Christopher’s sister, Sophie, phoned last night to tell me that their father (and hence my father-in-law) Alan had died on Sunday. He’d been increasingly infirm for a number of years now, but mostly affecting his mobility and quality of life rather than anything terminal. However, Sophie believes that he went into a decline dating from [...]
I’ve got Rob the painter here yet again all week, painting yet more of the outside of the house. This time he is concentrating on the woodwork at the back of the house, where I had a new utility-room window installed, the large stretch of replacement barge-boards and soffits where I had work done on [...]
Up until now, I’ve kept the old outgoing message on our answerphone, which was Chris saying “I’m afraid we can’t come to the phone at the moment…..” etc etc. I rather liked being able to listen to his voice whenever I wanted to. Also, since I’m dealing with a load of workmen at the moment [...]
Christopher’s favourite webcomic was xkcd.com. Randall Munroe, who writes it, is an ex-NASA physicist, and the website comes with a warning “This comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).” A recent comic strip [...]
I posted last week about the Greek poem which had been haunting me as I tried to get to sleep, and about how Christopher’s Librivox recordings were living on even after his death, I suppose giving him some kind of immortality, like Heraclitus’ poems. Today I got a blog comment from a teacher: “For the [...]
Christopher and I really used to enjoy going to Alan Ayckbourn plays. It didn’t really matter whether they were professional productions in Malvern, Worcester, or on occasions London, or am-dram affairs in a village hall somewhere, we would always make an effort to go. Indeed, provided we recalibrated our expectations, the amateur productions (often with [...]
The saga of Christopher’s tax liabilities continues. I last wrote to HMRC in the middle of January with more information about his estate. Today I got a letter back, saying that they are able to settle the tax liability informally, so I won’t need to fill in a tax return for him – that’s good [...]
When Chris was first made redundant, in Autumn 2009, he was very keen to be seen to be pulling his weight as a “house-husband” and spent some time working in the garden. Unfortunately, that enthusiasm didn’t last as the misdiagnosed cancer was making him weaker. But he did spend a while planting dozens of crocus [...]
Joan, the Australian cancer blogger I mentioned earlier this week, died today. My thoughts are with her husband Kevin and their family. Kevin blogged earlier this week about terminal agitation, and how the palliative care nurses explained to him what was going on and helped Joan cope with it. Chris also suffered from that in [...]
There are, as I’m sure you can imagine, lots and lots of people “out there” blogging about living with (and indeed dying from) cancer. When Chris was first diagnosed we spent a while surfing the net reading about other people’s experiences. Many of the blogs we came across were too depressing, or not updated regularly, [...]
