Sharon King is the author of The Sun Shines Through. Told from the heart, it’s a true account of love and loss and recalls the lives of a married couple, both diagnosed with cancer in the same year, and their attempts to save their own lives. Here, Sharon talks about living through the festive period over the past seven years:
The Sun Shines Through
My past seven Christmases have been impossible, but this Christmas, my daughter and I have booked a lovely aparthotel in the Trossachs. We plan to take our dogs long walks, cook up a storm, swim in the pool and treat ourselves to a spa. I feel so much better this year; I have returned to myself, seven years of caring and grieving have taken a huge toll on me physically and mentally, and grief lives alongside now, in its many forms and colours in this ‘new normal’, but I feel positive. I am, for the first time in many years, looking forward to the holidays.
The Christmas break will also be spent thinking about different ways to fundraise for 2020. This will help me to stay in the present, and for me to also include my late husband Jasper in my thoughts in a very positive way. It’s a coping strategy, to think ahead, make plans and in doing so help others who may be taking similar journeys. 2019 has been a great year for our charity – The Jasper King Trust. We raise money to send families affected by a cancer diagnosis on self-catering holidays in the Lake District, Harvest Moon (East Lothian) and occasionally to the Isle of Eigg.
This year, of course, I also have the wonderful distraction of the release of my memoir to look forward to. The response to its publication is overwhelming and November and December are a whirl of radio and press interviews, book launches and signings. It’s astonishing what a difference a year can make.
Hope is the key. Grief is a predictable, and unpredictable, journey of troughs, waves, longing, loss and madness, and the learning of how to traverse it changes us, we learn to adapt. We find a way through. With the passing of time we learn coping strategies which can even perhaps make Christmas magical again.
Jasper loved Christmas and was very traditional in his approach. We lived in Edinburgh, and he would be very excited when we picked him up at the airport, happily home from tour. We enjoyed the holidays and spent it with friends or family.
His excitement was infectious as he joked and sang “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!” My daughter and I would smile at each other and get into the spirit of it all. He was irrepressible, joyous and funny, but Jasper would also always insist we wait until 22nd of December to go buy a tree and he wasn’t ever bothered about receiving presents. He loved singing along at the top of his voice to songs, carols and hymns on the radio and would try to persuade us to attend midnight church services.
Christmas in 2012 was spent with immediate family in the Scottish Borders. Jasper had been increasingly unwell throughout the year and he and I were just waiting for the Cancer bomb to drop into our lives. It was a strange, shocked, quiet Christmas, we were full of fear of the unknown, and we were unable to tell our family that Jasper was very sick. He was diagnosed with incurable and inoperable Stage 4 lung cancer, in early January 2013, and we were told he could have as little as four months to live.
During the traumatic year of 2013, spent trying to understand and come to terms with Jaspers time limited prognosis, I was also diagnosed with stage 2a breast cancer. In November 2013 I had an operation to remove the tumour and clear lymph nodes. I had taken several months to tell the doctor I had found a lump and the cancer had spread. I was mad with anticipatory grief over Jasper and I foolishly discharged myself from hospital after my operation. The same night, at home, I had a large internal bleed which was unidentified and then became infected. I was in and out of hospital until 22nd December, on I.V antibiotics, and we were terrified I wouldn’t get home for Jaspers, potentially, last Christmas. We spent a very quiet Christmas again with family in the Borders. I was very poorly, still nursing a deep tissue wound infection and, we didn’t know that I was still carrying a tumour which had been missed by the surgeon.
In 2014 we spent Christmas with very close friends at home. Another friend had secretly organised with everyone we knew, to send us hand-made baubles for our Christmas tree. Every day in the lead up, the postman would arrive with boxes of all shapes and sizes. It was a beautiful gesture and to receive so many hand-made gifts really helped us to know we were being thought of.
Amazingly, considering his prognosis, Jasper was still with us. However, he was very unwell over our final Christmas and he ended up being admitted to hospice at midnight on Boxing Day. We spent a further three months in and out of hospice. We were deeply traumatised and exhausted, and Christmas came to represent the beginning of the end. Jasper died on Good Friday, April 2015.
Christmas time is very difficult for those of us who are bereaved, grieving, widowed, or simply lonely. It’s not just one day, it’s weeks and weeks of consumerism and planning. Other anniversaries; birthdays for example, are particular to you. Christmas for me brings deep feelings of loneliness, isolation and disconnection. I was anxious about it by mid-October. I didn’t want to be a burden. I was disconnected and flooded by memories of our eighteen different Christmas’s passed.
In 2015, eight months after Jasper died, I was crazy with grief and very lonely in Edinburgh. I spent it with Jasper’s best friend Dave and family in Bradford. To be fed, looked after and be in company; it was such a tonic to my loneliness. 2016, 2017 and 2018, are a bit of a blur, again spent with very close family.
I am looking forward to spending time this Christmas in a beautiful place, with my daughter and the dogs, perhaps it will even snow. Jasper will be with us in spirit and in memory, with his cheeky broad grin and his rubbish jokes; “its Christmasteve!”
The Sun Shines Through is available to buy from Amazon, The Book Guild and all good bookshops!