Ep.31: I’m here. I hear. I know.

A place to sit and think by Loch Ness.

A friend of ours has cancer.  A fellow cyclist, someone I’ve spent many hours cycling alongside.  Another fit, happy, life-loving, positive person has cancer.  Another person who was floating through life thinking they’d be the last person on earth to get cancer, has got cancer.  It’s the first friend to be diagnosed since my own diagnosis and I feel frozen.  ‘You’re in my head and my heart’, I immediately text, ‘please don’t feel you need reply,  but if you ever need to talk then I’m here’  then I press send before that strange instinct to look away from someone’s else pain pauses me. 

When it comes to dreadful news we broadly divide into two camps, those who step forward and those who can’t.  I remember when I got my diagnosis and David’s brother John and his wife, Liz, immediately arranged to come over.  I felt touched by this strength on their part to – as I saw it – step into the eye of the storm, lower themselves down into the trench with us, knowing they couldn’t offer anything more than their company, knowing it might be emotional quicksand, knowing – I now realise – that they were already dealing with Liz’s mum’s cancer.   I remember being somewhat taken aback by how many of our friends were brave enough to take that step forward into our pain, to lift me onto their collective shoulders and push my head up above the miserable flow.  For those who looked away I understood that too.  Sometimes we think that to over-invest in bad news gives it greater traction.  If we downplay what’s happening, if we treat this as a minor blip then it follows that it will be.  But I’m not sure cancer is ever a blip in a lifeline.

I think back to that time now, when I heard, as I wonder how best to step into our friend’s freshly forming cancer hell.  What did I want when I found out?  Who did I turn to?  What did I need in those first desperate days and weeks?   So when he calls and stutters out his shock and fear and sheer disbelief at the path he’s being pushed down, I don’t tell him it will all be alright and I don’t say he’s strong enough to beat this, because who am I to know what he’s up against or what strength is required.  And I don’t lecture him about the power of positivity, god forbid I ever dole out the think positive bullshit, no, I listen to his story and I listen to his pain.   And through his pain he says he’s asked how long he has but the doctors have told him that everyone is different when it comes to battling cancer and they don’t yet know how far it might have spread.  I try to reassure him that although he’s on a uniquely personal journey he’s not travelling alone.  There’s a silent peloton of fellow survivors who will pedal alongside him, no matter how tough the climbs.

And my memory suddenly flings me back to the day after my Aunt Liz’s funeral.  I was cycling with this same friend down narrow lanes through peaty brown autumnal farmland, almost exactly 5 years ago in fact, and as we came round the corner there was a massive red tractor in front of us, blocking nearly the whole road, coming at speed.  My friend was able to pull to the left and nip through the small gap to the side but I’d been cycling on his right and for a split second I was caught in the middle of the road, face to face with the tractor going full tilt.  I remember having time to size myself up against the wheels and realise how tiny I was, to picture myself and my bike creasing and folding under the gnarly prongs of the bucket on the front, time to know that if I went forward and under I was certainly doomed and time to think how awkward it would be for all my family to have to gather from all ends of the country yet again, this time for my funeral.  But as I  desperately tried to pull to the left, out of the path of the tractor, my back wheel started to slide, to tip me towards the road and an inevitably messy end and there was time to pause and think ‘well that was that then’.  All of those thoughts, every one, packed into those one or two seconds before I somehow managed to stop the wheel from sliding away, managed to shift my weight to pull myself up and across, move to safety round the side of the machine.  Once I was past I had to stop.  I leant over the handlebars while tears poured down my face, my heart pounding in my throat.  My friend cycled back to find me, puzzled to find me collapsed over the frame, he’d not realised how close it had been with the tractor, I tell him, as I choke down my panic, that I thought life was over.

And now here we are again and this time its him who’s looking at those huge wheels rising above him, visualising being pulled apart by its inevitable course and he’s telling me how he’s not ready to reach the end of his life, he’s still young, his wife younger still, they have plans, they have so much they want to do.  And I can see the panic as his back wheel starts to lose grip on the gravel.

And I tell him that although it feels like the world is ending right now, today, tomorrow, it isn’t. That life will be changed completely and utterly but, for the moment, there is still life. 

I don’t tell him, but perhaps I will when he’s ready, there’s the potential for that life to be the most bright, beautiful and all encompassing that it has ever been or that time can be stretched so that every minute feels full to bursting because you want to savour every second of it so much. That if you look hard enough through the fog of confusion and misery that cancer hurls at you, there are chinks of light, tiny beads of silver dust, catching in the Autumnal sun.  No, instead I tell him what my survivor friends told me. I’m sorry.  I’m here.  I hear you. I know.