We would often describe Spence as a bit of a Mr. Hyde / Dr. Jekyll type. On his good days Spencer truly was one of the most loving people I have ever met, a pure unadulterated love – no bullshit; just love bursting out of his heart trying to touch yours. However, sadly Spencer was no exception to Newton’s third law and on his bad days he was quite a handful to put it politely… In almost all of these instances his behaviour reflected how he was feeling. Either spiking electrical levels in his brain due to his epilepsy, a knock-on effect of the continuous concoction of drugs he was on, or underlying anxiety that he struggled to communicate. Much of the work was not taking these behaviours at face value, instead trying to read between the lines to work out what the cause was. This was often blind guess work and some process of trial and error.
Though no matter how challenging he could be at times any glimpse into his loving heart whether that was through his (often suffocating) hugs or his (sometimes snot producing) laugh, and everything that had come before faded to black. You were just grateful to be around him.
Spencer had such a distinctive way of making everyone feel like they were the most important, most special, and most loved person in his world. One time, a family friend remarked that Spencer must really like her because he’d said he loved her or sung her a song or something of the sort. My mum laughed and said, “yeah maybe, I mean he does that to the dry cleaner too.” I think in the world that most of us inhabit, that would undermine Spencer’s statements to our friend. It seemingly degrades the value of supposedly special statements when you make them to people as random as the dry cleaner, but that is not how things were in Spencer’s mind. He really did love and cherish the friend in question but also loved the dry cleaner just as much! For Spencer if it was out of sight, it was often out of mind, he lived very much in the here and now. On this point, I think we could all learn a thing or two from him.
At home in Sheen, there used to be a Blockbusters. It went bust maybe 10 years ago now, but we like to joke that we prolonged its life span by a not insignificant period of time. Every Friday (routine was pretty important for Spencer) we would go to Blockbusters and pick a DVD to rent. Spencer absolutely loved transactions and paying for things, so he enjoyed these trips immensely. We went there so often, and were probably quite memorable, that Spencer built up good friendships with the staff. We have this beautiful, collective family memory of Spencer serenading the lovely girls who were working in Blockbusters at the time. Down on one knee, singing his heart out to ‘Crazy’ by Bruno Mars – he really was a charmer.
mountains of my life 