Goodbye Milady, Goodby My Friend

I spent 6 months looking after Milady - a free-spirited 59yo who'd married into the aristocracy. An aggressive brain tumour had put her life on pause. Before becoming a member of the Landed Gentry she was a serial backpacker - working enough to fund her next adventure. She went from backpacker to The Lady of a 13th Century Estate (with Staff). Her sisters wouldn’t let her get away with any of that ‘Milady’ nonsense - they teased her back down to earth.

I lived-in as her carer, looking after her diet, medications, I gave her bed baths and as her mobility decreased took every step with her- walking behind her with my hands on her hips. I learnt how to stick her wig on as the chemo took her hair. I sat next to her in German clinics as they pumped her full of experimental immunotherapy- a type of Avian flu, ‘ze chicken soup’ as we called it. I knew how she liked her scrambled eggs, her favourite dance tunes, her bowel movements. Every month there was a new and unexpected turn, a twisted ankle, a low haemoglobin count, failing mobility & every month finding new solutions from one crutch to two to a wheelchair. Every month we kept laughing, joking & reaching for the next.

At the end of 6 months I returned to SA & Milady continued to fight. We continued to laugh & joke over text. 3 weeks ago I went to her 60th Birthday Tea. She’d abandoned her no-sugar cancer fighting diet and now ate 5 pastries for breakfast in a spectacular Fuck You to cancer. Her voice was small & distant. Speaking to her was like talking to someone behind a pane of glass, somehow I couldn’t really reach her, but still we laughed.

Today I got the message I'd been dreading. If cancer could be beaten by sheer will alone, she would have done it. Fuck it, she fought & laughed to the edge and over. I don’t believe in Heaven but when a friend said may she Rest in Peace, I suddenly had a vision of Milady laughing & dancing barefoot in a field too free-spirited for eternal rest.

We had an in-joke where I used to praise her when we pulled off something seemingly mundane, like making it into the chair lift without incident. Now seems a good time for one last, “Well done Katharine! xx”