Mark McLaughlin
Edinburgh Evening News
March 3, 2009
'I'VE seen death sitting in the bed next to me, and it's not something you'd want to watch on TV." Junaid Ahmad shakes his head sadly, as he lays out the latest glossy magazines and tabloid newspapers on the shelves of his Broughton Street newsagents. The striking image of a dying young mother, bald and increasingly frail, is splashed across the front of many of them.
Currently, Junaid spends much of his working day looking at pictures of Jade Goody, the reality TV star and mother-of-two who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
The 27-year-old now has perhaps just weeks to live after the disease, diagnosed as cervical cancer last August, spread to her liver and bowel.
She has pledged to make as much money as possible from her final days for her sons, Bobby, five, and Freddie, four - she reportedly made GBP 800,000 from selling photo and TV rights for her wedding to fiancé Jack Tweed alone, and she has also hinted she may allow the cameras to capture her last moments.
All of this has been almost too much to bear for 38-year-old Junaid who, just four months ago, watched as his own wife Shafquat died at the age of 42, another victim of cancer. "Jade recently said that she had lived her life in the public eye, and that she wants to die in the public eye, but to me life and death are two different things.
"She even said she may want her final hours to be filmed on television but to me this is unspeakable," he says sadly.
"It's relentless. Every single morning it's all about Jade Goody. She looks just like Shafquat did in her last few months, and it's too much for me and the children to bear."
It was October 17, 2007 - Junaid's 37th birthday - when the couple were given the devastating news that Shafquat was suffering from cancer in the glands in her armpit.
"I'll never forget that day," he says.
"My wife had a swelling under her arm and she had been to the doctor that morning for the results of some tests. The doctor told her it was cancer.
"We had the whole family coming round that day for a party. Shafquat was pale and upset and everyone kept asking what was wrong, but she was very brave and told them all she was just tired.
"After a couple of hours I took her out for a drive so we could talk it over."
Within a few weeks Shafquat was taken into hospital to have the tumour removed, and was put on an immediate round of chemo and radiotherapy.
The couple's children Hosam, 16, and Aaqib, nine, were not told of their mother's condition, and she hid her hair loss with the help of a wig.
Following her treatment, Shafquat was given the all-clear. The family moved into a new house in a quiet cul-de-sac in Drylaw and began to look forward to a fresh start, but in August last year, just as Goody was diagnosed, Shafquat began suffering from terrible headaches.
"We thought it was just the stress of the move and the result of everything that had happened over the previous year, but she went back to the hospital and she was told the cancer had returned and spread to her brain," recalls Junaid.
"It was too risky to operate, and her only hope was another round of radiotherapy.
"We were warned that the radiotherapy would either kill the cancer, or the radiation would act like a food and cause it to spread more rapidly.
"In the end the radiotherapy didn't work and Shafquat was told that she didn't have long to live.
"The headaches started getting much worse and she was given morphine for the pain. The doctor kept giving her stronger and stronger painkillers, and she became hazier by the day with all of the drugs and it felt like she was slipping away from us.
"Then, one day, she slipped into a coma and . . ." Junaid's voice breaks with emotion before he continues in a whisper. "She died."
Shafquat died at St Columba's Hospice on November 7, 2008. Her death has left not just her husband and children devastated but the whole close-knit family.
Junaid, who was born in the Pakistani district of Pir Mahal, around 70 miles south-east of Faisalabad, met his Dundee-born wife Shafquat at a family party in Pakistan.
The couple were first cousins, a common pairing in Pakistani marriages. The family was all the closer because Junaid's sister Nusrat, 45, is also married to Shafquat's elder brother Ashfaq, 49.
Shafquat set up the family's Broughton Street news and grocery business in 1988, and called it Shamoon's after her favourite nephew Mehboob Shamoon Ahmad, Nusrat's first son, who is now 23.
Four years later, in April 1992, Junaid and Shafquat were married in front of nearly 500 family and friends at Musselburgh's Brunton Hall and Shafquat soon gave birth to the couple's two boys. By 2000 their family was complete.
Nusrat struggles to hold back the tears as she lays out the latest morning papers featuring a bald and fragile Goody. "Every day it's the exact same story and it's making it hard for us to forget. Shafquat was 15 when I moved to Edinburgh and we were extremely close," she says.
The hardest part of Shafquat's death has been explaining to her children why their mummy is no longer around.
Junaid says: "When Shafquat had her first round of therapy we didn't want to upset the children, so we just told them that mummy was ill and very tired, and to try not to annoy her too much in the way that children do.
"The wig was very effective at hiding the hair loss, and the children just thought their mummy had got a new hairstyle.
"Since she died I've had to raise the children on my own. I get up in the morning to take them to school and then I have to be back in the shop, and then I pick them up again at three o'clock.
"I couldn't do it without Nusrat, who has been with me all the way, helping me out at the store.
"The children have been very upset. They regularly cry when their thinking about their mummy, and they keep asking questions that I don't have the answer for. The most common question is 'why my mummy?'. To that extent I am able to point to Jade Goody in the newspaper and demonstrate to them that it's not just their mummy, that it does happen to other people, even famous people, but there's only so often that you can see someone's face in the paper before it stops being about raising awareness, and starts to become upsetting."
Unlike Goody, any extra money Junaid manages to scrape together doesn't go on his own family.
"I visit my wife's grave every Sunday but I do not take her flowers. Every spare penny that I have I give to St Columba's Hospice.
"I understand Jade's trying to raise money for her family, but I think her fame would be better spent raising money for and the profile of the many cancer charities out there who are working to find better treatments.
"It's easy to look out for your own, but I think the mark of a real human being is being able to look out for others around you."
For more on St Columba's, go to www.stcolumbashospice.org.uk
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