My wife, Ruth Keen, who has died of a brain tumour aged 35, was a teacher, artist, volunteer, pub quiz lover and incorrigible compiler of neologisms and portmanteau words. Particular favourites in her vocabulary were: “shimmick”, referring to a pointless or contrived item or situation (I’ll leave you to guess the first word of origin, but the second is “gimmick”); and “podge and bodge”, which described her unwavering breakfast routine of eating porridge while wearing an over-size fleece dressing-gown back to front.
Ruth was born in Lambeth, south London, the daughter of Christine (nee Flaxman), a teacher, and John Keen, an educational psychologist. Her parents’ background in public service, and her childhood in unruly, multicultural Streatham, strongly shaped her adult perspective. The family’s move to Cheltenham in her early teenage years earned this comment in an autobiographical essay written aged 14: “I wasn’t used to seeing all white people. I thought it was a bit strange.”
A clutch of A-levels later, Ruth was back in her beloved London, studying human sciences at University College. She took postgraduate diplomas in psychology and in education, and worked as a primary school teacher and in special needs support. She was well set on her aim of following her father into educational psychology when in 2008 her disease revealed itself and checked her progress.
Ruth’s later years were often interrupted by surgery and treatment, and she felt acutely the frustrations of living life in the sidelines of her previous existence. Thwarted in her original plans, she threw herself into new pursuits and reawakened dormant ones. She wrote about her experience of having brain surgery while awake as information for other patients, and volunteered at Connect, a charity helping those with communication difficulties.
She ventured into Guardian Soulmates, which is how she and I met in 2009. Our wedding day in 2012 was the happiest of both our lives (my abiding memory is of Ruth on the dance floor singing along to Aloe Blacc’s I Need a Dollar, her index finger thrust purposefully into the air). At university, she had taken a course at the Slade School of Fine Art, and she turned to art again for comfort and purpose. Her early paintings were photo-realistic landscapes, but she grew more confident even as she became less well, and her later landscapes are vibrant, colourful and expressionistic – scenes as she felt them, rather than saw them.
Ruth is survived by me, by her parents, and by her brother, Freddie.
