"I asked the doctor how long have I got to live. He said ten. I said, years, months? He said, nine.. eight... seven..."
Bob Monkhouse.
So this blog post is all about death. I know it's not a subject anyone much likes me talking about because I always get told off when I bring it up - although that is, admittedly, quite a lot. Is discussing the possibility of imminent death some kind of taboo or do people think that the subject itself is enough to put some kind of curse on them? Certainly, people can get very upset at me talking about the possibility of my dying, far more upset than I am, which seems rather odd since I'm the one who is going to be most directly affected.
What I'm always told is that I'm not going to die from this cancer because medical science is absolutely brilliant and if they let me die then it will be bad for their statistics. Whether anyone has discussed this with my tumour is another matter. Presumably, it is not aware that it's not allowed to kill me, because that still seems to be what it's trying its damnedest to do, and that's why I'm shortly going to be ingesting a cocktail of lethal substances in some kind of chemical pre-emptive strike. I was wondering how chemotherapy works so I did a little Internet search for it and was faced with several explanations which sound very clever. It's all to do with stopping the cancer cells dividing and thus multiplying, although unfortunately it doesn't always distinguish between cancer cells and other normal cells which divide which is why some people get hair loss and the like. This is, apparently, less common nowadays which is a shame because I was bargaining on saving some money on my annual haircut. It can also cause digestive problems which is almost a given for me since I've already got IBS and anything even mildly disruptive causes a sudden increase in the rate and duration of toilet visits. But enough about my problems with the runs. Well I say enough but the subject will doubtless dribble on and on, if that's the term I'm looking for.
Anyway, death. I've been thinking about it a lot recently ever since I read that page about mortality rates that several friends told me not to look at. But since they told me after they had already looked, I didn't see why they should have all the fun. Here it is.
To summarise... I have a stage 2b tumour which has affected two lymph nodes so I have a roughly 40% chance of being alive five years after I am cured - assuming I am cured. So pretty good odds on the whole, although the implication of racehorsing makes me shiver slightly. However, there's no point being unrealistic. Oesophegal cancer has a high incidence of recurrence, even if I get through the entire treatment without succumbing to MRSA, the anaesthetic, or the wrong germ at the wrong time during chemo.
What fascinates me about death most of all is exactly what point I will know that I am right on the verge of death and then what will happen when I reach it. I haven't known anyone die who was sufficiently compos-mentis to tell me any of this. I know some of my atheist friends will wonder why I am thinking about this when there's almost certainly no afterlife and almost certainly no god and so on. But you see I have never quite divested myself of some kind of vague belief and while it is by no means rational, it is surprisingly comforting when you start staring the subject in the face. I do believe there is something after death that I cannot know about until it happens and I find that tremendously exciting. My mother believed that she would meet her husband and her mum again and I hope she was right but I don't have that kind of belief in bodily resurrection. Bill Hicks suggested that we were basically all one consciousness and that God was simply a reflection of that - "someone who speaks to your heart and not in a book that forgot to mention dinosaurs" - and I could go along with that. Perhaps I will just be subsumed back into the wider consciousness?
Indeed, thought of death itself is quite the best thing I've ever known for focusing the mind on life, particularly the specifics of being alive. Dennis Potter, at a late stage of illness, talked about looking at the blossom outside his window and it being "the blossomest blossom" and I already know what he means. The colours of autumn are that bit more vivid, the cold more bitter, the sun slightly more intense. There is so much I want to do, to write, to experience, to see - I hardly know where to start. That feeling of wishing for the end that chronic depression brings - not suicidal but simply a lassaiz-faire approach to going on any more - has been replaced by a violent, almost brutal desire to live.
It's also a wonderful excuse for procrastination. "It doesn't matter if I do this or not because I might not be around in six months" and so-on. You have to fight against this, not least because one level, in certain circumstances, it's quite true. But perhaps that makes what you do all the more important and significant. It can also make it enormously freeing. I don't mean that it gives you the right to go about being appallingly rude to everyone and shouting at the rain, although I suppose you could see it like that. The freedom comes with responsibility because it is valuable - it's the freedom to know that whatever you do and whatever happens to you is impermanent so the bad things won't last and the good things become all the more precious for being ephemeral.
But the point I suppose I want to make is that while life seems more important than ever, the thought of that last moment of life and beyond is somehow everything that isn't depressing or frightening, or even negative. It seems to me to be an open road to a glorious multiplicity of possibilities, where looking through a window into the unimaginable vastness beyond reflects nothing but the fears we bring to the glass.
I neglected to include a song in the last post so enjoy this one which is impossible to hear without feeling immensely happy. "You Got Me Dangling on a String" by Chairmen of the Board from 1970.
