How meditation helped me find inner calm

To quote my sister Caro, “You don’t get a day off from dying.” Nor from having cancer, having a loved one with cancer, or grieving when they’re gone. But even under the most seemingly impossible circumstances, there’s a way to find calm and inner strength. For me, this was through my meditation practice.

Caro was hilarious, wise, whip-smart, stoic, dramatic (it turns out you can be both), free-spirited, generous, cheeky, fiercely independent (also, just really fierce), dazzling and fearless. Her hair was a different shade of mermaid every month. She called part of her living room ’the witch corner’. She claimed not to like humans, but wherever she went, people orbited her like planets, bathing in her starlight. Even if, admittedly, it could be starlight that took no prisoners. 

It's important to know who she really was, aside from someone with bowel cancer, because that’s what she would want: to be remembered as a person, not a collection of symptoms or a statistic.

Caro had digestive problems from the beginning of 2020, but blood tests and an endoscope revealed nothing. It was suggested that she was gluten or caffeine intolerant, so she gave up bread and her beloved flavoured lattes. That didn’t help however. She returned to the GP at least five times, but sadly nobody took her daily vomiting seriously.

Eventually in December that year, she was referred for a scan that revealed a stage 4 tumour that had destroyed her intestine. She was immediately sent for emergency surgery. It barely crossed our minds that her story could have any end other than a lucky escape. Odds are averages, they’re for other people, and besides, they seemed pretty good. 

Six weeks after her post-operative chemotherapy, she had a new pain and we learned that the cancer had metastasized throughout her abdominal cavity. A seven pound tumour was removed from her ovary to give her a little more time. She mainly used this time to write her Will and Caro died in March 2022, aged 40. 

In the last year of her life, I lived in her spare room. To begin with, this was to keep her company during her treatment. By the end, I was on 24-hour call to help her with basic tasks, like drinking because she didn’t have the strength to hold a glass, or cleaning her teeth.

When she died, a fragment of my broken heart was glad, because she was finally free of the body that had failed her. For months my own body felt like it was echoing with uncontrollable grief. My best friend had been stolen. And now, I had to work out how to face life without her. I won’t lie, there are days when it still feels that way.

One night, I soaked through nine tissues because I watched a documentary about ‘Wham!’ and couldn’t ask her what she thought of it. For some reason, I decided to search for online meditation classes, then, I tried one. It didn’t bring her back, but I did find inner calm. I was able to separate myself from my sadness, and just ‘be’. It was, in a teeny, tiny way, life changing.

Caro was all about the impact you make on others. Remember her Will that I mentioned? She left a little bit of her life insurance to each of her friends and I had the wonderful gift of getting to distribute it. So, I was inspired to #BeMoreCaro. I qualified as a meditation teacher so I can spread a different kind of gift, the gift of peace and inner calm, to people going through the hardest time in their lives. Just by spending 30 minutes bringing attention to your breath, you can learn to calm the storm within.

Caro’s family and friends have raised over £15,000 in her memory. Jen is now offering meditation classes to help others find calm during difficult times. You can find a link to them on Caro’s Star of Hope Tribute Page.

• Find out more about Jen's meditation classes
• Learn about the symptoms of bowel cancer
• Read more real life stories