My wife, the love of my life and the mother of my three children, had a benign meningeoma the size, they said, of a tennis ball, removed at the age of 52. They said they had got it all, but she needed surgery again three years later. This time they removed two tumours. Three years later, she needed surgery again. For the last three years of her life, she could only manage the words 'yes' and 'no'. She spent three months in a hospice where they stabilised her and told me I had to take her somewhere else because they needed the bed. She was given the last rites three times. She spent the last eight months of her life under level four palliative care. How she coped, I can't imagine. No one knew how she was really feeling, because she couldn't tell us. I used to wonder what she thought of when she woke up in the morning to yet another day of pain and distress. I wrote a book because I needed to get it out of my system so I could move on. Writing it was certainly cathartic.