Eulogy for Liz Fernandez
1 Feb 2023 - Caterham Baptist Church
Liz died on Saturday 17th December 2022, just over eight years after the initial diagnosis of ovarian cancer, just over a month after our older daughter’s wedding.
The funeral service took place on 1st February 2023, at Caterham Baptist Church, after the burial at Eden Valley Burial Ground, just over two months before our younger daughter’s wedding. The building was as full as I’ve ever known it, and the video of the service has been viewed over 700 times. Here’s what I said, after the children had shared their reflections.
On behalf particularly of myself and the children, but also others who are closest to Liz, thank you for being here today. A lot of today was shaped by Liz – we talked about it together as she knew this day was getting close, she wrote some things down for me, she chose all the songs1 and had some ideas about who she’d like to participate. A quick comment about the first song, “Waiting for my real life to begin”2, we talked about together. It’s not a Christian song, though as with all good art, it expresses something deep about the nature of reality. The song expresses grief about what has not been done – in a sense, even though we did more in the last few years, she always felt that she was waiting. But the song also includes an eschatological sense – Liz’s real life has now begun.
Anyway, if you don’t like it, you can take it up with her one day – but you may have other things on your mind by then.
In a sense, even though I was the one closest to Liz, I barely know half of Liz’s story as so much of everyday lives even of couples takes place in different domains – when you talk together about work and so on, it’s not really a shared experience as a window on a personal experience. Writing in advance, I’m assuming that there will people present who know more, and maybe by the end of today, through conversations, you’ll have learnt more about who she was, fitted in more pieces of the puzzle, have a better idea of the whole picture.
There were things that she didn’t particularly want talked about in the context of remembering her life. But there’s no need to go where she didn’t want to go, because there’s plenty of other things to say.
The Royal Marsden Hospital was one of the most obvious features in Liz’s life. She worked at the Royal Marsden in Sutton for about 30 years, and this overlapped with the eight years that she was being treated for cancer there. Her job was designing radiotherapy treatment plans, amongst other things. Her greatest worry at work was that she was doing it “too properly” – she would spend a long time trying to find improvements to plans, to treat the cancer more effectively, or to help the patient feel more comfortable. It also involved research; developments in her job mean by the time she finished it was barely recognisable from when she started. One facet of the change along the way was the introduction of a device called a multi-leaf collimator. Liz was one of the authors of a paper on this when it first appeared.
The other big feature of her life was her Christian faith. For most of her life, the congregation here was the context in which her beliefs were expressed. We attended pretty much every week – often three times a week – and in addition to the main meetings here, she helped out over the years with a whole range of different activities – the toddler group, the youth club, activities for seniors. This wasn’t to get brownie points, or some kind of deal with God – if I do the right things, then you should look after me. It was with the conviction that giving back to God what he has given to you is the only ultimately meaningful way to live. For her to go through the years of cancer treatment did raise questions in our minds about why God would allow this – it’s hard to see it as fair, in human terms. Those questions and struggles are of course not unique to Liz. The people who were closest to Liz will know that she held on, even when there were times when she struggled to know what she was holding onto. And more importantly, her heavenly Father held onto her.
Liz was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, and as we walked back to the car after the world exploded, she said to me in shock, I’ve got six months. At the time, had someone said we’d have eight years, we’d probably have not believed them, but death still interrupts things, and it really doesn’t matter how long you have, you would always take five minutes, five hours, five days, five years more.
She continued to work for some time but it eventually reached the stage that the amount of time off sick she needed felt unfair on the hospital. So she took ill health retirement. But she continued to be as active as her health allowed after that. She became part of the North Downs Community Orchestra3, and for some time was also on the committee. She loved this so much. As her instruments were flute and piano, the opportunities for playing in orchestras were limited – but the Fun Orchestra welcomed her, and it’s hard to overstate how much joy playing with you guys gave her. During the Covid lockdown, we applied what we had learnt from the church here to keep music playing remotely – when there is so much music in your life, being deprived of it was tough, and I’m sure that the online stuff stopped some of us from wilting away. On a day out from hospital in the last few weeks, we were able to come and hear the final rehearsal for their Christmas concert. Liz loved that so much, even though doing that much was exhausting, and I know people in the orchestra said that seeing her was the highlight of the day – though it may just have been bewildering for some of the newer ones!
If music be the food of love, there was also the love of food – specifically, cakes. Again in the lockdown, it became apparent that there was a need at the Lost Sheep giftshop4 for extra capacity to get the tea shop downstairs open. On the way back from the shop after a Covid walk, I said to Liz it was something she could do – she was unsure of herself, but she understood what Sally (the proprietor) was trying to achieve and had all the right skills to make it work – including being very good at making cakes. So that’s what she did – the discussion was early in 2021, and the tea shop opened that autumn, I believe – and though I do say it myself, Liz’s cakes were amongst the best sold there.
There was Liz’s sense of justice and fairness. The tradition is that people often become more conservative, more selfish, more indifferent to other people, as they get older. Not all, though, and Liz found a way of expressing her concern for the vulnerable through the work of the foodbank that the church here set up with others5. It was a frustration to her that people could not see the unfairness of the world around them – that too often, people would side with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, either actively, or passively through silence. She was genuinely hurt by their indifference, and struggled to reconcile what people said they believed with their lack of compassion and integrity – and it was an honour together with Liz to be in a position to be able to not just talk about compassion but to show it. She would love it if her passing led us to look again at state of our society and ask yourself what you can do to make the world a better place.
Her family mattered dearly to her. Families are organic, elastic things, with shapes that change as time goes by, but she was deeply patriotic, even if occasionally exasperated, about our families. I guess by the time I speak, we will have heard from our children. She loved you so much, and when I told Liz’s counsellor about her death, she was gracious enough to say that she knew you loved her as well. There was so much she would have loved to do with you, so many holidays untaken together, C’s wedding, grandchildren in the future, maybe – as I said at K’s wedding, love is wanting to be there at the end of the story. She was so sorry knowing not just that she could not see more of your stories, but also how much you would be hurt by this.
What about me? Liz chose to take a barely competent, inexpressive, emotionally ignorant, nervous, shy boy by the hand, and walk with him through life. We worked together at relationships, parenthood, homemaking, our professional lives, church and politics. Insofar as there is anything good in me, any grace, any compassion, any empathy, any patience, it grew out of the years of our walk together. Where there were failures, they were mine; where there was damage, it was a consequence of me; and Liz would always be fighting to hold things together. In bad times – especially in the last few years, Liz would, improbably, apologise to me at times – I’m sorry for ruining your life. My reply was always, you are my life. I have nowhere else to go. We play the hand we’ve been dealt, we don’t turn the table over in disgust, and as far as is possible, we play it out to the end.
The last six months have been tough. By late 2021, we were into medical trial territory – we could expect one more go at chemotherapy, but otherwise we were basically looking for things in unexpected places. Nonetheless we tried, all the options that we had any hope that they might help. Another go with PARP inhibitors was looking good, but then that stopped working. Then we tried immunotherapy – so promising for many cancers, but they’ve not found a way with gynae cancers yet. We made it to the Carey Family Conference, and to see K’s fiance’s parents, having just started that trial, but on the way home, Liz got a temperature – it was the first gust of wind of the coming hurricane. It resulted in a trip to A&E, followed by a transfer to the Marsden, and what was Liz’s third close encounter with death following a Cytokine Release Storm– the scariest and most out of control so far. But we got through that, and then whilst she recovered from that, we were into her dad’s illness, death and funeral. By the time Liz was ready to try chemo again, the disease was already spreading, and Liz spent the next two months in the Marsden. We made it to K’s wedding, which was a miracle and a blessing for all of us, but by that stage it was becoming pretty obvious that the disease was winning. Finally, on 7 December, following a scan on the 5, the doctors told us that chemo simply wasn’t doing enough to merit further treatment. Liz came home on Monday 12 December, and got quickly worse – the struggle against it over the years taking its toll maybe. That Saturday, in the morning, K and L [her husband] went to get a prescription for painkillers to help Liz get through the weekend – the pain had got steadily worse – but by mid afternoon, Liz had quietly slipped away – in her own bed, next to K and me.
People talk about a “presence” of people who have died, but for me at least, it was more of an absence – an anti-ghost – a gap where Liz ought to be if things were as they should be. Nobody picking up the messages I sent in the hours when I wasn’t with her in hospital. Nobody coming into the lounge and offering a cup of tea. Nobody calling a hello to people arriving at the back door. Nobody to pick up the slack in the conversation. Nobody to express approval and appreciation of the things that I’ve done to keep things going. For so long, we had worked together on these things – and now I have to continue alone. There’s nobody that matters in the same way as Liz who can tell me whether I’ve done this right or not.
The end of the speech was deliberately left abrupt - death interrupts. There is so much more to say: maybe sometime I will find the right words to say it, and the people who are able to listen.
The songs she chose for the funeral were: There is a hope; Mine are days that God has numbered; Yet not I but through Christ in me; There’s a place where the streets shine.
Colin Hay, Waiting for my real life to begin. This was played at the start of the service.