David’s story
Early one sunny spring morning in 1970, I climbed into bed with my father in our house next to the sea in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight. It had been some time since we had visited my beautiful, charismatic teacher mother in hospital, and I asked him when we would go again. He had to tell me that she had died some weeks before. Her funeral had happened. She was gone.
I have snippets of memory: her taking me to work when I was tiny and the girls in her needlework class making a fuss of me, she and my father picking me up from the little pre-prep school I attended from 3 ½, by which time she was already ill. I remember the Roman Centurion costume she made for the Christmas fancy dress party. And I remember standing in an adjacent room and hearing her screaming in pain during a visit from the district nurse.
His absence from my life changed its course. My father married a violent and disturbed woman. I lost, for a time, safety and security that was only restored when I went to live with my grandmother at age 7. I have a mantra that I address to my little inner self: “Thank you for paying the wholly unacceptable price for the wisdom I now enjoy.” It is true, but ovarian cancer robbed me, violently and brutally, and it robbed my mother too. She never got to see her only longed-for son grow.
After 21 years as an ordained priest, I left the Church in 2016 and now work as a funeral celebrant and nonreligious spiritual director. Ovarian cancer set me on that road, but the price was extorted from me by that cruel disease.
I am inspired by the work of the LGF. They give voice to that which, certainly in 1970, was voiceless and all the more deadly for it.
If you are also the adult child of someone this disease has taken from you, you have my love and my fellowship.
If you are, or have a child, facing a similar bereavement, work hard to help them know the one who has died and feel their presence with them constantly.
I am incredibly thankful for the scientific progress that has made this disease more survivable. Let’s continue to promote that work so that fewer children will be robbed of their mothers and fewer mothers will be robbed of a future with their children.
@davidlinaker_author