptoms in the year before her diagnosis; the challenges of nursing a vulnerable young woman during the early days of the Covid pandemic when there was no immunisation; home-schooling two young boys during lockdown; my daughter’s battle for two and a half years against physical and mental pain, nausea, ulcers, exhaustion and unassailable anxiety. And in her last few weeks, the failure of the public hospital system to treat my daughter with gentleness and respect. The aftermath.
But I won’t do it. My daughter was a private person. She was authentic. She’d say, “People tell me I’m so brave. I don’t feel brave at all.” But she lived her death sentence with grit, and always found joy in the moment. Her eulogy read: “Life burned fiercely within her”. And so it did.
The point of this blog is to let you in on a small part of my personal life, and to explain, for those of you who have asked or are wondering, why you have seen no mention of a forthcoming book. But I have just started writing again. In 2020 I had written an early draft of my third novel and now I am working to complete it. Coincidentally, or rather, sadly, I had already written a scene in the novel about a woman with cancer, without knowing how much that would later resonate.
I held onto my daughter for as long as I could with a mother’s love. But the disease also kept its clammy arms around her, and took her away from us all.