A reflection on a year of care, loss and grief amidst the creation of Care Full from co-founder Hannah Webster.

When we launched Care Full at the start of 2024 I knew that we were creating a place where the personal and professional would be deeply connected; I wanted to be part of pushing forward a more caring economy at a time when I was at the sharp end of care myself. My husband – Bobby – was living with stage four cancer and it was getting harder and harder to work on anyone else’s schedule.

I could feel how the hardest parts of my life were the result of systems that didn’t care, or didn’t value the care of others. These systems were in contrast to my life at home which was intentionally wrapped around the grace of care. Unlike the binaries used to talk about acts of unpaid care in policy, I could see that a mutuality exists in care, and joy and peace can be borne from its gentle touch.

And so, the start of Care Full came with the consciousness of a delicate balance between my experiences. My hope was borne from ‘lived experience’, whilst my ability to take action came from my ‘professional experience’. But as author and researcher Emily Kenway says, it’s absurd to try to separate care out of our lives and act exclusively from a professional perspective, and so I took on this work with the understanding and intention that my two selves meet.

Whilst at Care Full we resist the sob story approach – something traditional media in particular are often keen to push onto carers – I can acknowledge that it is through the adversity of care within a capitalist economy that much of my understanding of what needs to change comes. And with that there are some things about my experiences which I see value in being open with.

That openness not only signals the things we have experienced at Care Full, but also the perspectives they have led us to. For me care has become intertwined with every part of my life. I am formed by it.

But recently, my relationship with care has changed. As we moved into Autumn last year, Bobby passed away in our home by the sea. 

Bobby was the inspiration, motivation and cheerleader behind my work towards Care Full. He believed that our lives could be opened up by our relationship with illness; that there is joy to be found in a world where we understand our bodies are fallible and our time precious. He understood that we had foundations in our life that not everyone was afforded, and that any peace we could reach was supported by those foundations. And he believed in me. Whilst I was technically the ‘carer’, he created an environment of care in our home that was reciprocal and which, in his last months, became as life-giving as the air we were breathing in.

Together, his hopefulness, sense of justice and generally being pro-me meant he was Care Full’s biggest supporter. The ideas that are at the centre of our work have all been refracted through him – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly and sometimes with the work just being better by having been surrounded by his glow.

As he became poorlier everything I thought I knew about the boundaries of care were ripped up and rebuilt. In a short time I learned what it means to give your all to someone you love, and now I’m learning how to find what I need to care for myself.

It’s given me pause to reflect on the work that is important. I’ve been a researcher for my whole career, once dealing in numbers but over time understanding more and more the value of stories in making change happen. Now I’m looking at the world anew. For the most part we have the evidence and we know the problems, so perhaps what we need is more opportunity to come together, to understand each other and to give permission to think differently.

I often think of David Graeber’s words, which opened up that permission for me; the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. For me this allows me to hold close that our world can still embrace care with ambition and optimism and hope. We can change towards a knowledge that the care we give is about all of us and for all of us.

Some of the change needed is tangible but the biggest shift has to be in our understanding of what it means to care. As Care Full moves into its second year I’ll be putting this purpose at the centre of everything I do. And while I’m doing it I know anyone who sees my work will also see Bobby. How lucky they are.