Compassion, Winter 2020

Winter 2020 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 11 My Survival I remember so clearly that day in January 2010, when the neurosurgeon looked at me and said, “I’m very sorry, but Becky has a grade 4 primary brain tumour”. I stared at him in horror and said, “You HAVE to save her. I cannot BE without her”. He promised he would do his best, but my beautiful, funny, caring only child and best friend took her last breath in my arms in December of the same year, aged just 19. I was heartbroken, bereft and utterly empty. All I wanted to do was never wake up again to the realisation that she was gone. And here I still am, almost ten years later. How have I survived when I never thought I could? I had no partner to lean on (Becky’s Dad and I divorced when she was five and he sadly died of a broken heart 14 months after she did). I had no real friends and very little in the way of family support. I did find TCF quite early on and spent many hours on the helpline, then moved onto the Samaritans after TCF hours. I bought myself an iPad and spent hours playing mindless games – things I didn’t have to think about, because I couldn’t think of anything else except Becky. I drank way too much wine and often woke up in the early hours, having passed out on the sofa. I was quite fortunate that I had very understanding managers at work, so I could go to work, not do very much if I couldn’t, then come home when I was too exhausted to continue even trying. It was probably two years or more before I was functioning anywhere near adequately in my role as a Specialist Nurse. I began using the TCF Forum to vent about the unfairness of everything and there was a number of people who had lost their own precious children around the same time. After some months, I started meeting up with some of these people and have made a few lifelong friends, although I cannot see some of them as regularly as I’d like, as most of them are a three to four hour drive away. In the early years, I constantly seemed to be planning and working on the next fundraising event. I raised around £20K in three years or so, but I have a finite number of contacts and couldn’t keep begging the same people for money or donations of items. Assistance gradually wanes too, so the fundraising had to come to an end. I read other people’s stories of survival and struggled to relate or follow in their footsteps – I can’t do many of the things that others have said helps them – I can’t knit or sew or embroider or paint or any other crafts, for that matter. I can’t blog. Baking would make me fatter. I have no other children or grandchildren to focus my attention on. I haven’t got a bench or a tree or a special spot in the garden to visit. I’m not much of a reader. My concentration span is too poor to immerse myself in films. I have no religion to give me comfort, no god to turn to or to be angry with.