Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You

Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You
Kate Gross

*THE NUMBER 1 BESTSELLER*What are the things we live for? What matters most in life when your time is short? This brave, frank and heartbreaking book shows what it means to die before your time; how to take charge of your life and fill it with wonder, hope and joy even in the face of tragedy.Ambitious and talented, Kate Gross worked at Number 10 Downing Street for two British Prime Ministers whilst only in her twenties. At thirty, she was CEO of a charity working with fragile democracies in Africa. She had married 'the best looking man I've ever kissed' – and given birth to twin boys in 2008. The future was bright.But aged 34, Kate was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. After a two-year battle with the disease, Kate died peacefully at home on Christmas morning, just ten minutes before her sons awoke to open their stockings.She began to write as a gift to herself, a reminder that she could create even as her body began to self-destruct. Written for those she loves, her book is not a conventional cancer memoir; nor is it filled with medical jargon or misery. Instead, it is Kate's powerful attempt to make sense of the woman who emerged in the strange, lucid final chunk of her life. Her book aspires to give hope and purpose to the lives of her readers even as her own life drew to its close.Kate should have been granted decades to say all that she says in these pages. Denied the chance to bore her children and grandchildren with stories when she became fat and old, she offers us all her thoughts on how to live; on the wonder to be found in the everyday; the importance of friendship and love; what it means to die before your time and how to fill your life with hope and joy even in the face of tragedy.

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Copyright (#udcf4ffbd-2c72-5398-a95f-d540ef34da76)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)

First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2015

Text © Kate Gross 2015

Kate Gross asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Cover handwriting by www.ruthrowland.co.uk

Source ISBN: 9780008103453

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008103460

Version: 2015-07-23

Dedication (#udcf4ffbd-2c72-5398-a95f-d540ef34da76)

There are two copies of this book that matter. There are two pairs of eyes I imagine reading every word. There are two adult hands which I hope will hold a battered paperback when others have long forgotten me and what I have to say. I write this for Oscar and Isaac, my little Knights, my joy and my wonder.

Contents

Cover (#ua86ced12-54e7-5209-bf9a-d0f41013e97a)

Title Page (#ulink_29a1a822-d29c-5fc5-bb1c-f2a4ce276cd2)

Copyright (#ulink_ab899984-289e-517c-8bff-efdc35d12cfb)

Dedication (#ulink_1dec4cc2-4eeb-53de-8840-9f1fdbeb2f03)

Introduction (#ulink_242491c0-78db-5b7c-ad19-68036360ab3d)

1 The Plastic Bag and the Red Coat (#ulink_e08350e5-58ec-5552-a904-371eff924e3d)

2 The Terracotta Army (#ulink_335c502b-ca4e-5043-872c-ac5a0587d3e9)

3 The Landscape of Your Mind (#litres_trial_promo)

4 A Pile of Golden Treasure (#litres_trial_promo)

5 The Original Four-Square (#litres_trial_promo)

6 The Woman in the Arena (#litres_trial_promo)

7 Earthquakes, and the Light They Let In (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Cantus Firmus (#litres_trial_promo)

9 What’s Love Got to Do With It? (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Sing, Everyone (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)

Credits (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#udcf4ffbd-2c72-5398-a95f-d540ef34da76)

When I was three, I told my mum that I kept my words in my head, in a clear plastic bag. Now it is time for me to take them out, to arrange them into this story. The thing is, I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know if I will die before I finish writing it. But if I do, I know someone else will write the ending for me. My mum will step in to close off my story, just as she used to step in to help with my homework. So I can begin.

We will start on 11 October 2012. I am running along the beach in Southern California. It is dusk, and as the waves break on the shore, surfers head out to sea. My legs feel strong, my lungs full of salty air. I’m here to raise money for the charity I run, which works in post-conflict Africa. I’m a successful thirty-something woman with an amazing job through which I travel the world and converse with presidents and prime ministers. My adorable twins are three, and their father, Billy, is my soulmate, as well as being the best-looking man I’ve ever kissed. But inside me a lump of cells has broken free of the rules and spawned a tumour which has blocked my colon, crept through my lymph nodes and colonised my liver. Cancer is halfway to killing me, and I am completely oblivious to its presence.

The next day I am at the airport, my week-long trip over, and finally on my way home to Cambridge. As I arrive at check-in, I am hit by a wave of nausea. I throw up for fifteen hours – through security, in the lounge, and all the way back home. I feel feverish, exhausted. Now, at last, I know something is seriously wrong. I crawl into a taxi at Heathrow and ask the driver to drop me off at the emergency department at Addenbrooke’s, our local hospital. A CT scan follows, and twelve hours after landing in the UK I am in emergency surgery. The blockage in my colon is a tumour, and the dark spots the doctors saw on my liver a series of secondary lesions – metastases, to use the proper term. I have stage four cancer. All this cancer-speak is new to me, but I do know there isn’t a stage five. What I didn’t realise then – though of course the ever internet-enabled Billy did, right from the start – was that I had only a 6 per cent chance of surviving the next five years.

Now we are more than two years on from that, the first earthquake to hit our little family. Two operations, six months of chemotherapy, and a brief, joyful remission filled that interlude. But now the cancer is back. It has spread, it is incurable. I will die before my children finish primary school, and probably before they reach the grand old age of six, which they think is impossibly grown-up, and I think is impossibly young. It won’t be long now.

I began to write straight after my diagnosis. And as soon as I started to type, the words emerged, as prolific at reproducing and ordering themselves as the malignant cells inside me. Everything I wrote was a gift to myself, a reminder that I could create even as my body tried to self-destruct. And I wrote as a gift to those I love: my living, breathing Terracotta Army. Now the words spill out of my plastic bag like the magnetic letters my children stick on the fridge. I write to make sense of what has happened to our family, to make sense of the Kate who has emerged in this strange, lucid final chunk of life. I write because the imprint of disease is growing in me, and like a poor man’s Keats I find myself full of fears that I will have to stop ‘before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain’. Before I can write down all the things I want to tell my boys when they are thirty-five, not five. Before I can tell them who I am, and what I know, and the stories that make up my life.