50 challenges at 50
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.
‘I’d bottled up years of pain’
It was a simple gesture but, until then, I’d bottled up all the years of pain,
