Caught In The Lobster Pot | The Struggle We All Recognise

Caught In The Lobster Pot | The Struggle We All Recognise

A painful experience shared by countless others, yet each person carries their struggle in their own quiet way.”

Readers mail….
From Hugh Jarss….

The silence was abrupt and total.  It was as if the universe had paused for a moment in its vast rotation.  That was the instant when my wife died.  That was the moment when my own little universe collapsed in on itself.

15 years ago, my wife discovered that she had breast cancer.  It was sufficiently advanced that a mastectomy was the best way forward.  Losing a breast is a traumatic event for every woman.  It sorely wounds her very femininity.  Possibly, my wife felt this a little more because having a beautiful body was an essential part of her career as a fashion model.

After the surgery, my wife followed a six-month course of chemotherapy.  This involved a three-week rotation of chemical infusion, sickness, and then foreboding as the date of the next infusion approached.  She lost her hair and her fingernails, as well as suffering recurrent dramatic loss of white blood cells.  This is the fate for many women undergoing chemotherapy.  Then followed courses of hormone therapy, which lasted for seven years.  These just involved taking a pill, which fortunately caused no particular side effects.

During this time, we moved to Cyprus and enjoyed all its sunny benefits,  forgetting about the cancer and making light of the loss of her breast.  Then, at Christmas 2021, we discovered that the cancer had returned and with a vengeance.  Our oncologist, we were in this together, did not sweeten the pill.  My wife had stage IV incurable metastatic breast cancer, which could not be treated with surgery or X-rays.  Chemotherapy would keep the cancer in check for a while so as to give her three or four years of life.

The fight for life continues

The chemotherapy began with the same rhythm and consequences as before.  Periodically the cancer would outwit the chemical formula and another one would be  chosen to continue the work.  Eventually the last combination of chemicals caused  such serious side effects that it was discontinued.  At the same time we discovered that the cancer had invaded my wife’s brain and had caused serious damage.  An intensive course of radiotherapy on her brain over the Christmas of 2024 arrested the development of those cancers but could not undo the damage already done.

Over the next few months my wife began to lose the use of her legs and hands.  How she battled to exert her dominance over the cancer as she vainly tried to climb the stairs to our bedroom when her legs would not carry her or when she took up knitting to force her fingers to obey her.  I still have the scarf  she was making.  It is unfinished and transfixed by her needles.  It will always remind me of her courage and determination.

And so the end of a sad jouney is reached

I wept bitterly the day I returned the wheelchair that we had borrowed from Tulips Cancer Charity.  By then my wife was so totally disabled that she could neither walk nor sit up and, for those reasons, she could no longer benefit from the chair.  My words of thanks to Tulips were strangled and died in my throat.  This was another awful moment of acceptance that neither I nor medicine had been able to bolster the defensive lines of my wife’s battle.

A little later my wife slipped into the coma which visits before death.  Unable to swallow  her saliva gurgled up and down in her throat, foaming as it did so, causing her breathing to rasp loudly.  This is familiarly known as “the death rattle”.  Then, as I attended to her, the rattle stopped.  That was the total silence.  She was dead.

The Struggle Ends For The Departed   

I felt no reaction.  Thef supreme relief that my wife’s horrible suffering had come to an end was balanced by the knowledge that never, for the whole of eternity, would my wife wake again in the morning nor would we ever again lie wrapped in each other’s arms.

Lying there she seemed exactly the same as she had the moment before, when still living.  How is it that the magic spark of life can leave no trace of its going?  I kissed her gently and smelled her skin.  I kissed her again.

In Cyprus, after a death, things move quite swiftly.  I washed and dressed my wife ready for her final journey, a task I could not permit anyone else to perform.  Then when she was ready, my final kiss of farewell.  The following morning the doctor certified her death and her body was removed to the mortuary in Kyrenia.  I had arranged already for the grave plot and the printed service sheet.  Key family representatives arrived from overseas.

My wife’s burial ceremony was conducted by the family.  A good gathering of friends and acquaintances turned out, most of whom we had not seen during Covid or my wife’s illness.  Some I have not seen since her funeral.  Despite knowing for nearly four years that this day would come it was still very difficult to watch the coffin descending into the ground forever hiding my wife from the light and from me.  I can imagine now how my father must have felt as he buried my mother all those years ago.  He was exactly the same age then as I am now.

The Struggle Continues For The Living

I do not think that I have managed my grief very well.  Apart from telephone contact with our children, who are spread throughout the world, my life has been virtually solitary.  This is partly because there is hardly anyone living around here, the cafés are empty, the bars with their karaoke and quiz evenings are a no man’s land for me.  Acquaintances have respectfully kept their distance. I feel that I, too, am in part responsible for my isolation and I have been too reserved.  A wise saying is that a stranger is a friend you have not yet met. 

In the early days after my wife’s death every room in the house, every cupboard and every drawer contained her ghost.  Her ghost confronted me at every place we had visited together.  Sometimes I felt unable to enter them.  This ghost was she when she was very ill or in her wheelchair or when she could not walk or feed herself.  Those were memories I did not want.  They squeezed my heart and made tears run down my face, as sometimes they still do today.  But, time passes and the face on the ghost has softened.  Now it can remind me of the good times we spent in those places; the fun on the beach, the joy of buying something together for the house and so on.  Happiness without her may never come but sadness may slowly leach away.  I await the time when the winter of my sadness evolves  into the warmth of my full acceptance of her loss. But how, I don’t know.

Living a life alone and celebrating the past life together

In the morning, when I wake, although I cannot throw my arms around her I do gaze at a special  photograph of my wife.  She is so alive and full joy.  Her beauty  raises my spirits to the sky.  I blow a kiss to her and smile.

It is not uncommon for a surviving spouse to die not long after the death of his or her loved one.  Often that happens within a year.  They say, “he died of a broken heart”.  In fact there is a well-known cardiac condition associated with the broken heart syndrome known as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.  The long-term stress  felt by someone coping with the terminal disease and death of their dear one can cause their own heart to malfunction, sometimes fatally.  The word “Takosubo” comes from the Japanese for lobster pot!

My heart is trapped in the lobster pot.#

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