Today is a sad day.
While packing up my mothers belongings, I came across a journal, and on the first pages was a kind of poem she must have written while in hospital. I remember buying her that journal, thinking she might want to keep a record of her treatments. Here is the poem:
Dear Diary.
I have Cancer.
I can feel it when I’m completely still in bed. I can feel something eating me from the inside. Sometimes it feels like something is moving, living inside me.
It’s not alive.
I have Cancer.
I hear the doctors say the word, over and over, every day. Even when I’m not at the hospital. The doctors live in my head, and they whisper it all the time. I have cancer. Sometimes they shout it, so very loud, making my head hurt and I need to lay down. That’s when I can feel it living and growing inside me. Cancer. I HAVE CANCER!!
Dear Diary.
I have started a new treatment today. The doctors say they are going to help me. “We have to fight this Cancer” they say. They give me chemo therapy. They put a tap in my arm through which they fill my body with chemicals. Poison to kill the Cancer. What if the poison kills me and not the Cancer, I think to myself. I guess it doesn’t matter. The doctors said I didn’t have long anyway. “We’ll have some lovely months together here” they said. I guess that means I’ll live a few months more.
I guess that means I’m going to die.
Dear Diary.
My hair has started falling out. The poison is eating my hair cells.
The Cancer is eating me.
”Have you had a hair cut?” they ask me at work.
”What is happening to your hair?” My children ask me.
I AM DIEING! I think, and laugh inside my head. Not because I am happy but because I am scared, but I cannot let the Cancer know I care!
”Had a trim,” I reply swiftly. Can’t say the word Chemo.
”nothing, just styled it differently,” I say briskly. Can’t say, just won’t say, the word Cancer!
Dear Diary.
Today my eyes are an odd lacklustre shade of grey-ish yellow. My skin looks pale and almost dusty. My body itches, inside and out. My hair is thin and fair. The last tufts are about to fall off.
I wonder if I can use the fallen off hair for something useful? I know they stuffed pillows with hair during the war... or maybe I can knit from it? A jumper maybe?
It's a bit on the short side... maybe a small jumper?
I wonder what it is like to die. Is it painful, or maybe relieving? I wonder if it is boring, being dead. Being alive is painful, but it is far from boring...
(The doctors only say "Cancer" now, and they say it often.)
Dear Diary.
I've written many letters, but I've thrown them all away.
I've written invitations too, most for my own amusement. I've thrown these away too. One just doesn't send out personalised invites to these occasions!
I almost don't exist anymore..
What does one wear to a funeral... your own funeral? Not sure I get to choose?
The doctors have moved out of my head. Guess they don't want to come with me where I'm going. The nurses say "we" and "us" and "good night". Family and friends are here most of the time. They don't say much. They cry, or want to cry, and smile at me through their tears. They hurt, more than I do.
Someone holds my hand.
I become scared. Scared that they will let go!
But they have to... everyone must at some point let go...
After that there was nothing else. Just empty pages, a whole book full of empty pages. Like the book that should have been the rest of her life.
It's maybe down to me to fill these pages for her?
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