It Could Have Been Me: In Memory of Helen Bailey

When I read about the brutal murder of Helen Bailey I knew right away that it could have been me. Helen Bailey (1964 - 2016) was a British author who wrote teen fiction. She was also a widow.

In 2011, at the age of 46 while on vacation in Barbados, Bailey's husband of 22 years died suddenly. He went into the sea for a morning swim, was caught in a riptide and drowned. In her own words she was still  a “wife at breakfast” and became a “widow by lunch."

In spite of her deep mourning, Bailey did everything within her power to get better and move on. She sought the help of a bereavement coach who helped her deal with her grief, she wrote a blog called Planet Grief, in which she detailed her struggle to cope with the sudden loss of her husband, and she joined an online support group for people who had lost their spouses.

And then something joyful happened, after eight months of widowhood she met through that group a  “gorgeous grey-haired widower" (her words), whose wife died suddenly in 2010.

Helen Bailey probably felt that she met a kindred spirit. They started out as friends, then grew closer, started dating and finally moved in together and bought an old house in Royston, Hertfordshire

According to her bereavement coach, Helen Bailey was a person who wanted to feel “secure and safe”, like she had with her late husband. She added that “there was never any inkling or sign that she was anything but safe” with her new partner.

It seems that after her world was shattered, she could rebuild her life with her new partner Ian Stewart. So in order to make him feel secure as  well, in case she died, Bailey changed her will and left him all her money, She gave him  power of attorney as well.

People love a happy ending, and there is nothing more heartwarming than a story about a  widow and a widower who find  love and happiness.

But on April 2016, Helen Bailey disappeared, and three months later her remains were found buried in the Royston house. Her new partner was charged with her murder.

I am almost certain that most of the people who read about Helen Bailey and her tragic death ask themselves how could she have been so naïve and so blind? Didn’t she suspect anything?

But to me as a widow it makes perfect sense:  I was not used to being suspicious, I had no reason to. Moreover, in the first year of mourning, when I was hungry for warmth and kindness, I trusted people even more. I can even identify with Bailey’s wish to insure the future of her new partner in the event of her death. Hadn't he suffered enough?

Actually, apart for the ending, my own biography is almost identical to that of Helene Bailey. My husband died when I was relatively young, I was helped by a kind bereavement coach, and like her, I found my partner another “gray haired gorgeous widower” online.

My partner and I were both safe and secure in our previous life, and that is why we  were not used to being suspicious. We were probably naïve, but we gained a lot by being able to trust each other.

This is a horrifying story for everyone, but it is especially scary for widows. Still l believe that it is better to be generous and trusting, like Helen Bailey, than to lose your faith in love and humanity. I am so sad that she was proven wrong.

The post appeared in the Times of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/it-could-have-been-me-in-memory-of-helen-bailey/

We Still Have Choices: Cancer Patients and Their Families

In recent weeks, I hear on the radio, almost every day, another heart wrenching story about the end of life and the accessibility of life-extending drugs.

It is so hard to know what to do in such cases especially as we hope that staying alive and hanging in there, with the help of life extending drugs, could mean that perhaps in the meantime a new cure would appear on the market.

We made our choice and there is no way to tell if things could have been different had we made another decision.

In late 2006, my husband, a healthy man of 54, went to a conference in South Korea. He came back with a pain in his leg which turned out to be a blood cloth. For a while the doctors believed that his condition was caused from sitting down long hours during the flight, but short time later he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

My husband, a practical engineer, asked his doctor how long he had to live, the answer was that normally in similar cases, the prognosis was death in less than a year.

My husband considered not taking any chemical treatment, but his doctor convinced him that, in spite of the side effects, chemotherapy could help him feel better and breathe easier. Thus,  instead of being a “dead man walking” (his words), he decided to  receive chemotherapy.

The first course of chemo was not effective, I can still feel the pain in my stomach once we got back the results of the PET Scan.

The doctor suggested a new drug, tablets which worked differently and were less harsh on the patients. At that time, Tarceva (erlotinib), was not covered by our health care provider or by our additional insurance.

We wrote a letter to both insurances asking to allow us to receive the drug, but our request was denied. Thus, my husband got another treatment, which apparently was too aggressive, and he died  few days after receiving the second dose, only 5 months after the diagnosis.

Because of the way it works, Tarceva could have made his last months easier, and indeed it became part of the standard treatment for advanced-stage non-small cell lung cancer soon after my husband passed away.

Of course, he wanted to live, and like many other cancer patients my husband agreed to try all kinds of costly natural remedies. But what helped him most was his decision, which he made once he was diagnosed, to be a role model to his daughters at that difficult time.

I believe that this was also the reason why he chose not to complain about the Tarceva's decision, or to contest it. Being prudent with our money, he also didn’t consider buying it in the private market.

Instead, he kept busy: he continued teaching, talked to us about the future, made plans and even forced me to go over the books with him and to write down important names and phone numbers. In those five months we sold our house in the suburb and bought a new one closer to town. I moved there on my own few months after he died.

Whenever I hear about a new drug for lung cancer I am pleased for the cancer patients, but feel a pang in my heart. We received a death sentence and had no medical answers.  However, after taking a deep a breath, I try to remember that at least my husband had the freedom to choose the way he wanted to spend his last days, and I know that those decisions made our life without him much more bearable.

In memory of Tzvi Raz, 1951--2007

The essay appeared in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-still-have-choices-cancer-patients-and-their-families/

God, Peace and Life: The Mourners Kaddish And Icarus

On this day seven years ago my husband Tzvi died. In previous years, on the anniversary of his death,  I used to go up to his grave  with one of his devoted students. As is the custom in Jewish religion, he read  the Mourners  Kaddish  for my husband . It was a lovely gesture.

The Kaddish is a prayer in Aramaic, it  praises God and expresses a yearning for the establishment of His kingdom on earth. The prayer is recited by a man, usually a family member, at funerals and memorial services.

I am used to the music of the Kaddish, and could almost chant it by heart. Still  since I know only few words in this ancient  language,  I have never really contemplated the meaning of  the words, until yesterday when I looked for the English translation of the prayer for the purpose of writing this post..

 The Mourners Kaddish

May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified (Amen.) in the world that He created as He willed.

 May He give reign to His kingship in your lifetimes and in your days,

and in the lifetimes of the entire Family of Israel,

swiftly and soon. Now respond: Amen.

(Cong Amen. May His great Name be blessed forever and ever.)

May His great Name be blessed forever and ever.

Blessed, praised, glorified, exalted, extolled,

mighty, upraised, and lauded be the Name of the Holy One, Blessed is He

(Cong. Blessed is He) beyond any blessing and song,

praise and consolation that are uttered in the world. Now respond: Amen.

May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and life

upon us and upon all Israel. Now respond: Amen.

He Who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace,

upon us and upon all Israel. Now respond: Amen.

 The Kaddish is mostly about the greatness of God. It mentions the fact that He created the world the way He willed. But what I find most interesting is that this significant prayer ends with a wish that peace will descend from heaven and enable life on earth. If we consider that this is a mourner prayer, it is curious that death is not mentioned only God, peace and life.

 A mourner’s prayer with no dead person could be compared to a painting about the Fall of Icarus with no Icarus or his wings, as can be seen in the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel. In that painting a ploughman is working the land, concentrating on his work, and only some smoke in the background faintly suggests that a tragedy takes place elsewhere. This painting was also the inspiration to W. H. Auden’s  poem Musee des Beaux Arts.

 Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

 About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Like the absent death in the Mourners Kaddish, Auden points out that in Bruegel's painting everything turns away from Icarus' fall:  In both cases we would rather turn our attention away from death and other tragedies as life goes on.  

 The Mourner Kaddish ends with the familiar words: "He Who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace,upon us and upon all Israel. Now respond: Amen." The bond between peace and life is especially meaningful  in time of war. This year I choose to say the Mourners Kaddish myself , and when I get to the last two lines I shall say the the words with special intention hoping that finally God and man would  listen and bring Peace to our area, Amen.

Make Room For Chapter 2:

A good friend, a widower, told me once that the main bones of contention in chapter 2 are children and money. In case you wonder about the meaning of  “chapter 2," in Hebrew it is the title of the meaningful relationship which occurs if or when “chapter 1,” in which people get married and have children, ends.

Many people are lucky and have only one chapter in their life, but others, due to unfortunate circumstances such as death or divorce, are left on their own. Some of them choose to turn a new page

My husband and I met when I was 19 and he was 22, and were married for 32 years. We had planned to be together for at least another 30 years, but as the Yiddish expression wisely states: “man plans and God laughs”: at 52 I was all of a sudden a widow.

 It took time to come to term with that new label,  I even dreaded going to the Interior ministry to change my marital status on my identity card from “married” to a “widow.”

Being a researcher at heart one way to relate to my new reality was to investigate widowhood. I met different widows and widowers and talked to them about their feelings and about the crucial first year of bereavement. It was an attempt to make sense of the loss and perhaps to ease the pain by studying it .

It  also felt comfortable to surround myself with people like me, and gradually I found many new friends who were widowed. We easily connect;  it is almost as though we have our own secret  language. One of the new friends is my partner whom I met a year and a half after I became a widow. He told me that losing his wife after 30 years, he just knew that his partner For “chapter 2” would be a widow.

Yet as the name suggests, unlike the significant chapter 1, its successive is somewhat secondary. While the first chapter sets the action and the tone for the whole book, chapter 2 works best when it develops the themes of the first. If it doesn't it could confuse and irritate the reader, and may even lead to disbelief. John Fowles tried to play with readers' expectations in the two endings of The Magus and lost their trust.

Reality is not that different from literature and as chapter 2  tries to be independent and assumes a life of its own it often creates feelings of suspicion and even ill-will among children and other family members. And, as my friend suggested, sometimes this mistrust manifests itself in issues related to money. Thus like a skilled author, members of chapter 2 find themselves trying to give power and significance to their allotted chapter all the while keeping in mind promises and assumptions which were set in chapter 1.

This is not an easy task, in books and in real life.

But for me chapter 2 is more than just having a meaningful relationship, it is the name of the new life which has emerged from the ashes. Obviously this phase is characterized by many challenges, but it also offers unexpected rewards and joful moments. One of them happened not so long ago, in my home when a group of us sat together to a New Year dinner. Out of 11 guests 7 were widowed. We were not gloomy, quite the contrary, we were a group of people whose loss enabled  us to create new meaningful relationships. We felt happy and close, almost like a family-- the family of Chapter 2.