Outside News And Inside News

www.justgiving.com/agracefuldeath for donations to the Hospice the Danced Steve Out Of This Life
antonia.rolls@btinternet.com if you want to contact me

Outside News First

I am meeting St Wilfrid's Hospice today, to introduce myself to them and to ask if they can provide me with boxes to collect for them during this exhibition. St Barnabas House has been in contact with them and they are up to date and happy about the exhibition, but I have not yet met them and would love to do so. Today is that day.

I have been offered exhibition space in London, in Wimbledon and it is very interesting where the offers of help come from. A friend living in a large and lovely house in Wimbledon has offered to host the exhibition in her home. This will make the exhibition visible to a different kind of visitor, it will be neighbours and friends and those who may not go specifically to a gallery. We will link the exhibition in with the local hospice, and that will I hope, start a process of this exhibition showing around the UK (and I hope, beyond) in conjunction with local hospices. I would like to do that in January. We have a meeting coming up next week about it, and I can't wait.

A contact from the Friends of East Sussex Hospices has been very supportive and has suggested the Graceful Death exhibition be shown in East Sussex. She has offered to sound out a couple of venues, and I am delighted with that too. I look forward to meeting this lady during the exhibition here, and hope that we can do this East Sussex thing.

I am hopeful too of putting the show on in Worthing, linked to St Barnabas House Hospice. I was fortunate to meet the Artist in Residence from St Barnabas yesterday, and he gave me to understand the idea was being followed up.

So, if all this works out, the Graceful Death exhibition will go to Wimbledon London, to Worthing, to East Sussex (Bexhill and/or Eastbourne), to Birmingham (the dates for that are March 21st to tie in with Lent), and to Bremmen in Germany. Steve would have loved it.

Inside News

Even the photographer who came to photograph the studio for our local paper said on seeing the paintings Ah yes, that was like my Grandfather. Steve is like so many others who have died of cancer. So many others who die of a killing disease. I look at him sometimes in these paintings and think the images of him, which seem so terribly personal to me, are in fact universal. The paintings are only the tip of the iceburg. There is so much to say and talk about concerning the End Of Life. Hospice workers, Palliative Care workers, MacMillan nurses, Doctors, Relatives, Patients, all have so much to say about their experiences. I just don't know where to begin with it all, I would like to know more. The one thing I would like to know above all else, however, and will never know, is Where Did Steve Go. I think this is what all of us left behind would like to know after the death of someone they knew and loved. Where do they go?