Craig and Roscoe are currently in Boston, proudly wearing their Barbados tartan kilts, watching football and baseball in stadiums, singing songs, meeting up with old friends, making new ones and being part of the joyous community of traveling Scots who believe that their football team may, just this once, advance into the knockout stages of the football World Cup.
Back in South Africa, I’m being asked why I’m not with them, why we’re not having this experience together.
Let me explain.
Cancer Adventurers often talk about greater meaning when they are through the worst. They speak of making choices which enables a deeper life. Of helping others, the planet, the greater universe. Some find meaning in organised religion and rituals. Some take up sport, run marathons, raising thousands for charity. Some change life course completely.
Me? No, this hasn’t been my path. My own recovery hinged on a strong desire to rush back to normality. To prove to myself, I was still here and still capable. Desperate to return to work, motivated to stand on the side of a football pitch, to drink wine and talk rubbish with girlfriends, my focus was on being normal, fallible, worthy of surviving. I knew, unlike the others who didn’t make it, I was so lucky to have normal in my life and I wallowed in it.
Fast forward, 10 years and it’s normal for me to make the choice to stay put. I haven’t had a single moments desire to be with my men on their trip. Frankly, if I’m blessed to live out my four thousand weeks on planet earth, my choice is to spend my remaining time filling my cup with bucketloads of what brings me personal joy. And for the avoidance of doubt, football and pubs just don’t do it for me.
This Father-son bond, where they actively want to spend time together, watching copious amounts of sport, talking nonsense, being funny, playful, free – just being my boys; well it brings me immense joy. It’s so different to any family dynamic that I had ever experienced; it feels like its own victory. Let them have these three weeks in their own four thousand; creating a chock-full kaleidoscope of stories and memories that they share or hold just between them. How powerful is this? How joyous!
I’m at an age now where friends and relatives are now dying more often than getting married. Currently, I have friends who are actively dying. That is, they are navigating a terminal diagnosis which has determined that their natural life left is shorter than others around them. Perversely and somewhat controversially, we could consider them lucky; their diagnosis force familial discussions about their wishes, desires, memories and stories. These are rich loving, worthwhile conversations. It’s normal and abnormal all at once.
I’m all for not waiting to make the memories; to spend the time now stomping through life with the people you love and care for beside you. Or being strong enough to say, that’s not for me but you go stomping on and I’ll be here when you get back.
I greedily rush towards having all the conversations; tough, loving and easy, to the extent that my own son thinks I’m weird for being so free in expressing my thoughts and feelings and ideas and opinions- even when he doesn’t want to hear them!
But, when I go, he will know what to do. He will know I haven’t held back. He will know he knows me. There will have been no conversation off limits, no emotion too difficult to dissect and express, no love hidden or important stories left untold.
My legacy is to make him realise this is normal.
And to thank me for it when the time comes.
Blessed with a really kind vet, he went with his head in Craig’s lap, my face close to his, lying on our outside garden sofa, birds tweeting in the trees and the late South African autumnal sun casting a golden glow. His was a peaceful, loving death.
Then the untethering that had started 4 weeks earlier became an unraveling which even now I’m struggling to articulate. I went to member meetings a day early, forgetting members who I’d booked to see in that time slot. I went to the supermarket with my ability to pay left sitting in the house. I spent an extortionate amount on a Lions Mane plant and even more on a glazed pot to sit where his food bowls used to be and then while at the garden centre spotted big yellow metal flowers that had to be obsessively planted in what’s now known as the Monty garden. I obsessively gathered the remaining fluff balls hiding hear the skirting to add to my large bag of his fluff currently tucked at the back of the wardrobe. I started sentences, couldn’t finish them, started work that stayed half done, wandered the house with silent rolling tears, went to meetings, leaving early, listlessly sat in front of the TV, watching all 5 seasons of ‘Six feet under’ (strangely cathartic) in record time. Craig and I would glimpse each other while sitting in the big empty Monty free space and cry.
