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.