Grantham professor publishes first book detailing her husband's battle with illness and suicide

A Grantham professor has published her first book, which tells the story of her husband's five-year battle with an undiagnosed illness and his suicide.

Sarah Tarlow, 55, is a professor of archaeology at the University of Leicester and an expert in the archaeology of death and burial.

She was widowed in May 2016 when her husband, Mark Pluciennik, ended his own life aged 63 after suffering for five years with a bitter, drawn-out and undiagnosed illness which left him unable to care for himself.

Sarah has written a book based on her experiences, entitled 'The Archaeology of Loss', which will be released on April 20. Although she has written or edited 10 academic books about archaeology and history, this is her first memoir.

"I didn’t write [the book] as therapy," Sarah said. "I wrote it for two reasons. One because I wanted to see if I could produce a piece of literature that could get published, and also I wrote it because I felt very angry about the way that Mark died, that he ended his life on his own.

"I think it was a tremendously brave and loving thing to do, but he didn’t tell me he wasn’t going to do it, so he had to die on his own. It upsets me that he had to die on his own and I felt quite strongly about that."

Sarah explained that Mark was in "a terrible state when he died" and was in "constant discomfort".

She continued: "There were multiple problems and, as far as we could see, there was no real prospect of him getting better. It was a challenging situation, because we didn’t have a very clear diagnosis.

"We knew that he had encephalomyelitis [a neurological disorder that affects the brain and spinal cord], but we didn't know what was causing it.

"He was being seen by a team of specialists in Oxford. They were great, but they still couldn’t work out what was happening.

"We didn’t know for sure that he was going to die, but it did look more and more like he was not going to get better."

Mark, like Sarah, was also an archaeologist and the pair met at Lampeter, part of the University of Wales, when they interviewed for the same job. Mark got the job, and Sarah was offered a role in the same department six months later.

“He was an extremely intelligent, sharp man," said Sarah. "It was wonderful that we could bounce ideas off each other. He would often keep me on my toes intellectually. There was definitely a strong component of that in the relationship."

Sarah's memoirs focus on the five years that Mark was ill, but she said that the book is "not about grief and bereavement so much as about caring and loss, and the issue of assisted dying".

She said: “When Mark was very ill, I found that extremely difficult to do. The caring, the full-time job, young children and so on.

"When I looked at other books that were about caring and death, the carers always seemed so angelic and all they ever thought about was the comfort of the person they loved.

“I thought, well that’s not been my experience. I feel really grumpy a lot of the time. I feel really exhausted a lot of the time and absolutely fed up, and I didn’t see that in the literature that I was reading, so I wanted to write something that was honest."

Sarah said that Mark's decline was "gradual" over the five years, starting with seizures, but progressed until Mark lost his physical abilities, with Sarah explaining that he "found it difficult to walk after a few years".

"It was a unique condition. There was no case in medical literature that was exactly like Mark.

“I think it made it much harder for various reasons. We didn’t have a prognosis, because we didn’t know what was causing it. So we didn't know if he was going to get better, or how long we were looking at. It was really difficult from that point of view."

When Mark died, Sarah's daughter had just finished her first year at university, while her younger brothers, aged 13 and 11, were at King's School and National Junior School respectively.

Sarah said that her children had been "really supportive" of the book, in particular, her youngest, Greg, who was six when Mark became ill.

"He’s been quite interested in finding out about Mark as a person, as a man," added Sarah.

“I hope [people] will find the book thought-provoking, moving, funny occasionally.

"It combines bits of archaeology, bits of history, reflections from my personal life, which I hope other people will find interesting and I hope they will respond to the honesty of my particular experience of caring and bereavement."

The couple moved to Grantham at the end of 2015, as it was close to Sarah's work, and they had found a property with an outhouse, so that Mark could take up sausage-making, having given up archaeology.

“In the end, he never got to make sausages here and so on," said Sarah, but they remained in the town as the children were settled in school.

‘The Archaeology of Loss’ is available to pre-order ahead of its release on April 20 via Amazon and other retailers.

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