Dina Rabinovitch, 44; Guardian columnist (her final column follows the obit)
amelia...@gmail.com
Stephen Brook
Guardian Unlimited
Tuesday October 30 2007
Dina Rabinovitch, the Guardian columnist, lost her long-running battle
with cancer this morning.
Known to thousands of readers for writing about the disease,
Rabinovitch, 44, had a relationship with the Guardian that stretched
back more than 20 years, embracing journalism about children's
literature, the family court, women's issues, education policy,
features and celebrity interviews.
But it was for her humorous and unflinching chronicle of her battle
with cancer that Rabinovitch became best known. Her last Guardian
column ran less than two weeks ago.
Her fortnightly columns in the Guardian's G2 section were collected
into a book, Take Off Your Party Dress: When Life's Too Busy For
Breast Cancer.
More recently her blog, Take Off Your Running Shoes succeeded in
raising more than £67,000, without, as she put it, running a marathon.
Her target for the appeal, to expand the cancer research team at Mount
Vernon Cancer Centre, was to raise £100,000.
"There is no template for the way I am living now," she wrote in her
final column for the Guardian, which ran the Monday before last,
October 22.
"I check out the depressingly regular obituaries, the ages always
similar - 46, 41, 48, leaving behind a son, a daughter, two children,
maybe three.
"But these quite long pieces, sometimes more than 1,000 words, are
careful to emphasise the lives and the achievements, what was managed
despite the illness, rather than talking about how, actually, one is
supposed to live each day with the illness."
A regular contributor to the Guardian women's page for more than 20
years, Rabinovitch was also an uncompromising critic of the family
court, and as a pro-mothers campaigner frequently arguing that it
should not be closed to public scrutiny.
In her final Guardian column Rabinovitch speculated on death. "Because
I am young - 44 feels young to me, too young to die - or perhaps
because I haven't had much to do with dying, I compare it with the
things I know," she wrote.
"What it felt like most of all was that moment towards the end of
labour, but still with hours to go, when you utterly reject any
lingering notions of natural childbirth and you are yelling for the
epidural. In this case it's morphine. Something to take away the
physical pain, to relieve the fear."
'We've had war, we've had plagues, but never this ... '
Dina Rabinovitch, who has breast cancer, on how it feels to be
terminally ill when you are the mother of young children
Dina Rabinovitch
Monday October 22, 2007
Guardian
There is no template for the way I am living now. There has always
been a plethora of instructions before, too many to choose from,
really: I could veer from Gina Ford to Sheila Kitzinger for the
labours and the babies, or pad the middle road with Penelope Leach;
range from Delia Smith to Nigel Slater for the suppers. No matter what
the life change, these days there's a how-to book, a lifestyle column
in a Sunday magazine; none of that mid-century fumbling in the dark
like Ian McEwan's honeymooners on Chesil Beach. Except for right here,
at the front line of breast cancer. Nobody has written the manual yet.
The drugs are too new, their side-effects not yet documented and, most
importantly, their efficacy not wholly determined.
Also - and those among us who are not Philip Roth can hardly be
surprised - there is a reluctance to examine premature, encroaching
death. I check out the depressingly regular obituaries, the ages
always similar - 46, 41, 48, leaving behind a son, a daughter, two
children, maybe three. But these quite long pieces, sometimes more
than 1,000 words, are careful to emphasise the lives and the
achievements, what was managed despite the illness, rather than
talking about how, actually, one is supposed to live each day with the
illness. Often, it will be covered in a line, this time after the
diagnosis is "terminal" but before - and maybe long, long before - the
term. "Her last five years were hard," the obituary might say or,
perhaps, "For the last 18 months she would often leave the restaurant
early, citing fatigue."
The BBC telephones me - the nightly news show, The World Tonight. Will
I go on the programme to debate with Matt O'Connor, the caped-crusader
founder of Fathers4Justice? His latest book isn't a guide book - his
organisation does that already, setting out game plans for men who
want to fight access deals to their children post-divorce - but an
autobiography, the raw father's personal history as template.
When the softly spoken researcher rings, I'm in bed, as I so often am
these days, and when she makes her request it's not what I might have
to say on air that goes through my mind - I know that book inside out,
after all, know exactly what I think about post-divorce parenting -
but it's the ins and outs of whether I will physically manage what is
involved in doing such a broadcast. And this is what nobody seems able
to tell me: what the boundaries of this exhaustion are, how long it
will last, what I can manage within its confines.
"Just take each day as it comes," the doctors say. In our
fortysomething world, with kids who need packed lunches and walking to
school (on days when I may not be able to get out of bed, my husband
might have an 8am meeting, and all the older children have morning
exams), not to mention the not yet extinct notion of a career, what
exactly does that instruction mean, I ponder? Because, honestly, what
works as a guideline for a Buddhist monk doesn't make tuna sandwiches
on days when you can't face food.
In the end, I stall for time, telling the researcher what I would say
on air to O'Connor: that he and I are agreed that the family law
courts are badly equipped to handle marital splits; but, unlike him,
what I believe is best for children would be one universal solution.
Kids don't need differences in their arrangements from other children
in their class, to add to the post-divorce self-consciousness. And
that universal arrangement - this is where O'Connor and I are about as
far apart as the aforementioned Fords and Kitzingers - should
prioritise the irreplaceable bond between mother and child, a deeply
physical tie that is different from the more detached - and
necessarily so - connection between fathers and children.
While I'm on auto-pilot, running these well-rehearsed - and, in my
case, well-lived - arguments by the researcher, in the back of my mind
I'm actually concentrating on all the pros and cons of what is
involved in enabling me to do a radio interview, what amount of
strength I need guaranteed to cover the time, what physical payback
there will be afterwards. One thing I have found out in my new, cancer-
struck world: if I take one exertion too far, there is always a
payback, as sure as laundry follows holidays. I will not manage to
talk about divorce with O'Connor, I tell the nice girl from the BBC
finally, cannot be sure I'll be able to sit up long enough to do a
microphone interview even. You see, I tell her, I have breast cancer,
and while we are debating how much time post-divorce children should
spend with each parent, there is something else going on in our
society that is getting attention certainly, but not enough.
For all the purple paint in all the country chucked at all the major
state institutions across our land could not highlight enough the
effects of this transformation in our time. Mothers are being targeted
by an illness, for the first time in our history, and families are
losing their linchpins. We've had war, we've had plagues, but never
before have we had an illness that has killed off the mothers. It's
October, which means breast cancer awareness month, and all about us
there is pink to counter the autumnal reds and oranges. Pink ribbons
wrapped round buildings, all manner of pink things to buy at tills -
including my own bete noire, the tight-fitting T-shirts that are the
antithesis of what is comfortable post-mastectomy - why, the very
petrol pumps are turning pink.
My book, Take Off Your Party Dress, about having this cancer, is on
sale - chicly - among the lingerie in 300 branches of Marks & Spencer
this crusading month. But the campaigning, hustling, fund-raising pink
of breast cancer charities brings in its wake the usual complaints
that breast cancer hogs the charity limelight. Only I don't agree. I
don't think we are aware enough yet. Mothers are dying before their
children grow up. Western mothers, in the affluent cultures, where
everybody else is living longer than ever before. It matters most
because mothers dying reverberates down the generations, the loss of
that nurturing a transforming factor. When I was growing up, the
mothers weren't dying.
Another lesson I have, too late, taken on board: we will need
childcare in our house. Breast cancer, a six-year-old - even with
copious older siblings - and no back-up just doesn't work. "I'm not
having one of those nanny people," my six-year-old son, Elon, says
firmly, as he listens in on a stream of eastern Europeans flocking to
answer my ad (I put an hourly rate way over the market standard,
thinking I want, at least, top-notch childcare). I say they play
games, and will race him to school on his scooter in the mornings.
"Not in my lifetime," he replies calmly.
It is, maybe, a shift too far, though of course he will get used to
it. But he has adjusted so much already.
I spent one of the long summer nights in death's anteroom. Because I
am young - 44 feels young to me, too young to die - or perhaps because
I haven't had much to do with dying, I compare it with the things I
know. What it felt like most of all was that moment towards the end of
labour, but still with hours to go, when you utterly reject any
lingering notions of natural childbirth and you are yelling for the
epidural. In this case it's morphine. Something to take away the
physical pain, to relieve the fear. And the exhaustion of cancer, the
feeling that there is no reprieve. That long summer night, I didn't
think the pain would ever be under control again. I was weak in a way
I had never imagined being weak, unable to make it up one flight of
stairs. I would fall during the few steps from the loo back to my bed.
I lay in bed in the daytimes and heard the life of the house go on
around me. But I came out of that night and the cancer is once again
under control: on a mixture of Navelbine, an intravenous chemotherapy
and tablets I take daily, called Tykerb.
Tykerb is the newest treatment for breast cancer and, deeply
ironically, it's a British invention, made by GlaxoSmithKline. The
plastic bottle stuffed with orange pills next to my bed tells me these
tablets were made for me in Ireland. But in England, Tykerb is not yet
licensed, and unless you can join a trial you have to find another way
to obtain the medicine. In my case, my oncologist liaised with an
Israeli oncologist, who prescribed the drug for me (it is available in
Israel, the US and Switzerland, among other places). My stepson took
the prescription to an Israeli pharmacist who dispensed the pills over
the counter and dataposted them to England.
But while the cancer is controlled once again, the shifts in how we
live are inexorable. Elon will trek upstairs clutching board games
now, will climb on to my bed to play games with me, and sometimes he
asks: "Will your breast cancer ever get better?" But not that often,
really, any more. He still says he wants me to take him to school, but
he understands that I am unwell in the mornings. He doesn't
automatically call mum any more, he calls for dad. There is a new
bedtime routine - backgammon with dad, instead of a story with mum.
And these shifts have happened without trauma, without, as I describe
to friends, a bleaching-out of the children's faces."They don't have
that white look," I tell people who ask. "They're fine with it all."
Perhaps these are just such small adjustments, yet to me in my bed -
hearing it happen around me but without me - it seems huge.