Remembering Kerry

This is my beautiful friend Kerry, I want to tell you about her and about how without her this business probably wouldn’t exist at all.

Kerry had been a mental health nurse for the NHS. From there she moved into working for Steps 2 Wellbeing, providing interventions for people struggling with their mental health. When I met her, a year or so after I moved to Dorset, she had begun to transition to working for herself as a counsellor.

I was working as a social worker when we met. We bonded over the highs and lows of  working for the state; trying to help and trying not to be overwhelmed and worrying about whether you were part of the solution or perpetuating the status quo. Back then I knew that I needed to move on because I was exhausted with the work I was doing, but I felt like the job I wanted to move into didn’t exist. Meanwhile Kerry was leading the way, breaking free and telling me that her only regret was that she hadn’t done it years ago.

One of the many things I love about Kerry is that she’s never been soft and fluffy like I can be. She has enormous compassion but she doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve, she is careful with herself. She has a busy brain and a sharp wit. She can’t bear self-pity in herself or anyone else.  She didn’t allow me to sit around and moan or feel sorry for myself about my stressful work life. Instead after a brief few minutes of sympathy she would mercilessly move me on with some variation of the question ‘well what are you going to do about it?’. I learned so many different things from her, and this was one of them – that you have a responsibility to yourself to figure out what you need and bring it about. Kerry was trained in ACT – Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It tied in beautifully with her ‘what are you going to do about it?’ philosophy and thanks to her I started learning more about it and benefitting from it too.

Kerry was recovering from cancer around the time I was first getting to know her, and it had changed her perspective and made her braver. For years she was cancer free and then all of a sudden she wasn’t, and this time the cancer could be treated but it couldn’t be cured. She was told most people with her condition lived between two and ten years. It seemed to me like an impossible timeframe – too long to throw caution to the wind, too short to ever forget about it or make any long term plans without feeling naïve and foolish.  But Kerry took it and asked herself what she was going to do with it and then she moved forward. She was awe inspiring.

She planned and planted out a whole new garden for herself based around her need to be able to spend time with friends outdoors and minimise her risk of infection (her cancer treatment kept her immunosuppressed). Instead of coming over for dinner or meeting for drinks she started going on walks with friends and visiting beer gardens and outdoor cafes. She began a blog and an online business and focussed on how she could support herself financially, letting go of any work that felt too stressful to maintain. She drew her friends closer and she lived as healthily as she could. I never once saw or heard her feeling sorry for herself, she was adamant, determined, she didn’t waver.

She never told me to be braver, but the example she set was so inspiring that I had no choice but to be. She became even more laser focussed on the things that mattered to her, so I began to focus too, and start thinking about what I could let go of. I learned from her to ask: what would still matter to me if I had between two and ten years to live?

During this period I learned something huge from her. I always thought about work as a defining part of my life.  Like a lot of people working in the public sector I tended to think of myself as motivated by doing good rather than by earning more. But in reality status has always been just as important to me; holding an important job, not just being good at it but being seen to be good at it. I was using work to help me feel worthwhile. But Kerry had stopped thinking like that. She worked to earn just enough money to live the life she wanted. She took work she enjoyed. She quietly helped private clients, she didn’t pressure herself to grow a bigger or more visible business. She thought about work as a component of her life as a whole and she didn’t see it as sacred or honourable or a way of earning peace of mind. She derived her worth elsewhere, from living a fulfilling and meaningful life, from connection with the people she loved, from being outdoors, from being creative. That was revolutionary for me, I didn’t realise the mindset I had until I saw someone without it. That was what made it possible for me to let go of the status my old job held and start from scratch, knowing it was going to involve trial and error and mistakes and failures. Having a friend like her, being loved by her and learning from her diverted the course of my life.

There were all sorts of practical things she did too. She was my professional supervisor, helping me detangle the work I was doing and find ways to do it better. She recommended all kinds of interesting books, schools of thought, podcasts. She bounced around ideas with me endlessly. Many of the features of my business were solidified during rambling walks with Kerry and my partner Mark, taking the kernel of an idea and then debating it and adding to it and polishing it up into something doable. She proof read every important document I ever produced for the business. This is my first solo blog without her (although I know what her advice would be, because her voice has stayed with me and I still hear it). She was creative in the same way that I am – a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of creativity. She passed on project ideas and craft materials too. And she loved nature and always had cuttings and seeds and advice to pass on and other green fingered people to connect me with.

At the end of summer 2023 Kerry found out that her cancer had stopped responding to treatment and become terminal, and she had months to live. It still feels deeply unfair that someone who had made such good use of her time got so little of it to work with. She approached the final phase of her life with the exact same attitude she had always had. She figured out what she could still do and did it, she let go of what she could no longer manage. She continued working with Axminster and Lyme Cancer Support to produce guides and how-to booklets for other cancer patients, and designed cards to raise money. She ramped up her friendship matchmaking, getting us all connected with one another, not to help her (although we did our best) but because she wanted to know we would be able to care for each other after she was gone. She wrote goodbye cards, gathered and printed photos of important memories and places, did what she could to help people cope with losing her. She continued to refuse to feel self-pitying, although she permitted herself to be royally pissed off from time to time.

Even in this last chapter of her life, she never stopped offering me support and encouragement. She would only allow any conversation to be about her for a while before she had had enough and wanted something new to chew over. Now she bounced ideas around from her bed instead of on a walk, but the advice and inspiration kept coming right up until the end. She actively encouraged me to keep bringing my life to her for her oversight, to keep worrying about all the other things that were going on, to not give in to sadness or hopelessness.

Kerry didn’t believe in an afterlife, but she believed the dead live on through the living they leave behind. She pictured it like ripples on a lake, stretching out and out and out across a body of water, so that people on the waters edge are reached by the ripples even if they weren’t there when the stone was first dropped in the middle. She believed pain and loss always produce growth and change as well as sadness. I believe that too. I believe I will still feel the ripples she started in my life for as long as I get to live.

Kerry died over Easter 2024. She was right. There is so much to be grateful for and nothing for it but to pick yourself up and make the best of what you’ve got. She is alive in the people and places that she loved. She was lots and lots of things to so many people, and I won’t have captured even a tiny part of her here, but I wanted to speak to what she means to me all the same. I will never stop being thankful that I got to have her in my life.