How death crept up on a mother’s perfect life
MOST of us spend our lives thinking that, if we could just get our hands on the last missing piece of the puzzle, it would complete everything. If only we could find the right man, the right job, the right house, have a baby, we could settle down to enjoy our perfect existence.
It is an illusion — but imagine for a moment that you really had achieved the unattainable ideal: a job you loved, a husband you adored, two wonderful children, a home in a beautiful city. and then, in an instant, you learned that you were going to lose it all. That is what happened to Kate Gross, who died on Christmas day, aged 36, of colon cancer.
on october 11, 2012, Kate, pictured below, was running along a beach in Southern California, raising money for the charity she founded with former prime minister Tony Blair.
Her life at that moment was blessed: ‘ I’m a successful 30-something woman with an amazing job. my adorable twins are three, and their father, Billy, is my soulmate, as well as being the best-looking man I’ve ever kissed.’
What she didn’t know was that ‘inside me, a lump of cells has broken free of the rules and spawned a tumour, which has blocked my colon, crept through my lymph nodes and colonised my liver. Cancer is halfway to killing me, and I am completely oblivious to its presence.’
The following day, as she flew home to Cambridge, she was hit by an overwhelming wave of nausea. From Heathrow, she went straight to a&e and, 12 hours after landing, she was in emergency surgery. When she came round, her doctors confirmed that she had stage four cancer. There isn’t a stage five.
Two years later, after a cruelly brief remission, Kate had to face the fact her cancer was incurable: ‘I will die before my children finish primary school, and probably before they reach the grand old age of six, which they think is impossibly grown-up and I think is impossibly young. It won’t be long now.’
So, Kate began to write — ‘to make sense of what has happened to our family, to make sense of the Kate who has emerged in this strange, lucid final chunk of life . . . I find myself full of fears that I will have to stop before I can write down all the things I want to tell my boys when they are 35, not five. Before I can tell them who I am, and the stories that make up my life.’
at the same time, she also admits: ‘I have experienced joy in an unexpected and new way. Billy and I have grown a love known only in power ballads, a depth of understanding and companionship which, in any fair world, would last us a lifetime . . . So despite all that has been and will be taken from us, I am happy . . .’
although her cancer — ‘the Nuisance’ — is the frame of her memoir, this is the story of Kate the bright student, the daughter, sister, mother, lover, friend and colleague. There is regret, of course, and deep sorrow at all she would leave behind, and trepidation at what lay ahead.
But there is also humour, unclouded intelligence, pride in what she achieved as a high-level administrator at 10 downing Street during the Blair years, and later in charity work (‘I have spent my short working life trying to save the world, one paperclip at a time’).
and some invigorating spikiness on subjects as various as fox-hunting, the terrible quality of much cancer-writing, and her jealous misery at the thought that another woman might eventually occupy her place in the family.
For anyone to die in the prime of life is tragic, but she leaves some remarkable monuments to her brief life: her family, her work in africa and this brave, lucid, witty memoir, which succeeds in expressing the essence of Kate to people who will only ever know her through its pages.