It’s just a year since Jane Tomlinson, known around the world for her incredible fundraising achievements, died from cancer. Here, her husband Mike talks about getting on with life and work without her.
It was one of the greatest surprises of my life when the beautiful, petite girl I’d spent the evening with in a Leeds bar scribbled down her phone number with mascara and handed it to me – especially as the conversation we’d shared had been so brief. That we went on to spend almost all of her adult life together is a complete joy to me.
Jane died last year, aged 43, but the good times we had will always sustain me. She was a young, vibrant mother to our two girls, Suzanne and Rebecca, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at just 26. We were kids ourselves, really; you don’t think so at 26, but you are. I certainly wasn’t old enough or wise enough to realise how much it would affect the next 17 years of our lives.
With Jane, the resilience and determination were much in evidence well before the endurance events that brought her to public attention. When she was first diagnosed, she decided to give up her maths degree for a career in radiography – she had the initial interview when she was still an in-patient, wearing her ward dressing gown.
We continued on life’s treadmill of work and family – Jane worked as a radiographer, while I was in IT, and then in 1997 our son Steven was born. It was when Steven was three that Jane was told that her disease was terminal. Jane was by this stage desperately ill but, after some major setbacks, chemotherapy produced incredible results and a better prognosis. She joined a gym and did a 5km run, moving on to longer distances until, in April 2002, she finished the London Marathon, which is when her story broke. In all the press coverage since, we never talked about anything before 1990: the time before her diagnosis is something we said we’d keep private, because it was ours alone.
A passion to save lives
All through Jane’s illness I never stopped working – apart from a three-month sabbatical when Jane cycled across the US to launch Jane’s Appeal. We tried to keep things as ordinary as possible.
Since Jane died, I have been working full-time, but now I also run the house. I’ve written a book about Jane’s life, How Good is That?, which has been poignant but also life-enhancing. And, of course, I’m running the Appeal, and the Leeds 10K, which is about a third the size of the London Marathon. Jane and I worked very hard for the inaugural Leeds 10K Run For All, which took place just two months before she died, with 7,400 runners racing to raise £500,000. Both Jane and I believed the harder you work, the more you get out of life. It’s also our passion to save lives and make other people’s lives better.
Family life now is as strong as ever. It’s often just Steven, 11 this year, and me, but Rebecca is at home quite a lot and Suzanne is nearby with her daughter and partner Tom. We’ve always been a very close family and we’ve stayed that way. We are really lucky – lots of families don’t have that.
This sounds awful but we haven’t dissolved since Jane died: we have our sad moments, but we get on with life and living, which is what Jane would have wanted. Steven and I do lots together. Jane was a great gardener and was extremely knowledgeable about it. When she died, Steven and I had to take her garden on; we’re not there yet but we’re learning.
When Jane was poorly and we’d go away for a weekend, if we did something in the morning, she’d be unable to do anything in the afternoon. This sounds callous, but now we get to do more of the things that we want to do. We do more ‘lad and dad’ things: we go for a round of golf and don’t feel that someone’s got to wait for us for two hours. We went to the football recently and at one point Steven asked me to hold his bottle of Coke. So I said to him, ‘I’m not your mum.’ And he said, ‘My mum’s dead. You’ve got dual responsibility now: you’re my mum and my dad, I’m just a kid.’ I thought, ‘Cheeky little so and so…’ It’s a sort of black humour.
Jane’s selfless nature
Sometimes it’s the small things that are hard to get used to. Jane was perpetually busy around the house: if you left a towel on the floor, mysteriously it would be put away when you got home. Now, if I don’t do something, it doesn’t happen.
It was Jane’s selflessness above everything that stood out. When she was refused drugs that would help prolong her life by the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, a trust for which she’d raised over £300,000, she decided not to go public. Jane was almost dead before they gave her Lapatinib, and she had to travel to Nottingham to get it. She’d rather have died early than get special treatment, but she did give me instructions to keep fighting until the discriminatory nature of drug availability in the UK is reformed. It is the injustice that is driving me on. I’m not in a situation where I have a loved one who’s not getting treatment, so there isn’t any anger in that sense. But there are people who are dying who need the drugs and are not being looked after. And my aim is to get fairness across all drugs – it shouldn’t be disease-specific.
I like challenges and I don’t have two days the same. I do think, though, that sometimes people can have set ideas about a dad running the home. A journalist who I know really well came to my house on Pancake Day. We’d sat down and had meat and two veg followed by homemade pancakes. She seemed really surprised. I said, ‘You would have expected it if Jane had been here’. Just because there’s only two of us, why wouldn’t we sit down and have tea together, why wouldn’t we have flowers in the house? Steven doesn’t get chicken nuggets; he has a proper meal, and we enjoy having a chat. As a family, when there were five of us, we would always sit and have tea together. It’s civilised.
More than anything, I’m living by Jane’s values that you should be glad for what you’ve got, not for something you can’t have. We all miss her dreadfully. She may have been a national heroine but to us she was just a mum and wife.
Sainsbury’s Magazine, September 2008
The Daily Waffle 