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Anna - a book by Karin Kennedy

Excerpts
	Preface Writing this book was a promise I made to my daughter Anna when she was sixteen. It was conceived one evening whilst she lay tucked up in bed. She had cancer, which had relapsed and we both knew that this time she might not have long to live. We were chatting about life, reflecting on the unexpected twists and turns since her diagnosis; it had not been easy, but we had found an unexpected silver lining, one that doesn’t feature in textbooks or in people’s normal perception. Anna suggested we should write a book, telling our story to challenge the impoverished attitudes we found towards illness and death; the ones that turn people into victims and disable them from a rare opportunity to grow in consciousness and spirit. I said I would have a go at writing it as long as she put in her bit quite clearly. After she died I collected together scraps from her intermittent journals, her poems, letters and other papers and realized she had given me all the things that mattered. The journal I had kept as a way of keeping sane, filled in the gaps of memory.
Excerpt from Chapter 16: Paradise My Holiday of a Lifetime When I was first diagnosed, my family and I were swept into an high speed world of hospital tests, specialists and treatments. We were in a state of shock. During the following year I had lots of things done to me and suggested to me. Sometimes I wanted to scream. It took a year before I started to rebel and fight back. Yes, I had cancer, but it was MY life and MY body and I wanted to decide how to live my life. After thinking things through I decided to go ahead and have the second surgery just after my 16th birthday, and a year after the first operation. I began to feel so much stronger about making decisions, even if my life depended on them. No, I didn’t want to have radiotherapy – the risks outweighed the possibility of it being a success. No, I didn’t want to try further chemotherapy when the chances of it working seemed so poor. I would rather use the time I had in other ways. Now, six months on, I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I do know that if I spend each day worrying about tomorrow, I will never be able to live for today. Instead I am packing my life with enjoyable things and living life to the full. During the eighteen months of my illness, apart from conventional treatment, I tried many different therapies including homeopathy, visualisation, counselling, painting and drama. Some of these helped to build up my energy and confidence again. I wanted to be part of the normal world, but I often felt different. On the courses I did, I never met any people of my own age who had been ill. What lifted my spirits the most was going away on holiday to places like Wales and Devon. They were always great fun, but they were never really warm or near beautiful sea that didn’t have ice cubes in it. I needed something more. While lying on my hospital bed I used to imagine myself instead lying on a beach on a tropical Caribbean island and seeing dolphins swimming in the wild and maybe get a chance to swim near one, it seemed to help me through the treatment. After my second operation I heard about a wonderful organisation called the Make-a-Wish Foundation. They arranged for my dream to go to the Caribbean to come true. Make-a-Wish grants wishes, often to meet pop stars or to go to Disneyland, to children with life threatening conditions. My wish was new to them, we entered uncharted waters! 0n April 10th 1996, I flew across the world to fulfill my life’s dream. Mum and I arrived in Miami and took a connecting flight to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands of the British West Indies. We had arrived in the Caribbean – another world. People of the islands had rallied round to plan an incredible two weeks for me as a gift. It was wonderful that strangers could be so kind, as though they understood how much I needed this break.
	Excerpt from Chapter 17: Swimming with a Dolphin ‘The beauty of this place is that you can take what you need from it.’ Anna was pondering on the beach. ‘I’m getting physical confidence and I’m getting stronger emotionally. You’re getting something else.’ She looked at me astutely, ‘Something more spiritual. It must be what you need.’ It occurred to me that Anna always had spiritual confidence. She just needed a way to express it. On this island of dreams, different parts of our fractured world were moving together. The integrity Anna had found through her illness was moulding a rare kind of life education rooted in truth. Her energy had become magnetic, people wanted to share in it and wake up from the mundane world. During the last few weeks I had suspended my ideas of what ought to happen in life, what people commonly held to be helpful and therapeutic. All the studies, books, theories and efforts to find a way through the maze that Anna’s cancer encapsulated didn’t seem to work. Spiritual beliefs had helped but didn’t provide resolution. So much energy had been invested searching for a way through since Anna’s diagnosis eighteen months ago. Now, the sheer exhaustion and weight of effort this involved fell away in a welcome release. It was shocking and wildly liberating to be in an ocean of uncertainty without drowning. Sitting on the beach we created shapes in the sand, beautiful shapes of dolphins and mermaids, and we watched the waves wash them away along with our footprints. The sea was around us and inside us, fusing body mind and spirit back into harmony. Nature has its own cathedrals, its own sacred places. We were inside one and all manner of things were being wordlessly resolved. A feeling of deep wellbeing had found us. It didn’t need to be visualised, prayed for, meditated upon, we didn’t need to make an appointment and pay for it. It was present without any kind of boundary. A gift for everyone. Well, not everyone. We were very fortunate, so many others didn’t have this opportunity. We had travelled from a search for cures, to a search for something to make sense of a life with uncalled for suffering. Here, now, vibrancy pulsed into each moment shimmering between paradise and the real world. We were transformed. Our relationship as mother and daughter was something we continued out of habit, but experience had also grown us into symbiotic friends, beyond a difference in status or age. This was a relationship of deep respect with an unspoken pact to help each other on a journey where the ordinary route-marks to the future had been destroyed and we were left free to create our own. We flew back to Providenciales with renewed confidence, having confirmed for each other that we both felt inexplicably free. We had not only landed in paradise, we had become a part of it and at long last sleep came easily. In the morning we head for the beach with Dean. He is working on repairing a small inflatable dinghy and Anna helps him. When it’s done, we’ll potter around the coast in it at our own leisure. There are holidaymakers relaxing on beach loungers and others heading off on diving expeditions. It’s thirsty work and I wander along the beach in search of cold drinks. Glancing up into the cloudless sky I notice a rainbow, as clear as anything, completely encircling the sun. Am I dreaming? No. It’s definitely there. Nobody else seems to have noticed. I buy a few cans of coke from a bar and return to the beach. The rainbow circle is still there. Extraordinary. Yet it appears quite ordinary. I start to tingle, recalling the inner voice in the Orkney Islands before Anna was conceived. For a moment, the past, present and future shimmer together in light and space. Everything is radiant with spirit, and, just for a moment… it all makes perfect sense. As I reach the dinghy, Anna is smiling at me, a great big grin on her face. It’s more real than reality. She knows… We both know.‘I don’t think they would mind...’ ‘Who?’ I asked her.’ ‘Make-a-Wish. I mean, they couldn’t do this for lots of people and anyway this idea is different, it’s for groups to share, not for a family.’ ‘What could they do here?’ ‘The same as we’ve done, but, not quite so touristy. They could do more group thingies and have the chance to share experiences and make friends.’ That was still something Anna had not been able to do. However sympathetic her friends at home were, they couldn’t understand the experiences she had been through. No one could unless they had been through it themselves and it weighed on her heavily, increasing her sense of isolation. We were sitting alone together on the beach, the boat fixed and ready for its first launch. The sun was shining and the rainbow had now disappeared into the sky along with the moment. ‘They could do lots of other things too, art and music and relaxation thingies.’ ‘We’d need lots of help from the people here to make it work…’ The prospect of bringing a group of teenagers with cancer to a Caribbean Island the other side of the world had serious practical implications.