Just as there are societies to encourage home births, so there should be societies for home deaths. Being looked after at home is more trouble, of course, just as home cooking takes more time. But dying in hospital, as most people now do, stuck full of tubes in white rooms, surrounded by suffering and strangers, with those you love kept at the end of a telephone, is a sad and bad ending. Caroline thought being sent to hospital to die is like being put in a skip (no disrespect to builders or doctors).
At home in August, Caroline finished planting our garden, with seeds and bulbs identified with little flags, so I would know what to expect next spring and summer. She gave two interviews: one at the beginning of the month, for the Guardian on her sense of death, as we ate lunch; the other from her bed, at the end of the month, for BBC Radio 4's Food Programme on the meaning of her work.
Our home filled with family and friends and flowers. Pain was the only uncertainty. The surgeons had warned me that obstruction caused by the cancer would eventually be horribly painful. Not so; Dr Anne Naysmith, consultant at our local community hospital, a woman about Caroline's age, dis-agreed; and with a careful cocktail of drugs, Caroline rested at home, and took responsibility for her death, simply by stopping eating, two weeks before she died. Around midnight as her last day began, she foresaw her death. How was it - what did the thought feel like? 'Oh, lovely, she said; and we laughed. And it was lovely to be with her when she died.
'I want to share with you why I shall always be grateful to Caroline,' wrote a friend. 'She could always make me laugh, with her wonderful sense of the absurd and her sharp wit. But it was the last few months of her life that were a real inspiration to me. She showed me that the time of dying can be an enriching and growing experience.'