11
KBO
Let us prepare for winter. The sun has turned away from us and the nest of summer lies broken in a tree. Life slips through our fingers and, as darkness gathers, our hands grow cold. It is time to go inside. It is time for reflection and resonance. It is time for contemplation. Let us go inside.1
Winter. The cold, the bareness of the trees and the darkness reflect my mood. Getting on with life is not easy. It requires an enormous act of will to get out of bed each morning and face each new day. Snow falls heavily on the ground.
Ben goes out early one morning and arrives back late. He has been to Wandlebury, one of the few hills near Cambridge and surrounded by woodland. It is an area we often walked with the children when they were young. Until, that is, one autumn, when a severe storm uprooted, and even snapped off like matches, many of the beeches. It looked like a war zone and afterwards we did not return for a long time, but now Ben has returned. Beyond the car park and below the woods is an open, sloping field, grassland, covered inches deep with virgin snow. He sets to work. The curved back. The foetal pose. The beard and the bald head. The bloated features. Captured perfectly in snow. Tom, lying on his deathbed. How else would an artist express his grief? He stays with it for a long time and takes some photos to show us. Then, as the sun rises and warms the earth, the snow sculpture melts and sinks back into the ground. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Without a trace. Like Tom himself, gone from our sight.
Spring is returning. Snowdrops push their way up through the hard ground and shyly open their green–white, drooping heads. Something inside me wants to go out in my boots and stamp them down, crush them into the ground, push them back down into the cold earth, so that I might remain here, in the cold, barren winter, frozen in time, like Miss Havisham,2 for ever. But it is not possible. Inexorably, more bulbs spring up. Buds appear on the roses and the soft fruit bushes. Blue tits fly in and out of the nesting box. There is no holding them back. No stopping them. The irrepressible cycle of life goes on.
We watch a TV series, The Gathering Storm, portraying Winston Churchill, played by Albert Finney, in the years between the wars. Feeling powerless, he sinks into a deep depression: his Black Dog. His wife, Clementine (Vanessa Redgrave), appeals to his reserves of courage and determination with the phrase: ‘KBO, my dear, KBO.’ (Keep buggering on, my dear. Keep buggering on.) It becomes our own code word for struggling on with life when all seems bleak and pointless. I come downstairs, looking grim, paralysed by a bottomless well of sadness, grief and anger. ‘KBO, my dear,’ says Annie, gently. So we keep buggering on. It is all we can do.
People ask how we are doing. We quickly discover that most of them do not actually want to know. They cannot bear the truth. They need us to tell them that we are fine. That we are bearing up well. That faith is as strong as ever. That we are ‘getting over it’ – whatever that means. We try to be honest, but we learn to limit that honesty to a relatively small group of people who genuinely want to know and who can bear it, with us. Sometimes, for a while at least, they even bear it for us.
It is not helpful, but I cannot help it. I go over and over in my mind what might have caused it. Melanoma. Skin cancer. They never found a mark on his skin, nor even in his eyes, where it sometimes, apparently, starts. Neverthless, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t caused by exposure to the sun. Who exposed him to the sun? We did, going off to South America when he was just six months old. We did use sunscreen – though occasionally we forgot. La Paz is 12,000 feet above sea level so, despite being in the tropics, it is not hot, never getting above 25 degrees, but the air is thin so it is easy to burn, and burn badly, even on a cold day. The altitude? Did that contribute to his illness? It certainly didn’t help. What about the salmonella infection? Surely he’d never have got salmonella if we’d stayed in England? The treatment: ‘Enterolit’, the recommended treatment for stomach infections in Bolivia, containing heavy doses of chloramphenicol, an antibiotic used only as a last resort in the UK. Did that irreparably damage his immune system? If we had stayed in the UK, would Tom have still been alive? Is his death all our fault?
We agonize over these questions, for which have no clear answer. Despite the well-meaning insistence of others that it probably didn’t make any difference, the truth is that, although we never knowingly took decisions we thought would hurt our children, we may well have been responsible for Tom’s death.
With such thoughts in my head, I play golf.
Annie runs. I do not think she runs because she enjoys running, certainly not now. She runs because she cannot help herself. She runs in order to survive. She runs to where she can be alone with her thoughts, her grief. Pounding the towpath and the fenland tracks is all she can do. She is not yet able to return to her work as a psychotherapist, so what she has on her hands is time. If you are going to run distances, time is what you need. You need to spend hours running, which is exactly what she does.
She has only taken up running recently. She does a short Fun Run. (Fun Runners – such an inappropriate term. They don’t do it for fun. They may not be fast, but they are serious runners.) Then she manages 5 km, a significant milestone. She hopes to make 10 km – that will be her limit, she says. Then she runs 10 km. She can never run a marathon, she assures us, but she begins to believe that she might, just possibly, be able to run a half-marathon – 13 miles. Before he dies she talks to Tom about it. She tells him she will run the Great North Run, a half-marathon, in his honour. She will raise money for Macmillan. She sends off the application form and, a few weeks later, to her surprise, a letter arrives, telling her she has got a place.
It is easy to see why charities such as Macmillan, Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, Marie Curie, local hospices and many others are so strongly supported, or even set up, by people who have had to face those same challenges in life. There is something redemptive about ‘giving something back’. Hoping that you might prevent – or at least alleviate – the suffering of others. Affirming that your own suffering has not been in vain. That this is not just a fluke of chance in an arbitrary universe, which has neither purpose nor meaning. Affirming instead that there is a purpose. That, though you would never choose it, good can, perhaps, come out of suffering.
Annie has put in the miles, got herself the place and started to raise money. Thank God for JustGiving, an online giving site, who do all the money collecting for you. There are few things more dispiriting than nagging people to pay up the sponsorship money they have promised, after the event. I announce it in church and invite people to sponsor Annie. After the service ten-year-old Samantha comes up to her and holds out a fiver. ‘This is for the Run,’ she says. Samantha is standing there with her younger brother, whom she cares for. She also cares for her mum, who is an alcoholic, mostly incapable of looking after herself, never mind the kids. Annie looks at the money and then at Samantha. What to do? This is the money her mum has given her to buy lunch for them both at McDonald’s, across the road. If she takes Samantha’s money, they will have no lunch, but how can you refuse such a generous, precious, costly gift?
Then she has a moment of inspiration. In her other hand Samantha is holding a cross, which she has made in Sunday Club. It consists of two pieces of wood, held together by string with Jesus, a paper cut-out, graphically coloured in with plenty of blood, tied to it. ‘Actually,’ says Annie, smiling at Samantha, ‘I think I am doing OK for money, but what would really help me is that cross. I could take it with me, to the Run. Could I possibly have your cross instead?’ Samantha’s face lights up with a beaming smile. She puts the money back in her pocket and hands over the cross. Annie thanks her warmly.
That cross becomes very important for us. It is the cross of suffering and pain. I cannot even begin to think about resurrection. I cannot bear the thought of a glorious, victorious God in heaven, but I can just about bear the thought of a God who comes down to Earth, who takes on human form, lives our life, grows up in the carpenter’s shop, works in the family business, enjoys a drink with his mates, goes to weddings, becomes famous and popular for a while, then suffers rejection, betrayal by one of his closest friends, desertion and denial by the rest, a mock trial, flogging that rips the flesh off his back in chunks, and a cruel, agonizing death, hanging, gasping for breath, on a cross. The God who knows what it is like to lose a son – an only son in his case. This is a God who knows what it is like to suffer. This is the only God I can relate to just now, in any shape or form.
Annie carries the cross with her up to Newcastle. She carries it to the starting line. Then she hands it to me and carries it in her heart instead, alongside Tom. She runs the Great North Run in a T-shirt bearing a picture of Tom with the words: ‘This is for you, Tom’. We see her off, straining to spot her among the 20,000 others as they pass by, then we head for the finish. We finally find her, exhausted and exhilarated, at the end of the run. Despite all her protestations at the time, 18 months later she will run the London Marathon. She will raise a heap of cash for Macmillan. It does not bring Tom back, but it is redemption, of a kind. That is not why she runs, though. She runs because she cannot help herself. The medals, and the cross, still hang proudly on our wall.
Running for Macmillan
A certificate
A prize
A medal
To put up on the shelf
To hang up on the wall
One of the top three highest fundraisers
With many thanks for your commitment to helping
Macmillan improve the lives of people with cancer.
A certificate
A prize
A medal
But no son
To be proud of me.3
She continues to run. I continue to play golf. We keep buggering on.