Words for Hannah

Words for Hannah

Yesterday a woman I know died.

Hannah Foxley.  Actually I didn’t really know her.  I met Hannah once.  She seemed bubbly, extroverted, extremely strong, very successful, and driven.  Yeah I’ll admit it – I found her pretty intimidating.

And yet I feel like I got to know her….through her blogs, along with 50,000 other people who read along as well. Hannah had a women’s wealth business with a website where she blogged, but she quickly turned to sharing her cancer journey.  The Hannah I met here was a very different woman to the one I met in person and, as she explained herself in her blogs, a very different Hannah to the woman she had publicly been.

Her journey, her sickness…it made her vulnerable and she shared of herself so incredibly bravely, so authentically and with so much guts and heart.

We were with her when she shared her love for a new man in her life and her fear that she may not be around to be with him for very long.

We were with her as she realised her business was not in line with her heart and let it go.

We were with her when her vulnerability broke her wide open…again and again and again and again…so she had no choice but to drop all of her armour, the masculine tough facade that she had been wearing (as she herself explained), and settle into trusting life and trusting others and allowing them to support, care for, and truly love her.

We were with her as she realised that this was not the time to fight (as, when it comes to cancer, you are only fighting yourself), but instead to love.  And we watched her love. And my god it was beautiful.

She inspired me and brought me to tears many times with the beauty of her journey and her profound learnings, which she shared with more bravery than I find in myself.

Hannah wrote with such a conviction that she would heal completely.  And when I read this I believed her…but I thought that maybe the healing would not happen the way she planned.  And it didn’t.

There are many types of healing.

For she did not heal her body.  But with the breaking down of her body, and with it every last one of her defences, she healed something infinitely more important and precious.  She healed her heart.  And I believe her body took her to just that place so she could do exactly that.

Hannah, I will not say I am sorry or that this is a tragedy or a pity.  I don’t believe any of those things. To do so, to my mind, would dishonour you and this life you have lived, and to my very core I do not believe that you needed even one more second in this life to create any more beauty or to change the world – you have done that perfectly in exactly the life you lived.  Just as you were beautiful exactly as you were, so your story – beginning to end – is beautiful just as it is.  Including the last chapter.  There need be no edits or alterations for me to think that.  It is perfection.

I know very little about your life up until the last year, but I do know that what you have created through this journey, the lives you have touched, the hearts you have opened, the people you have inspired….is the most incredible legacy.   You have touched and changed so many lives so powerfully and so profoundly, mine being but one of so many, and the ripple effect of all of that is probably so much bigger than you could ever possibly have imagined.

You have changed the world through your life and through your death.

I wish you well on your journey and thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing all of us to see to the bottom of yours.

K

xx

If you would like to read Hannah’s beautiful words you will find her blog here:  http://hannahfoxley.com/blog/

And here is my favourite of all her blogs and one of the most touching for me.  It is the last one she published and Hannah shares some realisations about the beauty to be found in illness, total vulnerability, and facing your mortality:  http://hannahfoxley.com/the-darkness/

Tagged as: death, Hannah Foxley