THE DAY MUM’S CANCER CAME BACK
And I was 5,000 miles away in India
V1 concluding sentence encapsulated the difficulty for those of us left behind l ooking for closure and searching for ‘The Why’ behind his death. ‘I do not know what happened,’ the coroner said. ‘He is the only one who did.’
Though almost 20 years have passed, I’m no closer to an explanation for what happened, which makes it harder to accept. Why my dad decided to end his life, and why he did so that evening, is an unsolvable puzzle. There was no note to read, no definitive clue to discover.
There were fragments, just bits and pieces of i nformation, but putting them together to reconstruct his last months never created a coherent whole that made absolute sense and explained everything, especially about what he must have been thinking. No matter how hard I tried, from what I knew as I grew up or discovered subsequently, there were always gaping holes. Questions that can’t be answered. Things that don’t add up. The truth is snagged somewhere in between them, caught in one of those places that’ s impossible to reach. I live with that.
The following day was my mum’s 42nd birthday. Only a few hours before he died my dad had gone to a nearby town and booked a meal for the two of them. He’d also booked a babysitter for Becky and me. That act makes what he did seem even more illogical to us. So did something he said not long before. After a friend of his died, also committing suicide by hanging, he’d asked my mum, disbelievingly: ‘Why on earth would anyone do that?’
So, instead of certainties, there are only theories, and always will be. My mum believes there were ‘ small bereavements inside him’, among them the loss of his cricket career, his search for something to replace it — which he never found — and also the death of his father.
My dad was an only child. His father raised him all but alone after his mother abandoned the two of them. He was only three years old.
Illness does its early work in secret, so another crucial aspect I don’t know is when his own began. My dad once declared ‘I love life’. For so long he gave every indication of doing that, making it impossible to pinpoint precisely when feeling a little down became melancholy and then tipped into an engulfing depression.
My dad had suffered a succession of setbacks. He’d applied for the job as Yorkshire’s cricket manager, believing he was the ideal candidate. He didn’t get it. He considered standing for the committee until the prospect of success dimmed for him.
He’d been doing occasional commentaries for the BBC, and listeners liked him, but a more permanent role went to someone else. He’d been steadily hunting down promotional work, which was becoming harder to get. He’d been running his own company, winning a contract to merchandise World Cup ties.
Life without cricket was initially harder for my dad than playing the game for Yorkshire and England had ever been. He missed it, and also the adrenaline pump of a performance.
He missed t he craic and t he camaraderie of the dressing room eight years after leaving it too.
There is nothing he wouldn’t have done for the club. His roots were in Yorkshire cricket. So were his inspirations. And so was his identity, his sense of self. Once a thing is known, it cannot be unknown — especially when you’ve seen it with your own eyes. But in the weeks, months and years that followed my dad’s death, I tried to blot out the memory of how it happened as much as I could.
In significant ways, I succeeded. Gone are the raw details of what I witnessed and also what was done and said in the immediate aftermath of it. Perhaps I was just too young to absorb them in the first place. Or perhaps trauma obliterated them, the mind deliberately wiping away in an act of self-protection what was too hurtful to bear.
I can’t tell you who among the three of us was first through our front door. I can’t tell you how we got from our house to our neighbours, which is where we apparently went. But what remains — and always will for me, I think — is how I felt, then and for a long while later: vulnerable and afraid, the sense of disorientation
IKNOW everyone draws first the easy straight line that connects me to my dad. I don’t blame them, but in doing so one fact, which is the most important of all, usually goes unnoticed or gets ignored. I look so much like my dad — same chin, same cheekbones, same forehead — and I play a little like him too. But I am my mother’s son. I am who I am because of her.
My dad passed on his cricketing talent. My mum has enabled me to use it. Her life’s work has been Becky and me. She’s given our lives balance and structure. She’s taught us to treat everyone decently and equally. Our sense of spirit and our guts come from her. So does our work ethic.
Without my dad, she had to be fatherly as well as motherly. As we broke into our teens, she could never rely on that ‘Wait till your father gets home’ approach. She had to pull us into line herself, responsible for all the dos and don’ts and also any tellings-off.
In having to be tough, she worried that she wasn’t being tender enough at the same time and that what we’d remember of our childhood were only the rebukes she’d given us rather than the love. Never. We remember only the love.
I knew my mum was giving — and would always give — everything she could and more to Becky and me. The money she had went on us. The time she had was ours. I knew, though she never spoke about it, how isolated she must have felt sometimes, bringing up the two of us practically alone.
Her investment in us came at an enormous personal cost. Her diary and her social life became entirely dominated by our own. As children do, we must have infuriated and exasperated her, no doubt in the same moment. We only wanted her to be happy, but some days we must have been more of a benign nuisance than a help.
There must have been other days, too, when she was fed up, but she didn’t betray it to us, going on indomitably instead and thinking of us first and herself hardly at all.
She didn’t even complain about her cancer. I’ve never heard her ask ‘Why me?’, though the question would not only be legitimate but also perfectly understandable for someone who has been through so much so often. My mum thinks I get my determination and resilience from my dad. I think it comes mostly from her. She’s recovered from each setback and every adversity, demonstrating a resilience that astonishes me.
Like my dad’s death, Becky and I recall my mum’s original diagnosis of cancer and then her treatment in fragments. Most of all, we remember how tired she became and how long it took for her to get well again. Also like my dad’s death, she explained her cancer to us — or as much as she dared — without ever getting emotional, aware as ever of our feelings.
Everyone who survives cancer knows the victory against it may only be temporary. You know eventually that you might have to fight all over again. Almost 15 years after my mum’s first bout of cancer, a second bout occurred. This time she needed an operation.
It was the winter of 2012, only four days before Christmas. I was on England’s tour of India. My mum didn’t want me to know what was happening to her in case it affected my f orm. She decided t hat I shouldn’t be told until after the surgeon had done his work. Only Becky changed her mind. ‘You’ve got to tell him,’ she said. ‘He’ll want to come home and be with you.’ Becky continued to press that point.
The way she felt was the way I would feel, she argued. ‘ I’d be heartbroken if I learnt about the operation only after it was over.’
I was in Pune, a city that is one of the symbols of the new, vibrant India. The temperature was over 30 degrees. Your mobile phone is locked away when a game starts, so England’s security officer Reg Dickason had to bring a message. It was no more than a solemn ‘Your mum wants to speak to you’, a handful of words that I knew were drenched in meaning. It couldn’t be anything but bad news. I was on the outfield, preparing for the match.
I ran off to reclaim my phone, saying nothing to anyone at first.
I called my mum without being able to reach her. ‘I need to know what’s wrong,’ I said to Reg. So he told me. The trek home began as a long day’s journey into a sleepless night. Mumbai is only 90 miles away from Pune, but the drive there took five hours. The wait for a flight to Manchester took five hours more. The flight itself took 12 hours. I touched down at 10am.
I was on the road almost an hour later. Since it was the weekend before Christmas, the holiday rush had begun, and it took almost two
hours to travel from the airport to the hospital in York.
The car got stuck in a jam and I told the driver in panic: ‘Please, j us t get me t here s o mehow, anyhow, any way.’ I arrived just 20 minutes before my mum was wheeled into theatre for an 11-hour operation. There was just enough time to kiss her and hold her hand.
The ward had been spruced up with tinsel and cards. I didn’t notice them. The hospital released my mum so she could spend Christmas at home with us. I helped cook dinner — though none too skilfully on my part — with Becky. We fetched and carried and fussed her, the fact that she was there and recovering more important than presents or food or decorations.
Exactly three years later, the three of us were in very different s urroundings, which made it especially poignant. The Oyster Box hotel in Durban sits on the Umhlanga seaside. The beach is decorated by an 80-foot lighthouse, the crown of it redder than my hair, that sits on the Indian Ocean.
The Oyster Box is a five- star palace, and Becky and I took Mum to the restaurant while I was on tour there with England, an early 60th-birthday present for her.
The perfect day is one in which nothing can be added afterwards to make it even better in the memory. We had that perfect day. Becky, I know, counts it as ‘ one of the happiest’ we’ve ever spent together.
We wanted to be nowhere else in the world then — and in no one else’s company except our own.
The sun was full. The sky and the sea were empty, each attempting to outdo the other for bright colour.
The afternoon was still and meandered on beautifully and we took our time to enjoy it, enticing Mum to eat mussels and scallops, which usually she wouldn’t, and also taste drinks she hadn’t sampled before. Mostly we talked and we talked — and then we talked some more.
Our mum was healthy and fit; only that mattered to us.