2017 saw a
good few friends of mine pass away, sadly long before they really should have,
all of cancer and all much too young. Among
them, Sue Edmonds who was in her late forties; she died of breast cancer, which
she thought she had beat. She was
diagnosed about the same time as me so we used to swap notes regarding our
treatment whenever we bumped into each other.
We both had operations, and Sue had extensive chemotherapy too, but
sadly her cancer came back a few years ago and pretty soon it was clear that it
was terminal this time. A few months before
she passed we were invited to her birthday party and it was clear when we got
there it was her way of saying goodbye to us all. She had endured a lot of surgery in the
previous few months, and it was upsetting to see a massive patch over her eye
which had been removed as the cancer was now in her face; she was also having
trouble eating and swallowing food too, but somehow she seemed in high spirits
and laughed and joked with us all and the evening in spite of her obvious
suffering was wonderfully touching and enjoyable; her children and husband Paul
were there of course and they made sure the evening was a success and that Sue
had a good time. It’s amazing how people
cope with life’s inevitable tragedy; I’ve seen it so often now, and seen many
of my friends and relatives face the end of their existence with courage,
stoicism and love for those around them, concerned also for their feelings at
the loss of someone close and important... themselves. I also lost a mate from drama school, ‘Adrian’,
who was one of the funniest people I have ever met. We were always together because we both
seemed to have the same mad sense of humour, but we lost touch over the years,
so when I heard that he had suffered from long term mental health problems and
struggled with life’s hardships for a long, long time I found it really
upsetting. It’s strange how some people
just seem to suffer; life just seems to constantly kick them in the face for no
rhyme or reason, and it seemed that Adrian really did suffer and struggle with
addiction, loneliness and a very cruel cancer that resulted in him having his
tongue cut away. I will always remember
him as a funny, intelligent guy, concerned about the injustices of the world
and passionately involved with theatre, the great love of his life. It seems however that theatre let him down;
he didn’t get on in the profession, and like many of my contemporaries
eventually gave up trying to find work in an industry that can be so
indifferent to great talent. I don’t
know if that rejection in some way contributed to his mental decline, but one
suspects it may have been a factor. I am
also mourning the loss of our good friend’s young daughter, ‘India’. She was only nineteen years old and died just
before Christmas and in spite of her youth was an incredibly inspirational
individual. She had complained of severe
headaches on New Year’s day two years ago and was taken to A&E where she
had a scan which revealed an embedded tumour in her brain. To her parent’s horror the medical staff informed
them that it was inoperable.
Nevertheless, she was operated on – again and again, and each operation
seemed to go wrong resulting in some speech loss, mobility and meningitis. Her family still battled on to try and save
their precious daughter; (because that’s what you do when you have a precious
daughter), even raising money to take her to America to have proton beam
treatment. Eventually India declared
that she had had enough of hospital and wanted to make the best of her last
moments on earth. She began her bucket
list, writing letters (no messaging or emailing for her), working for a
printing company and doing a parachute jump too. The family had booked a trip to Sweden to try
and see the Northern Lights; her final wish, but sadly the day before they were
to travel she had a bleed on the brain and instead of catching a plane, she
instead travelled to a hospice in Worcester.
A few weeks later she passed away and in those precious last days she
planned her funeral, wrote an elegy about her personal beliefs and even made a
video. Her funeral was of course
heartbreaking for her family, her friends and everyone who knew her – a
seventeen year old girl who was looking forward to going on to University at St
Andrews had endured two years of pain and suffering in a desperate quest to
beat cancer and live as long as possible, but in those last few years she had
achieved so much, and has left behind a legacy of memories and words which we
experienced on that day, including the video in which she spoke with a slow,
slightly slurred voice about the wonders around us all and how we should all
enjoy and make the most of every moment we have. There was no coffin at the funeral because as
she could not donate her organs and be a donor, she instead left her body to
medical science; and I think ‘what an extraordinary gesture from such a young
and extraordinarily exemplary young woman.’
I myself as you can see am still around and kicking and have recently
had more hospital checks, and indeed last year I had two endoscopies and a CT
scan as well as various blood tests – all so far clear, thank God! I endeavour to follow India’s advice and
example and try and make the most of every moment I have, and indeed once you
have experienced cancer you really do have a fresh perspective on life, but
life constantly throws up its challenges, both financial and emotionally and so
of course it is not always that easy to live up so such a unique person’s
philosophical advice, but I am going to give it my best shot. Life really is precious and it’s such an
incredible accident of fate that we exist at all: our lives were forged in the
furnace of the big bang 18.5 billion years ago and millions of years of
evolutionary chance had finally given us conscious thought so that we can experience
the amazing world we live in. We really
are, all of us, stardust. Life is a
beautiful gift; we shouldn’t squander it.
India as I
said planned her funeral, and as science was always her touchstone and made
sense of life and existence for her, one of the readings she asked for was ‘You
Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral’. By Aaron Freeman. Here it is...
You want a physicist to speak
at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about
the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not
died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law
of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is
destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration,
every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child
remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping
father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down
from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and
tell him/her that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the
particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your
hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their
ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving
family, may the physicist let him/her know that all the photons that bounced
from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her/his eyes, that
those photons created within her/him constellations of electromagnetically
charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind
the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may
be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell
them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part
of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you'll want the
physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith;
indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can
measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and
found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can
hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the
science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still
around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a
bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly.
Amen.
