Heartache inspired a journey to reflect on life & loss
JUST days after the start of the Edinburgh Festival where she was performing, Carys Eleri received a phone call from her mother.
Her father David, who had been battling motor neurone disease, had died. She had to get back home immediately. To mam. To Tumble.
Her one-woman show, Lovecraft (Not the Sex Shop in Cardiff ), had taken months to write and hone, but after just five days on the stage, nothing else mattered.
“Dad was my biggest champion. He had a deep belief in everything I did,” she said. “Growing up as a family we were all very close; my mother and father and my sister.
“My parents were both teachers and they loved young people and they liked coming to our house. They had a space in the cellar where bands could rehearse. It was an open house.”
Her dad’s illness started with a stiff leg. A sports teacher, David Evans had always been active. He loved the outdoors. He loved his rugby.
He and wife Meryl had planned a cruise early in 2018, probably their last big overseas adventure. But there was the stiffness in the leg that couldn’t be shaken. Before the couple took the trip, they decided to visit the doctor. For piece of mind.
“I was writing Lovecraft, and had been visiting Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff to write, and I hadn’t heard anything from my mother and father when she finally rang. She was crying her eyes out. She told me dad probably had motor neurone disease. He was soon on crutches and in two to three months he was in a wheelchair.
“MND is a terminal illness but you cannot say how long it will be. Stephen Hawking lived with it for decades and I thought his was a story of hope. But my father didn’t want to talk about him. All he wanted was to be around my mother as long as he could”.
Carys and sister Nia, a journalist, both lived in Cardiff, and would take turns visiting the family home to help their parents.
“And the community I came from was so important too. Everyone rallied round for my parents.”
MND is inescapable. It gets gradually worse over time and leads eventually to death. A few people live for years or even decades. For David, it was a matter of months.
“I cried leaving him to go to Edinburgh, but he told me to go. The day before I didn’t receive any texts from him because his hands had stopped working. Mum called me at 8am to say that he had gone.”
There was more tragedy ahead, but first, Carys and Nia embarked on a charity bike ride from London to Paris to raise money for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, a challenge they had signed up to while their father was still alive.
“We got lost, had so many comments on how we should do things differently and stood out like sore thumbs among the lycra and featherlight bikes.
“It was hilarious – but by the end, having won the entire team over with hard work and determination, they asked us to lead everyone into Paris to the finish line – the Eiffel Tower, in memory of our father.”
The stars should have prescribed some respite after a year of such emotional tumult, but they didn’t line up that way.
Carys then took Lovecraft to Australia, where she was met by one of her oldest friends, Trystan Wyn Rees.
He’d recently settled in Melbourne with his husband, and flew to Adelaide to see Carys. But back home, three months later, she took a phone call from Trystan. He had stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
“He was only 37 and in his prime. He had moved to Australia, he was married and had a job, and had nailed the perfect life”.
And then the pandemic. Artists saw their livelihoods swept from underneath them overnight. But it meant there was time – to process the cruelty of loss. Carys sat down to write.
“I wanted to talk openly about death. I started to go deep into the emotions of what I’d been through.
“Nature is everything. We forget that we are an integral part of nature’s cycle as humans, and sometimes think that we are superior, but we’re not, we’re part of it.
“As a Welsh speaker, I often use the word ‘mother tongue’ to refer to Welsh as my first language, where in many ways, our mother tongue as humans may well be nature.
“The book takes its name from the Welsh phrase Dod Nol at fy Nghoed. It literally means to return to my trees, but the meaning is to return to a balanced state of mind. As my mother told me – the trees outside have lived longer than you and I, and they will be there long after we’ve gone.”
Carys’s debut show, ‘Lovecraft (Not the sex shop in Cardiff)’ has just been commissioned for BBC Radio 4 and will be broadcast in 2022. Her book, ‘Dod nol at fy nghoed’ is available from local book shops and YLolfa.com.