Up Front 11/05

The story of a mother’s love for her child is always guaranteed to cut right to the bone of even the coldest hearted person, but never so poignantly as when that mother is dying of cancer. As October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, it is somehow fitting that a song written by terminally ill Portland mum, Maxine Edgington, for her fifteen year-old daughter Jessica, is being released as a single. Co-written with Burton Bradstock’s Billy Bragg, during a series of workshops at the Trimar Hospice in Weymouth, the song, We Laughed, has every chance of becoming a top selling record. If so, then nothing could be more fitting. Not because it points to the pain and sadness that terminal illness brings to so many people, but because it highlights the value we can put on those around us. When her condition was diagnosed in November 2004, Maxine Edgington’s first thought was how it would affect her daughter. She commissioned a series of photographs, so that one day her daughter could show her own children how happy they had been. One of those photographs was the inspiration for the song. It may be a huge hit or it may be a minor hit. It might not even make it into the charts, and more cynical music fans and critics will probably not see beyond what they, wrongly, consider to be commercialisation of a sad story. However anyone touched by this story can only gain from the strength and commitment of those that helped to bring it to a wider audience.