50 challenges at 50

Deep in grief, Karen Clayton, 51, found an extreme way to cope

- SASKIA MURPHY

Exhausted and weak, I stopped unloading sheets from the washing machine to wearily answer a knock at the door. Standing on the doorstep was a Marie Curie nurse who’d come to help my husband Ian, then 45, and I look after my terminally ill stepdad, John, then 68. Her role was to take over caring for John so Ian and I could get some much-needed rest. Only, the second she saw my worn-out, tear-stained face, she wrapped her arms around me and held me as I sobbed.

‘It’s OK to cry,’ she soothed. It was a simple gesture but, until then, I’d bottled up all the years of pain, and it was a release I so desperately needed.

Five years earlier, in February 2013, my mum Marlane, then 63, had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Growing up as her only daughter, we’d always been close, so I took the news hard. Mum had a mastectomy then round after round of chemo while John and I sat with her at every appointment.

By April 2016, the cancer was stable and wasn’t showing any signs of spreading. But then John was told he needed tests after a doctor noticed his voice had gone uncharacteristically deep – and, that same month, pancreatic and lung cancer were diagnosed. ‘It’s terminal,’ Mum told me tearfully.

I was heartbroken. John, then 66, and Mum had met when I was 15, and he’d been a father figure to me. He was a devoted grandfather to my boys Christopher, then 24, and William, 23, too.

John started chemotherapy to prolong the time he had left. As the weeks passed, he grew weaker. Mum did her best to look after him but, by Christmas, I was starting to worry about her health again, too.

Devastating news