The desert shall blossom!
Isaiah 35:1 “The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.”
It is Easter as I write this, a time when we remember that the joy of Easter morning comes after the dark despair of Good Friday. Is it possible, I wonder, to turn our experience of loss into making the world a better place for others? In the UK, spring bursts upon us with its masses of daffodils. In Namaqualand, the arid landscape turns into a blaze of colour as soon as the first spring rains fall in early September. In the Western Cape, fires decimate the fynbos, but out of the ashes, new life blooms. Similarly, in our lives, death might seem like an ending, but a new beginning is possible.
One of the things that has impressed me on coming to the UK, is the way many bereaved families are able to turn their sorrow into something positive. Some have fought for changes to the law so that others will not have to suffer in the same way as their loved one. Others have founded charities to help those who might find themselves in the same situation. A brief internet search turns up several examples that have been reported in our local papers in recent years.
Two of the laws that have been passed are Frank’s Law and Millie’s Law. Frank Kopel, a Scottish footballer, was diagnosed with dementia at 59 and died six years later. Because he was under the age of 65, the family could not access free personal care. After his death, his widow, Amanda, fought tirelessly for five years to have the law changed. Two years ago, Frank’s Law came into being and free personal care is now available for anyone in Scotland who needs it.
Millie Thompson was a baby when she died after a choking incident at her nursery. Her parents have campaigned to make it compulsory for all newly qualified staff with a childcare qualification to be trained in vital, lifesaving paediatric first aid. They have set up Millie’s Trust, a charity to help fund the training of nursery staff.
Other charities include:
- Fife Sands, a volunteer-led group that works to support Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal charity. The group was started by bereaved parents after their little girl, Grace, was stillborn.
- The Cookie Jar Foundation which continues the legacy of Christopher (Cookie) Coutts who died aged 19 from Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Cancer.
- Be More Ruby, a charity which supports Children’s cancer and leukaemia patients, in memory of Ruby who was just 6 when she died of a rare cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma.
- Love Oliver, a small charity which supports childhood cancer research and which gives practical support for families of children with cancer. The charity was founded by Andy and Jennifer Gill after their first son, Oliver, died at 24 weeks from a very rare and aggressive form of cancer.
I have not attempted anything nearly as impressive as these examples. However, I have felt a need to do something to keep Tom’s memory alive. One of the first projects I embarked upon was to create a photobook of our life together. Most of our photos were taken in the pre-digital era and were stacked away in boxes. I had to sort through them and select ones that brought Tom to life for me. They then had to be scanned and uploaded onto the website of a company that prints photobooks. The finished product is amateurish, but I love looking through my book and reliving the good times we had together. A friend of mine has gone one better and has made a book of her late husband’s entire life. Her idea has got me motivated to embark on another project and “Tom’s Life” will be something that the children will be able to enjoy!
In a future post, I plan to talk about “stuff”. Amongst all the “stuff” that Tom left behind, were thousands of slides taken of the Cape flora. A Cape Town friend tried to persuade me to digitise them and upload them onto a website so that they could be used for research purposes. Since I don’t have the expertise or the correct equipment to do that, I thought that I was going to have to bin them. However, the friend then suggested that, if I could get the slides to Cape Town, volunteers from the Kirstenbosch Branch of the Botanical Society would do the job for me. It was then simply the job of packing them and organising courier services to send them “back home”. The volunteers are doing a wonderful job and to date 3,500 pictures have been uploaded onto the iNaturalist website. They can be viewed here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/tom-lloyd-evans
If this blog is helpful to others, something positive will have come from Tom’s death. If you are finding it useful, please leave a comment and do subscribe to get notification of new posts by email. This should be a conversation rather than a monologue!
