15 March
It’s a sunny day and I feel fabulous. Have decided that today, for one day only, I don’t have cancer. I have been singing and spring cleaning and remembering the countless times I have cleaned this kitchen whilst listening to the Mamas And The Papas or some other such sing-a-long music, back doors open and sun streaming into the house. I could be twenty or sixty and the day-to-day of my life would probably be the same. However long you live, if you’ve had a life, it’s OK. That doesn’t sound like it makes sense, but I mean that I think I’ve lived long enough to know what life’s about.
This was my Weeze! This was how I hope to remember her in the years to come. Not cleaning – because however many times she said she did it, neither of us were brilliantly tidy people – but in the kitchen, dancing. It was our favourite pastime. The hours we spent kitchen dancing must run into weeks. Kitchen dancing for any out there not familiar with it is the kind of dancing you do on your own, only you do it with your loved one in the kitchen with the music playing very loud. You do all the movies you’ve seen John Travolta in or ballet moves or slow smooching or anything you feel like. I can’t recommend it highly enough – it’s one of the most life affirming things I can think of.
22 March
Looking back over this diary, I am worried that it might look as though I spend most of my time brooding on dying and feeling irritated by people. It’s like when I wrote diaries in my teens – when I am busy and happy I don’t think about writing, or I am too busy to write, and then when I look back it looks as though I was miserable for six years, which isn’t remotely true.
So in this entry I want to set the record straight. Now is a good time to do it, as I am sitting in Caitlin’s room waiting for her walls to dry and feeling fabulous. Tim and I are painting her room while she’s at school. It is a really sunny yellow – like Cornish ice-cream. Painting it feels like slapping custard on the walls. I want to make her room really fun – we’re doing handprints of all three of us on the walls next and writing our names and odd happy words around the edges.
Today I spoke to an old school friend whom I haven’t seen in years and she couldn’t think of anything to say to me. She said, ‘Normally I would say look on the bright side, but there isn’t a bright side. There just isn’t a bright side, is there?’
Well, Amanda, yes there is.
I have a really cool life. I live in a big house next to a park with a playground in it. I have tons of the most supportive friends I can imagine – friends who do so much for me (Jane and Uschi, I’m so lucky I have you) – friends who I know will look out for Tim and Caitlin always. My family is also fabulous – I would trust mine and Tim’s parents with Caitlin for ever, and I have two lovely sisters who are great to talk to.
If I died tomorrow I would have still known more love in my life than most people experience in eighty years. I still consider myself a really lucky person. And, weirdly enough given the circumstances, I think a lot of my friends still consider me lucky. To be honest, I would rather be dying than be married to someone else or have a different child. So I can’t be unhappy with my lot. If I had the chance to throw away my cards and get a new deal, I’d still play the hand I’ve got, because highs and lows are better than a healthy life without love or the ability to appreciate the wonder of it all.
Now that’s enough schmaltz for now, so I’ll sign off.
One last thing, though – if people can’t (and they generally can’t) think of anything to say to me, I wish they’d say ‘supercalifrajilisticexpialadocious’. I would laugh my head off if someone said that to me.
And loads of people did say that to her. As soon as that message went up on the website she got loads of guest book messages and emails which said exactly that. And she did laugh. By this time the site was really taking off and she was bowled over that people wanted to read what she had to say. Although she always wanted to write and leave a mark, for a few weeks when she started writing her diary it was very much for her, a cathartic process. But as time went on and more and more people were logging on daily to check on her progress, she began to write for her audience. She felt she had a responsibility to continue it and to be honest about how she was feeling. We had long debates about what the website was for and whether or not she could really be honest on it, and whether or not it was a valuable thing to be doing or mere voyeurism. It was a debate that continued right up until the end of her life and when she got particularly depressed towards the end she sometimes regretted she had ever started it. She looked back on previous entries and felt so different, so somewhere else, that she began to doubt how truthful she’d been earlier on in the diary. But going through it now I know she was honest about how she felt on any particular day, and I am proud of her for it.
24 March
First evening alone for ages. And I can’t stop crying …
1 April
Tim and I returned from New York the day before yesterday, having had an amazing three days. As our original Valentine’s weekend had been cancelled by the airline (strike), we were compensated with first-class upgrades on the flights and a suite at the hotel (overlooking Central Park). Talk about how the other half lives. It was great. We saw a huge Broadway musical, Ragtime, went backstage at the Late Show (halfway round the world to see Blur!), and saw Woody Allen playing with his jazz band in a club – the highlight of the trip. Tim bought an entire suitcase of clothes and I discovered that my bum is the same size in England as it is in Saks Fifth Avenue, so bought things like stationery and camera stuff – some gorgeous paper from Cartier and playing cards from Tiffany’s.
Although I got pretty exhausted and my ear hurt on the flight, one of the best things for me was that I really felt that I was having a holiday from having cancer. I felt like a tourist having a really romantic weekend, far too busy to think about much at all.
Caitlin had a great time here visiting new-born lambs and things and apparently didn’t cry once! So no guilt either! Home to something of an anti-climax, but at least the weather is nice here. Next holiday is France – all together.
One strange thing: flying back from New York I was looking out of the window and saw us flying from sunset to darkness. We were high above the clouds and over the sea and could see nothing but golden orange fading into deep blue, then blackness. I suddenly felt stifled and desperate to turn back into the sun, as though I were dying.
New York was an incredible time for me, I loved it. Yes, it’s true, I love New York. Just overcoming my fear of flying to get on a transatlantic flight was quite a big step, but actually getting in the limousine at the other end at JFK and driving across the bridge into Manhattan was a buzz and a half. As Weeze said, as compensation for the last aborted attempt, we’d had nearly everything on the trip upgraded. For those of you who haven’t flown business class or first class, it is simply fabulous! Especially, I guess, for a luxury travel virgin like myself. Why? It’s the big seats – they’re like beds. I swear I felt refreshed when I got to New York, not tired and filthy as if I’d just travelled in a cattle truck, as I normally do. But why the fear of flying?
OK, picture the scene if you will. Weeze and I are on our honeymoon, nearly everything that could go wrong has and we’re both sick as parrots. We cut short our cruise down the Nile and decide to fly back to Cairo to just rest up in a nice hotel. Well, on the way from the boat to Luxor airport the taxi breaks down in the middle of the desert. This I should have spotted as a bad omen. The massive fat man driving us turns round and says, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong, you better push.’ And he’s saying that to a couple who’ve been throwing up non-stop for ten days, for whom just staying conscious was a difficulty. But being a good English couple, rather than saying ‘Sod off, you’ve got to be joking’, we crawled out of the cab and began to push. It was so hot, and such hard work to push this taxi and this huge man that I thought one of us was going to collapse.