"A very Cro thing to say"

 I did promise when I started this blog that you would hear more about Cro, who is known to many of you and who died two and a half years ago after a year of quite implacable lung cancer in the twenty-fourth year that we had been together, and the sixty-fifth of her full life. 

To those of you who knew her and talked to her, whether in the flesh or online, this will not be a surprise, but to the rest I should explain that Cro had many distinctive habits of mind and of heart which did not diminish at all when death came knocking. Here are a few of the things that come to my mind.

She was very frank and honest. Now with many people the phrase "She said what she thought" is actually just shorthand for 'She was rude', but this was not Cro. She did not lie to herself about her own actions or thoughts or about other people's. And if you asked her opinion on something she would tell you. And when it came to her own illness she was equally open. I know that this is a personal choice, and some of us will decide to keep our illness to a very narrow, even tiny, set of the people we know, or even tell no-one. This is also perfectly OK, and you get to live your own life and die your own death in the way that you want to, not in a way that someone else wants. But for Cro, she thought that being frank was going to be the best way for her and in some way the easiest for everyone else. So she did full disclosure, from start to finish. And when she posted her very last thing on Facebook, a couple of days before she died, it was simply "Dying in hospital. Love to all. X". And that was when one of the (checks notes) 240 replies did comment that it was a 'Very Cro thing to say'. Honest and frank, open and true. And it included love, and was repaid a hundredfold. 

And for myself, I feel very privileged and lucky to have had that 24 years with such a lovely and interesting and good person. And I hope that some of her clarity and honesty and joy may have rubbed off. And I would want you all to be 'a bit more Cro', as several of her friends have separately told me.

One moment sticks in my mind. As the county councillor, she had to lay the wreath at the Woodbridge cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, and when another councillor asked why she was so glad to be able to take part in November 2022 (treatment had allowed it and was not too punishing by that point), she said 'Because it will probably be my last one'. She was, as it turned out, completely right. But I remember the frisson of shock that there was for someone to be able to speak truthfully like that. 

She was also very good at thinking of solutions. I have mentioned elsewhere that one of the truest kinds of 'creativity' is to be able to think of a solution to a problem that will produce the best outcome. Cro was outstanding at this, whether it was planning something everyday and practical or something extremely complex and sensitive. Her friends will also be able to think of examples, but obviously in her political life she had to find ways of getting the majority party on the council to do what was right, even when she was part of the minority opposition, and even if it wasn't at first what the majority party wanted to do. So this involved finding solutions and being able to describe how they would work and why they would be a good idea. She was also, because of her history in journalism and her great capacity with language, able to use words in a way that persuaded people and did not bore them to death. 

She also listened intently. This may have passed some people by, as she was a huge talker herself and, to paraphrase Damon Runyan, "did dearly love to commit conversation". But if you asked her afterwards what someone had said or what they had told her about their lives, the attention must have been absolute, because she knew everything and did not forget. I do not think that this intense engagement with life and with other people was any kind of response to mortality; I just think it was the way that she rolled. 

She loved the world and its beauty. I don't mean by this merely that she was a big fan of nature, although she really really was. When I look at her (capacious) Google pics now, there are hundreds of photos of the sun rising or setting over the river Deben that runs through Woodbridge, and there are hundreds of photos taken on walks through the countryside here, or the back streets of Xiamen, or the mountains of Guilin, or wherever. And when a clear starry night emerged above, we would both get sore necks from staring up at them. But it wasn't only the natural world. She loved to find out things that interested her, she loved to read voraciously and catholically. And she loved to learn new skills. She signed up for a carpentry course twenty years ago and completed it with joy. She has a lot of her own ceramic work around this house, and she was a great drawer and cartoonist, as well as developing into a really good and distinctive poet. And she learned Mandarin after the age of 40. This is not to boast about her achievements, it is rather to explain that she had never grown bored with the world, or complacent. She knew what a joy life was, and did not intend to miss out on any of it. 

On a practical note, I will, I promise make sure that the book of Cro's poems is published in the near future, and it will be a joy to you to hear her distinctive voice again, but I also want to leave with another one of the comedy incidents which I have found were captured in some of the thousands of her photos that I still have. The picture at the top was taken in the Autumn of 2022 sitting down on her favourite bench near Kyson Point on the Deben. All very lovely and sweet. But if you look closely between our foreheads you will see that there is a poor winter wasp which has been trapped by our gesture and which is about to give me my first wasp sting for about twenty years. But after the first shock, we both pissed ourselves laughing about it. 

Come on life, do your worst!