I didn’t want to write about cancer, but the more I write, the more this story roots itself in those nine long months from diagnosis in April 2018 to that final blast of radiotherapy in January 2019.

The thing that frustrates me is that breast cancer always seems to overshadow the grief. The turbulence of redundancy and relocation. Buying and selling homes. Our lives in boxes spread across storage units, garages and rentals. All the other crap.

There it is again I think, hogging the headlines. I want to scream and shout, ‘There was all this other crap too, you know.’ Mum and dad forgotten, eclipsed by this tumour in my right breast. Even now four years on from diagnosis day.  

I want to write about the grief of losing mum and dad four months apart in 2015. I want to write about how utterly dislocating it was grieving in a place – Bournemouth – that dad never visited. Mum only a couple of times. A place, beautiful as it is that had no personal connection to the people I was grieving.

I want to write about how bloody hard it is to make friends when you feel like you’re going mad with grief. And the people you’d normally turn to for support – your own family – are grieving too, trying to figure out their lives, their challenges, trying to work out what new family looks and feels like now that its foundations have disappeared.

But no. Breast cancer is jumping up and down in front of me, waving its arms, trying to get my attention.

So maybe that’s the deal right now. As a first attempt at writing a book maybe I do go with the less difficult option. On a purely practical level it’s a lot easier writing about something that happened recently. I mean I have a stack of WhatsApp messages, paperwork, photos and social media to help me piece it together for a start.

And it’s not like I can talk about having breast cancer and not talk about my family. My brother in Tokyo. My sister swapping central London for rural Somerset. My other sister meeting and marrying her husband, bringing their lives together and moving to a new home. None of us living in the same place we did before mum and dad died. Everything had changed.

And God, I want to talk about those ridiculously long phone conversations I used to have with mum. ‘Just a quick thing Harriet.’ An hour later and we’d still be talking. And we’d do the same again the next day.

But I think I need to accept that for now, this is what I need to write about. That trying to starve breast cancer of the oxygen it craves I’m making it worse. Sometimes I wonder if I’m minimising the experience. It wasn’t so bad, was it? Not compared to losing mum and dad. I mean, I’m still here, aren’t I? I survived.

So that’s the plan as I head into this weekend. I have a very immediate and specific final task to complete for the Write a memoir course. The opening 3000 words of my book. Wish me luck.

Thank you for reading,

Harriet