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All posts for the month March, 2015

A Good Year

Posted by geoffmead on March 29, 2015
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good year

In A Good Year, Max (Russell Crowe) and Fanny (Marion Cotillard) fall in love against the odds and despite a rocky start. Standard rom-com plot, I guess. The film didn’t receive great reviews from the critics but Chris and I were very fond of it. We watched it on DVD in her hospital room in Portugal in August 2013 just after we had decided to get married.

Back in England, we had a spectacular wedding in December with our dearest friends and family; became proud “parents” of Teddy the Cockerpoo in March; had several trips in our new campervan; and travelled to Amsterdam and Italy in the spring and early summer. Chris continued to supervise her doctoral students; we launched my new book; and we put on a great, two-day Centre for Narrative Leadership gathering.

Work took a back seat for once: we lived together in Kingscote and in Lyme Regis; we went to the farmers’ market on Saturdays; wrote, painted and read in the mornings; walked and swam in the afternoons; and visited friends in the evenings.

The medication did it’s job and Chris stayed symptom-free for 11 months until a series of seizures heralded the next stage of her illness in July 2014. It was a good year. It was a very good year. In some ways it was the best year we had together.

I’ve watched the film several times since Chris died, not for the story (though I still enjoy it) but for the memories it evokes of a time when we kindled a light in the darkness – a light that shone brightly right up until the moment it went out.

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First 100 Days

Posted by geoffmead on March 21, 2015
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the_sands_of_time_4_by_uktara-d4c7mky

Last week, I realised that 100 days had gone by since Chris died. This milestone made me think of what business and self-help gurus say about our supposed ability to change the world and ourselves in such a short period. I’ve always distrusted gurus and I believe that this kind of wishful thinking is an unhelpful fantasy. Life, love and loss go at their own pace.

Anything is possible,
The new-age gurus say.

100 days is time enough
To turn your life around,

To seek a new direction,
To find another ground.

But time is out of kilter,
You’ve stilled the hourglass.

How can I plan a future
When you are in the past?

There’s nowhere that I want to go
Without you by my side

And nothing that I want to do
If you can’t do it too.

To those who tell us otherwise
I have some news for you

100 days is not enough
To make a life anew.

Wild Strawberries

Posted by geoffmead on March 14, 2015
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wild strawberry

There’s a well-known zen story that reminds me of the last few weeks Chris and I spent together at home. It begins with a woman walking alone across a field:

As she walked she heard a roar behind her. She looked round and saw a tiger bounding towards her. She ran way as fast as she could, the tiger at her heels. Suddenly she came to the edge of a cliff. With nowhere else to run, she grabbed hold of a vine and swung herself over the edge. Hanging there she looked up to see the tiger drooling above her. She looked down, only to see jagged rocks far below. Two mice – one white and one black – started gnawing at the vine that was holding her. In that moment, the woman saw some wild strawberries growing out of the cliff face nearby. Holding on to the vine with one hand she reached out, plucked the fruit and popped them in her mouth. How sweet those strawberries tasted!

In the face of death, Chris also chose to savour life. Despite her declining physical capacity, she accomplished and delighted in many things after she got home from hospital. Here are some of her wild strawberries:

Having Sunday lunches at Abbey Home Farm
Going to the Anslem Kiefer exhibition at the Royal Academy
Visiting Westonbirt Arboretum in her wheelchair
Brushing Teddy (our dog) as he lay on her bed
Eating apple pie, preferably with cream
Using eye make up for the first time
Buying expensive new designer spectacles
Enjoying convivial meals with old and new friends
Having visitors to stay in Folly Cottage
Making Skype calls to distant friends
Getting massages and giving cuddles
Wearing dresses and hats in profusion
Collecting her thoughts and writing
Taking part in the Medicine Unboxed conference
Writing secret (and utterly brilliant) poems
Making images and art of all kinds
Watching the sun set and the moon rise
Commissioning a sculpture for her memorial
Designing an extension to Folly Cottage
Meditating and chanting with Buddhist friends
Sprouting seeds and juicing vegetables
Finding a spectacular birthday present for me
Being interviewed on film about living artfully
Helping to shape a student’s PhD proposal

Being Chris, most of the strawberries were shared. But I had a special one for myself that doesn’t appear in the list: after 15 years together she finally managed to teach me that love is a verb.

The Tango Lesson

Posted by geoffmead on March 7, 2015
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it takes two

A few years ago, Chris came back from a trip to South America, raving about an impromptu tango evening she had been taken to by her hosts. “There were all shapes and sizes, young and old,” she said. “The men came up and asked me to dance. I didn’t know I could do it but they led brilliantly and made me feel so graceful.”

My own terpsichorial repertoire being limited to headbanging and a rather pale imitation of John Travolta, I let her comment pass. But when she followed up in the next few weeks by renting DVDs of Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson and of Al Pacino strutting his stuff in Scent of a Woman, I took the hint and booked a half-day tango lesson for us both as a surprise birthday present.

Sadly, my two left feet combined with Chris’s absolute refusal (in practice, if not in theory) to allow me to lead her anywhere, left us both frustrated and footsore. Nevertheless, we bought some fancy tango shoes and determined to give it another go. A couple of sessions later, however,  the reality of my incompetence on the dance floor overcame any remaining Strictly Come Dancing fantasies.

We put away our tango shoes for good. “Well, at least we gave it a go,” said Chris, finding a crumb of comfort in the fact that I had been willing to suffer public humiliation for her benefit.

“I’m not sure those shoes were good for your feet,” was all I could think to say.

But Chris continued to dance with life, through images, ideas, words and deeds. She brought the same playful impulse to her art and her work, making no real distinction between them. She danced with her illness and, in the end, she danced with death.

She understood, as Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor (1978) that the metaphors we use to describe our illness come to define us. Wisely, she refused to frame her condition as a battle against cancer. “How can you fight something that is part of yourself?” she once said. “This is about living well and looking after myself; about doing what I love and being myself, whatever the circumstances.”

So instead of fighting her illness, she allowed it to lead her, responding to every improvised step with the verve, intelligence, and spirit of a true tanguera: a mistress of tango.

Dance with death

[Picture: Valente Celle Tomb, Genoa, 1893]

Beloved

Posted by geoffmead on March 5, 2015
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image

A few days ago, a friend reminded me of Raymond Carver’s poem Late Fragment. I find it both joyful and poignant (the more so because he wrote it when he was dying from cancer at the age of 50). It expresses beautifully what I wanted for Chris more than anything else, for her to know that she was both lovable and loved.

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Unless you knew her very well, you would not have been able to guess that – despite her extraordinary gift for friendship – Chris found it hard to believe that she herself was worthy of love. Often I found loving her both the easiest and most natural thing in the world; but when the shadow of self-doubt ruled her heart, it was neither.

For me, our last weeks together were wonderful when she let me in and excruciating when (because of my fear and clumsiness or for reasons I didn’t understand) she pushed me away. As the end approached, my greatest fear was that she would die without knowing – really knowing ­– that I loved her. But at the eleventh hour, she let down her guard.

As she drifted toward unconsciousness, I held her hand and said: “I love you sweetheart. You do know that I love you, don’t you?”

She squeezed my hand and replied. “Thank you.”

They were her last words to me and I knew that she would die knowing that she too was beloved on the earth, and beloved by me.

Perhaps this is the greatest gift of all: not just to love but to take the greater risk of allowing oneself to be loved. As in so many other things, Chris taught me what really matters in the end.

[Picture credit: Paul MacDonald]