When life collides with work, should we take sides?

I’ve thought long and hard about whether or not to post this article but right from the start I felt I do not want to be silent about something that’s torn my life into pieces and roughly glued them back together into a completely different picture.

I guess on the surface it might look nice to some people who’ve known me for years that I now have a child to raise and a dog. How lovely for Emma to have a lovely doggie to melt the heart and the daughter she always wanted!

We’re told work and life outside shouldn’t mix…

We’re told it’s not good for you to show vulnerability…

It’s crass to air your private experiences in work-related spaces…

But when a merciless form of cancer comes for your 49-year old sister with devastating consequences, is it not even more crass to just pretend it hasn’t happened?

Growing up with Liz

Liz and I didn’t have the easiest time growing up together. I totally loved her and looked up to her but she used to drive me mad. Although a few years older than me, everyone thought Liz was younger because I was allegedly the more sensible of the two of us. She believed in Santa way longer than me and used to get seat-wettingly excited as a child at Christmas. She was the kind of sibling you loved and hated at the same time (is that most siblings?). She used to say we were the same person. She taught me the alphabet before I went to school. We were very competitive with one another. We loved to dance around the living room to Simon & Garfunkel ‘The Boxer’ jumping from one ring to another on the gaudy 1970s carpet. To defend me, Liz had a fight with one of my school bullies at Dudley bus station once and won. We would taunt my parents by reciting rude excerpts from ‘The Young Ones’ at the dinner table. Not exactly young ladies!

Liz’s utter enthusiasm for her friends, her music and her pooch Gorgeous George the Grippet (the greyhound/whippet cross) were a joy to behold.

And so it starts…

Back in August 2020 (remember?! THAT bloody year?!) my sis Liz, a musician, teacher and mom to my 14-year old niece started to have chronic pains in her stomach that just wouldn’t go away. My dad – who also has terminal cancer (yes – I know… “the tragedy family”) – helped her out with some medication (I know we’re not supposed to do it but in this case it was better than the Wolverhampton hospital that told her it was a strained muscle and sent her home with just paracetamol for the severe pain). Sometimes it was so bad, Liz was crying out in pain just moving in the bed. It took 7 weeks and 4 trips to 2 different hospitals before her body was scanned for possible gallstones or a stomach ulcer. Maybe it was just too much exercise? On September 10th 2020 we received the worst possible news. Liz had pancreatic cancer with secondaries in her liver. Stage 4. She called me to tell me from her hospital bed. She just thought she’d need some chemo, lose her hair, get over it and be home again in time for Christmas.

Liz had her fair share of mental health issues in her youth but she never really got the kind of diagnoses or support that a kid with her issues may have received today. Mental health diagnoses for girls are still notably rarer and in the 1970s were unheard of. Last summer, Liz had worsening mental health which was put down to the impacts of lockdown and the pandemic. This can also be due to chemical imbalance when there is advanced cancer in the body. Crazily enough, although once detected pancreatic cancer can and does lead to death very quickly, it could have been growing inside her for up to 20 years.

A swift killer

I don’t know why I knew that pancreatic cancer was a death sentence. I don’t know why certain bits of cancer information stick in my head and others don’t. Maybe it’s the fear that weld them to the inside of my head. A close friend’s father had died from it in the 90s but surely the treatments must have improved since then? Unlike Liz, who was shell-shocked by the news but still hadn’t been told it was terminal, when I put the phone down (knowing she didn’t know) I started howling with the pain of the diagnosis. She was going to die. I knew.

At the time I didn’t realise I knew people (friends of friends) who had died from it. Perhaps because it takes people so quickly we literally don’t have time to hear about it before its already too late. Or perhaps, because it’s horrifyingly effective at wiping people out, they can’t linger over a social media campaign to raise funds for the necessary trusts. They literally have NO time. By the time the pain is under control they’ve gone.

Becoming a carer

Between myself, a very close friend of Liz’s and my mother we suddenly became nurses and carers to Liz and my niece. We were handling very strong medication with no real experience (at least in my case). Feeding drugs to a very spaced-out patient and only really getting her pain under control by week 3. I’m reading that line again and can’t connect the word patient to the fact it was MY sister. How did that even happen? How could Liz need 60mg of morphine minimum just to get her through each day? Writing this just makes it seem all the more surreal.

Once we had the diagnosis, a wise friend said “you’ll always feel you should be somewhere else doing something else”. Designing the best possible food for healthfulness: turns out everything was just feeding the cancer; spending time with Liz; making sure my niece had some treats; checking in on all the other carers to make sure we didn’t go under from the mental, physical and emotional demands; resting so I had enough energy to keep going; tracking down and telling relevant friends. I think my most hated part of the whole thing, other than watching someone I love die in such a horrible way, was then having to pick up the phone and break the hearts of the huge number of friends that Liz had. Over and over again… picking up the phone and making people cry. It’s just awful. And then there is the conflict and hurt you feel when complete strangers are overwhelmed with grief - the desire to look after them was overriding my own need for care and space.

The Two Cs – COVID and cancer

We knew she had only a week or less and then under COVID restrictions, Liz died on her own and not strictly when expected by us or the hospital. Luckily, the last thing she and I said to one another was we loved one another. I’ll probably never completely forgive myself for leaving her at the hospital on the Saturday night… It was Sunday October 18th. Liz’s days were over. We had just 5 short weeks and 3 days from Liz’s diagnosis to her death. The family were heartbroken. I think I understood a physical internal pain to be ‘soul ache’ – my soul was aching for Liz’s loss. The cruelty of how she was taken. For all the things I could have said or done differently. That there was nothing I could do to save her. Could I have shown her more love?

And then there’s the COVID funeral experience. As a musician living in quite a small town, there are very few people who didn’t know Liz in some capacity, be it up the pub, at school, pupils she taught, people who knew her from dog-walking, from the gym or the swimming pool. Liz was talkative and fun and physically striking, beautiful to look at, so she was never short of people to hang out with or chat to. Somehow I had to condense down the 467 people on Liz’s FB friend list or thousands of music followers into 30 people who could attend the service. We tried to mix family and friends and had 15 of each. I guess there’s something to be said for having such a small family. And Liz’s friends ARE her family. Over 330 people logged onto the online service and there was some small comfort that our ‘peacock calling’ (mine and Liz’s preferred way of finding one another in a nightclub) and us all dancing to ‘We Are Family’ were found by everyone to be fit tributes to our favourite Liz.

Back to the new ‘normal’

I guess some significant back story from me is that I’ve never had children, not because I didn’t want to but just because I never really met the right person in time to have them. By 2019, I was single again but I’d had a breakthrough and felt I was really ready to adopt on my own. Why would I want to wait for the right relationship if it meant I might never have a family of my own? My greatest concern was adopting a child with so many issues I wouldn’t know how to handle them.

And so now, with her mom gone and her father who never truly participated, I’m the testamentary guardian to my niece along with her grandparents.

I’m a believer in things happening for a reason it is no longer a surprise to me that I spent the first lockdown with a friend and her dog. I’d never been a ‘dog person’ but Zuri melted my heart into a shape fit for another dog and so Gorgeous George is fitting into my life as it seems he needed to.

Having the daughter I always wanted is a bittersweet experience with a child who has suffered a number of issues over her short life so far. She’s not my daughter and I’ll not try to replace her mom because I never could but I will do everything in my power to help support her through the next years of her life, to protect her and give her as much love as I know her real mom would want me to and because I love her like my own.

The life/work divide

So why am I writing about this? I’ve largely been off social media for a number of months now and found it utterly impossible to do anything but basic work activities whilst I learnt how to nurse my sister and look after my niece and adjusted into doing the things a parent needs to do with no prior experience. I wanted you to know why my presence was not exclusively at the ‘coal face’ (excuse the phrase) of the sustainability issues I’ve championed throughout my career. I also wanted to challenge the artificial divide between ‘home’ and ‘work’ as I feel this is part of the reason we have compromised our home: planet Earth.

Where we can bring the two realms of ‘work’ and ‘home’ together we should.

Where one realm affects the other we should admit it.

We need emotional intelligence and acceptance over pushing bad feelings away and drawing a veil over them.

We need to acknowledge that being bereft in one realm of your life leaves you less functional in the other.

I don’t have all the answers and invite you to enquire with me. Emotional intelligence helps. You never know what someone is going through personally and perhaps just trying to put a brave face on it all.

The moment of elation in a sea of misery

In the midst of the sheer craziness of autumn last year, I felt drawn to apply for a ‘Women in Innovation’ award. An old colleague (and awesome writer) promised me we’d get the application in. Colleagues and contacts rallied round to provide testimonials and tips on completing the forms. I nearly didn’t submit on three different occasions due to the pressure of the situation and turned in an all-nighter in order to finish it – a moment of elation in a sea of misery. I knew I owed it to myself, to Liz and to the Earth to make the carbon footprint game into a digital version. I submitted just 4 short days before Liz left us. Had she died any earlier, I wouldn’t have made it. Having been shortlisted from 650 applicants, I was one of the final 40 who were interviewed and chosen to receive the award. On Monday 8th March – International Women’s Day – we launched the programme.

For other women reading this I’d like to share what I’ve learnt – we are good enough, we are strong enough, we have resilience that we never knew we had, we can do anything we want to do, we are stronger when we accept help and offer it to others, we might have many caring responsibilities but our ideas, our skills, our unique energy will all contribute to make our world more equal and more sustainable.

I wish you all the power in the world to make anything you want happen – you will. We can! I am certain of that.

A Greener Exit?

I wish I could finish this by saying it is all a fiction or that Liz’s story finished in a different way. She’ll be pushing up daisies this summer in the beautiful natural burial ground where we left her on a cold November day last year. Turns out she was more green than I could ever be in death, as she wanted to be buried rather than cremated (lower carbon emissions) and we found the perfect spot for her: mostly in the sunshine with an option to get an oak tree on top. I love you Liz – I’ll miss you like hell. I’ll do the best job I can bringing up your daughter and I’ll never ever forget you. Who could?

Donate to Liz’s charities here or listen to her music.

Join her Facebook tribute pages

To listen to the Spotify list I made to celebrate her life go to Liz Fieldhouse Lives Forever! 

Sign-up to the Women in Innovation newsletter

If you are affected by any of the issues in this article, don’t go it alone, phone a friend and have a chat or please share your thoughts here with me.

Thank you for crossing the divide and reading mine and Liz’s stories. She always did steal the limelight so I couldn’t possibly leave her out of my biggest career win yet! Bless her.