Aurelie Boas interview: I can’t let Simon’s death be a sad story. I want it to give a sense of direction to my life

The late Simon Boas garnered attention for his stoic, cheerful perspective on dying. His wife reflects on life without him…

Flowers fill Aurelie Boas’s cottage kitchen sent by neighbours to mark her return to Jersey this week after seven weeks away from home. Her absence follows the death of her husband Simon Boas from throat cancer on July 15, celebrated and remembered throughout Britain for his extraordinarily stoic and cheerful perspective on dying. He was just 47. 
Back in April, when I first met them both, Simon was slightly bemused at the degree of attention he was attracting. His first letter (of three), A Beginner’s Guide to Dying, had been published in the Jersey Evening Post. Soon after it was shared across the country, by email, and read out by Boas on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House.
“The prognosis is not quite ‘Don’t buy any green bananas’,” he wrote – and then said – cheerily, “but it’s close to ‘Don’t start any long books’”.  
Boas’s cheerful stoicism, his ability to find joy in having been born at all, touched the entire country – and even our king. Three days before his death on July 15, the governor of Jersey delivered Boas a letter from King Charles. There was the rumour too that the King had been planning to visit him in the hospice where he spent his last eight days, watching Wimbledon, sitting in the hospice’s rose garden, surrounded by his family: “When he died, they said he was the best patient they’d ever cared for,” Aurelie says. 
Today, I meet Aurelie again. It is publication day of A Beginner’s Guide to Dying, the book that came out of Simon’s extraordinary early writings. It is already soaring to the top of the Amazon bestseller chart, with plaudits from the very best of Britain’s bereavement experts (“Simon Boas’ outlook on life is an inspiration to us all, and his wonderful book is full of both wisdom and humour,” writes Julia Samuel MBE).  
In April, the couple were still hopeful, not of a lifesaving miracle but certainly of more time through medication – “a year if I’m really lucky,” Simon had said. He was to have just 12 more weeks. They had planned two trips to Brittany, where Aurelie’s French family has a house. The last trip Aurelie has just taken alone: “I needed to be away from Jersey, away from the house, mostly with family and a few friends visiting. I wanted to be completely alone to see how it felt. I wanted to go on the walks we had done over the years. It was very triggering, but I’m glad I did it, maybe it prepared me. 
At two points while we talk, Aurelie suddenly begins to cry. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m exhausted.” She has the book launch tonight for 48 friends. There were 220 people at the little local church for his funeral at the end of July, and 160 people in a pub celebration. He was loved by all who met him. The night before the funeral, her sister Maureen, over from Paris, cooked supper for 24 of Simon’s most beloved (Aurelie is the youngest of four, with two brothers between her and Maureen). “I made it to 8.30pm on the day of the funeral with a lot of white wine and nothing to eat,” says Aurelie.
For Aurelie, continuing her husband’s legacy is a deep honour but it is also a strain, socially. As she says herself, “It’s an unusual way to grieve. Simon drew people to him. I’m less like that.”
She is 41. Her family live in France although she is close to Simon’s family too, in Winchester. His parents relocated to Jersey for Simon’s last months “and I’m going to spend Christmas with them this year.” She is about to restart the last year of her counselling course. But apart from that, the landscape is completely new, save for a trip in October to New York and possibly Vermont to see the falling leaves with Maureen. 
Simon’s book is the result of him coming to terms with his approaching death – it is a spiritual journey that has already helped hundreds and thousands of readers, who found solace in his three Jersey Evening Post letters, which were widely republished. Aurelie watched him slowly release himself from the world, and from her too. 
“I think Simon let me go before he died, in those last days. He wanted to be free of anything tangible and material. He wanted to detach from the everyday things in the world, including me. 
“As he got happier and less scared at the end, I felt very lonely but I never doubted he loved me. He had to just let go of all of us. I don’t think he needed us much, or anyone, anymore. I look back now and think it was a bit of a gift. He was preparing me to live without him.”
They met in 2008, on a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He was an aid worker; she was, then, training to be a journalist. They had been together 16 years when he died.
When Simon received the terminal diagnosis in February – told that he had six to 12 months to live – Aurelie was so close to qualifying as a counsellor. She had taken all the exams, done the assignments, but needed to complete 80 hours of practical counselling work with a dementia organisation and Macmillan Cancer Support. She had already started and loved it. But there was so little time with him left, even though he was writing intensely and engaged in discussions about a potential publisher. And there were decisions to be made about the proceeds of the book, a large proportion of which are going towards palliative care in countries where there is barely any. Boas, the executive director of Jersey Overseas Aid, remained an aid worker to the very end: 
“Sometimes I hated the book,” Aurelie says, “I remember thinking it was taking all the precious space and time we had left and I felt neglected. 
“But it was amazing for him and he was receiving hundreds of messages a week. It feels weird to be rejoicing in its success now. 
For her part, realising that time was running out, she stepped back from her professional life: “I decided I couldn’t do it. I was two months away from graduating and this would be my way of being independent, my job after losing him. I didn’t tell him immediately. He heard me on the phone. He just said ‘Oh, you’ve stopped your course?’ He didn’t tell me what he was thinking, he didn’t push me to continue. And I thought, ‘Okay, he’s no longer the husband with whom I make decisions about the future.’ 
“We didn’t talk about my life after him, about what I feared or what I’d do because he didn’t want to influence me. He didn’t say, ‘how are you going to spend the summer when I’m gone?’ I think didn’t want me to have his voice in my head after he was gone, telling me what to do. 
“Eventually, he just let go completely, which could be very hard.”
Before Simon died, the couple had had a discussion about where he would be buried. He didn’t even care what happened to him after death but Aurelie is a Catholic and she did not want a cremation.
“He said, ‘I don’t want you to be attached to my grave. I want you to be free.’ He wanted me to decide the location. It turned out naturally to be Jersey.
“I don’t think it will tie me here. I thought I’d be going every morning to the cemetery with my bouquet, but I don’t have the need to go.I don’t connect to it yet. I have no plan to leave Jersey right now, but it’s only a grave and I think it’s one of the many things Simon prepared me for so well.”
The days leading up to Simon’s admission to the hospice were, physically at least, grim.  I had stayed connected to them over WhatsApp throughout the summer. Simon provided frequent updates about the book and his health. 
One evening in June, he messaged with characteristic good humour, but the information was upsetting: “My day started excitingly by being nee-nawed to hospital when a tumour on my stomach decided to piss two pints of blood. All fixed now and am back at home, though the kitchen looked like a crime scene! Hope all well with you…I’m still loving every day and feel very happy indeed. Lucky me.”
I was horrified for Aurelie, thinking of her fear. “It was absolutely awful,” she says. “I was on the phone to the ambulance saying ‘where are you?’ and they were saying ‘how is he looking?’. There was blood everywhere. He wanted me to roll him a fag. The ambulance lady said ‘absolutely not. Do not let him smoke.’ But Simon said ‘I’m having a fag.’ So he had a fag.” It encapsulates his spirit. Soon after, he fell at home. He had a horror of dying in hospital. “That was my fear too. After a good cry, we decided it was time for the hospice. I packed our bags and it was sunny and he said, ‘I want to drive round the island’. There was a sense of relief. He said, ‘I’m not really looking forward to it but I’m quite curious how it’s going to feel.’”
It’s barely been two months since Aurelie lost him. She is, she says, reconnecting with the house in Jersey again, after the summer in France. His popularity on the island was hard for her to cope with in the run-up to his death because well-wishers continued to pitch up at their cottage in Trinity, north of the island’s capital, unannounced: “arriving from the front and the back and sometimes just sitting themselves down at the table in our garden with a bottle of wine. He was always drawing people towards him. I’m sociable but I’m not as keen on that as he was. 
“But Simon would say, ‘They mean well’. He got very good at saying ‘Time for my meds now!’ and people would take the cue.”
The conservatory, where Simon settled himself each day to write, is the room that is most connected to him:  “It felt very weird in there,” she says of her return. “I couldn’t sit on his spot on the sofa, but in a way it had lovely memories.”
They never had a television. He told her to buy one after he died to keep her company, “so I’ve splashed out on one that looks like a mirror.”
Pippin their Picardy Shepherd dog, who Simon loved so much, is fine: “At least I’m not dealing with a depressed dog! People are offering to help and walking Pippin is a part of that.”
With her sister, Maureen, she has swept the house clear of all his medication, sticky bottles of medicine that covered night tables and coffee tables, the countless packets of pills in drawers. She cleared the garage out of the 12 to 15 pouches of remaining liquid food which arrived last winter when he could no longer swallow. She laid out all of Simon’s smart jackets and asked the male members of her family to choose. Her older brother took the flying jacket Simon treated himself to towards the end (“my midlife crisis jacket” he told me), and another brother one of his shooting guns. 
She has kept his Panama hat. He was wearing a Panama hat when she first met him on that bus from Tel Aviv: “this tall guy wearing a hat and reading the Economist”. She was only 25, beginning an internship with a Palestinian news agency as part of a Masters in journalism. Much of his professional career working for an NGO was spent in Palestine: for the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute; as special adviser to the Minister of Planning for the Palestinian National Authority; as head of the UN’S food and agriculture office in Gaza; followed by various Civil Service roles before they both moved to Jersey in 2016. 
Back in the beginning, when she took a room in his shared house in Ramallah in the central West Bank, she saw he’d put a bouquet in her room. They were not even a couple then. “I could barely speak English.”
They were married for 15 years: “I look at my wedding ring a lot at the moment. I’m not married anymore but I’m not single either. I’ve never taken it off. I don’t know how you are supposed to go through these stages. I’m very attached to it, but hopefully not forever.”
Simon was buried wearing his ring. “They asked me if I wanted it. It took me 30 seconds but I said of course he must keep it on.”
As she heads into a week of publicising A Beginner’s Guide to Dying, it is important, she explains, for everybody to understand that Simon’s optimism, his love of life, was a result of his journey. It was real and heartfelt:
“There was a bit of joking at the funeral among his friends that it was because of morphine that he wrote the book, that he was high and happy because of the drugs.
“I know for a fact that is not the case. I asked his oncologist after one meeting where he was laughing and cracking jokes, ‘Are you giving him something that is wonderful?’ and she said, ‘It’s all him.’”
 “The steroids gave him a huge amount of energy to finish the book but the meds were the same. 
“He just got happier and happier and more detached and more calm. In that sense, it was quite wonderful and very reassuring to be near him. 
“Losing Simon changed my life, not just because I’m on my own but because I witnessed his bravery. He wasn’t just brave in the newspapers or on the radio or in what he wrote, he was like that all the time. He was floating with happiness. I can’t let this be a sad story. I want to make the most of it, for it to give a sense of direction to my life. 
“He left me some instructions: remember him as happy; be joyful; connect with people; rejoice in the little things. I really want to practice as many as I can. Connecting with people might be a challenge at the moment, but I feel I am on a bit of a mission to keep going – otherwise it was all for nothing.”
A Beginner’s Guide to Dying (Swift Press, £14.99) is out now. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books