Ep.24: The art of not dying just yet

‘What are you most looking forward to?’ my mum asks me one day when we’re in the kitchen cooking.  They’ve finally jumped through enough lockdown rules and red tape to feel confident to make the 10 hour drive from Cambridge to the north of Scotland without being stopped at the border and it’s the first time we’ve seen each other since my diagnosis.  I was nervous of seeing them, worried that I wouldn’t cope well with the emotional overload of seeing my mum.  And it is difficult, mainly because mum is a searcher, a philosopher, an intensely interested miner for information and intelligences.  She wants to know and understand my struggles, physical and psychological, but its like an extended therapy session and I’m exhausted, both with the constant unpicking of my state of mind and just for the very fact of having to share a space.  I’ve spent 4 months locked away with David and B and although occasional visitors have smuggled their way into our hillside retreat I’ve spent great swathes of time alone.  And now I miss it.  I’m used to folding in on myself, curling around this cancerous narrative, letting my anger, frustration and horror at the events of the past few months run unchecked through each day.  Now, with the presence of others, I feel I need to box them up and put them aside.  Cage them.  But they fight to get out, they scratch and force their way into too many of my conversations.  I sense my stepfather’s discomfort with the subject of my struggles, his need to move on when it surfaces and re-surfaces each day.  I start to suspect I’ve become a cancer bore, steering every dialogue back to me and my recovery.  I dislike myself for it but I’m not sure how to pocket all these feelings when they continue to dominate so much of my day to day.  My mum is more indulgent and hovers close to me, too close, waiting to snatch at any opportunity to help me but I don’t want helped, I want to feel less compromised not more so I snap and feel my fuse shorten too often.

‘What are you most looking forward to?’. The question stumps me.  I pause midway through de-seeding a pepper, rooting around for an answer but every time I cast ahead into the future I draw a blank.  Even trying to slot events and possibilities into my mental calendar makes me flinch and I’m puzzled by it.  Later that evening, driving with David to a favourite fishing spot on the loch shore, I guiltily fess up.   Tears pouring down my face I tell him I can’t cast ahead because I can’t get past the idea that I’m going to die soon. 

‘I think I only have another 5 or 10 years max’ I tell him, ‘I’m too scared to plan in case I don’t make it that far’.   Obediently obeying my friend Al’s advice to keep my horizons close I’m keeping them so close its like I’m afraid to get on and live.

‘Where would you like to go?’ typical of David he tackles the problem head on, ‘we need to start planning’. 

But planning anything in the wake of the pandemic is problematic.  The world unlocks then retreats, unlocks then retreats so in spite of our intent to start forging a shape to the future it feels sticky and uncertain.

My conviction that I’m not long for this life infects my attitude to work too.  After 25 years in BBC radio I’ve applied for voluntary redundancy.  Just like that I fired off an email saying ‘I’m in’.  Its uncharacteristic of me and I wonder if it’s the cancer talking and taking over again?  I’m a planner, someone who likes to know where the next paycheque is coming from, fiercely financially independent, so why am I throwing caution to the wind?  I’ve never been looked after by anyone.  Not even that much by my parents.  I left home a week after my 17th birthday when a fight with my dad had me fleeing the house and setting up camp in a tiny bed sit opposite one of the newer Cambridge colleges.  I lived there for a month, heating beans on a baby belling 1 ring cooker and playing Elvis Costello, Nina Simone and Billy Joel LPs while reading The Woman’s Room with a precocious knowing and nodding of the head.  After that even, when I moved back in with my mum as we gypsied our way through a variety of houses and homes, I mentally saw myself as separated, unpicked from my parents.  They had their own messy lives to mend and I mine.

Maybe it was something about that overt rejection by my dad that tipped me into the need to never ever depend on anyone else, some kind of pathological independence resulted and I’ve clung to it in all the years since.  Until now. 

‘But I won’t be contributing’ I say to David, ‘I need to do my bit’. 

‘We’re a team now, we’ll manage and you will be earning once you get yourself sorted and past all this’.

And the thought of being able to lean into his strong and resilient form is at once terrifying and utterly seductive.  I want the responsibility I’ve carried since I was 17 to lift.  I want to feel light and airy.   But secretly I whisper to myself that I don’t want to spend what little time I have left working because, contrary to all the evidence, I still feel I’m going to die soon.  Its only when I start to dig into the financial reality of taking redundancy and look at what my pension might be in 10 or 15 years time that I actually envisage being alive that long and the realisation that I’ve cast ahead comes with a whoosh of relief.  I share it with David, I tell him I’ve managed to imagine living for another decade and he smiles. But the shadow of my uncertainty lingers and when my cousin, Dom, asks how I’ll feel about living here on the hillside when my knees and hips complain each time I return from the loch side, I can’t resist saying that if I live long enough for them to complain I shall consider it a triumph and I realise I’ve still got work to do if I’m to perfect the art of not dying just yet.