Hello darling :)
I felt the need to fill you in on a few things related to my family history, as it is pretty chequered, and, it seems, a bit more relevant to your life than I thought it was just a few days ago. I have taken a few days to write this entry as situations are changing for me that mean I'm feeling better now than I was a few days ago. Many bad things have happened in the last week or two, and some great things, but this needs saying, I'm afraid.
Cancer, apparently, has a free parking space outside my family's house. At the last count, my sister and my mum both succumbed to its spurious charms, and as of a few days ago, I am now the latest in the Jones line to get the pleasure. My mum developed stomach cancer at 62, having been diabetic since her early fifties, and by the time her cancer had made its presence felt, there really wasn't much the miracle-workers of the NHS could to do help her out. She went through chemo/radio like a trouper, being wheeled through the endless, freezing Bauhaus monolith that is Poole Hospital for several months - just a few hundred metres, as irony would have it, from the rooms in which both her children were born. In the end, she said all the treatment she went through was essentially a waste of time, and she'd rather have just had a shit-ton of pain-relief and had done with it. Despite my own current predicament, I have no idea what she was going through emotionally, having watched her own daughter succumb to cancer 15 years earlier. How do you keep going? Why even bother? Surely finding any resolve whatsoever in that situation is almost impossible? The mind - yes, even mine - boggles.
Lucy's brush with the Big C was, let's not be opaque here, sadistically unfair from start to finish. At the end of 1999, she finished her GCSEs, picked up a part-time job in good old Morrisons in New Milton (just like her criminally shy, Oasis-obsessed older brother). Quickly realising that divvying out ham behind the meat counter in a provincial supermarket wasn't the rock'n'roll dream she'd assumed it was, she took the opportunity to pack maps into boxes in our friend Bill Hunt's company's warehouse in California. For the record, at the time, I was offered the chance to do the same thing, but I was frightened of being 5,000 miles from my family, and I couldn't drive, so it never made sense for me to go. Lucy was as confident as a peacock dressed as a cockerel in platform-boots, so she had no problem with it. She had an amazing time - I got some genuinely hilarious phone calls as she wandered through illegal 'chiba' markets in Santa Barbara eating hash cookies, and passed her American driving test by going around the block once in the testers' car. Effortless stuff, clearly. Despite having to get up at an unprecendented 0500 each morning, my sister fucking smashed California.
Before she'd left for America, Lucy had started experiencing intermittent headaches, which our GP put down to exam stress, or something related to her finishing her studies. Then, after a couple of months of r'n'r and her new job in the Deli at Morrisons, her eyesight started to change. She had grown up with a brother with the nickname Wonky Eye, so nobody was overly shocked at this. But after a few more weeks, and a change in prescription, the same wandering pupil returned, so she went to the doctors'. 'It's stress', he said. 'Go away on your holiday to America and it'll go away, too.' Possibly the best worst advice he gave anyone, that.
In due course, off she duly popped to California, and for a good few months there, she did just fine, until one day, at about 0600, our phone rang at home. My mum answered it, ran upstairs, and told us what she'd heard - 'Lucy's collapsed and is in hospital with a suspected brain tumour. I'm on my way to the airport now. Look after Mike, and don't let him do anything silly while I'm away', she said. As she turned in the doorway, she added: 'Do you want to come with me? Actually, best not, you've got exams, and Mike needs someone to keep him steady,'
With that, she was off to the airport, where she bought an open ticket on the next available flight to LA (an eye-watering £1200 in 1999). By the time she arrived, Lucy was in surgery, and by the time she phoned, Lucy was in recovery. The doctors told Mum that she had less than a week to live when she was discovered, and that a raiki massage had saved her life. A type-4 glioblastoma approximately the size of an orange had taken up residence in her noggin over the course of the previous 6-12 months, and her prognosis wasn't good, even from there. Even with radiotherapy, chemotherapy, a will and a prayer, she had approximately 12 months.
The good news, such as it was, came in the tiniest portions - the surgeons said they had removed 95% of the existing tumour, which would buy Lucy time for other treatment; she would be able to fly home as soon as the swelling, caused by the operation, had reduced, so that she could speak again. After a couple of days she was chuntering nonsense to herself, and laughing uncontrollably at the very idea of being alive. After a week or two, the speech therapists weren't sure what was going on, as progress wasn't being made, but it turned out that Lucy just thought the speech therapists were arseholes, and was keeping her thoughts to herself. One particularly condescending meeting with the therapist which included Lucy's newly-shaved head being called 'gorgeous' and compared to that of Sinead O'Connor really lit her stove, though. After weeks of silence, the phrase 'Sod off, bitch' finally escaped her lips, and we knew that however short-stacked she was, our Lucy was coming back. The speech therapist didn't return, however.
Lucy flew home to begin chemo at home soon after. As she was still quite frail, she travelled in a full hospital bed, with drips, monitors and, I remember being told, 'a sexy male nurse'. Also on the flight, then at the height of their fame, were the Spice Girls (ask your Mother). In an act of kindness I've always wanted to thank them for but surprisingly never managed, they sent their complementary BA bouquets back from First Class when news reached them that a bolshy teenager with a head injury was downstairs with a hot medic.
Lucy coped stoically with aggressive chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and during a period of six months when she was in remission, a truly terrible Oasis gig at Wembley which Uncle Joe can tell you all about, I'm sure. We are even on the DVD of said show, singing Wonderwall in a crowd of 76,000, and you can clearly hear Lucy. It is one of my most treasured memories, and something I plan to mention to either Liam or Noel should our paths ever cross. Your Great Aunt passed away six months after that footage was taken, peacefully and in her sleep, on the morning of New Year's Eve 2000. The first person I called was Joe.
He answered the phone with the words: 'I know mate. I woke up too.' And we had a little cry together, and then it got easier, as I phoned everyone else. Lucy's funeral was held at Bournemouth Crematorium on January 12th 2001, and she is buried at the Church of St Mary Magdelaine in New Milton. I'm sure you'll visit her and the rest of the fam one day. It's a nice place - I go back there once a year or so and say hello. Lucy's funeral was attended by over 150 people, and I remember it being bitterly cold, waiting in line to shake everyone's hands as they left. We chose The Masterplan, a great Oasis tune that sums things up nicely, and your Great Uncle Neil complained on the way out that he'd managed to avoid crying until Noel started singing. I still have a little moment to myself every year on New Year's Eve and go outside, toasting Lucy, my good fortune and good health, and the will of the universe, of which we are all still a part. You should do that, too.
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