I watched a film tonight for the first time since I saw it at the cinema, P.S. I Love you. For those who haven’t seen it or read the novel that it is based upon, it’s about a woman who loses her husband when he develops a brain tumour. Before he dies he writes her a series of letters and plans for them to be delivered to her one at a time after his death. He knew she would really struggle and wanted to help her through the loss himself and help her rebuild her life so she could move on. Some letters had memories he wanted her to think about, some had tasks he wanted her to complete but they all had one thing in common they all ended with the words “P.S. I Love you.”
This doesn’t usually happen in life, people often are far too scared to face their own mortality even when they are close to death themselves. I lost my Mum to cancer, she had tumours in her lung and as happens with a lot of lung cancer cases apparently it spread to her brain. She fought hard and was so ill with her chemotherapy and radiotherapy but she made it through and started to recover, it took a long time but she started to get back to normal. Unfortunately it didn’t last and her cancer came back with a vengeance as it often does when it reoccurs. She went downhill so quickly after that and so many things went unsaid, and I wish she had thought to write things down just a little note for us for when she was gone but as it was a brain tumour she started to fade before the end and that made it hard for her to write. She kept a diary – not a journal as such, just a normal daily diary for keeping track of things and she wrote in it every day what she had done or who she had seen. I read it after she died. May and Sheila visited today – brought flowers, they were lovely. Ross passed his exams, went out with friends to celebrate will be home late. Alex back in hospital but will be out on Friday. Got a letter from Ann today. Her handwriting was always so beautiful, but reading that diary you could see her fading away day by day just by watching the way that pen moved across the paper. It stopped a week or two before she died.
Dad had died as well by the time this film made it to the cinema and his death was very sudden too, it wasn’t any of his conditions that killed him – it was a bacterial infection. All those years fighting one problem after the other, open heart surgery, heart bypass, heart valve replacement, failing kidneys, dialysis and it was a simple little single celled organism that killed him and practically overnight too. I never even got to say goodbye because of interfering psychotic family members.
So watching this film with all those emotions still fresh and raw I’m not ashamed to say I cried my eyes out. It was a beautiful film and a beautiful story and I was left feeling stronger at the same time as I felt more broken than I had ever been. I cried myself to sleep that night wishing that I had gotten just one letter from them, it didn’t matter what they had said on them I just missed them so much and wanted some contact again. I felt silly for letting it get to me so much and put it down to the fact that I was depressed and dealing with what was essentially being orphaned. It doesn’t matter what age you are when you lose your parents or anyone you love for that matter its always going to feel like a part of you died as well.
My parents never wrote me letters but that doesn’t mean they didn’t love me or that they aren’t still watching over me somehow. I get little signs now and then that I take as messages from them, a song on the radio, a quote from a favourite poem or author, a shape or symbol in the most unlikely of places that caught my eye whilst I was thinking about them. This may be them showing me they are still here with me or it may be wishful thinking of a person desperately clinging to a world where things aren’t quite as hopeless as they feel sometimes, but I know one thing for sure…
A few days after I watched that film for the very first time and cried myself to sleep wishing for just one letter from my Mum I opened a box in the loft that was full of old junk looking for something which was so insignificant I don’t even remember now and in that box I found a single little piece of paper tucked away at the bottom having been there for who knows how long and on it were the following words.
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