Ten Years Later

That Sunday ten years ago had ended like most Sunday evenings: I’d written a post for my booklog (Omnitopia Dawn), farted about on the internet and had gone to bed before midnight. A few hours later I was woken up by a phone call from the hospital telling me Sandra had passed away.

It wasn’t unexpected but it was still a surprise. I’d visited her in hospital only that evening, never expecting the end would come only hours after I’d left her. It was a surreal experience to take that taxi to the other side of Amsterdam and find her, well, gone. I knew that moment would come, but still wasn’t prepared for the reality of it. That day and the week after, I was just numb, just surviving day by day arranging the funeral. You never know how much your family can do for you until a moment like this. It was only once my parents and siblings had to go home again and I was alone, alone for the first time in years, that it all hit me. In a year after her death, not a day went by without crying. Dip into my posts for 2012 and you see how often I mention her.

Time heals all wounds, as the cliche says and it’s frightening how true this is. In the decade since she passed away she’s never been far from my memory, but the realities of day to day living means that raw pain is slowly ground down. As the physical reminders of her presence in our home slowly disappeared, the opportunities to be accidently reminded of her dwindle as well. You can’t keep grieving; at some point I made my peace with her death. Now it’s mostly moments like this that I’m mourning again. Despite this, she still isn’t far from my thoughts. Sandra shaped my politics (socialist), my tastes in literature (classic detectives), music (p-funk) and that influence is there to this day.

We met the old fashioned way, trading sarcastic barbs on an IRC spinoff of the alt.fan.pratchett Usenet group back in spring of 2000. To be honest, first impressions weren’t good, but it soon turned out that this was our form of flirting. Chatting in the main channel became private chats between the two of us, became long phone calls — and wasn’t that scary that first time I called her– and finally, at Christmas 2000, Sandra came over to visit. That was a magical moment, it had started snowing only that day and waiting in a silent winter wonderland for that Eurolines bus to come in is one of my best memories. Getting used to each other and being with each other over the next few days was even better. In 2001 I tried to move to the UK but couldn’t get a job, so instead she moved to Amsterdam two years later. When we bought our house, we also got two kittens to keep the elderly stray cat we’d taken home from my parents company. Now only one of them is still alive (Sophie, on the left).

Our mutual love for Terry Pratchett’s books is what brought us together. We weren’t the only ones that got together through pTerry fandom; in our circle of friends there are a lot of people who met, shacked up, married and had children thanks to Pratchett. What set Sandra apart is that Pratchett also gave her the courage to die. She had had a bout of cancer that nearly killed her decades ago and as a result had barely functioning kidneys left. These finally packed up in 2008 and she needed a kidney transplant. It took a year of her slowly getting worse on dialysis before it could happen. As luck would have it, I was compatible with her and could be a donor, but both she and I needed to be in a good enough condition to undergo the operation. Two days before Christmas 2009 it happened. For me, the operation went smoothly and I was discharged on Christmas day. Sandra was less lucky.

The next two years were an ordeal, as she combatted secondary infections and moved in and of hospital and worse, intensive care. Periods of recovery became fewer and fewer; the times she was home shorter and shorter. Those moments of hope followed by disappointment ate away at her and, if I’m honest, me as well. And then Terry Pratchett did one last thing for us: release a documentary about his decision on end his own life. Pratchett had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of early onset Alzheimers a few years ago and had decided that he would not let the disease determine his time of death. He would end his life on his terms, when he was still able to make the choice and before the disease ate away his personality. He made a documentary about this decision and we watched it together. It was this that gave the courage to do the same. In October she decided to stop all treatment and prepared for her death. We had a last family farewell that month and a few weeks later she passed away.

It took me a long time to get to peace with her decision. Still not sure I’m completely.