An act of selfless TRUE LOVE
Married to Emma Thompson, actor Greg Wise’s life was ripped apart when his sister fell terminally ill. As this inspirational memoir shows, his tender devotion to her was ...
ON August 15, 2016, actor Greg Wise stripped down to his underpants — ‘ not even the posh Marks & Spencer ones, these were three for £5 in Sainsbury’s’ — and prepared to give his dying sister a shower.
He got her undressed and onto a commode- seated wheelchair, then tenderly rinsed her down before drying her, applying moisturiser and popping her into new pyjamas.
It’s not something every man would do for his sister.
although this profoundly uplifting book of their shared blog doesn’t give many details of their early family life, Wise says that the ‘ tricky dynamic’ between their architect parents gave the siblings an ‘incredible closeness’ that lasted until Clare Wise’s death in 2016.
Born in 1964, Clare Wise was 18 months older than Greg. They were raised in the North of England where ‘she read books, he fell out of trees’.
Despite their different temperaments, they were both clever, creative types and ended up in the film industry, with Greg ‘pretending to be someone else’ as an actor, and Clare becoming Vice President of Universal Pictures.
Greg fell in love with Emma Thompson on the set of Sense and Sensibility and they all moved into the same North london street: Greg and Emma (with their two children) lived opposite Thompson’s mother (actor Phyllida law) and Clare bought a place a few doors down.
THEIR
lives seemed charmed until Clare was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. She took Greg with her to the appointment where they were informed she had a 3.5cm tumour in her left breast and cancerous cells in the lymph nodes of her left armpit.
Clare’s response was to begin a wonderfully irreverent cancer blog. Her warts-and-all wit went to town on her ‘deciduous’ hair and nails, Marilyn Monroe wigs and her refusal to give up red wine because of its iron content.
Her curious mind rooted out all kinds of quirky, cancer-related factoids. Yes, the agonising mammogram machine was invented by a man.
losing your eyelashes is called ‘madarosis’ and the average human has between 100-150 on the upper lid.
Readers will learn that the French for goosebumps is chair
de poule ( chicken flesh) — although without hair you can’t get them in any language.
The miseries and mundanities of Clare’s treatment rubbed up against the more glamorous aspects of life with her celebrity sister-in-law, who whipped the ailing Clare away for restorative holidays and decked her out in diamonds for the Baftas.
I hooted at the tale of a hospital
receptionist gawping at Thompson (who had come with Clare to chemotherapy) and asking: ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, it’s me,’ replied Thompson, ‘but who do you think I am?’
The receptionist thought the star might have been in The Parent Trap. ‘That was Natasha Richardson and she’s dead.’
Clare was declared cancer-free in 2014, but in 2015 the disease dug into her bones and she was told it was incurable. There were tumours in her arms, ribs, spine and skull. Greg cancelled a family holiday in Greece and moved down the road to care for her. He took over the blog when she became too ill — and too heavily medicated — to continue.
‘There’s an old joke,’ writes Greg: ‘Why doesn’t the actor look out of the window in the morning? Because then he’ll have nothing to do in the afternoon.’ But Greg thinks he has always worked harder when ‘resting’. He approached his sister’s care with vigour, attaching a walking stick and climbing rope to her NHS hospital bed so she could pull herself out of it, whizzing up a fridge full of watermelon smoothies, feeding her beloved cat and hacking away at her garden. It was the quiet moments he found hardest. They forced him to sit with his feelings and try not to ‘pre-grieve’. Even the incredibly kind and patient Greg found himself with ‘compassion fatigue’. They shouted at each other: ‘I’m in pain!’ ‘ I understand!’ ‘ NO, YOU DON’T!’
HE
GOT a brilliant tip from a former flatmate who had become a vicar, who invited Greg to consider the relationships around a dying person as a series of concentric circles.
‘ The dying person is the centre. The first circle around that, the close family. Next circle, close friends . . .
‘And here’s the advice: You are allowed to throw s*** outwards, but not inwards. The person at the centre can throw as much s*** as their energy allows.’
Greg realised he needed to sit quietly, suck up Clare’s anger and frustration and chuck his own further out of the circle.
He reveals that towards the end of her life, Clare regretted her refusal to let romantic love in. She had great friends and family and a brother to ‘do whatever man things needed doing’, but never ‘that kind of love’.
But loss and pain, argues Greg, can help focus our minds on the present. He finds himself surprisingly capable of finding joy in his sister’s last days: the smile that appeared on her face before she opened her eyes, as he woke her.
On the night she died he wiped her face, told her he loved her and gave her permission to go when she wanted. She died one minute later, holding his hand.
‘This writing,’ concludes Greg, ‘may have been about a journey to death, but I think the theme has been about the act of living.
‘The two are the same thing, probably — can’t do one well without an understanding of the other.’