The Inescapable Maybe

 

 

       

Sometimes I fancy an exit

from uncertainty -

but think how those who know their time for sure

tend to wish they didn’t…

         

Can’t sleep for thinking

of items for my ‘to do’ list,

even though one of them is getting to sleep.

I don’t suppose I need to add ‘die’?

 

 

All I really know of death

is how to live without it

and I'm not sure that's going to prove

of value for very much longer.

 

Regrets?

There’s one or two

might cause me pain

were I to dwell on that dimension.

      

What happens when we die?

I do know that my funeral

will feature the Cocteau Twins,

so the afterlife sounds pretty good.

 

 

 

I’m not in love

with easeful death.

But that doesn’t mean

I want it to be hard.

 

      

I guess I'll take life

till death do us part,

if I'm not allowed

any longer.

 

       

I always knew

that life is liminal,

but it took the prospect of the actual transition

for me to take that in.

 

No arthritis

no bladder problems, no hearing loss,

no cataracts, no reduced mobility.

The future’s looking good.

      

This time round

the nothing-much of chemotherapy

is a little more of something –

but let's keep any side effects in short-of-death perspective.

 

Chemo

exhausts me.

My thoughts 

must shorten.

 

The Queen of Sleep

is gentle, loving, sweet.

No wonder she cannot control

the impish Jack of Steroids.

 

How does the chemo diet work?

Does my body tell me what to eat,

or my mind tell my body what to eat,

or the drugs tell my mind to tell my body what to eat?

 

Just when I’m getting

a train of thought going, under the scanner,

a voice interrupts with breathing commands

and all that I’m left with is this.

 

I had to remind myself

before the appointment:

it’s hardly a matter of life or death,

merely a matter of when the two occur.

 

I’m calm enough

The day before the scan result.

Maybe I’m deceiving myself,

but what would the deception be?

 

      

Tumour 

or data blip?

My mind's 

in a flop of flip. 

       

I don't believe in lucky numbers

but 3,

the lowest cancer count I've had to date,

felt luckier than the highest, 88.

      

I don’t believe in unlucky numbers

but good old 13 may have a case,

that being what my count

has edged its way to now.

 

     

The cancer is back

Not a surprise but a disappointment:

I had hoped to write

some happier poems.

      

The cancer is back

three months after the all-clear.

I knew it was possible,

but why the hurry?

     

 

The cancer is back

is hardly a title

one wishes on a quatrain,

let alone three in a row.

 

I’m dying again…

I was going to say

‘That wasn’t the plan’,

but who would make a plan like that?

 

1.30 a.m.

my first night of fresh doom…

I wake to Nielsen’s ‘Inextinguishable’.

Of course there is hope.

 

 

'Don't think, just be'

is all very well

if you’ve got a lot of  being

to use up.

 

 

It seems I’ve gone

from ‘won’t’ to ‘will’ and back to ‘won’t’

survive.  Though actually

the long term’s always ‘won’t’.

 

I could claim

‘it isn’t fair,

I am not ready’

but I suppose I’ve had a practice run.

 

Whether to be glad I had ten weeks of optimism

or aggrieved at the up and down of it?

A year would have been a better trade-off,

so yes, I resent the re-sentencing.

 

Look on the bright side 

I'm ending up with volumes of these.

Look on the dark side:

I'm ending up.

        

There may not be

so much delay

in arriving at my being 

not.

 

 

Pop stars love

a break up album,

but hardly ever do we find

the break up is with life.

 

2.7 billion beats

seems to be average for 65 years.

At my low rate, I’ve a billion spare.

Doesn’t that count for anything?

 

Perhaps I could find someone

who’s had too much of life

and seek a little

passing of the time.

       

All the same

the bowel failed, the liver failed,

even the peritoneum

failed to kill me yet.

 

You only live

is it once, twice, or thrice?

Forget the details,

let’s get on with it.

 

 

There's no time

but the present.

I propose to live in it

for now.

 

I'd rather carry on as normal

while I can: I'm not one of those

who’ll do anything to beat cancer,

even if it kills them.

 

All aboard for the short term!

That sounds like a liberation,

not so much from future life

as from the need to plan for it…

       

If absence is

the highest form of presence,

it’s a shame I won’t be here

to experience mine.

 

After years

of dancing around it

I still have no feeling

for what death is like.

      

Is it time I cracked on?

I must have said goodbye with words

a hundred times

without so much as dying once. 

 

 

What difference would it make

to the meaning of life, were there a god?

None, I would suggest,

making the question doubly academic.

 

When I say the pain’s been nothing much

that's broadly true. 

What's odd’s to think that the nothing much

is set to kill me.

 

I might get fed up

with people telling me

how wonderful I am because I'm ill…

so far, though, I can live with it. 

        

Not for me the cancer workshop

the cancer books, the cancer counselling.

Why waste whatever time I've got

on living a cancer life?

 

    

You live and learn

It may be that you die and learn, too,

but that’s not so easy to determine

in advance.

 

Goodbye cool world

I know you are cruel

but I have enjoyed you nevertheless,

apart from how you’re making me go.

 

If there's no greater power 

than the power of goodbye, 

I think I'll stretch it out a bit - 

I may not even die.

     

I've been reading

about the plague, the black death, smallpox,

typhus, typhoid, scurvy, malaria…

I’ll stick with cancer if that's okay.

 

Whitman called it a ‘fearful trip’

Yet, if you’re not afraid

of fear,

it seems to be OK.

 

I’m not so sure

‘the paths of glory lead but to the grave’.

I have declared my wish

not to be buried.

   

 

Hello darkness my old friend

come to help me write again?

About, perhaps, how I’ll experience

the ultimate light of my cremation.

       

Beyond the stresses of a day

compounded with complexity,

I think how simple things will be

when I (perhaps) compounded am with clay.

 

 

For all that ‘D’ will boss it up

in view of how it closes out the end,

the letter that matters most to me

is the ‘M’ between creation and cremation.

 

       

If all I get from death

is a death song,

no matter:

it's something I wouldn't otherwise have had.

     

According to Jon Fosse

‘literature is also a way

of learning how to die’.

Is that why I’m writing this?

 

What comes after death?

According to my dictionary

‘deathbed’. You’d have thought

that would have come before.

If the soul

is the only asset we hold in this world,

I’m going to feel the lack of one

to use as life’s collateral.

 

Perhaps I could buy a dead soul,

to be on the safe side, 

or at least play the song again

and reread the book.

 

Imagine living

in fear of hell-fire.

That would concentrate the mind

on the business of staying alive…

 

The funny thing about death

 isn't that it makes me laugh 

so much as that it doesn't 

make me cry.

 

Why is the malady of death

fatal?

Same reason

as the malady of life.

 

Can you make a proper sentence

out of just one word?

Death.

There you go…

 

Timeline: Having been told I was cancer-free in July, I was put on precautionary chemotherapy. In September my cancer-reading rose, and I was told the cancer had returned. Chemotherapy carried on, but the cancer marker kept rising, so I was taken off chemotherapy at the end of October with a view towards starting a different chemotherapy regime in due course. Scans suggested the return was in the peritoneum.

 

Photographs

It was hard to work out what was going on in this period, with apparent good and bad news alternating, so my photographs show sites of informational lack. Even once I’d been told that the cancer had returned, it was a while before the expected extent and impact of that became clear. How long had I got? Hard to say, and the doctors won’t commit to such estimates. The informational lack feeds into the other recurring question: what happens after you die?

 

Notes

‘This time round’ - my chemotherapy regime was the same as after my first operation, but there were more side-effects.

‘I don’t believe in lucky numbers’ - In fact these cancer counts are at the lower end of what is feasible: nurses tell me that can reach into the hundreds. There are many such tumour markers: mine is the CEA marker (Carcinoembryonic antigen), a blood analysis used to keep track of how well Colorectal cancer treatments are working and check if cancer has come back or spread. The normal range for CEA is 0-5 nanograms per millilitre of blood (ng/mL). If CEA levels remain elevated during treatment, the treatment may not have been as successful as hoped. Anything greater than 10 ng/mL suggests disease, and levels greater than 20 ng/mL suggest the cancer may be spreading.

‘I’m dying again’ – my cancer marker rose from 2.8 to 13.1

‘1.30 am’ - Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4, Op. 29 'Inextinguishable' (1914-16) was played on the ‘Through the Night’ episode of 2-3 October: I tended to go to sleep to Radio 3 when the chemotherapy regime made it hard to drop off.

‘2.7 billion beats’ – The human heart beats about 100,000 times in one day and about 35 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times. As my heart rate is 45 / minute against an average of 80, I have ‘used’ a billion fewer beats than the average 65 year old.

‘‘Breathe in’, says the scanner voice’ - computerised tomography (CT) scan.

 ‘What happens when we die?’ - I’m tempted by the idea of enlightening / punishing funeral guests with an extensive sample from my eccentric musical tastes: Bach, Schubert, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Terry Riley, Ornette Coleman, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Joy Division, The Fall, The Slits, Richard Thompson, Garmana, Mary Margaret O’Hara, The Pixies, Swans, Bill Callahan and Billie Eilish for example. But my current thinking is that it would be better to start and finish with a slice of Cocteau heaven, opening with ‘Domino’ (1984) and closing with ‘Pur’ (1993). That would give guests a crystalline memory. Or should things kick off with Brian Eno’s winsome ‘Here He Comes’?

 

References

‘Beyond the stresses of a day’ - The last line comes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71, first published in 1609. The ‘perhaps’ refers in my case to the probability that I will be cremated rather than buried.

‘I’m not so sure’ - the quote is from Thomas Gray: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, 1750. 

‘Perhaps I could buy a dead soul’ - In the 1842 novel, Gogol's anti-hero purchases 'dead souls' - the ownership of serfs who are dead, but not yet officially reported as such - as a fraudulent means of making himself appear wealthy (falsifying his credit rating, in modern parlance). Ian Curtis titled one of Joy Division's finest songs ('Dead Souls' 1980) after Gogol’s novel. 

‘Whitman called it a ‘fearful trip’ - ‘O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done’ is the opening line of ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ in Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ 1891.

‘Hello darkness my old friend’ is a line from Simon & Garfunkel’s song ‘The Sound of Silence’, 1964.

‘You only live’ – ‘You Only Live Twice’ (1964) was the last book completed by Ian Fleming (1908-64) before his death. It contains both James Bond’s obituary (purportedly written for The Times by M.) and a Haiku by Bond: ‘You only live twice: / Once when you are born / And once when you look death in the face.’

Of course I want to be there’ – Woody Allen’s 1975 play ‘Death’ contains the line ‘It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens’.

Love and death are often connected: according to Karen Carpenter singing ‘Goodbye to Love’ (1972), all she know of love was how to live without it.

‘If all I get from death’ - ‘All You Get from Love Is a Love Song’ was composed by Steve Eaton and popularised by the Carpenters in 1977. 

‘Why is the malady of death’ - The first two lines are from Marguerite Duras: ‘The Malady of Death’, 1982.

‘Regrets’ - The rhyme echo is with ‘My Way’ (Paul Anka’s words to a tune by Gilles Thibaut / Claude Francois / Jacques Revaux, as first released by Frank Sinatra in 1969)

‘If there's no greater power’ – cites a phrase from Madonna’s ‘The Power of Goodbye’, 1998.

‘If the soul’ - the soul as an asset comes from Amber Pinkerton’s soundtrack to the six screen film work ‘Hard Food’, 2022 (shown at the Alice Black gallery, London, November 2023).

‘According to Jon Fosse’ - from Merve Emre’s 2022 New Yorker interview with the 2023 Nobel Prize winner

‘I've been reading’ - The book was Andrew Doig’s ‘This Mortal Coil: A History of Death’, 2023.

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