Here’s something I’ve learned about myself:
I’m not big on chaos.
.
Dirty pan, I’ll clean it.
Clothes on the bed, I’ll hang them up.
Bored kids in the park, I’ll organise a match.
Room full of actors, I’ll direct them.
Feeling lost in life, I’ll help you find your way.
.
When you first received your diagnosis
I weeded our garden
like a maniac.
.
Cutting out this invasive creeper:
a natural growth
just in the wrong place.
.
As you became more poorly
I arranged
and rearranged
and filed
and automated
trying desperately to build structure
and process
in all the parts of my life I still had some control over
where action could lead to logical and direct consequence.
.
Tidying around the edges of trauma.
.
After you died
I bought a roll of masking tape and a sharpie
and I labelled everything.
.
Jars.
Tins.
Tupperwears of frozen food.
Shelves.
Clothes drawers.
.
If she’d stood still long enough
I’d have stuck a piece of tape
to Avi’s furry back
labelled ‘cat’.
.
Using written words to
ground me
connect me
to what is still
undeniably
resolutely
here.
.
Raisins.
Garden tools.
Leggings.
.
Rice (basmati).
Flour (plain).
Heart (broken).
.
You had a kind of anarchy in you.
A wildness
that drew me in
.
An unstable element.
Naughtiness.
Mischief.
.
As though
amidst all the responsibility you took
you were always on stand by to
let it go
if the opportunity arose
the mood took you
or the situation just damned well demanded it.
.
I worry sometimes
that I tried too hard to tame it.
That my proclivity for calm order
left little space for wild abandon.
.
That in complementing you
I somehow neutralised you.
.
But maybe that was just us aging.
.
When I was in my 20s and it was the done thing to stay out all night partying with shots and strangers in search of one-night stands, I secretly looked forward to the decade when social norms would instead finally align with my behavioural preferences;
staying in all night with a good book, a bottle of wine, a warm fire and my soul mate.
.
We did a lot of that.
.
God how I miss it.
.
I’d waited all those years to hit my stride
imagining that’s how we’d spend the rest of our lives.
Sitting contentedly side by side.
.
So here’s some misdirected anger for you:
When people say
We’re not good at death.
.
Of course we’re not good at fucking death.
It’s the end of the world.
The purest form of chaos.
A chaos that cannot be ordered.
Without
I suppose
faith.
.
Which
in a sense
is it’s own way of bringing order to chaos.
.
We are meaning makers.
And yet
tell me
where is the meaning in this:
.
I think about the moment you died
the second you stopped breathing
Every
Single
Day.
.
The weeks before.
As your thighs shrunk to the width of my forearm.
Sitting on the commode as you gasped for rattling breath crying with pain and despair into my hip, the cables from your two syringe drivers pulling taught against your arms as they gripped mine.
Your pallid wrinkled skin that I used to hold tight against mine as we spooned in bed now hanging from your skeleton like a sheet on the end of a bannister.
.
And then your final moments slumped up in bed, your hair merely wisps, your face fallen, murmuring half words as I dabbed water onto your cracked lips.
Lips I had kissed thousands upon thousands of times.
.
This disease that robbed you of your work, your diet, your energy, your body, your mind and finally your breath.
.
It is impossible to describe what it is like to return to that experience on a daily basis.
.
The question it begs of me is this:
Now you have seen and carry with you this most impeccable form of chaos, how can you continue to pretend that order ever even existed in the first place?
Is this piece of writing worth £1.25?
No.
Yes.
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On Coping is my story of surviving on the sidelines of cancer.
It begins in March 2022 with On Coping #1, written the day after my 41st birthday. The day my wife Imogen, the mother of my three children, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
On Coping is the story of what happened next.
Yes it is! In fact it's worth so much more. Sending love xxx
Reading this was so harrowing (sorry if this seems like an overreaction, I can't think of another word) it feels wrong to 'like' it. But it is beautiful writing.