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Not long after Donna was first diagnosed with cancer she
set off on her characteristic mission of managing the situation for everybody
concerned. This included a list of
requests for her funeral. I always
said that at least on this occasion the whole thing wasn’t up to her and I
would do whatever I wanted. Of course
she knew I wouldn’t. In her list of
items entitled ‘for my funeral’ was ‘some of Andy’s jokes.’ For once in
this instance the word ‘stupid ‘ didn’t precede the word ‘jokes’, which was
unusual and mildly flattering, and it then said ‘the Aardvarks etc.’ Well –
in the current circumstance, the aardvarks would mean a joke that starts ‘3
aardvarks at a funeral’ and end with the line ’guys… why the long faces?’… and you can fill in the rest. She was also
fond of the conundrum “If a man speaks in a forest, and there is no woman
there to hear it, is he still wrong?” Another
request on her list was that there would be plenty of booze at her
funeral. I said she was being hard on
herself, and that nobody would actually boo on the day. And here
endeth the stupid jokes. I wanted to
try put together some kind of talk that tries to summarise the best I can
what made Donna so driven and such a wonderful presence in this world. Because although
she patently carried an internal image of herself as a superstar, she would
readily acknowledge that she had no great media talent. She couldn’t write,
paint, sing, act, produce… But for
most of us here there was something intangibly special about her,
which I would say was all about the encounter. She had some kind of gift of encountering that was all about
the moment and was very hard to capture except in the thousands of Donna
stories that we could accumulate together today. Maybe I could
put it this way – here’s 3 things people never said about Donna: First –
“Donna, which one was Donna?” Second – “I’m
not sure what she thought about that…” Thirdly – “She
had the patience of a saint” In fact – she
had the impatience of a saint. She
had no time for entertaining expressions of concern when she could be getting
involved. She had no time for
hand-wringing when there could be wine and Pringles instead. She had little time for extended thought
in a world full of hurting people. And I guess
that’s why most of us here remember the encounter with her. Because she would always be wanting to cut
the crap in the belief that she knew what was at the heart of the matter. And 9 times out of 10 she was right – much
to her surprise. She used to confess
to me that she was just winging it in most situations, just going on a hunch
– but still she ended up speaking so much truth… I suppose the
fourth thing people never said about Donna was that she spent too little time
on the phone. I know that there’s
many of us here today who no longer know where to go to when we need to sort
out a life issue, someone who can turn us around in 5 sentences and leave us
feeling brave enough for the next day: always feeling understood,
accommodated, enlightened and inspired.
That was the gift of the encounter that she offered the world. And although she never had formal creative
talents, it feels to me that her early death is like losing Shakespeare half
way through his first play. A
travesty. Donna used to
keep journals – kind of letters to me and Cara. Their content gave me confidence to feel that I could say
something from her today. I thought I
could try sum up some of her core messages to us – excuse the artistic
license but I’m confident I knew her very well. One thing that
I know is that despite all her ambition to be a good nurse when she was at
work – all that Donna ever wanted to be was a mother, and a good mother. To fly in the face of her own loss of
mothering by nurturing a wonderful family of her own. And as she got near to dying her anger and
despair at being deprived of this ended up most palpably in our
relationship. Sometimes I ended up
being the brunt of all her anger, which is very common in loving couples when
one has to be able bear the impact of the others’ despair. And a couple of nights before she died
this was at its worst. We’d had a
terrible day and she had been lovely to everyone else and then just so hard
on me. And as I drove back from the
hospital I thought on our encounters of that day – and I thought that she’d
been just merciless towards me – just merciless. And as those words went around my head I realised that that was
the way her life had gone. Life had
been just merciless towards her. It
had cut her down at the point of most promise and it was unbelievably
merciless. And who was I to resent a
few moments of transferred anger when she was dealt such an immensely cruel
blow – I didn’t mind even though it stung at the time. And this is
where I want to start when I think about Donna’s messages to us. Because I think that her first big message
was “be real, and let God be real”. I want to
clarify something that came as a hard lesson to us. God isn’t running life’s circumstances. Donna’s cancer wasn’t God sent, and her
absence of healing wasn’t God’s absence.
Only a protected and decadent rich Western mindset can equate having a
cushy life with God’s blessings. God
has let go of creation so that love might rejoin us to our loving creator and
that’s why Donna’s journal attests to never being distant from God’s love in
all the mercilessness of her situation. She and I hold
to a view that when invited God comes to meet us at the very core of our
being. Deeper than the us that we
know, more true than the us that we think is us. And our journey into God is our journey into our true selves,
and that being real with God is being real with ourselves. And God helps make that happen through our
spiritual journey. And who is there
who had this belief and practice more tried and tested than her? And who can testify to its authenticity
than the person we remember today?
She forbade herself and each of us from only living half a life – even
if it made us wince at times, she would challenge us live and find freedom,
and she would exemplify it even as she died.
Please – for Donna’s sake – don’t let life’s trials be a barrier to
knowing the God that holds out such profound love for you. God is love, God is truth, God is
enlightenment. Be real and let God be
real for you. And her second
message I think goes something like this… (and you may cheer) Men – help
your wives more in the house and with the kids! (for wives please read
partners too) Don’t let them be
isolated and your relationship compromised by your laziness. Love needs constant practical signs that
you won’t let them be alone in the nurture of the family, get your ass in
gear and learn how to be a partner in the home. And thirdly
(and you may also cheer here), women, give your husbands more sex! They’re simple creatures responding to
simple stimuli. Teach them how to
satisfy you in the process, and you’ll close the loop between them being
emotionally absent from the household and you’ll get absolutely whatever you
want when you need help. Don’t ignore
the whimpers, use your power. (Guys,
that’s a fiver each.) Fourthly –
never ever complain about getting old.
Some people don’t get the chance.
Donna always dreamed of being a grumpy old woman, and in that respect
I was glad that I was 16 years older than her and might never have to witness
it. Fifthly,
become a proper adult and love and nurture your children, don’t let them have
to look after you. Grow up, grow up,
grow up. They need you to – they’re
powerless, they are precious, be 100% present for them. And lastly –
say what you think. Make others have
to reckon with you, life doesn’t fall apart when we’re honest; love is big
enough to receive the honesty and the foibles of each other. Make people deal with you and learn to
deal with them. Somehow I think we
all can see how she modelled that beautifully, but this was such a positive
thing for us… When Donna was
diagnosed with cancer for the first time and we thought that life might only
give us a number of years together – we were shocked to find that there
wasn’t anything that we thought we would need to say to each other if we were
to die the next day. That we were
exactly where we wanted to be in our relationship – and it stayed that way. That wasn’t because of me. That was because she spoke her mind and
taught me that it was OK for me to do that too. When Donna
died much sooner than we had expected I felt robbed of months and years of
life together – more than I could say here without losing control, but I
didn’t feel robbed of the chance to say anything that we had been holding
back. We spent our last hours saying,
“I love you” and “thank you”, over and over again. And now I want
to write and talk forever to keep her alive but we all have no choice but to
let her go, recognising that none of us will know if we might end up in the
same position, losing life much too early, cursing some horrible merciless
disease, looking to a merciful God for hope for life beyond this period of
toil. And I think that deep down she
would want us to take inspiration from her, and learn some of her lessons in
order to know that her many fights with life had been worth it. She would want us to believe that love
will have the final word and to live out that love, and in the love that she
inspired, she will be present, always. Andy 4th Oct 2003 |
