Tales of Everyday Bravery – by Katie Marsh

A couple of weeks ago, one of my closest friends asked me a question that had been troubling her for some time. She asked me why, as one of life’s eternal optimists, I always seem to write novels about people facing serious illness.

It was a fair question. In my everyday life, illness has never been one of my lead topics of conversation. I like laughing. Give me a tap-dancing musical finale and I’m in heaven. And I certainly don’t greet people by saying ‘Hi, have you been to A&E recently?’ And yet again and again I find myself drawn to writing stories about people facing life-changing disease.

I thought about her question on the tube home, wondering if I write about sickness because I worked as an NHS manager for ten years. In my first job I held the complaints bleep, dashing off to face people who were unhappy with the care they or their loved ones had received. I saw big, messy emotions on those wards – anger, rage, frustration –  emotions I would eventually want to capture on the page.

As I got home I kept thinking as my handbag continued its hilarious tradition of hiding my keys whenever I actually need to open a door. I thought about the catalyst behind my second novel, A Life Without You, which is about Zoe, who leaves her own wedding day to help her estranged mum Gina. The two reconnect, only for Zoe to realise that Gina is no longer the mum she remembers – she is losing her memory.

The book was triggered a long time ago – on a Boxing Day morning in south London, when I took a cup of tea to a woman called Mary and she had absolutely no idea who I was. Mary loved tea and M&S tights and sitting on a swing seat in a summer garden. She had dandled me on her knee, made me Clothkits dresses and always gave me cake for tea. She was many things to many people, but to me she was Granny.

Her dementia came on gradually after Grandpa died. It started with calls to my mum, generally in the small hours and always full of fear. Her clothes hung off her and we worked out she must be forgetting to eat. She filled her petrol car with diesel. She forgot names and burnt her electric kettle by putting it on the gas hob. She left doors unlocked and windows wide open. I knew all of this when I took her that cup of tea – she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s by then. But that morning she looked at me with absolute terror and that was when I really felt it – the pain of knowing that the person I loved was right here in front of me but yet had never been further away.

That moment led to A Life without You, not because I want to write about disease, but because I want to write about the people who face it – about their defiant humour, their kindness and about the everyday bravery that is all around us. I want to write about people like my mum, as she tried valiantly to keep my fiercely independent Granny safe as her mind disintegrated. And, of course, about people like Granny herself. The woman who always called herself ‘feeble’, but who fought the fight of her life right up to the end. At times she knew what was happening to her, and it must have been absolutely terrifying. Knowing a face was familiar but not remembering why. Staring at a cheque book with no idea how to write her name. And – every day – trying to hold her head high and keep in step with a world that she no longer understood. That, to me, is courage personified.

Everyday bravery is all around us and I hope that my books celebrate it. Look around you. Maybe the man in front of you has a young child with a heart condition. Perhaps that woman carrying her baby in a sling may has just discovered that a tiny lump is going to change the course of her life. And you – who knows what fears you may be hiding beneath a smile or a joke? Bravery doesn’t always come with a sword and a shield – courage can burn most fiercely when it is quiet.

Katie Marsh’s second novel, A LIFE WITHOUT YOU, is out now in paperback and ebook.