Mrs Birks Blogs

Dear Jon, Last night when I couldn't sleep I started thinking about writing to you.  Tomorrow will be your 50th birthday and of all the 'anniversaries' since your death, this one seems particularly hard.  You were always better at writing the soppy stuff than me.  Even though your handwriting and spelling was terrible, you always used to write the loveliest messages to me in birthday and anniversary cards.  I write the occasional blog, but you were always so much better at expressing your love for me and the children in writing.   I wish I had trusted that love more. When I read those cards back now, I can see that your love was constant and uncomplicated.  You were proud to be my husband and proud to be a father.   I wish I had seen that and just enjoyed it.  I was wrapped up in the everyday and I was insecure.  I questioned our relationship.  I didn't need to.   You loved me the way that I am, you chose me, you liked me...

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...