Great Hosannah

TRACK 5 of my auto biog work-in-progress

The condescending, cunt of a consultant broke the news that the tumour on my husband’s lung was stage 3b.

Terry’s hand flew to his mouth in shock, like a small child.

First of many punches to my gut.

It was November 22nd 2017. The same date John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

Our own grassy fucking knoll.

I have thought a lot about what the cancer business does. And it is a business. We’re all going to die – and the truth is we don’t know when that might be – but it’s not a second sooner or later than it’s meant to be. So why do we let the medical industry, that – particularly over the past 5 years has shown itself to be a monstrous, fear-peddling, bloated, Godless blob – impose meaningless time frames?

Most doctors shat all over their sacred Hippocratic Oaths a long time before 2020. As I have said many times, our crusade is to see moral and ethical first principles established. I want to see places of healing full of meadow flowers in vases, open windows, and beautiful art. I want dream rooms, prayers, fasting, and baths like the Greeks had in their Asclepieion. The human spirit simply cannot thrive if it is terrorised, sanitised, muzzled, or injected with poisonous metals.

Fuck it, let’s paint the words Truth, Goodness and Beauty in the entrance, and pipe Bach into the wards. Nobody feels worse with the Brandenburg Concertos or St Matthew Passion humming gently in their ears.

My darling Terence departed this realm on November 28th 2018. I don’t want to dwell on his diagnosis and treatment at The Royal Marsden, largely because it’s too painful, but also because my anger – that resulted in several letters of complaint – began to consume me, and I don’t want to find that the unbridled rage that filled my heart has somehow usurped my love for him.

It turns out that anger and love are not good companions.

I chose to read And Death Shall Have no Dominion at Terence’s funeral. I must have played this magnificent version read by the peerless Richard Burton a thousand times. In my opinion, there is no greater poem about death. Despite its stark imagery, the repeated phrase ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ tells us, in no uncertain terms, that no matter how our life ends, death can only take our mortal body. It is not the end. After I’d finished reading, the man who conducted the service was so impressed by my rendition he said perhaps I should do his job. It wasn’t a showbiz, showy-off thing you understand, I was just determined to make it the very best I could muster.

The truth is, I was desperately holding onto my voice, in case it floated away like a hot-air balloon that has come untied from its pegs.

I was a balloon full of complete desolation.

Terry and I both loved this live performance of Kula Shaker’s Great Hosannah (on Jools Holland) and I chose it for the start of his funeral, as I followed his coffin down the aisle of the crematorium. Terry was a big Smith’s/Morrissey fan and I chose Come Back to Camden. Terry was born in Newcastle, so my final choice was When The Boat Comes In.

After Terence died, I found myself compelled to write to him in the form of blog posts. It became an almost daily routine that helped me immensely in those first few months.

You can read them all here.

MORE TO COME…

PS darling reader, I’ve started calling the chunks/chapters TRACKS because I see this book as being very much like a CD. Skip, pause, re-play, stop, and remember. Music and words underpin who I am.

PPS I will revisit the big life and death themes in another TRACK