http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... land-discs
What do you picture when you hear the theme music to Desert Island Discs? For years, I did as the title suggests: I’d imagine a remote beach of bone-white sand, with the requisite lone palm tree, surrounded by azure blue waters. But now I have only to hear that melody to be taken somewhere else entirely. The instant that gentle tune plays out from the radio on a Sunday morning, I am back in the living room of my older sister, Fiona, having a conversation that was absorbing, funny, revealing – and the last such talk we would ever share.
How My Sister Said Goodbye - extract
Jonathan Freedland in conversation with his sister Fiona, whose final wish was to record her own Desert Island Discs
She had been diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2009, when she was 45. She had been through extraordinarily intensive medical treatment: 18 or 19 operations (she had lost count), and between 70 and 80 rounds of chemotherapy (she had lost count of that number, too). Her doctors told her she had set some kind of record.
But by the early spring of 2014 it was becoming clear that the disease could not be resisted much longer. She knew she was going to die....
...She mentioned the answering machine message that she had kept, carefully stored and saved, from our mother, who had died two years earlier. She cherished it because it was the only recording she had of her voice. She sometimes played it back, just to feel near her. She didn’t want Beth and Ellie, or Robin, to be in that position. She wanted to give them more than a scrap to hold on to.
Fiona told me she wanted to record her own Desert Island Discs
...the format demands the interviewee look back over a life in full, which is what she wanted.
She began with Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera. It wasn’t there for its musical value so much as a reminder of our own mother, who loved the song and would sometimes sing it to Fiona when she was a little girl. As the song played out, the two of us were transported back to our childhoods, the room filling with memories of those years we had shared: Fiona the oldest, me the youngest, with Dani in between. Like smell, music seems to have a hard-wired connection to memory, evoking the past instantly and powerfully...
...Inevitably, we drew closer to her illness and to the reason she was playing the castaway. She spoke of the previous five years, of the ordeal of her treatment and the pain she had endured. Yet she also described the joy she had felt in that period, her appreciation of the family she loved and of life itself, every day of which she had learned to savour.
...she recalled a family holiday in Italy, by a lake where almost every day she would swim in the water while Robin and her daughters drifted by on a pedalo. She was then recovering from a recent round of surgery but as she swam, she would think to herself, “This is just heaven. Heaven.” The song that brought all that back, the song the four of them had belted out as they packed up their towels for each daily trip, was Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose...
The function of the recording, imagined by Fiona as a posthumous gift, began to change. When close friends came to visit, Fiona would ask, or motion to, Robin to put on the CD, and they would listen with her. Sometimes, when she could, she would nod or smile at the relevant moments. Sometimes she might squeeze their hand. But, in what she knew were her last times with those she loved, she let her special edition of Desert Island Discs do the talking. It became the way she said goodbye.
...She understood that this could be an extremely helpful way to approach a terminal illness: helpful for the person facing the end, helpful for those left behind. She had told the story of her life, addressed those she wanted to speak to, made sure those who loved her would still be able to hear her voice when they needed to. People leave wills and letters, of course. But sometimes it’s the voice you long for.
