The show must go on

Newsletter #16 | April 2024

When I started writing these newsletters in January 2023, the rule I set for myself was that they must be helpful, hopeful and true.

As you will know from last month’s message, I have been struggling recently to feel hopeful and helpful.

Instead, I have focussed on being true. Honest. Brutally so, at times.

With the compassionate leave from work I allowed myself in March and April, has come a switch of writing focus from my weekly journal and LinkedIn posts and these monthly missives, to the weekly, daily and sometimes hourly updates I have been writing on Substack about how I’ve been coping on the sidelines of cancer.

A shift of vantage point. From an aerial view of what I notice about who we are and how to better navigate this thing we call life to a close-up picture of the moment to moment experience of living with loss.

My wife’s funeral was on Friday and I return to work tomorrow.

What I notice about this transitional moment is how tangibly it encapsulates the threshold between present and future; between experience and meaning; between inside and outside; between inward and onward.

On 6th March, the day of my 43rd birthday, Imogen was admitted to a hospice for end of life care. Over the following three weeks I watched the love of my life physically, psychologically and emotionally disappear in front of my eyes. Her body shrinking; her mind scattering; her spirit distilling.

And yet they are the most precious hours my memory hold. Being at her bedside in those final days and nights, holding her hand for her last hours and cradling her in my arms as she died has been the greatest privilege of my life.

I have never before been so present. Cocooned within her hospice room, nothing else in the world mattered beyond her moment to moment needs. And when she slept I wrote about what had just happened. A feedback loop began; intense experience through meeting the needs of my slowly dying love, reflection on those needs, sharing of those needs in words and then she’d wake and need something again.

And so I find myself torn. This time is still suffused with that memory. With her presence. And the closer I stay to it the better able I feel to write of it and the easier it becomes to understand what I’m feeling.

Yet I am pulled, compelled towards and desirous of future thoughts - towards a new world, a world without; the work that gives my life so much purpose, new adventures as a family of four; to a higher vantage point from where I can make sense of what has happened and share what I notice in a way that is helpful and hopeful.

I’ve spent the past two months redirecting my professional practice of listening and being alongside to my own life.

I listened and was alongside Imogen as she lay and lived in her hospice bed.

I listened and was alongside our children as they navigated the loss of their mum.

Hardest of all, I listened and was alongside myself; my own body, feelings and thoughts.

I wept when I was sad. I slept when I needed to. I walked and ran and swam. I accepted offers of help from neighbours. Company from friends. Late night phone calls from those who had been somewhere similar. I reheated frozen dinners when I could’t face cooking. I stayed sober.

And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.

Emails and letters and cards and messages and blog posts.

And whilst I am still no clearer on why this happened, or what it means, or what I have learned from it that might be worth you knowing, the one thing I can say for sure is that I have been with what has happened.

Life intruding on life is life. We can fight it, deny it, wish it were another way. But sooner or later, we have to accept that we can’t control what happens to us, only how we react. Better to accept that sooner rather than later. And later rather than never.

I don’t know if I’m there yet. After all, grief is a process you can’t rush. It will happen at it’s own pace.

Imogen said to me before she died that if you spend all your time waiting for the ending, you’re going to miss the show. The curtain may have come down on her glorious performance. But mine must go on.

We have two lives, Confucius tells us. The second begins when we realise we only have one.

So here we go with Act Two.