Monday 19 February 2018

Farewell to some old friends

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.