Three weddings, two funerals, and a tumour

We don't have an anniversary as such, M and I. We've never got married, mainly because patriarchy. I never wanted to be anyone's wife. When I was a teenager I used to stand on street corners on summer Saturdays shouting "DON'T DO IT!" at passing bridal cars. You could argue that we're in a long term monogamous relationship, we *might as well* be married, but it's the principle of the thing. I still don't want to be anyone's wife. I especially don't want to be anyone's second wife - no offence to anyone else in the mix, it's just not a very tail-end second-wave radical feminist move, dude.

I know other unmarried couples who still have an anniversary though... the first date they went on, or some other appropriate milestone. My Significant Ex and I used to have an anniversary, to the extent that my mum used to send us cards on it. But my beginnings with M were messier. If we were going to have a date, it would probably be the night we came out as a couple at the office summer party, by way of me wearing his new green jumper and, later, snogging in the pool.

I can't remember that date, and if I can't M certainly can't, and it's not one we've ever marked. But it was sometime in the late summer of 1998, which means we have been an item for twenty of your earth years now. We've loved each other across two millennia and four prime ministers (technically it kind of started under Major but that was part of the messiness, and we did not declare till Blair), and we're not done yet. 

We've had a lot of stupendously good times, but they haven't all been easy years, and in some ways the last six have been the most challenging. Moving to Ecoville has brought some wonderful things into our lives, but only counts as a walk in the park if the park has several angry men in it who shout at you (and on occasion *specifically at you*) from a range of soapboxes you hadn't previously been aware of. We also now live in the rural north, where the effects of austerity are undeniable. Our MP is a complacent Tory, the majority of our non-Ecovillanese neighbours voted Leave, parts of the local area are spectacularly deprived, and there are even fewer buses than there used to be. Let's just say that on pretty much all fronts I spend a lot more time thinking about the concept, and reality, of entitlement than I used to.

But, you know, this is all mind-expanding stuff - and even at the points where living here has been at its most uncomfortable and conflict-ridden, whenever people have asked me about it I've said 'well, it's never boring'. And it never is. And we've slowly come through the culture shock, both the regional and the hyper-local, finished falling out with the people we were maybe always going to fall out with, got to know and in many cases love a whole load of other people, painted a few walls, put up a few pictures, tamed a wild allotment, built up what can with a fair wind be called a yoga practice, developed a whole new way of cooking and eating*, started reading the London Review of Books, walked up more hills than I ever previously would have countenanced, and generally - finally - just about worked out how to live here. We used to be Team Warneford, after the street that our house was on. Now we're Team Warneford in the North.

So this was supposed to be a different kind of summer. The year started pretty well, with good habits and better intentions. We did our usual Dry January, and M decided to carry on and just be Dry. This was in part so he could apply himself to his Grade 6 piano exam, which he did, and which he passed. I had no such driver, but there was definitely a knock on effect, and I even managed to quit Candy Crush Saga. We read things. We planted things. We planned things. Our little clam shells were more open to passing plankton than they have been in a while.

We also accepted invitations to THREE weddings. This has happened only once before - in 2007, when, if you were my age or a bit younger, it was marrying time. These were all a little different - one getting around to the whole business a little later than usual (but with no dilution of enthusiasm, if anything quite the delightful reverse), one my littlest cousin, and one ex-housemate S's niece - the latter two firmly in the standard marrying time window, but both with the added twist that I was *at both of their parents' weddings*. I am now going to second generation weddings. I old.

If I old then M very old, but we like to think that we can still give good wedding guest, and we duly organised our other summer commitments around these milestones. There were really only two at the outset: one work trip for me, to Myanmar, (which turned into a whole existential crisis of its own, in that I found out I was losing my job while I was there - of which more another time, and it was pretty hellish tbh, but at least I didn't miss any weddings for it) and one trip to visit friends who have bought a shack (technical term) in a naturist resort near Bordeaux. I was still dealing with the existential crisis, but there was a lot to nakedly enjoy about that week, and I also read three whole books. I was going to say novels but they might not all have been... the only one I remember right now is Amos Oz's Judas, which is just heart-stoppingly brilliant. Read it.

But while all this was going on, there were a couple of people in our orbit busy dying. One of them was B's dad P - B is married to M's son, and I didn't really know her dad, but over the last 10+ years I've come to know her pretty well. We have spent many evenings together talking about travelling, growing food, and losing mothers, these being the things we have most in common, aside from the men in our lives, with their big hair and their ridiculous love of the ridiculous and their ability to sail through (almost) everything. My dad is still, at time of writing, with us, so I haven't had the full parental loss experience, but I know enough to know it's a huge fucking deal and *of course* we went to P's funeral.

The other of them was our next door neighbour. He moved here about 18 months ago. He already had incurable cancer, but it was one of the blood ones and there were drugs keeping it at bay. Until they stopped working and (long story short) he died. I have thoughts about aspects of R's journey that I don't think it's fair to write about here, but one thing I will say is that it is properly challenging to live next door to someone as their boundaries are disintegrating. I think we did our best to respect his wishes, and we did go to (part of) his funeral - the interment of his coffin in a green burial site, overlooked by cows. It was not like any funeral I've been to before. The whole thing left me with a lot to think about, not least a very strong reminder that we pass through this world but once. It all matters, or maybe none of it matters.

My dad often quotes Longfellow: into every life some rain must fall. And he's not wrong, but it's a quote that doesn't really account for extreme weather events. Some years, pretty Mediterranean. Most years, classic Lancashire. Occasional years: terminal piss down situation with localised flash flooding.

And this year, despite all the love, is giving us a proper drenching. I am already getting made redundant, remember, and then it goes a little something like:

Wedding #1: M notices bright red streaks in his urine after dancing. Carries on dancing regardless.

The following Monday: M notices more of the same and does about turn on train to visit client Down South in order to see GP asap. Gets fast track urology appointment for the following week.

Funeral #1: tells his kids. I mean, handy to have them all in the same place. But a bastard of a place to have to land (at this point still potential) bad news. 

The week after: M has urology appointment and is advised there is a tumour in his bladder, but it's 90% likely to be 100% sortable (slight paraphrase). This news arrives the day our neighbour dies.

Wedding #2: The post-cystoscopy urine situation is code red. M does his best to carry on dancing regardless, with some success, but it's a little challenging.

Funeral #2: We are waiting for a date for tumour surgery. The funeral seems to take over our entire community for several days. We are not in a good place.

Tiny bit of good news: the date is just after wedding #3, so we can go!

Wedding #3: we stay till the very end and do absolutely all the dancing possible (this is a lot of dancing). The next day, for reasons I don't fully understand, we find our hungover** selves in the Wohl Pathology Museum. Look! I say. They have a bladder with a tumour in it! We look at the bladder with a tumour in it. We look at many of the other preserved body parts gone wrong. We go back to our hotel and go back to sleep. I mean, there was some fascinating stuff in there, but on balance I don't recommend it if you're about to go into hospital.

Tumour #1: is removed. But unfortunately this isn't the end of the story: turns out M is (unusually for him) in the unlucky 10% this time.

We are waiting for the full picture (and it's not my story to tell), but there seem to be options that have a fair chance of dealing with it in a reasonably manageable fashion. Let's say that he seems to be in a much better place, prognosis-wise, than my mum was at this point in her cancer 'journey' (I hate that word. I'm using it reluctantly). But it's not great. It's a lot to process. Whatever happens is going to be unpleasant and uncomfortable at absolute best. And there are moments, like when he puts his (now very old green) jumper on back to front and doesn't notice, that my heart fairly breaks for him.

So we're sitting here, with our newly uncertain future... wondering where all of this will take us, and how, if it's bad, we will cope. I'm quite an anxious person generally - it doesn't take much to get me imagining all of the awful things that are but one misfortune away. And most of them don't happen, but the ones that do can be just as shatteringly awful as you expected, which doesn't, you know, help with the optimism. I've done some work on that, in the past, but I might need to start doing a bit more. We have a lot of good things to build on, and a lot of love around us as well as between us, but honestly. This. Fucking. Year.

So watch this space. In the meantime, I may not be at my most accessible (and sorry if I already owe you an email or similar)... but we will both be doing our best to get this bit right. As a wiser man than I once wrote, it takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry.

joella

* New to us, that is, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking about it, but it's very different from the Red Star Noodle Bar days

**  By this point M has started drinking again, and I have reinstalled Candy Crush Saga