Lights out

The Women’s Institute Journal 1988 lists the comings and goings of a retired secretary and Cooperative Society member in clipped, efficient entries. “Dot to tea”, “Precinct with Bobby for shopping”, “To building society this morning”, “Anne rang evening”, “Chops for tea.” Through the medium of shopping lists, everyday communications, bills paid and payable, the WI Journal faithfully records the beginning, middle and end of another unremarkable year in the life of Mrs Mima Williams, 69. 

Only 1988 was quite unlike any other year for Mrs Mima Williams, 69, for this was the year she was dying of advanced stage, inoperable lung cancer. This year, her last on earth, sandwiched between visits to the precinct and the tearoom, acting as a grim parenthesis to trips to the post office, the hairdressers, the butchers (did she see herself hanging in the window? imagine the day she would be just another carcase lying cleaved on the slab?) were endless hours in hospital waiting rooms; sitting in comfy chairs feeling anything but comfortable as she watched her veins slowly fill with useless chemotherapy - a sticking plaster on a gaping wound. The gradual ebbing away of hope with each set of negative results. The quiet horror of mornings spent in front of the mirror, carefully teasing newly unanchored strands of hair from her head, strategically aligning the remains of her wash and set, powder-puffing over the fear so she could face the world. The inedible chops congealing on the plate, scraped into the bin. The clink clink of the teaspoon on the second-best china a metronome marking time in Death’s echoing antechamber. Sitting alone in her first floor flat in the gathering dark, a candle flickering in a hurricane. 

None of this is mentioned in the pages of that bastion of reliability, the WI Journal 1988. the practical entries belie nothing but business as usual. Nowhere in the pages of those doughty ladies is there a single entry saying, “I have no control over my life anymore”, “my body is at war with me”, "my grandchildren have already forgotten me”, “I am frightened”, “I am alone”. 

On its final page, the WI Journal 1988 provides a space for the diligent diarist to continue into the start of the next year. This section has been left blank.