LITMIR.BIZ

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inside it that she didn’t want me to have to face, a thing I regret a little. Although we talked a lot and got through the experience together, I know there were bits of her that were frightened and anxious, bits which I let her keep inside or sometimes let her tell the whole world on the Net rather than talk to me. That may be why I rarely read the diary while she was alive. The things she wrote in her diary were the things her internal voice was saying, and I was afraid it would be too painful too handle. I couldn’t bear to know the mental torture that she felt at times. Physical pain I could handle, there were things I could do about that – I could call doctors in, I could give her more morphine – but sometimes I didn’t want to know where she was in her head, I couldn’t handle it. Weeze was my rock. I needed her to be strong and there for me, I couldn’t think of her not being my anchor. That’s not to say we couldn’t talk about the illness, we did, a lot. In the last few months when she stopped writing and became very depressed, we talked and talked, and that was the toughest time for me. Because what do you say to someone literally weeks away from dying, ‘Cheer up, it could be worse’, or ‘Come on, why the long face? You never know, it might never happen’? But, of course, it was going to happen and it did.

      Weeze had a great ability to learn and it only took her a couple of hours with Gav to work out how to load her own entries on to the website and then, that was it, she was off. She sent her soul out into the ether and captured a world.

       1 February

      Big girls, they don’t cry-y-y (they don’t cry)

      Big girls, they don’t cry.

      If one more person tells me categorically that I’m not going to die I shall punch them. Now, I’m aware that this is probably misdirected anger and that I should be angry with the cancer, if anything, but honestly, it makes me want to scream. So – a friend of a friend of yours had cancer and they were written off by doctors and then they saw a homeopath and it just disappeared. Well, that’s just fabulous. A friend of a friend of mine won the lottery. But I don’t tell people who are in debt that a rational answer to their problems is to spend all their time buying lottery tickets. Yes, it may just go away. But the odds are that it won’t. And I’m damned if, having been given this warning, I’m going to die unprepared. I figure if I do a load of practical preparations over the next couple of months, then I can relax and live however long I’ve got left TO THE FULL. So. A recipe book for Tim. A few letters for Caitlin – ‘For When You Miss Me’, ‘For When You Get Married’, ‘For When You’re 27, Like Me’ – that kind of thing. ‘Dear Caitlin, please disregard all the times I read you Cinderella. Be nice to your stepmother.’ Weird. The usual wills and money stuff – ‘Please assist me (wink, wink) should I go bonkers when it enters my brain.’ Then once my ‘affairs are in order’ I can get on with the all-important tasks I have set myself:

      To cuddle Caitlin as much as is humanly possible – how many memories do I have from when I was three?

      To do as much photography as possible – TO MAKE MY MARK.

      To try to make Tim as happy as he makes me.

      Sometimes it’s so awful that I can’t bear to think at all. But sometimes it really is like the Travolta film, Phenomenon – life has such a wonderful intensity that I feel as though it is a gift, not a disease.

      And with that simple entry she started a remarkable document. The last sentence was to become a theme of Weeze’s illness. She was very split between the higher state of reality she gained from facing death and the hard evidence of the price she’d have to pay for it. I remember walking around our local shopping centre, a hideous cathedral of consumerism. I had just been thinking how appalling the place was, how it sucked the life out of people, sending them into a shopping coma, when Weeze grabbed my arm and kissed me.

      ‘This orange juice, is unbelievable.’ She sipped again at the drink I had just bought her from M&S. Her face was lit up. ‘I can’t tell you what it tastes like, it’s just so – mmmm. Everything is so fabulous. Kiss me.’

      She could find beauty in everything in life. I would occasionally find her crying and when I’d put my arm round her she’d just look up at me and say something like ‘It’s all so wonderful.’ I’m not sure how usual this kind of response to a terminal illness is. Although I was grateful for this for her, for me it just made the divide between us seem all the more wide. Dying is a lonely business, not just for the one dying but for those that love them. Because each person has to face the journey in their own way. I got none of Weeze’s optimism or joie de vivre. For me it was all bleak and dark and impenetrable. All I got out of the experience was the pain of watching and waiting.

       5 February

      I’m so tired. Yesterday I felt so tired that for a split second I thought of death in terms of rest. I doubt I’ll win any positive thinking points for that one. I got pretty down on Wednesday and thought – oh, here it comes, this is how you’re supposed to feel about dying, I must have been in denial up to now – but then it turned out that it was just PMS. I feel much happier now. Mind you, it doesn’t seem strictly fair that I should have terminal cancer and PMS.

      A couple of times last week people have been over for dinner and the conversation has turned to how cynical the world is now, or how terrible politicians are, or how we’re destroying the earth, and I’ve felt really detached and almost bored – as though I can’t muster any strong emotion about it, because it’s not really my problem any more. I suppose I could be concerned about the world for Caitlin, but what will be will be, whether I sit and worry about it or not. I suppose that’s the case with everything really – and that’s why I’m not too depressed by this dying thing; I’ll either die or I won’t (well, in the near future), but whatever happens I will cope in some way, because that’s what happens – people get ill and die all the time and life still goes on for everybody else. I don’t see that it’s such a huge thing, really; everyone dies and just because we as a society can’t deal with it or even talk about it, doesn’t make it any less natural.

      I spent most of today waiting for a phone call from a doctor in Sheffield who has something called a gamma knife. So far he’s the only person who has shown any signs of wanting to talk to me about treating me – but he didn’t ring. He’s got all my scans and treatment history, but he’s going to Australia next week for a month. I really hate waiting for news. In a way I’d rather he rang and said he couldn’t treat me than just didn’t ring.

      Song for the day: Who Wants To Live Forever?’ By Queen.

      Waiting for results or phone calls was the hardest thing over the years of her illness. When she was first diagnosed we had the agony of waiting to see if anyone could do anything. After the operation we had the anxiety of waiting for the re-scan results. Then every three months we would have to travel up to Guy’s Hospital in London where Prof Gleeson would examine her and give us the all-clear or not. These regular check-ups were the worst. Weeze and I would both know we were getting close to one because we’d start getting nervous and we’d stop talking about her cancer. As if, if we talked about it, it might be there next time the Prof looked up Louise’s nose.

      During her remission we must have been up to Guy’s twelve or so times, and it never got any better. In fact, the further away we got from the operation and the further we were into her remission, the more frightening the trips got. Partly because we knew that they’d been unable to remove all of the cancer and so it was only a matter of time before it came back and also because the longer it went on the more we got back to a normal life and the more precious that became. Enjoying watching Caitlin grow up, Weeze’s amazing flourishing of her photographic talent, me getting on with writing and directing – life was good and neither of us wanted that taken away. I personally got very jumpy and hyper before the meetings, wanting to bounce around like a rubber ball, but Weeze would get very calm. This was always the way with us in times of stress, I got loud and over-excited and Louise turned into some kind of Zen master.

      My bowels were the thing that always took the full brunt of my nerves. I have suffered from IBS ever since this thing started. I remember one time with absolute horror. We were waiting in the hideously depressing old waiting-room

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