Dr Claire Gilbert had spent her career in the space between faith and public life. She was the founding director of the Westminster Abbey Institute. She had worked for the Archbishops' Council of the Church of England as a policy adviser in medical ethics. She was an author, a lecturer, a mentor. She had helped other people think clearly about life and death.
Then death stopped being a policy question and became personal.
The Diagnosis
Myeloma. Terminal blood cancer. The kind where doctors do not talk about cures. They talk about management, about buying time, about making the most of what remains. Claire Gilbert — a woman who had advised some of the most powerful religious leaders in England — was now facing the one question that no amount of institutional wisdom could answer.
The Fear
There is a specific kind of fear that arrives with a terminal diagnosis. It is not just fear of dying. It is fear of the slow unravelling. Fear that the pain will strip you of dignity. Fear that the people you love will watch you diminish. Fear that everything you have built — the ideas, the relationships, the faith — will crumble under the weight of what is happening to your body.
Claire felt all of it. She was not protected by her intellect or her theology or her position. Cancer does not care about your CV.
The Encounter
But Claire Gilbert did something that would transform her remaining time into something luminous. She began writing letters — to a circle of trusted friends, to anyone who would listen — about what she was discovering in the darkness.
She found Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic who had written from an anchoress's cell: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Those were not the words of a woman in denial. They were the words of a woman who had seen something beyond the suffering — and what she had seen was so beautiful that it made the suffering bearable.
Claire's letters became a book — Miles to Go Before I Sleep. And in those pages, something extraordinary emerges. Not denial. Not the stiff upper lip of someone pretending to be fine. But defiance. A joy so fierce it surprised everyone who encountered it. A woman who had been told she was dying and responded by learning to live more fully than she ever had.
Her faith, she wrote, was "no simple solace." It was "a whole new realm of meaning."
The Freedom
Claire did not claim to be free from cancer. She claimed something harder and perhaps more miraculous: she was free from the fear of it. The myeloma remained, but the terror did not. In its place was a presence — the love of God, experienced not as a doctrine but as a person walking beside her through every scan, every treatment, every difficult conversation.
She wrote an open letter after King Charles received his own cancer diagnosis, sharing the lessons she had learned. Her words carried the authority of someone who was not theorising about suffering — she was inside it, and she was not afraid.
What This Means for You
If your diagnosis is terminal — if the doctors have used the word "incurable" and the fear is so heavy you can barely breathe — Claire Gilbert's life says something that you need to hear.
You are not required to be fine. You are not required to have perfect faith. But you are invited into something that the fear cannot touch: the love of God, which is wider than your diagnosis and longer than your prognosis.
Julian of Norwich wrote those words from a cell. Claire Gilbert lived them from a hospital. And both of them discovered the same thing: the fear is real, but the love is realer. All shall be well. Not because the cancer disappears. But because the One who holds you does not.