Thank you for a really beautiful email, writes Philippa Perry. I will store your lesson away for myself
The question I need your help. Specifically, a woman therapist’s help, in fact. Even though I’ve got a perfectly good and helpful therapist, who’s helped me a lot in the three years since I was diagnosed with stupid cancer aged 43, I’m finding that the thing I want to do is probably quite female and when I mentioned it to him, he said: “That’s what women do.”
Long story short: happily married to a lovely man. No kids of my own, wicked stepmother to a 24-year-old. I was busy-busy-busy working when I got a terrible cancer diagnosis. Loads of chemo, loads of weeping. Grim prognosis. Still, I’m cracking on and writing this from a hotel on a jolly to London. Quite at peace with death, although obviously I’m sorry it’s coming so soon. It’s the living through to the end that’s killing me.
