So after a couple of weeks at home, with my wonderful partner and her fabulous sister, and my wonderful friends, I started to learn about incurable death. It wasn’t half as bad as I thought. In fact there were moments of real fun, fun, fun! Everyone just wanted harmony and fun… at risk of repeating oneself.
The pain had moments of being slightly nasty, but on a scale of 1 to 10 it never got any worse, except for one night. (Well one night isn’t so bad!) I woke up and looked at my partner, utterly exhausted, and said her name a couple of times but I just couldn’t and didn’t want to wake her up. For a while I wallowed in a little pointless self pity, the usual rubbish… you know… why me? It’s not fair… the usual crap. Then I realised… ‘Oh for crying out loud… horrid though this may be, it’s not going to last… awful stuff does not last. We are all designed to get to press the override button, and move on, be bold and enjoy being brave and bold, and that is what happened. Next day my beloved, pressed the hospice support button and within two days I was instructed to go to the hospice and have my pain addressed, reduced, sorted and fixed.
The whole process was as heavenly as going to heaven without visibly being hauled into heaven. The Martlets, despite its diminishing resources has, with its sister hospices still retained extraordinary levels of care, and talent. If only the NHS were able to dispense this quality, this service, this scale of love, the life of the people in the United Kingdom would be so utterly different. And truly it is not beyond the mind of man that one day we will discover that the harmonious balance of life and death is worth everything, far, far more than the idiotic intellectual squirming and thrashing of 100 AI corporations.
It’s tough work struggling with a fun box load of cancer, but please stay with me on this journey. Unlike me, you don’t have to snuff it when you reach the end! xx
On May 6th 2026 at 11.30 am my world went ‘BANG!’ with an element of undignified ‘Ping!’
Following nine months of denial, with a mythic attack of sciatica, (apparently I didn’t need a scan, and the cough was imaginary) my femur snapped like a flimsy matchstick and I had to be hoisted by a crane through the velux window of my second floor under-roof study by the fire service before I was carted off to A& E in Brighton, later dismissed with Stage 4 cancer. I had a mass on the lung, metal pin in my leg and was pointed in the direction of the hospice – with the instruction ‘do not pass go, do not collect £200.’
To be fair the Cancer Centre looked for something to help, instead they gave me six months to live… and love… and trust me, that sharp learning curve is priceless… particularly the loving bit.
The stoical path is paved with arrogance and a lot of other silly stuff… terrible pain is just one dimension, along with pink brain fog and the withdrawal of common sense. But the lessons to be learned on the way are exquisite.
Come die with me and learn the hilarity and joy of meeting death, something I have embraced pretty well all my life, as a funeral celebrant, a snoopy sort, and a dotty stoic with rubbish health, verging on hilarity.
Normally when it comes to pitching a story, it must be said that those journalists that invite one to skip down the primrose path, do get on my nerves… their descriptions of sadness and pain are no fun. Unfortunately, if I pitched a story to a newspaper today nobody will listen. My voice, which lovingly sustained my professional career for 30 years, honed on beautiful meditations, smoothed by funerals, shaped by the odd radio or TV broadcast, and smoothed as a minister and hypnotherapist has gone, snatched by a lung tumour, that in eight months has totally destroyed my vocal chords. It’s hell. Nobody can hear me, and I’m not even in space!
But that wasn’t the only pleasure taken off the menu. Twelve years ago, I developed coeliac disease and a milk intolerance: no gluten, no cheese. Two years later came pancreatitis: no alcohol, no fat—not even a friendly tipple with mates. Dear reader, whom did I annoy? Where is my pain au chocolat? It’s not fair. Then, after a brutal week at Sussex General, I discovered just how disappointing the gluten-free menu could be: jacket potatoes seven days running. Oh! but the nurses, what an opportunity to see loving care, receptivity, compassion and kindness given in totality. The nurses are angels, and as I made my wobbly way through the system, against the distant instagram background media noise created by Trump, Musk, Putin, Netanyahu and a thousand other wicked men, I came to see that we are blessed, blessed by spiritual beauty that must survive and flourish. This is my journey of discovery to death and love. Please join me. Come die with me and have fun.
Thanks to the loving attention of my lovely friend Rabbi Elli Sarah it looks as though this opening step to death will make a bit more sense. Let’s go darlings.
