By Sarah Caden
Sunday Mar 1 2009

Last week, with her wedding over, Jade Goody began planning another major event.

The wedding, last Sunday, was a huge occasion, filmed for her ongoing documentary series, photographed for a magazine deal, attended by as many TV personalities and celebrities as it was by family and friends. For a woman in the full of her health, it would be a massive undertaking, draining, exhausting and emotionally depleting. For a woman with a terminal illness, in constant pain, it could have sapped her of the strength she needs to survive. Still, within days, Jade was planning the next big thing, her little boys' christenings.

On Saturday, Jade's sons, Bobby, five, and four-year-old Freddie, will be christened, their mother's hope being that if they are closer to God, they may be able to connect with her in heaven. It's a heartbreaking hope, made all the more pitiful by the possibility that Jade may be lucky to make it to their big day. But of course, she clings to hope. The hope of a miracle that she mentioned in her wedding speech, the hope that she has longer than doctors have predicted, the hope that by planning something, something special and significant and set to be filmed and photographed, that she simply can't die. Because as much as people sneer at Jade's living and dying in the public eye, for her it's not so much a reality-TV exercise as her reality. Being a focus of public attention, being famous, is Jade's life. It's what saved her life once, and, in a strange way, she may hope it will save her life again. It won't and it won't make everyone like her -- it never did -- but she cannot be judged for hoping or for dying as she lived.

After an interview on the Seoige television show last week, Jade's publicist Max Clifford expressed shock at the sisters' attitude to his client. He found them to be "antagonistic" in their approach and was "disappointed" at the suggestion that Jade's selling of the rights to her wedding and the continued filming of her last days was something people found distasteful. Clifford said his experience of public opinion was that people understood Jade's desire to provide for her sons, in order to save them from the kind of childhood she endured and said he was shocked that the Seoiges were not aware of this.

In response, a spokesperson for the Seoige show said they were trying to give a balanced view of the situation, but their standpoint is telling of the media response to Jade's conduct. There is a desire either to make a saint or a sinner of her, to celebrate or to slam the public manner of her dying days. The beatifying is patronising, the demonising even more so; and the reality is that she is doing this as she has done everything. It's peculiar and it's certainly not for everyone, but it's real for Jade.

Perhaps to take the edge off the harsh reality of our mortality, we all try to find meaning in illness and death. We feel comforted when the terminally ill bear their burden bravely and feel relief if they accept rather than rail against the inevitable, in the hope that some day we will experience similar peace. And in death, we are loath to speak ill of the deceased and tend to gloss over the more complicated reality of human relationships. These days, in fact, it has even become commonplace to refer to dying as "passing", as though it makes it nicer. But there's nothing nice about dying, and many of us are not improved by the knowledge that it is imminent. Illness doesn't necessarily teach you an invaluable lesson or make you a better person and it hasn't altered Jade.

When she was removed from the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2007, Jade Goody probably believed all was lost and ruined for her. Her life of privilege and comfort, she feared, was over, shattered by her bad temper, her bullying tendencies, the brutal ignorance that has proved both her most endearing and appalling feature. She must have been terrified, as people turned their back on her, shunned her -- potentially permanently. She did not know

then that worse was ahead, but it must, then, have felt like the end of her life.

What was overlooked in the furore over Jade's behaviour in the Celebrity Big Brother house, however, was the behaviour of those who had entered it with her. Jade's mother, Jackiey Budden, had also been in there, along with Jack Tweed -- now her new husband. They had been the real curiosity until the row with Shilpa shifted our focus, -- Jackiey for her tendency to allow Jade to mother her, all the while egging Jade on into fits of temper and aggression; and Jack for his utter passivity.

In the Celebrity Big Brother house, neither Jackiey nor Jack steered Jade away from the dangerous side of her personality and both, we knew, were living off her -- two children, effectively. Jade was a 25-year-old mother of two actual children at that stage. However, it was obvious Jackiey had never been the adult in the relationship between mother and daughter, and Jack was only 19. It was pathetic, it allowed for a whole new sympathy for Jade and appreciation of her desire to get out and get on and get a life for herself of her own making, and then she went and spoiled it all with her "Shilpa poppadom" outburst. She had been building up towards that for some days, without either of her loved ones telling her to stop, take stock and calm down. It highlighted the lack of care taken of Jade in what we, in our smugness, might consider to be real, off-camera life and suggested, in fact, that Jade has been protected, even parented, by her reality-TV existence. It gives her attention, feedback, criticism and praise, helps her to distinguish bad from good. It's not something you'd prescribe for everyone, but it saved Jade Goody's life once.

And you have to believe Jade is sincere in thinking her efforts to make as much money as possible in her last weeks is purely for the benefit of her sons. Certainly, there is the need in her for the attention that comes with having the £3,500 wedding dress given to her by Harrods, her wedding to Jack Tweed photographed for a magazine, and the Sugababes as her wedding band -- and all the fuss of being the centre of attention, as ever.

But on the more brutal side, she's married a very young man just out of prison for assault, who's wearing an electronic tag on his ankle and has had the 7pm curfew of his probation conditions lifted only for his wedding night and for Jade's forthcoming final hours. She hardly wants her mother to raise her two boys as she reared her and she's more aware than most of the difference a cushion of wealth can make in life. This is her means to make a difference. It's not particularly nice, or heartwarming or life-affirming, but it's the last chance Jade has to make a success of herself.

Last August's trip to Mumbai for the Indian version of Big Brother and a reconciliation with Shilpa Shetty was probably perceived by Jade as a second chance. Like any 27-year-old, she imagined her whole life stretching out ahead and believed she must fix her future, until it was snatched away.

To live in the public eye, was and is for Jade the way to live. It was and is life itself. It saved her once -- from her child-mother and her lack of prospects -- and while her hope of a comeback was not what she imagined, it is, in its strange way, saving her again.

By giving her hope, by giving her days meaning and focus and a significance that makes sense to her.

It won't save her, but it confirms that she's still alive.

- Sarah Caden

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