'Ali is gone. Home. So peacefully. Sue mum me all there. Binham music been playing for hours. Can you blog something? Love you both. Chris'
These are the two texts I received in fairly quick succession around 6am on 4th April 2007. It was the Wednesday of Holy Week and Chris was letting us know that his wife and our dear friend Ali had died after an 18 month cancer roller coaster. She had celebrated her 40th birthday just a month previously. Their two kids were 4 and 2 years old.
The way she'd lived out her terminal illness, the way she and Chris allowed us in to their inner turmoil and trust and the way Chris let us help shape her funeral and various other moments of remembering which followed will always remain with me as the most precious of times. Desperately sad but full of life and hope too. Angry and confused but accepting and grateful too. It was only how she had been in her living and dying that allowed us to be this way. Her gift to us.
We listened to a bit of the funeral
And we lit a fire and told some stories. We hung a heart on a tree here in Knockbrex that Ali had made herself. Well, a string of buttons made for a bathroom lampshade and rescued by me and made into a heart, to be precise!
Good to be here at a place she loved in the company of others who lived here too. Ali, we miss you. But thanks for the sunshine you brought us all those years.
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