Secondary: Rapid Response Assemblies


Jade Goody's life and death
By Tim and Vicky Scott

Suitable for Key Stage 4 upwards (could be sensitively adapted for Key Stage 3)

Aim

To reflect on the sad loss of Jade Goody, what her life and death teach us and how cancer can affect even the young.

Preparation and materials

• Pictures of Jade with her boys are readily available from the internet.

Assembly

1. Towards the end of her life, Jade was on the front pages of the tabloid papers every day. In its way, the story of the final weeks of her illness, the way she traded privacy to safeguard her children’s financial future, and even her baptism, is ‘serious’ news. Baptism, after all, is about the transformation of life, and so is her story.
   
2. It is rare for anyone’s dying to be chronicled, filmed, recorded and analysed as publicly as this one. Every detail of Jade Goody’s condition has been revealed in the newspapers. Did this excessive media frenzy of her terminal illness go too far? Was it a distortion of the public’s ‘right to know’? Perhaps. Yet surely if Jade wished us to know (and she did), then she had the right to share the experience with us.
   
3. Whatever we may think of Jade Goody and her brief time in the public spotlight, no one would wish such a painful and premature death on anyone. Jade was diagnosed with cervical cancer just seven months ago, in August 2008, while she was appearing on the Indian version of Big Brother. If unchecked, this form of cancer can be a silent killer. However, a test is available in this country called the Pap smear, or smear test, where a small sample of cells are removed and checked to see whether any of them are potentially cancerous. Her death has raised the profile of this test and could save hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.
   
4. This test is required once a female is sexually active and is generally available from the age of 18 at most doctors’ surgeries. However, the age at which it becomes available is under debate, so the age band could be lowered. This is because of the rise in the number of people becoming sexually active at a younger age.
   
5. Prevention is always better than cure, and we are fortunate in the West to have such options available to us. Since the introduction of regular smears in the Western world, the rates of cervical cancer have plummeted. If a woman has the test regularly throughout her life, the chances of her contracting cervical cancer are reduced by over 90 per cent.
   
6. Sadly, despite such encouraging statistics, the number of young women attending screening has been falling all across the UK, even though cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in women under 35. Ultimately, if the disease is caught early, the chances of surviving are very good. However, in Jade’s case, it seems that she didn’t have this simple test and was unaware of the cancer’s growth in her body for some time.
   
7. There is no evidence that this type of cancer can develop in schoolgirls, since their bodies are still developing. Even so, this does not mean that this subject is irrelevant. Without an awareness of such issues, more young women like Jade will carry on their life oblivious to the dangers of sexual activity without the correct tests.
   

Time for reflection

Reflection

Jade’s willingness to share the experience of her final illness made it different, gave it a strange but deep significance. Jade has reminded us that dying is also part of life and that, right to the last moment, decisions can be made, steps taken, relationships healed and real change experienced. As Christians travel through the season of Lent towards Good Friday and Easter, the notion of real change is a strong theme – new life coming out of hopeless situations.

In her last weeks, Jade seemed to have found a new inner strength, a determination to do whatever needed to be done. Her life to this point had been a strange mixture of deprivation and amazing popularity. Now, at last, what she did was not for her alone but entirely for others.

She was not, and never claimed to be, a saintly figure. She knew she had made mistakes in her life. That is precisely why her story has moved ordinary people so deeply. We can’t see ourselves as Nelson Mandela, but we can see ourselves as Jade Goody: fallible, human, frightened; yet, right to the last, longing for love, looking for hope, wanting to feel that the faith we have grasped makes some kind of sense, and that the life we have lived has a proper conclusion to it. That’s why it was important to Jade to get married to her boyfriend Jack and for her children to be baptised. A lot of us will want to say: ‘Thank you, Jade, for reminding us that life does have a purpose and meaning to it.’