‘Kate’s love will always be with us’
Six months after she died from cancer, Kate Gross’s husband, Billy, tells Elizabeth Grice her bestselling memoir is far from her only legacy
Who has not been ambushed by a young child’s piercing questions? They come at you, sharp and sudden as a paper cut, with the power to amuse, to wound and almost always to amaze.
Billy Boyle’s six-year-old twin boys have an agenda. “What age are you when you get cancer?” they want to know. “You can be any age.” “What age was Mum?” “She was 34,” their father replies. “What age are you?” “I am 34.” Pause. “Can kids get cancer?” Already they are little logicians, trying to work out if the death of their mother could mean they’re in danger of losing their father, too.
“Their minds whirr away and out pops a question,” says Boyle. “The best approach is to be open and direct.”
This is the approach that his wife, Kate Gross, followed so heroically after she was given her death sentence, turning the diagnosis of terminal colon cancer into a compelling blog, The Nuisance, and, finally, into a book,
Late Fragments.
The memoir, out in paperback next week, was first published a few days after she died last year and became an instant bestseller – not, I think, because it taps so intelligently into the stream of literature about death and dying, but because from the hugeness of her heart flow wise, funny lessons on how to live.
Kate wanted to die well, but she wanted to live abundantly even more, and in the short time left to her she discovered how. “I am wired for happiness,” she wrote, astonished by the wonder to be found in everyday things after her world was turned upside down when she fell ill in October 2012 on a flight home from California. Taking a taxi straight to hospital, it emerged that the digestive trouble she had endured for years, missed by doctors, was advanced colon cancer. She was 34. She and Billy had been planning to have another child. After the initial shock, she began the blog that became an inspiration to thousands. “I wrote myself into existence to stop existence being taken from me.”
Gross died at the age of 36 on Christmas Day 2014, a few minutes before Oscar and Isaac – “my knights” – woke up eager to investigate their stockings.
The book was initially begun for her sons, a way of telling them who she was, but its insights have reached far and wide.
She had a high-achieving career, first as Tony Blair’s private secretary for parliamentary and home affairs and, more recently, as chief executive of his charity Africa Governance Initiative, for which she was appointed OBE. “She didn’t always know she was going to die young,” Blair said. “But she lived as if she might.”
Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About This Magnificent Life) was the realisation of a childhood ambition to write. No one had guessed what a gifted, crystalline writer she would be.
“I found the book a source of strength after she died,” says Boyle, “because of her clarion call to find joy and wonder in life. I can find her in it and it helps me day to day. I see it as a way of the boys knowing how amazing their mum was. Other people say it has changed their lives, they do things differently, they rediscover the things they loved doing when they were young.”
Their house in Cambridge is full of the chatter and exuberance of boys whose favourite pastime is “beating lumps out of each other”. There are photographs of them as a happy foursome. On the television screen, they can, and often do, watch scenes from their life together, before the Nuisance came. They listen to recordings of Kate reading bedtime stories. Nothing is out of bounds, hushed up.
“I want them to remember the fun stuff we did. Our memories are so fresh.” But at the kitchen table or in the sitting room, he says, they seem to exist in a parallel world. “Not so long ago, she was there. The physical space evokes a huge amount of memory. There is still an element of her with us.”
In the final chapter, Kate said that “for a long time my little family will no longer be four people, but they won’t be just three either”. Anyone lucky enough to meet them can be in no doubt that this is true.
“The biggest relief for all of us is that the boys are doing so well,” says their father. “The love she gave them for five and a half years is in the bank for ever. The goal now is to focus on making their lives good. I try to do as much as I can for them. I can, she can’t. I tell them: ‘There
‘Pick what you want to do with your life and make it count’
are only three of us now. We have to work together.’ ”
Boyle is less fluent about how he is coping himself, beyond agreeing that when the house falls silent at night, the sadness creeps in.
“When Kate knew she was going to die, she talked to people who had lost a parent early – and the overriding news was one of optimism: they grew up to be OK, but they also understood the preciousness of life.”
Gross was a doer who gave her family and close friends a plan for afterwards. But some things were beyond her caring reach. “I have given my benediction to a future Mrs Boyle,” she wrote with gentle irony. “But in truth my feelings are more mixed… I want Billy to be happy and loved. I want someone to get the washing done, without the darks bleeding into the lights. If the two could combine in one washerwoman-cum-wife, ideally without my sparkling eyes and wit, perhaps I could look down on that content.”
Boyle treats the topic briefly. “Kate was pragmatic and practical, and that is what she said. But I’m not thinking about that. I still had her. So it wasn’t something we talked about.”
The book is a magnificent love song as well as a hymn to friendship. Billy is “my north, my south, my east, my west”, she wrote.
The couple married in Norfolk in February 2013 while Kate was on a harsh chemotherapy regimen between two major operations. “It was a happy day. There was hope,” says Billy.
But just before Christmas that year, after three months of near-- normality, the cancer returned and was now incurable. Kate wasn’t interested in the science of her disease, but her husband, a scientist, certainly was.
Boyle’s technology company, Owlstone Nanotech, is working on a groundbreaking machine that will detect lung and bowel cancer via a breath test, using microchip technology. It has been awarded a £1 million grant to develop clinical trials. “I find it unbelievable,” he says, “that if you detect cancer early, 95 per cent of people survive. You don’t need to invent new drugs. There is only a six per cent survival rate if cancer reaches stage four [as his wife’s did] before it is detected.
“The fact is, colorectal cancer is rare in young people and the symptoms could be so much else. GPs don’t have the tools to make an accurate diagnosis. You can’t send everyone with a dodgy tummy for a colonoscopy. We are trying to give the GPs and doctors cost-effective tools.”
That he, of all people, should be in a position to do this kind of research gives it meaning and drive. “It is in line with the lesson Kate teaches us,” he says. “Pick what you want to do with your life and make it count.”
Kate wanted to die at home and moved into a simple room at the top of the house where she could watch a vast eucalyptus tree swaying in the wind. Boyle recalls the surreal dayto-day routine of pain medication, nursing and care, as life started to shrink to that one room. “Each day, something was being taken away. Today, she can’t go downstairs. Today, she can’t shower. Today, she can’t communicate. At the end she just lost consciousness. The body shuts down piece by piece.”
Caring for his wife, Boyle says, was probably the most important thing he has ever done, yet also “one of those unspectacular things that people do every day. We saw families who slept on the hospital floor night after night. It is part and parcel of love.”
Boyle finds no predictability in grief. “There are down moments and dark thoughts, but they come at random, surprising times,” he says. Revisiting seaside haunts they had been to together, with the same friends, is “bittersweet, familiar”, but new places are much more upsetting. At a beach cottage on the Essex coast recently: “Bam! It just hit me. Why is she not here to experience this?”
Drawing on the legacy of happiness she left and the support of family and friends keeps him afloat. “We had a wonderful time together for 10 years – although she’s not here now, that cannot be taken away.”
‘There are dark thoughts, but they come at random, surprising times’
Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You (About This Magnificent Life) by Kate Gross will be published in paperback by William Collins, priced £8.99, on Tuesday