The year 2015 began for me on the porch of a cottage by the sea in Buccoo with a bottle of liquid that could barely be described as "bubbly."
Tobago has never been a destination for wine connoisseurs, yet even I was surprised at how difficult it was to get our hands on some half-decent fizz. Instead of a pop, the cork gave a timid report as it was released into the cicada-drenched night. We laughed, feeling relaxed and amused that a week after Christmas–with fresh memories of crisp, frost-covered England–we were about to countdown the year's end far away from crowds of revellers. The night soon took an unexpected turn.
We were in Tobago because my mother has liver cancer. We had found out three months before Christmas that it was terminal and I had expressed my wish to take her to T&T while she was still able–to see the islands I fell in love with and to meet the family of the woman I fell in love with.
The cancer had been discovered a year earlier, in 2013, just after I first arrived in Trinidad. At the time we thought it curable–the wonders of modern science you know? A year and several surgical operations later we were disabused of that notion. Shortly after I returned to England in 2014 she was given the prognosis and we made the collective decision that all of our energies, time and money would be spent thenceforth on happy times, special things and memorable occasions.
I have never written about this before and don't know why I am now. But while we are on the subject, I should tell you that she contracted cancer in her professional capacity and through an act of love: two things synonymous with my mother. While working as a midwife, one of the thousands of women whose babies she delivered unknowingly infected her with the blood-borne disease hepatitis C.
The silent killer, hep, attacks the liver causing cirrhosis and eventually cancer. While we sat sipping the sweet, flat Asti Spumante, my phone rang. It was my sister calling with bad news. Our grandmother (who has Alzheimer's) had been found by the police at 2am on New Year's Eve wandering the shopping precinct in the town where she lived. When the cops took her home she didn't recognise it and told them it wasn't her home. She grew agitated and it became clear they would have to section her unless my sister, eight months pregnant, took control of the situation.
I will never forget seeing my mother's face drop as I passed the phone to her.
The holiday thereafter was punctuated by my mum's instinctive urges to go home and deal with her mother though we still managed some special moments–spotting dolphins from the beach at Macqueripe and looking down from Paramin over the lush wind-swept hills.
My grandmother is now in the best care home we could wish for, in London, close to the family. My mother continues to make the four-hour round-trip up from her house in Sussex to visit her each week.
Before Christmas, my mum worked tirelessly arranging a carol-singing concert to raise funds for the care home. She worked so hard she was hospitalised. She discharged herself–still barely able to walk unaided–so she could attend the concert which she sang at with the old folk and our local MP.
This year I have contemplated death for the first time in my life. The same is true of people all over the world who have lived and died through this most violent year.
I found myself obsessing over the Holocaust and reading about murders, particularly the Moors Murders. I revisited an old interview I did with the songwriter Luke Haines, where I asked him to explain the lyrics: "Talking to a stone, wailing at a grave, maybe when a year's passed go and see a medium" in his song What Happens When We Die?
I donated to a family who couldn't afford their mother's funeral and was chilled by the news that on Christmas Eve one of the Paris attackers was buried in an unmarked grave in a funeral attended only by his parents. I realise I have been attempting to immunise myself against death: its meaning and its sadness.
In September, British politicians voted 330 to 118 against the Assisted Dying Bill which would have given terminally ill people the right to end their lives. Even though 82 per cent of the UK public support assisted dying, Parliament prevented it from being made law, and did so as passionately as they voted for bombing people in Syria.
I don't know when or how I will die and I don't fear my own death, but I do fear the death of others and I fear pain. Many of us, politicians included, will never experience pain and fear until we are close to the end. By the time my end comes, I hope the ability to control one's own mortality is an enshrined human right.