Translator: Linda Anderson Reviewer: Denise RQ
OK, thank you.
So, yes, I'm Simon Hancox,
and I'm here today to talk about my journey
of the last 15 or 16 months of my life basically.
But before I do that, here's my little dog, Hank.
Thank you, you can do that again, if you'd like.
He's a little bit bigger than that now. He's a little border terrier.
We've had him for just over a year or so now.
So, I live with Hank in my house in Alvaston, Derby,
with my two little boys, Will and Sam, who are five and nine years old.
I work in the not-for-profit sector in Derby, in the charitable sector,
and I have done for many years now.
It's humbling really, I speak to people that have innovations,
ideas, TED-kind of ideas really, passions, determination, motivation.
Sometimes it's fueled by a personal tragedy, a general interest,
some desire to make things happen, to make that change.
So every day in my working life, I speak to these people,
I connect with them, and I help try and facilitate and grow their idea,
much in the same way that our good friend here is growing furniture.
And we're all kind of growing these ideas together as well.
This is my mum and dad,
and when I told them I'd been nominated for a TED talk, we got chatting.
They're quite gregarious people.
They've always been surrounded by friends and family,
all their lives really.
And, I'll get to the point here.
There is a reason I put my folks in there.
I was very, very poorly when I was born.
I almost died, and I was in hospital; incubator-jobbie for quite some time.
And, I wonder if that's kind of affected, in a very positive way,
the relationship I have with my parents.
Because they were often to and from hospital, more or less every day,
coming to see me, to see how I was doing, etc.
And I've seen them surrounded by friends and family
more or less all of their lives, and I wonder how that's affected me as well.
This is Annabel.
I met Annabel in 1994,
in, not too far from here, The Blue Note in Derby.
Can I get a shout-out for the Blue Note?
(Shouts) (cheers)
Well done, very good, that's made my day.
So, in the heady days of Britpop, Blur, Oasis, Pulp, and all that,
we had a shared love of David Bowie, vodka, and alternative cinema,
kind of in that order as well, really.
We connected very, very well, very, very quickly.
Friends and family could see we were very, very close together,
very, very well connected, very early on.
So four years later, we got married.
We began our journey together, if you like, really,
in this next stage of our lives together.
And new jobs, new houses,
new haircuts for Annabel, not for me, unfortunately.
And new additions to life, to our family as well.
Will came along in 2004, and Sam came along in 2008.
We got changes in jobs, as I say.
Annabel entered into the world of education,
which was something she'd always wanted to do.
Basically, that was our life, we were very happy.
It was in April 2012, when Annabel found a lump in her breast.
At that stage, we were a bit shocked, surprised, and concerned.
We were both turning 40 years of age that particular year,
and we'd been making plans to go to the States at Christmas time,
to spend a joint 40th birthday together, and have a great time, as you do.
Even to the point of sorting the kids out,
in terms of, they're going to go here, etc.
So we had this news, which seemed a big shock.
It felt particularly cruel, as Annabel had entered the next stage of her life,
in terms of job and everything else.
So, it was triple-negative breast cancer, quite aggressive.
Because of Annabel's physical makeup,
in terms of what she was receptive to or not,
we were a little bit limited
in terms of what drugs would work, and what wouldn't.
But chemotherapy began, so we started on a plan, on a chemo cocktail.
And initially, over the summer period, things went well.
It was great, we were looking for that word "shrinkage".
We were looking for some positive signs from the consultants and from the team.
Initially, over the summer, it was great, it went really well.
Bike rides, walks out, runs, holidays, all that kind of stuff,
that went really well, that was fine.
And that kind of aided our well-being, and our position, if you like.
And then, towards the end of that period,
towards the end of that particular chemotherapy phase,
it was pretty clear that the cancer was a bit more aggressive than we thought.
Unfortunately, it was clear that the cancer was taking hold,
and things weren't really working in the way that we wanted them to.
This is a photo taken at the end of October, 2012, on a trip to York.
So I surprised Annabel with one of our many surprises,
most of them didn't work out in life really,
but this one was OK, I find that I quite like that.
So we went to York for the weekend, did all the usual stuff,
ghost walk, walk the walls, all the rest,
and Annabel was quite healthy at that point.
But things went kind of downhill from then on after that.
November and December came, the cold winter air, and everything else.
It was quite a tricky time for us.
Christmas came, and we went into hospital on Christmas Eve.
Because Annabel-- it was quite difficult at that point.
I took the kids in with me on Christmas Day.
They were being their usual noisy selves, running up and down the corridors,
getting on the nerves of the nurses and the team there as well.
So, that's great, that's fine, that's what kids do, isn't it?
But then Annabel died by my side, on the 28th of December, a few days later.
So that was big, that was a huge shock.
A massive change in our lives really, for myself and the kids.
So, I thought, OK, I need to let people know,
and I got Annabel's phone, obviously all my friends and family knew,
and I started phoning people, people I didn't know, in Annabel's phone.
Started making connections, talking to people,
and I ended up with something that was quite new to me.
I didn't realize that Annabel was so vocal,
and so loved, and liked on the many forums she was involved with.
She wasn't quite moderating the forums, but she was a very active person on there.
She connected with a lot of people, some of which are in this room today.
Some of the people I spoke to felt that they wanted to do something
to commemorate Annabel because she'd been doing lots of research
in local areas to see how Huddersfield could be supported by this group;
how so-and-so could be supported in Bath by this group over here.
She'd done a lot for people, and people wanted to give something back as well.
So the "Race for Life" was happening, as it does every year across Britain,
and a couple of the ladies wanted to get involved and run a "Race for Life" group.
Allie, who is over here, put your hand up please, Allie. Thank you.
So, she came up with the name of Annabel's Angels.
And said, would you mind if we run a race in London
under the name of Annabel's Angels, raising money for Cancer Research UK?
I said, "No no no, it's fine, that's OK, that's great."
And then one cropped up in Bath,
and then in Aberdeen,
and then in Bradford,
and then in Nottingham, Derby, etc.
So there were loads that kind of cropped up, quite a lot, really,
and it was quite humbling and, wow, OK.
So then I got on the phone again. It's your fault, again.
And I said, we need some kind of design.
We need a name, we need a T-shirt design, something really.
So I said, "OK, I'll speak to the kids."
So I had a word with Will, who was eight at the time.
I said, "Let's get our pens and pencils out," so this is what we did.
He thinks it's his work, he's looking at a career in freelance design.
(Laughter)
He doesn't get out of bed for less than 5,000 pounds, apparently,
or so he says.
He should be here, in this room, shouldn't he?
But we talked in town with this, with a designer who's based in New Zealand,
a very successful designer who has also been touched by cancer.
So all of this has been created by letting people in,
letting new people into my life, into our lives.
I start to meditate at this time as well.
I always wanted to try and understand how Buddhists were always so calm.
They are, aren't they, they're always so calm, really, why is that?
And so I started to go into the Tara Buddhist Center
down the road in Etwall,
and I find that incredibly relaxing, and I really wanted to embrace
this idea of impermanence, that letting go is not a bad thing.
It doesn't mean you love a person any less or anything like that at all.
It's about the acceptance of life and death.
I also started writing. I started writing a blog.
It was more or less a letters blog to Annabel, to tell her,
I knew she wouldn't read them, I know that,
but it was more or less designed to show other people how I was feeling.
So I ended up writing 32 letters,
and the ones in the December, January, February time,
they were pretty dark days, really.
But then moving forward, it was a little bit different.
And anyone who wants to ask, the phone was going all the time.
"How are you doing?" "How are you doing?"
I would point to blog, say, "Here's what I'm doing."
I'd point to blog, that's kind of what I would say, my standard response.
"How are you doing, Simon?" Point to blog, "There you go."
So people would know, but then it went pretty viral.
It got something like 40,000 views within six months or so,
and it went a bit mad.
Media got involved, local, regional, and national,
even the telly people got involved,
and it was all a bit "Uhhh..." I think it was strange.
Here's a guy who is sharing his thoughts in a very unusual way, perhaps.
Maybe a little bit too soon after what has happened, I don't know.
But what I really wanted to do was to connect with other guys,
to talk to other guys to see what they were feeling,
to see if what I was feeling was kind of the norm.
I spoke to lots of my friends and family about this journey,
but they were involved with me already.
I didn't want to burden myself, didn't want them to think,
"Christ, it's Simon again. He's crying.
Pick him up off the floor," that kind of thing.
I know they wouldn't think that,
but it's my perception, it's how I would think.
So I wanted to speak to other guys,
other people that were going through what I was going through.
So, my best friend, Matthew, rings me up one day,
"You need to turn the telly on." OK, so I turned the telly on.
And it was a breakfast TV program.
It was a guy called Ben who was talking on there,
to the telly people, about his journey.
He'd lost his wife, very recently in a car accident in London.
And he's got a young boy that he's bringing up on his own now.
And he also wanted to connect with other guys as well.
So, we started talking, I managed to get his email address, got chatting,
got chatting late at night, early in the morning,
more or less all the bloody day, really.
And then, we had this idea, well, we're connected here,
we're connecting with each other,
we're talking about some common stuff, we're helping and supporting each other.
Maybe there are other guys out there like this
that would like to benefit from that as well.
So about a month or so later, it's an online forum,
called "The Gentlemen's Room", sounds a bit seedy, I know that,
that's why I put that very manly "Fight Club for Widowers" underneath.
So, there's people, there's guys in it in the same position as us,
from different countries, mainly English-speaking countries,
from England, the States, all over really, that connect on there.
We're there more or less all the time,
during the day, in the evening, in the early hours,
because widowers don't really sleep.
So, there's me and Ben, I've got me and Rhys, and myself and Mike,
just couple of others really, that have met up as well.
And all this has been made possible by the idea of letting people in.
Nigel will like this one.
Grief can play a funny part in your life.
You think you're doing OK, but it oscillates like this.
(Waves hands up and down)
This is on the top of Snowdon, minus 20, with an 8 year-old
who's clinging on to the trick point at the top.
No idea how we're going to get down.
Poles were at the youth hostel, and I've not got my crampons with me.
So, you feel this sense of invincibility because what else can happen in your life?
You've lost the partner that you've had for 20 years.
There's not much more that can happen in terms of worse things than that.
There's been a lot of research and a theory written about grief.
The most famous is by a lady called Elizabeth Kubler-Ross,
who wrote about the five stages of grief:
denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance,
and these have been used, and quoted, and misquoted as well,
by psychologists, psychotherapists over the years.
Not so much nowadays, but it has been the benchmark for years.
But in reality, they're not linear, grief is unique, there's no real set pattern.
Elizabeth herself, just before she died,
stated her annoyance about how she was misquoted.
She said these are five common stages, they're not five required stages.
She said, "I'm more than these five stages, and so are you."
I did lots more reading as well. Brene Brown, who's no stranger to TED.
There's a wonderful graphic novel
by a guy called Anders Nilsen, who also lost his wife, his partner to cancer,
and Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking";
is a diary, 12 months after her husband died of heart attack.
So, going back to the ladies that I talked about.
They wanted to do something a little bit more, beyond the "Race for Life".
They had this idea of setting up a fund raising support group,
where we could tangibly help women and families that were going through
what we were going through.
So, that's what we did.
So, this is Nichola, with our cheeky little logo on the top there.
So this is a photo shoot done in London
with a photographer, Rachel Raphael, who is incredibly talented.
I've got Linda, and Amanda there as well.
We started selling these things,
these wristbands, mugs, tee shirts, all the rest, really,
all with the aim of raising money
to become a registered charitable trust in Derby,
that would directly support families and local cancer-related support groups.
Going back to the Cancer Research UK and "Race for Life",
they spoke to me, they asked me and my children
to come and open the "Race for Life".
So that was a bit of a surreal experience,
addressing 5,000 women, all there with the regalia,
with these funny things sticking out of their head,
wings, pink, and all that kind of business,
and me kind of pouring my heart out, trying not to weep.
Quite surreal, really.
But, we did it. We did it well.
And we raised thousands of pounds for cancer research all around the country
as a means of doing that.
And again, it comes back to this core of letting people in.
In terms of the charity, we're going well.
We've got people running, writing, climbing mountains,
all the rest, backpacks, huge events, big things at Pride Park.
We've been involved in Guinness World Records,
auctions, Westfield charity climbs, and all the rest, really.
And the idea is, like I say, to create a grant-making trust locally
that would directly support families in and around Derby.
It makes their life a little bit easier.
We're not really doing the same thing as what Cancer Research UK do,
because that's about the research.
It's all about making people's lives easier where we can.
Headspace; has anyone heard of Headspace?
Well, they got in touch because they had read about the blogs as well,
and they saw me dabble with meditation, and they got in touch.
And they said, "OK, we really like what you're trying to do here,
so how about we work in partnership?"
I said, "Yeah, alright, OK, that's fine."
So, every person who follows Annabel's Angels, every kind of follower,
we've got a free 12-month subscription for Headspace.
So, if anyone in here wants it, grab me at the end.
So, again, that's all made possible by letting these new people
and these new organizations into our lives.
So just to finish, really, we're kind of doing OK.
It still oscillates, and it will always oscillate for years, I imagine.
Grief isn't fixed in six months, a year,
18 months, 24 months, or however long really.
Moving forward doesn't necessarily mean
you leave something behind, right behind.
It's about pushing yourself and challenging yourself.
And I really like this idea,
it was mentioned in the talk by Kelly earlier on, on the video,
if you can somehow summon up the courage, I suppose is the word,
to speak to your friends, speak to people that you know
that you've known for years, speak to new friends and acquaintances,
and present with them a tangible reason for them to help you and to support you--
-Because that is what they want to do;
That's what they will want to do.
They want to tangibly help you in some kind of way.
So I wrote 32 letters to Annabel,
in a very kind of open, very frank, very honest way.
And I firmly believe that why we are all here today,
why we are all here, and exist,
we're here to individually and collectively support each other.
To live this world of life as best we can.
So that's my message to you: open the door, let people in.
Thank you.
(Applause)