It's been a lifetime...

I can't write since I lost my brother

It’s been a while. It feels like a lifetime. Because in some ways, it has been.

I started WriteRightRites with the enthusiasm of a puppy, but then life hit. My brother had been diagnosed with cancer the previous year - incurable, inoperable. It was devastating, but Rory was so positive, and so fit and healthy, that I found myself thinking about people who live with cancer for years and years. That would be him. Definitely. Absolutely.

But in October he was told all treatment options had run out. He was given just six months to live. Still he seemed fit and healthy. He was still working, still going on long walks with his wife and children. There were things he couldn’t do any more, and two of the hardest were probably being unable to draw any more or play guitar - two things he was incredibly talented at, and which had always meant so much to him. Still, he was doing so well that we all spoke about how arbitrary the ‘six months to live’ prognosis was, and that he might be with us for much longer. We hoped. We believed.

Christmas was…hard. Despite the positivity, I kept crying. Rather than thinking about the cancer, about my big brother, about the possibility of the impossible, I instead fixated on Rory’s gift. What do you give someone for their last Christmas. What possible present could show him how much he meant to me? How much I had loved my big brother and looked up to him for the whole of my life, and would continue to after he had gone? What would make him realise how important he had been?

Rory was ten years older than me. My big brother had helped me learn how to read; had entertained me with stories from his own imagination, too. He made up songs for me when he was looking after me, playing them on the guitar he taught himself how to play. Even when he moved out, when he was 18 and I was 8, every Saturday when he came to visit, we would spend time together, just the two of us. He had been the male role model in my life, because our father was definitely not one.

At Christmas he said: ‘Six months? F*ck that.’ He was determined to do everything possible to spend even an extra minute with his wife and two children.

But 2025 hit hard. Just before it started I had a strange dream about a hare. It was racing across fields, and I was beside it, watching it, when it suddenly ran into the air and was floating, free, easy… ‘That’s Rory,’ I thought. ‘He’s going to die this year.’

Rory has always loved hares. They were his animals. I had drawn several for him over the last couple of years… It was just a silly dream, though. I dismissed it.

Rory had been so well (aside from the chemo treatments. They hit hard, but I won’t go into that) but suddenly it seemed to be one thing after another. He recovered from each wave of illness or hospitalisation, but it was like watching a tide going out, because each time he didn’t get back to the level he’d been before; I was watching my brother be slowly carried away from us.

I was halfway through a yoga session a Wednesday evening when my phone rang. It was my one of my sisters telling me I needed to get home. Now. There were only days left.

The drive was a blur. Apart from one moment. I was driving slowly along a single track country lane when a hare popped out from the hedge on one side and ran in front of the car. Literally. It glanced over its shoulder and then ran, not in fear but as if asking me to follow it, along the lane itself. I slowed to a stop. It did the same. Turned. Looked at me, then loped into the hedge on the other side of the road.

Somehow this felt like a sign.

I thought of that dream. Remembered how free the hare had felt in it. How easy it had been to go from running on land to leaping in the sky and floating free.

Rory died peacefully on Saturday 3 May, with his wife and children at his side. We had all said our goodbyes. I had read to him, just like he had read to me all those years before. When it came for me to leave, I told him how much he meant to me; that my happiest childhood memories involved him; but at the last I couldn’t bring myself to say goodbye, instead I said ‘I’ll see you later’. He’d smiled. He’d even, somehow, found the strength to lift an arm over to my back as I kissed his cheek, to hug me.

Since his death, there have been a couple of strange little moments - real or imagined. Little glimmers that have helped me immensely (if you don’t believe in that kind of thing, that’s absolutely your choice. Please respect mine). The first full moon after Rory’s death was called the Hare Moon. At his funeral, as the service took place, a hare came and loped gently out from under a hedge and came towards the window, until it was only a couple of feet away. It sat and looked at us for about 30 seconds, then turned and slowly loped back the way it had come. It was a beautiful moment, and definitely felt like a sign. He’s okay.

Tomorrow it will be nine weeks without Rory. I still haven’t written a word. I can’t seem to. I’ve finished edits on a book, and done the proofread, and that was fine - but they require a different part of the brain somehow; a different level of concentration. I’ve even taken on some freelance editing work, and was able to do that easily. I enjoyed it, in fact. Still, I can’t seem to write. I need to at some point, though, and that reality is starting to loom larger and larger, because waiting for me is an incredibly rough first draft of a book that needs to be turned into a draft good enough to send to publishers. Luckily, both of my publishers are kind, patient, understanding. The reality is, though, that a writer isn’t a writer unless they write…and somehow I need to find a way to flick that switch again. A first step was writing this post. Just getting it down has helped a little - and made me cry a lot. It’s a step. Every journey is a series of steps, and there always has to be a first one…