CANCER RELIEF

When I had cancer, the sprinkle of few in my life housed a complicated arrangement of grief, in which, like an invitation, I was to step into. For death is by nature, a solitary conversation. I understood that gesture, and I valued it, but I also felt completely fraudulent, and ashamed, because I didn’t feel grief – I felt relief. I didn’t want cancer, but I appreciated the certainty. For as long as I can remember, death has existed in my mind as something circled in an Argos catalogue. I have lived with depression for so long that suicidal thinking became less like a crisis and more like noise, – like a smoke alarm with a low battery you can never quite locate. Do I, or don’t I? Not necessarily because I truly wanted to die, but because the possibility always insisted on being considered. Depression doesn’t always look like wanting to disappear, sometimes it is being unable to answer question. Cancer silenced it. For once, the burden of choice was no longer mine to carry, the question that had followed me for years had been answered externally, without my involvement. I have always been to cowardly to live, yet too cowardly to die. But death relieved me from responsibility, from duty, it had entered the room, helped itself to a seat, and on the table, placed something else, – a deadline. A deadline, counterintuitively, is clarifying, – it dismantles the illusion that there will always be more time later, another month, another year, another better version of yourself who will eventually do the things you keep postponing. The problem with life, – well, one of them, for I’m sure there are many, – life has a finish line, but not only do we not know where it is, the track is so long that we forget it’s even there. So, you pace yourself, but when you see cancer on the horizon waving a chequered flag, you no longer need to hold back. I have spent my life thinking about what remains of me after I’m gone, as though I am already being viewed in retrospect. Not in any grand or noble sense, like curing cancer, but in the little ordinary ways like not leaving projects half-finished or leaving private things found in drawers. My focus has always been on the version of my life that other people piece together afterwards. So this finish line, or the suitably re-literalisation of the word ‘deadline’, becomes the collapse of endlessness, contributing to my relief, for my life suddenly became tangible and contained, and thus, organisable. I’m fine, by the way, the cancer was removed, so maybe fear would have come knocking on my door eventually. But I write this now because I think it says something important about the relationship between long-term depression and death. Not all longing for death is really longing for nonexistence, sometimes it’s longing for certainty. Cancer exposed a part of me that has always been there – the part that finds the open-endedness of life more frightening than death. And it came from a strange realisation that while others were mourning the possibility of an ending, some part of me was relieved to finally have the sense of one. Perhaps that is why the relief came first, because before cancer was a threat, it was an answer. Not a good answer, and certainly not one I would have ever chosen. But when you have spent years trapped inside a question, even a terrible answer can feel like peace.