Today is the day that Jade Goody – a reality TV star whose fame has
accelerated as her death approaches – will marry her boyfriend in a wedding
ceremony that has been sold to the highest bidder: £700,000 to OK! magazine,
£100,000 to Living TV; and more deals with ITV, among others.
At 27 she has terminal cervical cancer and she wants to provide a legacy for
her two small sons; but her impending death has already generated another
legacy, an intense public debate about the rights and wrongs, the profits
and losses, of living and dying in public.
A great many people are watching this story unfolding and are feeling sad and
troubled and fascinated, all at the same time; an uncomfortable combination
of emotions that generates animosity (Goody has been cast by some as a
baddie, receiving hate-mail and online attacks), as well as sympathy (the
prime minister has declared that people should “applaud her determination to
help her family” by selling the media rights to her wedding).
Elton John has offered one of his houses for the honeymoon; Mohamed al-Fayed
has donated a wedding dress; the cameras have followed her everywhere from
the moment of her diagnosis (when she was on an Indian reality TV show, an
appearance following previous accusations that she had racially bullied a
Bolly-wood star on Celebrity Big Brother); and hundreds of thousands of
women have made appointments for cervical smear tests, hoping to avoid a
similar fate.
All of which is a confusing yet potent brew that seems to have reached a
boiling point in terms of public emotion on a level not often seen in a
nation that has a history of keeping death private, yet occasionally allows
itself to be swept up in a mass outburst of grief.
It has not quite reached the same pitch as the death of Diana, Princess of
Wales – she was canonised as a beautiful royal saint; Goody is a less
photogenic working-class girl, the daughter of drug addicts, brawling her
way out of a deprived childhood on a council estate – but both lived out
much of their adult lives on camera and both manipulated (and were
manipulated by) their publicity campaigns. If Diana was the people’s
princess, then Jade is the people’s commoner and each of them mirrors
uncomfortably distorted reflections of ourselves.
So I cannot help but be reminded of August 1997, when Diana died and my sister
Ruth was terminally ill with breast cancer. We all know what happened in the
wake of Diana’s death – the carpet of flowers, the outpouring of heartfelt
emotion by those who knew her and those who felt as if they did. On the
morning after the night of Diana’s death, I sat by my sister’s bedside in a
hospice and we watched some of the television reporting.
By this point Ruth’s cancer had spread to her bones, her lungs, her liver, her
brain, but she retained a mordant sense of humour. “The death of the media’s
golden goose,” she said, but she was crying and I kissed her. A few days
later she e-mailed a friend to say: “I have to say I shed a tear for the
icon – if she can go at 36, why not me at 33 (actually, that’s a tear for
me, of course).”
Ruth was, as always, spot on in her observations, even as she was drifting in
and out of lucidity because of the painkillers and her brain tumour. She
realised that in mourning others we are also mourning something of
ourselves; a truth that had become clear to her while she was writing in the
Observer magazine (which I was editing at the time) about her impending
death.
The supplement in which she wrote about death was called Life; a title that
seemed inappropriate (as is the case with Goody’s appearances on Living TV)
and yet also somehow fitting. In life there is also death; the two go hand
in hand, however much we might wish otherwise.
My sister died in September 1997, before the pervasive influence of reality TV
had taken root in our culture, before Goody became famous as the gobby girl
from Bermondsey who had dragged herself out of the gutter and into our front
rooms. But when Ruth wrote about her experience of cancer – of knowing that
she was dying too young; of the unbearable knowledge that she would not see
her twin babies grow up – she received thousands and thousands of letters
from people who told her their stories, both of losing someone they loved
and also of their own experiences of cancer.
Before she died she asked me to make sure that her writing be turned into a
book and her husband and I followed her wishes. The book, Before I Say
Goodbye, was published the following year on May 1, her birthday. It seemed
absolutely right that she should live on in her writing; that her birthday
be marked by her own words on her death.
The financial gains from this were negligible in comparison with the £1m deals
negotiated by Max Clifford, Goody’s publicity agent. Nevertheless, the
modest amount of money earned went a little way to help Ruth’s children, who
had just turned two when she died. This seemed to enrage a few other
journalists at the time, just as her writing in The Observer had been
fiercely opposed by some of my colleagues on that newspaper.
“Why on earth would people want to read about breast cancer?” said one of them
contemptuously, as if this were a subject of no interest to anyone, despite
the fact that one in seven women will be diagnosed with it. “How can you be
so nepotis-tic in letting your sister write for a magazine you edit?” said
another, ignoring Ruth’s reputation as a journalist of great talent.
If I sound bitter, then I shouldn’t, because Ruth’s handful of columns – 7½ of
them (I had to finish the last one on her behalf) – received the warmest
response imaginable from readers. Her book was added to the reading lists
for medical students and other health professionals because of its insights
into the experience of being a young woman with cancer. (Ruth was initially
misdiagnosed after a catalogue of errors by the NHS hospital that was
treating – or mistreating – her).
Incredible though it may seem, this was an era when doctors still declared
that young women didn’t get breast cancer and, just as Goody’s public
utterances have sent a multitude to have medical check-ups, so too did my
sister’s.
The other effect of Ruth’s writing – as with that of Oscar Moore (who happened
to be a friend of mine and who wrote an acclaimed series of columns about
life with HIV before dying at the age of 36) and John Diamond (another
friend who wrote brilliantly about his cancer) – was to bring death into
everyday life at a time when we were encouraged to believe that youth and
beauty were all that matter and dying was an unpleasant subject that had
become far more of a taboo than sex.
One of the letters sent to Ruth came from a nurse and health visitor who had
herself undergone chemotherapy. “Nursing on the wards nearly finished me off
as I could not understand why people had to suffer,” she wrote. “I still
remember the first patient of mine who died . . . She was 32 with two kids
and what sticks with me is we never allowed her to talk about what was
happening. I feel we denied her the chance to get better because we denied
her feelings and fears.”
Goody will not get better, but she is expressing her feelings and fears in the
manner to which she has become accustomed – in public. You may not feel that
this is how you would face death, but it is her choice and choices become
limited when cancer invades the body, consuming a life and all its
possibilities.
I know my sister felt that in writing about her experiences it gave her some
sense of shaping them, even as her body was becoming misshapen and distorted
by cancer. “Everybody thinks cancer makes you thin,” she wrote, eight weeks
before her death. “In fact, I’m getting fatter and fatter. I know this because
people keep coming up to me and saying, ‘You look so well’. Actually, I
don’t look particularly well – I’m pale and my hair is falling out . . . so
what they really mean is, ‘You look so fat’.
“Why am I so fat? Before anyone mentions the term ‘comfort eating’ can I just
say cancer isn’t just about getting round to reading Middle-march before
it’s too late: it’s a full-time job keeping up with the eating
opportunities. Yes, we cry at the breast cancer support group, which meets
once a fortnight, but there’s always a huge tin of biscuits including
chocolate ones . . .
“Still, one of the women at my support group recently lost a lot of weight. On
Monday night she died. I’m glad I look well, after all.”
Rereading Ruth’s writing – as I have just done while thinking about this piece
– reminds me of how wonderful it is; as wonderful as my dearly beloved, much
missed sister (my comrade in arms; my closest friend). I wish I could read
you her entire book; I wish she were here to tell you about what it feels
like to face up to the grotesque horror of cancer; I wish she had never had
cancer and she had never had to write about it and that she was with me
still. I wish all those things and they are so contradictory and confusing,
but life is full of contradictions, as full of horrible moments of despair
as it is of moments of courage and fortitude when a path seems clear again.
So in the end – not that there is ever an ending to stories of human grief and
suffering – I feel terribly sorry for Goody and for her children and for all
those who suffer as she does now, but without the desire to express their
suffering. If she wants to make some money before she dies, then by all
means let her do so, for this is one of her few remaining moments of
defining herself, both as a mother and as a woman who has made a career as a
reality TV star.
There is no right way to die and very little dignity in the brutal onslaught
of cancer; and those who die young do not go gentle into that good night. If
Jade Goody refuses to leave quietly, then that is her right for she has
lived by being loud, by refusing to give up the light.
