It’s nearly exactly a year since Nat died.
Of the many cruelties of her illness, and of cancer in particular, is the way it overtakes the life of the person living with it, and of the lives of those around them.
Through the long months of her illness, I came to see Nat’s cancer as a cage in which she was trapped. The bars of the cage were all the daily reminders to her of her illness: the endless medication, the trips to hospital, the blood tests, the fatigue and nausea, the anxiety. I felt, as the person closest to her, that my job was to help her to push the bars of the cage apart and to look out and not see the things which were trapping her in a life she would never have chosen for herself. That meant trying to find ways to make each day as ‘normal’ as possible – cups of coffee in the café in the park, discussing which shoes to buy for the boys, thinking about upcoming family occasions, birthdays and the like. Even in the final weeks of her illness we went out from the hospice where she was staying up to the high street to browse in shops for presents for the boys. We enjoyed picking things out for them together and shared the joy in giving those gifts to the boys too.
All of which is a long way of saying that I have been thinking a great deal about Nat and those last months.
What has become increasingly clear to me is as much as the cancer was a cage inside which she was trapped, it was also a scourer slowly erasing so much of what our relationship once had been. As she was incrementally able to do less and less, so too did her illness take from us the contours of our relationship – the shapes and patterns and choices of behaviour which we had found together, and which defined our identities in relation to each other.
It’s absurd to say it but it bears repeating – cancer took so much from Nat: it took her ability to be the mother she wanted to be, it took her capacity to be a daughter to her parents, it took her job, it took her friends, and it took her agency to be present for me in the way that I know she wanted to.
And cancer took from me too, not least in that it took from me every aspect of my relationship with Nat. Over the three years or so of her illness, the cancer slowly smoothed away all the choices and quirks which made our relationship what it was. And now as I sit here a year after her death, I also begin to understand that it also took my memories of what our relation was before the cancer.
It’s not easy for me to hold that thought, but there is a truth to it.
One bright autumnal day not long before Nat died, I remember walking with her in the garden at the hospice. It was not an easy conversation we were having. I was saying that I wanted to do something in her name after she died. It was not a long conversation, but I told her that I wanted to do it at least in part so that the boys would have a way to engage with her memory in a way that wasn’t about cancer or illness.
Nat loved books and she loved libraries. Pre-Covid a weekend was not a weekend without a trip to the library to load up on books for the boys. Indeed, on one occasion the buggy collapsed and broke because it was so weighed down with picture books, but that’s a different story. Back in the garden at the hospice, I told her that I was going to do something about libraries and she gave the idea her blessing. I was glad that she knew and that she agreed.
Twelve months later, we – the boys and I – have been able to do a great deal already. We have bought new computers and furnishings for two libraries and have commissioned artwork for another. Doing this has helped me (and the boys) to hold close the memories of who Nat was before the cancer took its grip on her life.
At the distance of a year I ask myself whether if I had understood quite how much cancer would take personally from me would I have done anything different? My sense is that no, I wouldn’t. I would still have focused on Nat, to try to support her to see beyond the bars of the cage of cancer. That was unquestionably the priority. That and being a parent to the boys. That was work enough. Even so, I ask myself, was there space too to be aware and to watch as our relationship – Nat’s and mine – was smoothed away into and by the daily routine of living with cancer? I honestly do not know.
Thank you for reading this far. If you have, and if you know someone living with a life shortening condition, aside from my usual advice of telling them that they are doing an amazing job, maybe find a way to talk to them about your relationship with them. Maybe share with them a memory which you have of your relationship with them, of how things were before the illness. Those memories of who you were in relation to one another, they’re important.
I would love to hear what you think!
Josh Cass 