For those people, and there are many of them, that think hospices only offer clinical care for people at the end of life, the experience of people like Emily Georghiou and her husband Glenn are an essential reminder that hospices do so much more.
As Emily, 47, explains so eloquently: “I feel very lucky to have a hospice like St Christopher’s near me and I am very grateful for the support they’ve offered beyond the clinical. It’s helped me to forge relationships that make me feel they will be there for me when things get worse.”
18 months after her initial referral to St Christopher’s, following a very delayed diagnosis with advanced cancer, Emily shared a number of art works in an exhibition in Lambeth at the end of 2024. The paintings and ceramics were all produced or inspired by art therapy sessions with St Christopher’s Integrative Art Psychotherapist, Hilary Powers.
“Before I had the kids, I’d always been creative, doing ceramics courses and stained glass but I’d never really done any painting. “Hilary has been amazing. She made me feel really welcome, confident to try new things and open up in a way I hadn’t been able to with anyone else.”
Having spent her career campaigning for equity and rights in health, care and communities and better later lives for our ageing population, Emily had heard of St Christopher’s and end of life care.
However, as a woman in her 40s and a mother to young children, she never expected to be accessing their services at this stage of her life.
“One of the hardest things about my situation is having young children.”
“When I first visited, I didn’t feel like I fitted in and was there way before my time. Mentally that’s very hard to come to terms with. It was actually my husband who visited first, benefitting greatly from talking to a social worker,” she says.
“It really helped that someone came to assess me at home and it was actually their complimentary services – acupuncture and art therapy – which brought me to St Christopher’s. I’d always imagined I would return to the arts, but I didn’t anticipate it would be through art therapy.
“But it’s given me an opportunity to express myself in ways I hadn’t even tried before. Hilary just opened up the art studio and let me do whatever I wanted to.”
“There’s something about art therapy that meant I could just chat.”
Living with life threatening illness and uncertainty is a daily battle of the body and mind.
Finding outlets for herself is really important for Emily.
“Sometimes this stuff is too big to talk about and traditional counselling didn’t always work for me, but there’s something about art therapy that meant I could just chat and, like with my art, whatever came out was both valid and valuable. There’s something really special about one-to-one and the sense of safety that enables you to express yourself.”
One of the outlets Emily found was connecting with other disabled and neurodiverse people (Auditory Processing Deficit and now cancer in Emily’s case) through disabled-led digital arts organisation FilmPro. Their upskill labs support creative arts in disability activism. Some of Emily’s pieces produced or inspired by art therapy at St Christopher’s appeared at FilmPro’s studios.
To tell the story behind these works, Emily made a short, captioned film in her local park, using skills she learnt through the programme.
“For the first painting I used lots of different, bright colours. It looked joyous, masking how I really felt. The second painting was full of blacks, purples and blues. Hilary commented that in the darkness there was still hope and light. You have to find a way to have hope.”
When Hilary handed Emily a lump of clay, she probably didn’t anticipate the result, a brutally honest ‘sh*t sandwich’, which summed up how Emily felt at the time
Other work displayed a beautiful Kintsugi bowl. Literally meaning ‘gold’ ‘join’, this ancient Japanese art form and philosophy teaches us to embrace life’s challenges and celebrate the perfectly imperfect.
Budgetary constraints mean St Christopher’s is only able to offer people like Emily six art therapy sessions. However, she’s excited to learn that Hilary has plans for further engagement, bringing together other young mothers like Emily.
As Vice Chair and Lead Patient for the online patient and carer support group Breaking BRAF (for people with advanced BRAF mutated bowel cancer), Emily understands how important it is to have peer support, information and to find ways to cope with difficult diagnosis.
“One of the hardest things about my situation is having young children. I’d discussed with Hilary, during our sessions, how there’s a real lack of support for people at our life stage, particularly those with children and the crushing worry of how and when to talk to them about what’s happening to mummy.”
Emily reflects on her wider experience of St Christopher’s to date and how she now feels about future interactions with the hospice.
“I’ve always valued the warm welcome you get, particularly from the volunteers, at St Christopher’s. Now, thanks to the support my husband has received and the outreach and complimentary therapy I have benefited from, especially art therapy, we’ve built relationships in what feels like a safe space we can return to when we need to.
“The gardens and studio space felt like havens of wellbeing, where I could be myself in the midst of all this hideousness. I’m grateful to be able to share my story through the artworks I’ve created and the platform Filmpro has provided.”
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This article is republished from https://www.stchristophers.org.uk/emilys-art-story with permission
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