Sharon was full of fun and life and laughter. When I remember her I hear her laughter, I see her smile.
Even on the last day of her life she greeted me with a smile. She was lying in her special bed in the sitting room, sitting up with pillows and cushions to support her, her phones and the television zapper and her notebook beside her, running the daily life of the family from her bed. It was Friday morning. I let myself in the front door and into the room. She looked pale and strained, but as I came in she smiled and greeted me. Although she had to have the bed downstairs now, she had made sure that as many things as possible stayed as normal as possible, so it wasn’t like walking into a sickroom; it was just that their sitting room happened to have a bed in it.
“Hello, Mum. How are you doing?”
“Hello, darling. Anything I can do?”
She said that she needed some more pills so would I pick up the prescription. She told me briefly that she’d had a bad time last night when she hadn’t been able to breathe, but that M had helped her through it, just like he used to when she had panic attacks years ago.
She was brave and determined. She was more concerned with how others would cope than with how things were for her. M didn’t like hospitals, so she had done all she could to prevent her home being turned into a hospital. There were the things she needed, like her walking frame and the tablet box, but mostly the house remained as it was; it was still their home. She didn’t want drips or catheters or oxygen machines invading their space if she could help it. Getting to the loo was a major operation, but she did it, sometimes with a little help, but mostly with sheer determination.
It was hard to see her so ill. Just a couple of years earlier it had all been so different. She was well and strong and bubbly, happily married to M. She worked with old people in a day centre; she planned activities for them and helped them take an interest in life. She enjoyed her job and she loved her life with M. They loved their time together, their cats, their holidays, and their weekends. They were just starting to talk about having children. I was a busy primary school teacher, working four days a week with Fridays off to try to make sure that I had a life. I looked forward to grandchildren and had even started to practise pram pushing with friends of mine who had young children!
Sharon would have been a lovely mum. She was so good with her friends’ children. She had lots of patience and a sense of fun and they loved her.
She loved all of us and loved to make us happy. Buying just the right card, just the right gift for the occasion was important to her because she wanted people to have the best time and know that they were loved. Organising parties and events that people would enjoy was something she was really good at. I remember going to her parties and having fun and seeing everyone else having fun too. There was food and music and a raffle to raise money for charity; we all enjoyed it, forgetting all the hard work it had taken to organise. Sharon made it look easy, so you didn’t think about it.
She was a special girl, a big strong woman, someone you could talk to about things and know that she would listen. Someone you could have fun with, dancing, singing, talking and laughing. She was a person that you could tell things to and know she would keep your secret and never make fun of you, someone you could feel comfortable with because she was never trying to put one over on you or put you down. She was kind and generous of heart. She could always see the funny side and laugh, and make you laugh too. When I look back I can’t remember why some of the things we said were so funny, but they came out of love and fun and light heartedness and when I remember I smile and laugh all over again.
“I love you lots!”
“I love you two lots!”
“I love you three lots!”
So we would go. I still say it to her, speaking to the smile on her photographs.
As I said before, she used to work with elderly people, thinking up activities and then doing them with the groups that she worked with, activities that would encourage them to think and talk and take a full part in life again. I never actually saw her working with them. I wish I had. I know she loved doing it and those people that worked with her said how much the elderly people enjoyed it and how much they got out of it. She took them to garden centres and bought plants. She encouraged them to make big collages for each season and special time in the year. There was lots of discussion, chatting, laughing, and getting to know each other as they did each activity. People who worked with her said how well organised she was and how full of ideas, always planning something new that the patients would enjoy.
She was brave too. I remember when she did a parachute jump for Cancer Research. She collected lots of sponsors. Then she and Sue, M’s mum, went up to Hinton on the Hedges for Sharon’s training. The people taking part in the sponsored jump had to do lots of practice so they would know how to land safely. They had to learn all the procedures, what to do and when to do it; they had to practise it so they would remember what to do when they actually jumped out of the plane. Then it was the day of the jump. I’m sorry to say I wasn’t there to support her. It made me feel too scared; I just felt I couldn’t watch.
“Just let me know when you’ve done it,”
I said, feeling so proud of her for doing something that I would have been terrified to contemplate.
M and Sue were there. I’m sure Sharon was nervous, but she never showed it. The plane seemed tiny on the huge runway with its propellers turning as the first group set off for their flight. It was a small plane with only room for about six people.
There was a lot of hanging around until it was the turn of Sharon’s group. Finally it was time for them to go up. M and Sue were nervous now. There was the tiny plane flying through the air. Each of the parachutists jumped in turn- Sharon was the last – and came gently through the air, all those hundreds of feet to the ground. M and Sue watched as each one came down. One seemed to be drifting away from the others. Sue thought it was Sharon because of the colour of the helmet. Another parachutist landed safely in front of them. Sue thought “But where’s Sharon?”, starting to get a little panicky. Sharon had drifted a little off course, landed in another field and got a lift back to the airfield. They were so pleased to see her. She was pleased and proud to have done it and to have raised so much money for Cancer Research, but it had been quite scary, and she wouldn’t have wanted to do it again.
I’ve just been looking at photographs of Sharon and M’s house and garden. Sharon was so pleased that they were buying their own house at last. Both house and garden needed a fair amount of work, especially the garden, which was more like a small meadow with meagre chalky soil underneath. She worked so hard to get things to grow and was so pleased when they did. Especially roses. They had a rose arch and several other rose bushes. In the middle of the lawn the ground was poor with lots of stones and it was hard to make things grow. Sharon tried many different plants and shrubs. They would last for a while, but nothing lasted for long. Finally she found a miniature tree, willow, I think, and that grew. She planted a bamboo in the middle and that grew and grew.
She planned different areas: a vegetable patch round the corner, a water feature, the rose arch, beds round the edges. She tried different things to see what would work and learned about gardening – and about patience! – in the process. She was so pleased when they were able to buy a summerhouse from work. (It wasn’t needed any more as they were moving sites.) It was just right in the corner of their garden.
Sharon loved doing the decorating around the house too. She looked in books and magazines, watched house improvement programmes and had lots of ideas of her own. She did a home decorating course and learned lots of new ways of doing things. I loved the way she used stencils: leaves around the top edges in the sitting room, dolphins or shells in the bathroom. The way that she sponged gold over red on the walls of the sitting room worked really well.
I could go on, but I hope you’re getting a picture in your head of what Sharon was like. I expect you’re also getting the picture that I loved her very much! Well, that’s true, and of course I still do. She was my only daughter and I thought the world of her.
In my description she sounds like a paragon, but she wasn’t perfect – none of us are. She got angry and fed up and made the wrong decisions, just like the rest of us. But now that we have lost her it’s hard to dwell on those memories. We like to remember the good things.
Sharon and I used to have fun: going shopping together, seeing films together, going to garden centres, talking and laughing together. We’d phone and e-mail and text. She helped me to learn how to text. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets, but we kept in touch, and talked when we needed to.
We didn’t agree about everything, but we could usually talk about it. There always seem to be things that are too hard to talk about. I bet she got really fed up with me sometimes and I would think “What did I do wrong?” Sometimes there were things I wanted her to do differently in her life. Well, sometimes I’d say something and sometimes I’d just keep quiet because she knew her own mind. Sharon and M would make their decisions together and it wasn’t my place to interfere.
She was so happy with M, her husband. When I said how lucky she was to have found a man like that she would smile and say, “I know. That’s why I chose him!” They loved each other very much. They were just starting to plan to have children of their own.
And then…
She got breast cancer. In February 2002 she discovered a lump in her breast. She had a biopsy. It was cancer. She had two ops at the Jane Ashley Unit of the Churchill Hospital. There were some lovely nurses who really looked after her. (Later, in the summer, she had a party to raise money for the unit to show her appreciation. With the money that she raised they bought a big table for the Day Room so that everyone could sit down together.)
She had chemotherapy, which made her really sick. She sometimes had to have anti-sickness injections because it made her so ill. She lost her hair. That was so sad because her hair was so lovely and she did so many things with it. Looking through the photos after she died, we realised just how many different ways she’d worn her hair: blonde, black, red, auburn, long and short, in many different styles. When it started to come out she asked M to shave her head and she started to wear scarves and caps to cover her head. Now she used those to change the style. Later she bought wigs, not just one, but several. She had a brown one, close to the colour of her own hair, a red one, even a green one! And she wore it at Halloween.
She had radiotherapy and started to take Tamoxifen. In June 2003, after all the treatment, she had a check up at the Churchill Hospital. It was all clear! No signs of cancer at all. That was wonderful! Such a relief after all she had been through.
In August she had a party to celebrate. Her hair was starting to grow through again. It was brown and soft and fluffy. It was so great to see it and to see her healthy and dancing and having fun at the party.
But she had started to have aches and pains. She put it down to a car accident that she had had in May, but in September she had to go to the doctor with it. She had a bone scan. Sue, M’s Mum, went with her to get the results. It was bad news: the cancer had come back. It was in her bones.
It was hard to take it in after she had been told so recently that she was OK. She had been through the whole roller coaster of emotions when they had treated the breast cancer. She thought that she was over that, but here it all was again, only this time much, much worse. If it had got into her bones it was everywhere. How could they ever treat it? What about all the things she had wanted to do in her life? What about the children that she and M were going to have? The news slammed the door in her face and told her “No, you’ll never do those things. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
In December she was in such pain that she couldn’t go to bed to sleep any more. There was no position in which she could make herself comfortable. There was one chair that she used to sit in that was not too bad; she could maybe snatch a few minutes sleep during the night. The doctor had prescribed painkillers and she was taking the full dose, but it wasn’t enough. The doctor suggested that she go into Sobell House Hospice so that they could sort out the pain relief. Dr Lee made all the arrangements and M took her in.
At Sobell House they looked after her so well. She was treated as a person, not just a set of symptoms. So many little things to make her feel better, to feel more normal while she was there: people who would come and chat to her, manicures, massage, a bottle of Pimms off the drinks trolley. Not too much like hospital, though of course there was the special bed, the buttons to press and the bells to ring, and that smell you get in hospitals.
They tried a mixture of slow release and fast acting morphine plus an anti-depressant that worked to relieve pain. The combination did manage to fight off the worst of the pain, but it made Sharon very sleepy and sometimes she would feel really weird and strange; it could be quite frightening. Sometimes she fell asleep in the middle of doing something. It was hard for her to concentrate.
The doctors said she had between six months and two years, and Sharon was determined to make the most of her time. She had holidays and weekends and evenings with M, visits to different places with friends, and days out with me each Friday. But she was still in pain and she found it difficult to do the things she usually took for granted. She couldn’t move easily any more, so she had to use a wheel chair. It was terribly ironic that she had become almost as helpless as the people that she had looked after when she had been a care assistant.
In December 2003 Sharon and M went to Somerset to stay with Dave, her cousin, and Esther, his wife, and their two children, Gracie and Mattie, for Christmas. They had a lovely time, getting together with Sharon’s aunt and uncle, Sue and Chris, and having fun with the family. Esther and Dave made sure they enjoyed themselves and Sharon enjoyed the food and exchanging presents and all the special things of Christmas. But there was a shadow over them all, because everyone knew that Sharon’s time was limited. Would this be her last Christmas?
The time went too quickly. In early spring Sharon and M went to stay with Jenny and Tony in Bere Ferrers on the Tamar estuary in Devon. It was a beautiful place to stay and Jenny and Tony made them so welcome. Sharon had known them since she was three. They felt like family and were very good friends, very fond of Sharon and of M too.
In May there was another holiday, this time to Weymouth to stay with Karen and Graham. Sharon had been their bridesmaid in the ‘70s and they had always kept in touch. Sharon loved the sea and again they had a wonderful holiday. Karen took them out to some lovely places like the Weymouth Monet Gardens. Sharon enjoyed buying presents for people at the shops in the Centre by the harbour.
But at the end of May Sharon had to go into hospital. She was in pain again and there were other problems too. She was in the John Waryn Ward at first. Doctor Fritha came to see her and Sharon and I both listened hard, while I took notes, so we could remember what had been said. She was transferred to the Blenheim Ward of the Churchill Hospital and seemed to be recovering. She started doing exercises, practising going up and downstairs so she could go home again.
But one night she had stomach problems and was swiftly taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital. She was there for days, stuck in her room, stuck in bed as no one had time to get her up and do exercises with her. She was so frustrated. It was the bank holiday and nothing happens in hospital at bank holidays. Luckily her Uncle Leslie came down from Preston to see her and helped to take her mind off it. He took her out in her wheel chair into the sunshine – there was a little garden just outside the hospital. He took her to the restaurant on the second floor of the hospital so she could eat some more interesting food.
While Leslie and I were there Dr Fritha came over from the Churchill hospital to see her. She explained Sharon’s choices, which were really no choice at all. An operation would be dangerous and probably wouldn’t help. Chemo and radiotherapy weren’t going to solve anything. They couldn’t do any more for her. So she came home with a special bed and chair and support from a Macmillan nurse from Sobell House.
She died at the end of June. She was 34 years old.
* * * *
We loved her very much and since she died we miss her very much. I cannot tell you in ordinary words how much I miss her. None of us can express the sense of loss, sadness and loneliness we feel at losing Sharon. We had lots of happy times. As I remember her, it’s her laughter and her smile that I remember most of all.
* * * *
Sharon gave me a saying to put up on my wall:
“In the time of your life, LIVE So that you shall not add To the suffering and misery Of the world But shall smile To the infinite delight And mystery of it.”
I often look at it and think, “I’m glad she gave me that!” It’s one of the things that help me through.
