Always Relating to Fictional Characters

Who is the fictional character you relate to the most?

It so hard to pick one character when there are so many loves in my fictional life and so many versions of me to choose from. In children’s fiction it’s the Snork Maiden – short, plump, blonde hair and utterly in love with love. Then there are all those characters from my later childhood like Jo March and Anne of Green Gables, – the tomboys, strong willed, stubborn young women who don’t want the norm and dream bigger than those around them. Neither want to marry Laurie or Gilbert and live a small town life where they stay home and have babies. They want to be writers and both get their big adventure. Jo goes to New York, she writes stories and goes to the opera and joins a men’s debating club as well as being the governess to two small children. Imagine my disgust when I do a quiz on Facebook and find out that of all the March sisters I am most like Amy. As for Anne she goes to university, she teaches and meets different people than those back home in Avonlea. Yes she marries Gilbert in the end, but only after she chooses to come home herself.

I relate most to Louisa Clarke in Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You, with her bumbling character and bumble bee tights. She’s a working class girl whose ambitions feel out of reach and she’s so caught up in the lives of her family that she doesn’t make plans in her own. Lou loves fashion and colour which is definitely something we share. When she gets a job as carer to Will Traynor her life starts to change. Will’s family are wealthy so they’ve never moved in the same circles but an accident has left him quadriplegic and he’s back, living in his own part of the family home. Lou is a bubbly and kooky sort of girl and she’s never done this sort of work. Slowly they start to understand one another and they each teach the other person something. Will sees that Lou is under confident and doesn’t have the nerve to follow her dreams in case she fails. She thinks she’s going to open up Will’s world, he’s been depressed since his accident and doesn’t really participate in life so she starts to suggest going out more. He’s reluctant, but he sees someone who hasn’t had the experiences in life he’s had mainly down to his family having money. So he takes her to the theatre/opera, slowly opening up her world.

I relate to this because I arrived on my late husband’s doorstep with only a photograph and address. We’d written and talked on the phone for several months but never met. When we did meet we went for dinner and talked for hours. Before I left he asked me if I wanted to go to the ballet and I said yes, I’d never seen one. We saw Romeo and Juliet by the Northern Ballet and I was entranced with it. We came home late that night and ate scrambled eggs and bacon with Buck’s Fizz at midnight. Six weeks later we got married. It was crazy, but I simply didn’t want to be anywhere else. He totally opened up my world with opera, jazz, theatre and supported me to do the English degree I’d always wanted to do. I was learning so much about culture and art, but also about love. On our honeymoon week I had to learn about intermittent catheters from a man called Richard who we dubbed the King of Piss. We didn’t get out of bed much except to order Chinese food which we’d eat in bed, showing each other our favourite films and listening to music, reading the papers together. He’d travelled and I’d never had a passport. He’d spent time in New York, played rugby for London Irish, and learned both scuba diving and tall ship sailing after becoming a wheelchair user. He was adventurous and believed I could do these things too. I think this is exactly what Will gave Louisa, but she gave him a sense of family that was warm and loving. She saw him and not the disability, something he was even struggling to do for himself. She let him know he was still everything he was before his accident and the rest was just logistics.

I believe I taught Jerzy to laugh at himself. To find his situation annoying but not unbearable. I taught him that family look after each other and that true friends don’t say ‘we must get together’ but never ring. They pop in and put their own kettle on. I taught him that loving someone means you’ll fight for them, to make their life the best it can possibly be. I taught him to stop and look around once in a while. To enjoy the small things. Unfortunately for Louisa, Will decides that his life is still not how he wants to live and he opts to go abroad for assisted dying. This has been heavily criticised in disability circles for the trope of using a disabled character to teach or improve the life of an able bodied person, only to be discarded once the lesson is learned.

I also had to lose Jerzy. Not in the same way Lou lost Will but we had that discussion. Once he was unable to swallow food without aspirating and had to be PEG fed through a tube into his stomach he lost a lot of the joy he had in food, one of his great passions. He said later that he wished he’d made the choice back then, had he not wanted to stay with me. However, pneumonia and sepsis weakens the body and when it’s a repetitive cycle it’s exhausting. I was essentially doing the work of several nurses by the end with skills in PEG feeding, catheterising, suctioning the airway, chest physio and many other things. I was tired. He was exhausted. One night he was taken to hospital again and he never returned. He spent weeks in hospital and eventually chose to suspend treatment. When he died at 5am in the morning the world stopped making sense.

What Jerzy left me with was similar to what Will left Louisa with. So many experiences and a confidence I’d never had before. He had more faith in me than I had. I got a first in my English degree, then went on to get a diploma in therapeutic counselling, after five years of study. I even started a PhD – although I didn’t finish. I also got that passport and went to New York and Venice, two bucket list destinations. More recently I’ve started to write for myself and have the confidence to put my writing out into the world. Jerzy taught me more than anyone or anything else in life because he taught me how to love, to commit to someone even when the going is almost impossible, to laugh every single day and I hold what he said to me before he died very close to my heart. He’d watched his father struggle after his mother was killed in a car accident and he didn’t want me to be stuck. I’ve resolutely moved forward and kept going even when I made terrible mistakes, never forgetting and keeping him lodged firmly within my heart. Now all I need are those bumble bee tights.