Ep.21: Fragile

Lying in bed we can see the loch and each morning when we wake we stare at the view in disbelief and David says ‘another day in paradise’.   As we inch through spring the sun rises earlier and earlier and I find myself up at 5, watching the deer graze in the field below the house.  Two red-legged partridges peck their way across the grass under the bedroom window, chatting to each other while the house martins swoop round the eaves where they’re nesting. 

When David and I first met life was complicated.  We fell for each other over many miles spent cycling side by side but at the time we weren’t at liberty to be together and it seemed utterly impossible that we ever would be.  As we pedalled we’d talk about an alternative universe where everything would be possible.  I used to joke about stumbling across a doorway to get us there and we’d play at imagining what our house in this parallel universe would be like.  David would have a balcony, me an open plan kitchen, we’d live in the countryside with stunning views, people we loved and cared about wouldn’t be profoundly hurt and upset by our finding each other.      

In spite of the heartbreak caused through our getting together, 7 years down the line it seems we’ve found that doorway and stepped on through and every day we wake stunned by our good fortune.

The glorious April sunshine persists and we set about an ambitious idea to dig up the scrubby front lawn and create a massive pond and wildlife garden.  David is a man possessed and spends day after day wheeling quantities of stone laden clay from one part of the garden to another.

Time and again I have to catch my breath at the beauty of where our lives have landed.  We immerse ourselves in the landscape.  Above the house deer tracks lead into a birch wood so we buy camera traps and spend our evenings up on the hill searching for signs of badgers.  Each day we find yet another promising entrance to a sett, each day we clamber up the hill to retrieve the cameras at dawn, each day we laugh at our hopeless efforts to film anything other than deer and birds and bracken shivering in the breeze.

I set myself the ambition of a walk to the end of the loch with B, in part to tempt her out of her room where she’s spending more and more time but mainly so I can see if it’s possible for my body to walk that far.   We decide to go across the fields so she gently helps steer me under and over fences and through scrubby gorse.  The sense of triumph when we reach the shore infects us both.  The loch is utterly calm.  B helps me sit and while I quietly cry with gratitude just for being alive she delights in hurling gravel at the water, loving the sound it makes.  She leaps and dances on the stones and I capture her on my phone.   It’s a joyous photo bursting with life, head flung back with laughter, hair trailing, arms wide.   I look at the photo again and again, something in it makes me want to spill over, it’s at once utterly lovely and all too much.

I’m becoming increasingly aware of my tendency to weep.  I try to pin down what the problem is.  We live in the most extraordinary place, surrounded by a landscape which fills me up in every way.  This is our dream.  We live in paradise and I’m surrounded by people I love who love me back.  What’s wrong with me?

I try to articulate it to David.  I say I think I’m almost overwhelmed by how amazing everything is and I’m so scared of losing it all.  I’m waiting for the bubble to burst.  Cancer burst my bubble. Totally out of leftfield, like a random car crash, and now I’m waiting for the next car crash to happen.  All this beauty around me feels, so, fragile.  Just looking at David and B makes me panic they could disappear.  I dream we lose the house, that I give it away to a good friend of mine, and I wake up devastated, sobbing.  I start to be so scared of losing everything that everything makes me cry.  Walking to the loch in the evening, the reflection of the castle opposite, even the birdsong.  Everything.  I feel simultaneously overwhelmingly grateful for all of it but at the same time the cancer makes me so aware that at any minute it could all be taken away.

And the more I look at this as an idea, the more I realise that it has hijacked my life.  My cancer has given me a fear.  My colleague Roy calls by and I tell him how I’m feeling, he tells me to expect it won’t go away for a while, if ever.  He says I will forever be aware of the fragility of life. 

I call my friend Carla and try to explain my pain to her.  She suggests I seek some support and I realise that lockdown has stopped me seeking help.  I call the Maggies Centre the next day and talk to one of their team.  “Everything you’re thinking is normal” she tells me, “It’s still really early days”.  Is it?  I feel like it’s been interminable.  She suggests I join a zoom support group the following week so I do.  I listen to the other breast cancer survivors and hear about their own uneasy steps in their personal post-cancer- pandemic-ridden worlds but instead of finding solace and companionship in our shared experiences I feel at one remove.  I feel huge empathy for the woman who’s sense of loneliness in lockdown is overwhelming, but I don’t feel lonely.  I’m horrified for the woman who’s husband and daughter won’t look at her scarred body, who hides from them,  but I couldn’t imagine living in a home where David and B wouldn’t look at me.  I can’t compare stories of hair loss and re-gain and I can’t profess to having had any side effects from my Tamoxifen medication.  As I listen to them all, once again I just feel overwhelmingly fortunate but I’m not sure sharing my sense of good fortune feels quite right.  While we are all united in having had breast cancer we are clearly all so different in how we’re coping and feeling and I’m not sure that telling them I feel lucky would provide them with much solace.  Rather than feeling supported by a common experience I come away from the group feeling I have very little in common with these women.  We share breast cancer but that is all.  I feel like an outsider in a group that I’m supposed to feel part of and it unsettles me.   I end up using their stories as a measuring stick to make me feel more fortunate but feeling fortunate and grateful doesn’t make me any less afraid that my world just might break.