Dancing with death, inviting life

This morning, my daily Yoga With Adriene fix was preceded by an advert for the Google Pixel 6 mobile. Demonstrating its eraser feature by rubbing someone out of a photo, the narrator declared "Ta da - perfect - just like your memories and how you want to remember them."

I felt deeply confronted by this. In these unsettling times of 'fake news' and altered reality - where the very question "what is truth" feels so loaded, it seems we are now being actively encouraged to manipulate our personal histories - literally wiping away anything that doesn't 'fit'. I find that unsettling.

Equally unnerving to me is the suggestion that our memories (and so surely by implication our lives) have to be 'perfect'. That we need to find ways to erase unwanted, unexpected or uninvited events out of our histories. That they serve no use. That in some way we can (and indeed should) sanitise our lives.

But there is no such thing as a life without challenge and it is disingenuous (and frankly damaging) to suggest that there is. After all, so often it is these very same unwanted, unexpected or uninvited experiences that shape and reshape us, as we rise up to meet adversity.

I wrote the first draft of this blog last summer, in some of the darker weeks of my treatment journey. I didn't publish it at the time and it has sat unfinished and gathering proverbial dust in my drafts folder for almost a year. Its content is important to me though and I do want to share it. And so I find myself curious about my resistance to finishing and posting it.

There is a clue perhaps in the difficulty I had settling on a title. I played around with many alternative headings, before realising that part of me was uncomfortable using the word death, knowing that it might put some people off reading.

It strikes me that this is an indictment of how uncomfortable we have become talking about death in our culture. The one certain thing that we all have in common, and yet we don't even feel at ease using the word. As if somehow even uttering those five letters might in some inexplicable way hasten its arrival. And so we feel far more comfortable keeping death at arms length, resorting to euphemism and carefully averting our gaze until forced to look.

Death first came crashing uninvited into my simple world way too early, when, at the tender age of six, the light aeroplane in which my father was travelling slammed into the side of a mountain in a far distant land. Shrouded by snow, the plane was not found for four months. But the outcome was inevitable.

It sideswiped my life again during my formative teenage years when a series of violent accidents prematurely ripped a number of close friends from our unfolding lives.

And then, two years ago it came again with my mother's graceful death from breast cancer. A different, far more gentle parting, we were deeply blessed in being able to nurse her to death and she died surrounded by her family. The perfect ending to a life fully lived - but still deeply traumatic in its own soft way.

Not surprisingly, my earliest, brutal acquaintance with death left a deep scar. I was, quite simply, too young to make sense of such a significant and traumatic loss and as a result I have spent my life walking in death's looming shadow.. At some subliminal level, I have always experienced a sense of threat, a subconscious belief that nothing is secure and that life can not to be trusted. A perpetual state of alert, my nervous system primed, waiting for the bogeyman lurking silently around the corner to strike. My family joke that I am part meerkat - always a little part of me on guard, one eye open, never quite fully relaxed.

This low level anxiety has manifested as a certain tautness in my relationship with life. An exaggerated animalistic instinct to insulate and protect myself, and those I love, from the possibility of unexpected and catastrophic change - which has the potential to strike at any moment.

Although subliminal, this anxiety has in many ways run my show. A nagging sense of random risk has been my constant companion - like an awareness of a 4th dimension. It's not that I necessarily worry about the small stuff (though I often do that too). It's rather that at some subconscious, visceral level I have a deep understanding that life can be 'stolen' at any moment. This awareness can be the thief of joy and ease, creating a tendency towards hyper vigilance - for freak waves, slips from trees, random accidents. Acutely conscious of trying to push the fear away to avoid cramping the ability of my children to experience life in a carefree way - I am too often not successful. After all, as the saying goes, 'what you resist persists...'.

More profoundly, this dis-ease has manifested in a futile search for certainty - trying to find ways to counter or 'fix' the persistent sense of the insecurity that lies at the core of what it means to be alive. I can now clearly see that this has been a silent driver in the way I have shaped much of my life, and has been behind some of my biggest life decisions.

And yet conversely I have also lived my life to date, as most of us do, with an implicit assumption that I am assured my four score years and ten and as if I have absolute control over the way my life unfolds. As well as fundamentally wanting security, I also have a hunger for change and an existential aversion to 'routine'. Welcome the knotty bag.

In short though, I have spent my life waiting. Waiting, at some unconscious level, for things to go wrong.

And so, perversely, when I was first diagnosed with cancer I felt some weird sense of relief at finally standing face to face with the bogeyman that I had always sensed was silently stalking me, just two paces behind. Almost as if it proved me right, justifying my chronic sense of dis-ease. In some perverse way it stilled the ever vigilant voice in my head - this after all was what I had been preparing for my whole life. This was my fate.

The assertion of Gabor Mate (author of the renowned book, When the Body Says No) that the lasting emotional and physiological impact of early trauma potentially leaves individuals vulnerable and predisposed to developing serious health conditions in later life feels very plausible to me. His description of a typical cancer sufferer felt rather like reading my own life story. Not that I caused my own cancer - but that the lifelong ripples created by my early life experience had possibly created a fertile physiological microenvironment for illness to develop.

In our culture there is a dominant perception that if pain and suffering are present, something is wrong. We do everything we can to avoid it, escape it, deny it, push it away. Erase it from the stories of our lives...welcome the Google Pixel 6. But, this drive to avoid difficulty may in fact make things worse - raising unrealistic expectations, bending ourselves and our lives out of shape in an attempt to achieve guaranteed security, falsely creating the illusion that we have control of our lives. And while, of course, to some limited degree we of course do (or at least we have to believe we do in order to plan and live our lives), my most formative life experiences showed me that ultimately we don't.

Fundamentally, nothing is in our control - now or ever. Life is fluid, uncertain and ever changing. We are all constantly living in the shadow of death . Ultimately everything ends. Nothing is permanent. And yet perversely we tend to live as if it is.

Facing the reality that 'nothing lasts forever' is initially confronting and unsettling. It can generate a deep sense of closing down, of shrinkage, indeed of hopelessness. But sit a bit longer, and there is also a deep sense of liberation to be found in this realisation. The flip side of perpetual change is that as well as the certainty that everything ends, so there is a certainty that everything is also evolving - creating the extraordinary dynamism that is life.

Truly embracing the reality of 'permanent impermanence' offers something intensely liberating. Accepting that nothing is forever is surely an invitation to open up, breathe more fully and loosen our grip on the handlebars of life a little. An invitation to relax our striving and future focus, our attachment to expectations, and to focus instead on living in the here and now. Experiencing life moment by moment.

But to do this requires coming face to face with my demons. To shine a torch around the dark corners of my mind, bringing the shadows into light. Most significantly for me this past year, this has called on me to approach death and look her squarely in the eye.

I do not and can not know if I will die of breast cancer. That story has yet to be written.

But I do know that I will die. That is certain.

I do know too that since my diagnosis I can hear death breathing more closely at my shoulder. I have though realised that covering my ears and trying to run away from it, pretending that I can somehow protect myself against it, has generated brittleness, fear and suffering in my life. Only by sitting with and accepting the possibility, proximity and eventual inevitability of death can I remove its sting, liberating myself to truly live (however long that might be for) and focus on what really matters in my life, rather than wasting precious time and energy boxing shadows.

As I explore this thinking, I reflect on our final months with mum. I can see now how often she tried to talk about how low she felt, or her fears before an oncology appointment or receiving her own scan results. I recognise now her gentle attempts to talk about her encroaching death and how she felt about it. Looking back, I can see how, instead of meeting her with curiosity and a selflessly listening ear, I often unwittingly shut her down. Each time thinking I was doing the right thing by trying to distract her or reassure her so she didn't have to go to a painful place. Or perhaps I was actually trying to avoid a reality that I did not feel ready to accept?

Now on the other side of this equation I understand how my response must at times have increased mum's sense of isolation and separateness. Closing down the space for her to share authentically and honestly, to face her fears and look death in the eye. And in doing so to liberate herself in some way. I do not judge myself harshly for this. As with my diagnosis, we all feel our way as we go along - it's all new and so often we don't know what is best.

I know that the idea of greeting death will sit uncomfortably for many people reading this. As someone living with cancer you are so often reminded by others of the need to 'stay positive'. Any acknowledgment of the possibility of death might well be interpreted as allowing the shoots of negativity to creep in. I understand the sentiment, and yes of course, an optimistic outlook is helpful. But in just the way I tried to divert mum away from tricky conversations, I sometimes wonder who stands to benefit most from the entreaty to 'stay positive'? I know from experience that it often feels easier to be with someone who is upbeat, rather than sitting with them in the darker corners of their situation. But I also know that the expectation of relentless positivity can create an unwanted burden of secondary guilt in the moments when we are not managing to stay upbeat, evoking a feeling that we have somehow failed ourselves and those around us.

But discussing and accepting the possibility of death is not being negative. It is simply being honest.

More fundamentally, pushing away negative and difficult feelings ultimately does not serve. To be fully present and fearless in the face of my reality has required me to be accepting of all possible outcomes, and open to experiencing and accepting the full gamut of my emotions. Welcoming them as they unfold rather than trying to deny their existence.

Only by dancing with death, can I be liberated to truly choose life.