Laura’s life

Before we met at university, Laura suffered with ME as she entered sixth form. She missed out on so much, as her friends, who saw her frequently and kept her involved of course, nevertheless started to go out and socialize while she was immobile at home. After her recovery, as soon as I got to know her, I could see she was making up for lost time. According to her, she was the one always organizing activities for her friends at university. She expressed a certain frustration at the natural disinclination of others to make fun plans, but this was couched in a very real and wry self-awareness that her drive was unusual and often comic.

We started our life together, and almost everything fun I can tell you about that life almost certainly started with her. We hitched to Paris and slept in bin-bags under the Eiffel Tower, drinking apparently the only vile bottle of wine for sale in France. We walked part of the Ridgeway and drank a pint among the Avebury stones. We bought our first house. We got cats. We made each others’ wedding rings. We moved to the remote countryside. We learned to sail. We got our first dog. We took a cruise across the North Sea. All of these were Laura’s ideas.

It was Laura’s idea to buy a share in a narrowboat. Over twenty years on, that ownership is sadly coming to an end against our wishes. I can’t believe it will have outlasted her, but it means she got to enjoy it until the end. It was one of the best things we ever did, as holiday after holiday was an absolute joy.

Once the children were born, it was Laura who organized activities time and again for them both. Alys now has her grade 6 in tap dancing, thanks to Laura starting her in lessons when she was four years old. She has been volunteering at Kielder Observatory since she was fourteen, and is applying to study astrophysics at university. Barnaby loves learning the piano and performing with the Bellingham and District Dramatic Society. He will hopefully start volunteering with birds of prey once he is old enough, after Laura set the ball rolling.

We went to music festivals, we had holidays abroad, and we had a fabulously packed London trip just last year, seeing Shoot From the Hip, The Play That Goes Wrong, and Matilda. We camped and walked, and went to Riverdance and the Strictly Come Dancing live show.

Sometimes Laura’s planning was overambitious. Sometimes she was frustrated at the lack of time to do what she wanted. She was famously quite astonishingly terrible at estimating how long any given task would take. We had holidays of which we missed the first two days (out of seven) because of her passionate hatred of packing.

Laura supported me through the deaths of my uncle, my dad, my sister, and my brother. She took Mum to Chinese watercolour classes after Dad died, and was there through Mum’s increasing dementia and eventual move to residential care. She was hit so hard by her mum’s death, and looking back, perhaps never really recovered from it. None the less, she arranged holidays to Istanbul and Toledo for us and her dad.

We went back to the old town on Rhodes last summer, and revisited many places with the children which delighted us when we first went in 2000. The day before we were due to have a week on the narrowboat in February, the doctor told her that she simply must not go. I took the doctor’s advice, and absolutely insisted that Laura stay safe with her dad, within reach of medical care and support. You will be unsurprised to hear that my insistence fell on deaf ears, and Laura enjoyed what turned out to be her last holiday on Willow, again revisiting favourite places from the last twenty years.

In the last two weeks before she died, Laura went to stay with her dad to take care of him through post-op recuperation. She went with him to buy the plants to go in the pots laid with her mum’s ashes. She lost all strength. I knew things were more serious than they had ever been as she stopped reading, and was sofa-bound, comforted by “crap telly”, as we always described it. But she still heard Alys perform a solo piano piece at her school concert. She still spoke lucidly and made plans with her manager at work.

Laura has gone, and the hole she leaves in our lives is incalculable. I knew we could lose her, but the suddenness has left us baffled. If I can do a tenth of what she did with us, I’ll be proud. And she’d be cross that I’d not done more, as she always did.