Unfinished Business

When I went into hospital in June 2016 the prognosis wasn't good. My diagnosis of acute myelomonocytic leukaemia was frightening: a rare and aggressive blood cancer. Its classification is AML4, a necessary clarification as the types of leukaemia are many and varied. A month later I was told the good news that my bone marrow test showed that the particular genetic mutation (there are many) that had caused my leukaemia was NPM1. This was seen as cause for celebration, holding out hope for a complete cure. However, the bone marrow sample taken after my first cycle of chemotherapy (there were four cycles, each taking a month) showed that what is known as Minimal Residual Disease indicated a 2.5% presence of mutated cancerous cells in my bone marrow. This doesn't sound much, but it was very bad news, not least because it indicated that a stem cell transplant, which I was planning to receive from my brother, had a 'dismal' likelihood of success, with very few patients surviving to two years even. It was for this reason that I then declined the chance of a stem cell transplant, as it offered very little hope of a good quality of life after the initial challenging and lengthy experience of the transplant. However, at this stage there was a five year survival rate quoted of 30%, which offered some hope, but this soon shifted to a two year survival rate of 20%. But still there was hope.
A telephone call to me in Trieste ten days ago changed all that. I was asked to come back into hospital immediately for further bone marrow tests. The senior nurse who phoned me of course could not confirm my fears, but a week ago I returned to hospital to have the bone marrow sample taken and was told that the underlying indicators showed that my leukaemia was indeed returning and that I had probably three to six months left to live. I have been able to accept each stage in this journey with equanimity, but it has been startling how quickly my prognosis has declined, so that when I return to hospital tomorrow I almost expect my life expectancy to be halved yet again. It is for this reason that plans have had to be drastically reduced and changed. I shan't be going to Milan in January, nor to Florence in May. Writing I hoped to do cannot now be accomplished. I shall not see the 'Mme Isaac Pereire' Bourbon roses flower in June that will be planted today. I shall not meet my new grandchild that my daughter in law is carrying, or any other grandchildren, nor see them grow up and delight in them. I do not know what the future holds for my wife and children, or indeed for the world I live in. Over time I had several schemes that I planned to finish over the next few years in my retirement but which will now never happen.
One unfinished project goes back a long time, to when I was nine or ten years old, which is when I discovered my great grandfather's notebook on the Gent family history. Over the past almost sixty years I have accumulated a mass of material to add to what my great grandfather collected, especially the wives of my ancestors, and recently I have collected a vast amount of material about my mother's family, the Schiffs. I have done a lot of work nevertheless, much of which is available through my many websites and blogs, but of course this is ephemeral, and I need to download this material and rearrange it so I can print it all out in a master copy to go in the family chest. I doubt I shall manage to do all this, nor sort out the boxes of papers that I have. 
Culver House, my home for almost thirty two years, has to be another unfinished project. Of course the work was ongoing, and much was done, and in the nature of entropy much needs to be repeated. Some rooms I shall not see redecorated, though as I write this a decorator is working downstairs, and since I was taken ill in June there has been a constant team of people finishing jobs. The kitchen is done, the attic shower room and laundry room are completely refurbished, the roof is repaired with a new, deeper and wider lead-lined gully, the side and rear walls are repainted, as are all the many windows.
The garden is very much a case of the Forth Bridge style of maintenance and repair. Thirty years ago I worked hard and conquered the jungle, and I was very proud of my achievements: the Gertrude Jekyll-inspired huge double border with its hot colours, the cleared country walk down one eighth of a mile to the chickens and geese, planted with many rambler and climbing roses, including the rampant Rosa filipes 'Kiftsgate', and 'Wedding Day', and many shrubs, then there was the lower lawn which I levelled and bordered to the west with historic roses such as Rosa mundi, Rosa centifolia 'Cristata' 'Chapeau de Napoléon', Rosa rugosa 'Blanc Double de Coubert', and my beloved 'Mme Isaac Pereire' with its wonderful, rich scent; the upper lawn which started as pink 'Lady Gay' rambler roses from David Wagg over arches with silver-leafed plants below, and vegetables on one side with flowers for cutting on the other, and which eventually became the upper lawn, bounded to the north by nut trees and to the east and west with high square box-shaped hedges in the style of Knightshayes. Eight or nine years ago I gave up on maintaining the garden, the chickens had gone, and I was into running, swimming, cycling and weight training. The courtyard has now been cleared, but the plan was to surround it with trellis between brick columns. The trellis is till stacked there, but there are no brick columns. I also planned to rebuild the wall to the east side of the lower lawn, originally of cob, but which was demolished by the previous owner.
Twenty three years ago my Aunt Lyn's funeral was the last service to take place at Iddesleigh Methodist chapel before it was demolished and rebuilt. At that time on a visit to my grandparents' grave at the chapel I noticed two gothic windows from the chapel lying next to the graveyard, and purchased these, together with fancy arch supports from the roof and a gothic side door. About ten or fifteen years ago I purchased the entrance doors to Uffculme Baptist church to complement these windows, and the plan was that in my retirement to build a chapel-like structure on the site of the old linhay which had fallen down at the beginning of the country walk to the chickens. I saved all the Bridgwater roof tiles from that linhay, and also acquired many more roof tiles from the cart sheds that had been converted to garages next door to Culver House, and which were demolished to create what is now Culver Court.
I wasn't quite sure what this building was to be. Possibly I would build my own shul, which quite appealed, as I have my own sefer Torah and megillat Esther, but also it might have housed my proposed bookbinding workshop. In preparation for my retirement I built up a sizeable collection of equipment and tools, along with materials including beautiful marbled endpapers. These too are now all unfinished business.
Of course, in a sense everything is unfinished business. The moment a project is finished we think of what could have been better. I am delighted that one project I started fifty years ago suddenly had a remarkable dénouement over the past few years. This was the story of my mother's family that I referred to, and in particular the London Schiff relations who were invisible, but now I know and have written about them in much detail. and have met and had contact with many of these distant relations.
Exeter Synagogue is a project that of necessity must be unfinished business, for I hope it long outlives me, but when I entered the synagogue for the first time in 1983 it was just at the beginning of its renaissance, and over the years it became a source of tremendous pride. I gave a lot, whether officiating at services, taking weddings and funerals - scores of them over the past thirty years - and caring for the building and the cemetery, refounding the hevra kadisha, organising exhibitions, open days, school visits and communal events, and celebrations for the festivals. I succeeded in bringing the synagogue archives together, and adding to them in great quantity. For many years I produced a newsletter which became a valuable resource when Dr Helen Fry came to write the community's history. It was a labour of love but I was amply rewarded.
When I think about what I shall miss most as a result of dying, it is not knowing what happens to my wife, my children and my grandchildren, and indeed to the world they live in. All my life I have been able to look back, often in great detail, at the life of my ancestors, but I cannot look forward for even one brief second to what will become of them. We can never know what the future will hold, we can only hope for the best. I wish my wife's grandparents, murdered during the Second World War, could know that their children survived and that they were to have grandchildren, and great grandchildren. I cannot change the future, any more than I can alter the past, but I can hope that all will be well, despite the bad things that may happen.