‘Hi! My name’s Stephen and I am pretty much like your
average teenager – except for the last three years now I’ve been battling
cancer.’
This is how 19-year-old Stephen Sutton introduced himself on
the Just Giving internet page which he set up to raise money for the Teenage
Cancer Trust (TCT). Sadly, Stephen himself died of bowel cancer in the early
hours of 14th May 2014. Later that day, charitable donations pledged
via his site reached £3.6 million – more than the TCT knew what to do with.
Stephen’s mother Jane announced on Facebook that her ‘inspirational’
son ‘had passed away peacefully in his sleep.’
In a Press Association photograph featured in the Daily Mail’s coverage of Stephen’s death, she appears as a strawberry blonde
wearing a strawberry-print blouse, half-smiling (her lips have managed the
right shape but her eyes are struggling), standing next to her emaciated son.
Not that long to go now. His jaw too big for a frail neck,
arms much thinner than the arm cuffs on the hospital crutches he’s using
(lightweight walking forearm crutches, approx £50 a pair).
In Stephen Sutton’s eyes at that moment, I think I can see something
not much noted: a touch of what might be adolescent anger; just a little bit
Liam (LG); echo of Mercutio in Romeo and
Juliet, declaring ‘a pox on both your houses’; in this case, the living and
the dead.
To do anything at all in the face of death, while looking
down the barrel of the last syringe, surely calls for a do or die attitude; even
a touch of the impious attitude of James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, who refused to
re-enter the Church despite his mother’s pleading – and she on the point of
dying of cancer. Likewise, our new Stephen Hero keeping death waiting for his
dominion, must have been something of an act of teenage rebellion.
A mother who survives her son’s death from cancer must be
entitled to say whatever she likes about him – or, if she prefers, nothing at
all. He will have been her inspiration for as long as she carried him. In the
womb, in her arms, toddling through schooldays and holidays all the way to his
death bed. Now she will have to carry his not being there to see her grow old.
Stephen’s mother’s grief can hardly be straightforward; its
complications could last her a lifetime. But many of those who hardly knew him,
or not at all, who’ve rushed to find him ‘inspirational’, seem to have
simplified Stephen Sutton to suit themselves.
In their rendition of him, the last few weeks of Stephen’s
life were a saintly progress of smiling through adversity; his death, nothing
but a course of morphine – letting go, letting go, letting go.
It’s as if they are laying him out in clothes they’ve had
the cheek to choose for him; and in the act of finding, defining him so, while acknowledging
Stephen as hero, aren't they also pursuing a claim on him, their ticket to today’s
Priority Area?
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