As we approach the end of 2025, I have been given a moment or two to go through my old diary to check whether anything needs to be transferred into the new one. It comes as no surprise that I have had quite a year. According to the Chinese Horoscope, I fall under the sign of the Snake, it has apparently been MY year. I suppose that in a Buddhist sense, it has, because I certainly have been tested, in my own emotional abilities as well as my intellectual capacity. I also turned 60 this month, which has seriously added the icing to this very dense, somewhat morbid cake that has been baking over the past twelve months.
Listing the pros:
I changed my representation as an actress just over a year ago, to see if a new approach would alter my prospects for the better. It is always positive to go into new pastures, and I have no regrets and a certain amount of pride in achieving the transfer, since my type of casting ie white, middle aged and female is dreadfully out of fashion these days, (plus ça change) therefore I might have been undesirable on the the books of a new aspirational agent, but I managed to bond well with my new one, who was rather taken by my showreel. I have had some good castings earlier in the year, they slowed down a bit recently, but they have for everyone, so I am satisfied to continue my groove as it is.
I am still managing to get some writing done, one in the form of my second novel set in Malaysia in the 1970s and one in the form of a film script set in the 16th Century. I get good feedback from the few who are allowed to read it, so I will continue that groove too.
I will list the cons, which the level headed out there will argue are the pros, because all of the cons are character forming.
My mother died in April this year, very suddenly of a horrific stroke. A woman of such extraordinary articulation and grace was rendered unable to form words or swallow or move her right arms and legs for the last 8 days of her life. I was there in the hospital with her for the first five, but was advised to go home and take a break and she died three days later, although the staff had expressed no point of view as to whether she would live or die. I hate living with the fact that she died without me there, holding her hand, although I will admit that when I was there, she kept nudging me to go, trying to tell me that she felt sorry for me (because I would not stop crying or calling members of staff) and when I left, some instinct told me to hold her and tell her I love her for as long as I could without collapsing in the corridor. Letting go of her, after we lost my father 9 months previously, has been and is an impossible task, filling me with such sadness that I do not know where to place myself, when my soul and heart get taken over by her (and his) eternal absence.
Dealing with the probate and wills and bills and horrors following my parents’ deaths and navigating that with a sibling who is also grieving is extremely difficult and challenging. The sibling, my very dear only brother, had to undergo open heart surgery a few months after we had said goodbye to my father, so that he was not physically able to say goodbye to my mother. I was asked to attend the hospital on the day of the surgery, (a month before my mother’s death) because of his terror. I had to come to terms again with the concept that I could lose him as well. At the same time his wife, my sister in law, had a return match of her breast cancer, which also affected all of our emotions, in terms of attempting to stay strong and cope with it all.
The focus, to pull me away from all of this living hell, was to plan a huge and long lasting set of celebrations for my sixtieth. Many of these went askew because The Captain, my beloved husband, fell terribly ill throughout the last month. It began with a random attack of viral gastroenteritis that lasted over two weeks, developed into a flu that pervaded his body, and when he began to have massive temperatures, with the house filled with endlessly laundered sheets and nightwear, we decided to go to the doctor, who sent us straight to hospital, who eventually after a range of diagnoses, including terrifying ones, discovered that he had pneumonia, with a possible side order of shingles. All dinners and plans cancelled, and at one point it looked like we were not going to India to celebrate my “coming of age”.
There were a few other blocks that stood in the way of our possible journey. But I won’t go into those now, as it looks like we might still be able to go, and I do not want to jinx it.
Another pro, in this year of 2025, has been that despite all the shit, yes you heard it, shit, I noted that at the beginning of the year, we travelled to Abu Dhabi for six days, which we both loved, managing to see a couple of friends, sunbathe, swim and forget. I travelled to Rome to see the Italian, who hosted me well (very soon after losing my mother) and she had kindly booked the Caravaggio exhibition for me to catch, which was marvellous. I travelled to Bologna for a long weekend with the Captain in mid June, and we walked all the way up to the Basilicata in 40 degree heat, then ate Tortellini al Brodo (which the Captain repeated using a Gandalf tone), to our heart’s content. We travelled in August to Brussels on a job and Reims, by car and ferry, and stayed in a luxury castle drinking endless Ruinart Champagne. I went to join some good actor mates in Skiathos for a few days, and enjoyed their loving and unconditionally caring company and sunshine.
So, from an outsider’s view in, I live a good life. But all of the experiences are soaked in a sense of grief that is taking an age to go. As well as a burden of how to deal with the remaining material goods of the now departed.
I will leave you with a strange little bit of prose I found among my random, scattered bits of scribblings on one of those holidays:
Leaves are glittering with tiny, moist prisms. A sky is picked with blue, where clouds float like curvy mountains, watched by crows who stand on roofs; the custodians of this lofty universe. A breezy, light amber hangs in the air, promising hope.
Kate Terence's Letters from London 