The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

"This was, again, another book that I wouldn’t normally have read. It came out of the same publishing house as mine; I’d been chatting with the author and went away and ordered it. She wrote another book called The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry which is about this man’s journey to meet Queenie Hennessy. Queenie is somebody that he met whilst he was at work. Harold was married but she was not—she was really quite besotted with him and he didn’t notice. But the book The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy is from her perspective. So, there’s a book from his perspective and there’s a book from her perspective. Her perspective is that she’s terminal; she’s in a care home—a hospice—in the borders of Scotland. He’s down in the far south of England. His pilgrimage is that he’s going to walk to her. She’d written a letter to tell him that she’s terminally ill, and, for whatever reason, he’d decided that he was going to walk from the south coast of England all the way to the Scottish borders and he has told her that she is to wait for him to arrive. His book talks about the pilgrimage, and hers talks about how she knows that he’s heading towards her. She’s trying to stay alive for the whole time, waiting for Harold to arrive. He’s not sure why he’s doing it, but she knows that she wants him to do it because she’s still very much in love with him. It’s this concept of knowing that death is coming but waiting for something else to happen—and being able to almost postpone your own death whilst waiting for an event to occur. Again, I’m not going to spoil the book for anybody because the last part is really important. She is conveying to the nuns in the hospice her story of her relationship with Harold, what it is about him that’s important, and how she’s lived her life without him, yet always with him. And, finally, she’s coming towards the end of her life, she feels he’s finally coming just for her. “It’s this concept of knowing that death is coming but waiting for something else to happen—and being able to almost postpone your own death” I’ve seen this in my own family and others also say that it exists. When you know you’re dying—and we all know that’s going to come—if there’s a really important event that you’re waiting for, whether it’s a wedding or a birth or Christmas, it’s amazing how many people make that date and then die shortly afterwards. It’s almost as if death gives us a little bit of leeway, provided we have a sufficiently strong case to make. It’s a sad story but it’s a hugely uplifting story. And the novel reflects this. Some people think it’s an urban myth, but I don’t think so. I think the human spirit is incredibly strong; we can overcome the vagaries of our health and our death if our spirit and will are strong enough to get there. Obviously, sometimes it doesn’t happen that way, but there are so many instances I’ve heard of where people have got to that milestone and almost stopped directly thereafter and let death come. It is. When I spoke to Rachel about it she said she was only ever intending to write Harold’s perspective, but she said everyone kept asking, ‘But what was Queenie thinking? What was her side of the story?’ So, Harold’s book almost forced her into thinking about it from Queenie’s perspective. I think it’s a lovely indication that the strength of the story was enough to transcend one book, requiring someone else’s perspective. There are wild and wacky characters in the hospice who all know they’re dying. In that regard, for some people, knowing that you’re going to die is actually a release. You can say the things you want to say, and you can perhaps do the things you want to do. You have a different perspective on what’s important within the time that you’ve got left. You can be happy if you want; you can be sad if you want; you can be on your own if you want. There’s almost a strength that is given, which asks: for these final hours, days, weeks, months, how do you want this to go? “In that regard, for some people, knowing that you’re going to die is actually a release. You can say the things you want to say, and you can perhaps do the things you want to do.” Often, we feel there’s a way in which we should behave. What this hospice gives the patients is the ability to behave as they want, fundamentally, and to say what they want. There are people they get to like and there are people they don’t, but this is just accepted. There are things they want to eat and don’t. There are things they want to hear and don’t. Around what’s happening to Queenie, there’s a background—almost a fog—of the complexities of the others who are going through their own stories. There’s a total acceptance amongst them all that they’re going to behave individually the way they want to up until the very last moment."