When I started writing, it was going to be a story of how my wife survived cancer and then never looked back.. it didn’t work out that way
Gordon Darroch tells how he started over in a new country while raising their children alone
GORDON Darroch first thought about writing a book when his 36-year-old wife Magteld was diagnosed with breast cancer.
They were both young, fit and – mutating cells aside – healthy. Surely there was an uplifting and life-affirming story to be told here.
He recalled: “I started keeping a diary.
“I thought maybe I’d get round to writing about the experience of cancer treatment from a carer’s point of view, it would be a story about how Magteld had gone through it and survived and now she’s never looking back. “It didn’t work out that way.” Six years later, Gordon is a published author. He’s also a widower. His book, All the Time We Thought We Had, is a painfully honest account of his wife’s illness.
It’s not the story he would ever choose to write. But it has helped him make sense of a chain of events so horrible that he needed the discipline of setting it all out on paper to begin to understand what had happened.
Before the appointment at the Beatson Cancer Centre that gave their lives a handbrake turn, Gordon was a journalist, working on STV’s news website.
Magteld was a full-time mum, looking after two boys with autism. At the time she was diagnosed, Euan was seven and Adam was nine.
At first, Magteld’s illness followed the script Gordon imagined in his early diary entries.
He said: “You put your faith in the medical system and they do their best and you go through the treatment.
“It’s really gruelling but you come out and are slowly getting better and healthier again.
“You’re a bit anxious, you know it never totally goes away but you think, ‘Now we can get on with it’.”
For six sweet months after Magteld got the all-clear, they did get on with it, planning to move to Holland to be nearer her family.
The only downside was Magteld’s persistent cough. She made every excuse. Draughts. The stress of trying to sell their house. Glasgow’s climate.
Eventually, she went to see her GP. An urgent X-ray showed there were lesions on her lungs. The cancer had metastasized. This time it could only be treated, not cured.
With months left to live, Magteld was determined to get to The Hague. She wanted to spend the time she had left with her family – her parents, her pregnant sisters, her two grandmothers. And to settle her sons into their new life.
For Gordon, this meant cramming two of life’s most stressful events – moving to a new country and preparing for a spouse’s death – into six weeks. All while looking after two autistic children.
He said: “I was very methodical. It was my way of dealing with the grief. I had to book a removal van. We had to find a house. It was all about lists and sorting things out.
“I’d do a couple of things a day and take Magteld for a walk. It felt as if we had enough time to do everything. In fact it was all quite helter-skelter.”
Magteld flew to Holland and found them a house in The Hague. The family packed up the last of their belongings and drove to the ferry.
This was not the new life of bike rides, camping trips and herring eating that Gordon had imagined. Magteld spent the first few weeks in
a hospice until the house was ready. She deteriorated quickly.
With aggressive tumours on her spine, she soon couldn’t walk. Within weeks, Gordon was pushing her in a wheelchair.
He said: “People who met her in The Hague saw a disabled woman. They never knew her running, walking long distances, a fit, healthy, mobile young woman. The speed at which things changed was shocking.”
Magteld only lived in the house she chose for two weeks. Gordon nursed her through the last bit, bringing her ice cream for her ulcered throat and morphine for the pain. Then he would carefully get into bed beside her and cuddle her frail body. Two days after Euan’s ninth birthday, she was gone.
Finishing a book has been the least of Gordon’s achievements since then, although getting it all down was tough.
He said: “Writing it spun out the grieving process. Accepting that it had happened and adjusting to it took the best part of three years.”
He has finally managed to take her clothes to a charity shop. A 10-year-old car that he should replace has too many memories to let go.
After a year of meetings, reports and assessments, Gordon has finally got Euan and Adam into schools where they are thriving and happy.
He said: “In Holland, you get support and it’s very well organised. But it’s a lot of work for you as a carer to do to access that.”
It’s part of his mission to carry on the things his wife thought important.
Gordon said: “Magteld was constantly pushing me to get things sorted out for the house and the boys so that when she was gone the boys would still have a good upbringing.
“We made a few plans while she was alive, like going to a ceremony at the harbour when new herring arrives. She cut that out of a newspaper but died before it happened. So I took the boys.
“We’re doing all the nice things we’d always talked about. It makes it more bearable. We are doing them without her but we’re still doing them.”
All the Time We Thought We Had by Gordon Darroch costs £9.99 (Polygon) and is out now.
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