Mrs Birks Blogs

I didn't really want to write this post and have been putting it off for ages but I feel I must finish our cancer story which ends pretty much in the way you'd expect.  Mr Birks has gone.  'Gone' is a pretty rubbish way to put it considering my last post which mentioned the language of cancer but there's no easy way to say that someone has died.  6 months after diagnosis and 6 weeks after writing my previous blog post, Jonathan Birks, the funniest man in the world, died in the Tapping House Hospice, Norfolk. We never did get our pain free time in the end.  Although Jon always claimed it was more discomfort than pain, he wasn't able to sit properly or sleep or eat, it completely restricted his life and took the joy out of everything.  He went from being relatively mobile to unable to get out of bed by himself very quickly and his final deterioration was shockingly quick.  If you've never seen death close up, like I hadn't, every little change comes as a

I haven't posted on my blog for quite some time and it's not just because of my usual tardiness.  I usually post about nice things on here, things I enjoy, things that make me happy but since my husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer it has been hard to find anything that brings me joy. When my husband told me that he had found a lump, my first reaction was 'I hope it's not cancer'.  His Mum and Dad both died of cancer a few years previously and within one year of each other, so in our family cancer means death.  No survivors, no fighters who have won, just beautiful people that have left us too early.  When he went for his second biopsy, I knew it was cancer.  By this time, my optimism that it could be something else had disappeared and I was beginning to think through practicalities - How would he cope with treatment?  How would he eat?  How would he talk?  Even with our experiences of cancer, I still hadn't faced the idea that he might die.  He's 48