Songs for my mother
Amy Keen was only six when she lost her mother to cancer. She is now using her singing talent to help others cope with the effects of cancer
In Britain a child loses a parent every 30 minutes. Over 17,500 die annually, long before their allotted three score years and ten.
Seventy per cent of such deaths are sudden, road accidents, heart attacks, suicides and so on. The rest are slower, more insidious, and, for women, breast cancer is the biggest killer.
Adding insult to terrible injury is that we consider ourselves a lucky generation.
Compared even to our grandparents’ time, we have this belief that scientific advances can cure everything. The brutal reality is, they can’t, and breast cancer is still up there, top of the league tables in making widowers out of husbands and shattering the lives of young children, many of whom will nurse for ever the wounds of emotional and social rejection.
Amy Keen is one young girl who knows only too well how fragile life can be. Her mother, Hayley, died of breast cancer age 30. It was a cancer in a hurry, taking only 14 months from diagnosis until she died, leaving Amy bereft at the age of six.
One year later her father, Russell, decided to leave England and move to Paphos to join his parents who had retired here. He understood Amy’s need to have caring grandparents at her side, helping her to heal and overcome the memories of the daily brutalities of the illness that had taken her mother.
Amy is now a lovely 12 year old, on the brink of her teenage years, and full of enthusiasm as she talks about her ‘special’ project which combines her two great loves, singing and the wonderful memories she has of her mother. She has combined both by making a CD of Christmas songs. Every cent generated from the sale of her CD will be donated to the local Cancer Patients Support Group.
This CD is important to Amy. She recognises this is one way she can help other children and their parents cope with this disease. And Amy knows only too well how very hard it is to cope.
“Mum was also pregnant with twins when she was diagnosed, but lost the babies with all the treatment she had to go through. It was all very confusing for me. I knew deep down she was very sick, but I tried to shut it out and just wanted to do all sorts of things just to help her. I would get her a glass of water when she was lying in bed, and when she could get up, I’d help put on her shoes which she couldn’t do very easily, things like that,” says Amy.
“I didn’t really expect very much from her when she was so ill. She couldn’t do things other mums could, but we would talk all the time. I would sit on the bed, and tell her everything that happened at school, all the things that I thought would make her laugh, and we always joked with each other. Those were the best times. Mum told me she was ill, but she never said she was dying, that was something I couldn’t really understand, but a lady at the hospice sat me down and talked very nicely to me, asking what I’d feel like if Mum wasn’t there, well, not exactly in those words, but I remember she was trying to get me to think about Mum going away and never coming back and that did register with me. Then Mum died just one month after Christmas.”
Apart from the constant pain of Amy’s loss, she has also experienced the casual cruelty at which children can excel.
“Some people at school were terrible. A few would openly shout at me ‘she’s got no mother’ and laugh, things like that. It was so bad I didn’t want to go back to school, but Dad then got me into another school and that’s been much better. The teachers here are really kind, and I’ve also made nice friends. But, I don’t stand in the playground and envy other girls with mums. I’m really happy for them that they still have their mum, but I do miss mine badly and wish I could still do things with her, like going shopping, telling her my secret thoughts, things like that. My Nan has now brought me up, and along with Dad she means such a lot to me.”
Tragically, Amy’s brush with cancer is not over. Her grandmother has also been diagnosed with breast cancer and her grandfather now has throat cancer.
“I’m scared about what it means, but I can’t think about it all the time. I know Mum is in heaven, but she is also around me, sort of looking after me. I even woke up one night and I could actually smell her. I thought she was actually there, standing beside me in my bedroom.”
Amy has been singing since she can remember and the lessons she has with voice coach Kathryn Robson in Paphos play a very important part in her life. She has big plans and wants to get into drama school.
Amy’s CD is called The Brightest Star in memory of her mother.
“Just after Mum died, Dad and I went out one night and looked up at the stars and he pointed out the brightest star and told me that was Mum looking down on us. I’ve also put in a song that is specially for her. It’s the Bette Midler song ‘The Wind Beneath my Wings’.”
For Amy, her mother is that wind.
There’s no template for the way a family copes with cancer, cancer takes on a persona of its own. It comes uninvited into your home, and like a fire it can destroy everything in its path.
Amy’s ache will never ever go away, but she has coped and survived the worst of times, and has developed into a talented, highly likeable, attractive young girl who has to cope with the effects of cancer yet again.
Amy has experienced an irrevocable tragedy, and no child who loses a parent at such a young age will truly ever get over it, but she has used the experience and her talent to do good.
Everyone who has worked on the CD has done so for free. Dave and Jan Robinson of NB Music provided the recording studio and their expertise. Andy Crafter of Fineline designed the CD cover, and the CD has had free publicity on Paphos TV and Rock FM.
For Amy now, the main thing is for readers to add her CD to their Christmas shopping list and help give support to other cancer patients and their families.
You can email your order direct to [email protected]. CDs are also now on sale (£4) at the Paphos branch of the Cancer Patients Support Group, 9 Dimitriou Mavrogenou St, Paphos. Mon-Fri: 8am-4pm. Tel: 26 952478, Fax: 26 221986
