"You did a lot of good, Gary"

Sunday 02 January 2022

Alan Burgess released a message after announcing that his husband, the broadcaster and journalist Gary Burgess, had died at Jersey Hospice on New Year's Day.

Alan said that Gary "did a lot of good" and thanked well-wishers for "the positivity, warmth and support" which the couple received following Gary's diagnosis with terminal cancer in November 2020.

His full message - released with the title 'A message from Gary's husband, Alan' - is reproduced below.

"It is with great sadness that I need to announce the death of my wonderful husband Gary on Saturday 1 January. After many years of fighting cancer, Gary died peacefully in his sleep in Jersey Hospice.

I would like to publicly thank all of the many people and services within Jersey, and also at Southampton General Hospital, who have cared for Gary so well over the last seven years through all of the different stages of this disease. Gary was always grateful for the many kindnesses he was shown, whether it was from the nurses in the Oncology ward, the porters wheeling him down corridors when he was too weak to walk by himself or the cups of coffee made by volunteers in the MacMillan Oasis Suite.

I have to say a special thank you to Jersey Hospice and the Clinical Investigations team from Jersey's Hospital, who together enabled Gary to stay safely and comfortably at home for as long as possible in accordance with his wishes. He was even able to continue making occasional trips to his favourite breakfast spots on the island with his oxygen tank in hand.

And finally I have to say thank you to the many well-wishers, be they friends, family, colleagues, ex­-colleagues, viewers, radio listeners, blog readers or complete strangers, who have sent us their love and kind words since Gary received his terminal diagnosis in November 2020. At times we have both found the volume of messages to be almost overwhelming, but we were always thankful for the positivity, warmth and support shown to us both.

I expect there will be many tributes made to Gary in the coming hours and days and I want to keep my words about him now as simple as I can. Through his career in journalism and broadcasting, Gary would have seen every variation of words describing someone's strength and bravery, their wit and humour, their kindness and generosity, their stubbornness and determination, their sense of mischief and their joy in life's simple pleasures. So, in an attempt to avoid cliché, I am just going to misquote a line of dialogue from the final episode of The West Wing, being one of Gary's favourite programmes and something said with love and pride by one spouse to the other.

You did a lot of good, Gary. A lot of good."

Pictured (top): Gary Burgess and his husband, Alan, were the first couple in Jersey to convert their civil partnership into marriage, back in 2018. Credit: HuffPost.