I remember hearing those words as a teenager, and they resonated so deeply with me....they still do now. As I write, my Great-Aunt is in hospital, and doesn't particularly want to hang round anymore. Her son is in the same hospital with a badly broken leg after a fall at home. A man who's like a brother to me is waiting to bury his wife, who was a dear friend of mine. And the best we can hope for with my Aunt and her advanced cancer is that the chemo works....but if it hasn't started working after the second dose, then they give up.
Things that worried me a few short weeks seem so irrelevant, so miniscule at times like these. It's surreal to think that if you'd asked me a few weeks ago what my biggest worries were, I would've said my brother's decision to not start maintenance chemo. Or my knee, and the uncertainty surrounding it. Or work, trying to get weekly episodes edited as well as new ones shot, and teaching transition years several days a week. And yet, over a fortnight, I've come to terms with my brother's decision. I'm gone beyond caring about my knee, given that this is year 18 of problems with it-whatever happens to it will happen. And work...well, work can always be gotten through.
But sudden cancers and deaths....jesus...they take some getting used to. Those 4pm idle Tuesday moments will happen again and again in life, they are, unfortunately, unavoidable and heartbreaking. But I can't buy into that bull that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. What doesn't kill you can still leave you broken in ways you didn't realise you could break. You don't come back stronger, you come back shook. Like when you get badly injured in a tackle, no matter how strong you get again, there's always that small part of you that holds back the next time you're tackling someone. All I can say for those shit, shit times is that "It doesn't get better....but you get better at it.."
The only thing getting me through this last fortnight is the little moments in life that we sometimes take for granted. The silly smiles from unexpected sources, a horror movie made at physio, many, many random hugs and texts from friends....a camera-shy squirrel scampering up a tree, a night full of the most broken sleep but with the strangest of reassuring dreams, and the daily, reassuring knowledge that friends are the family we choose for ourselves, and my friends and family are pretty damn fantastic.
Over the last fortnight, I've been amazed at just how lucky I was to have met the people I did when I did, friends from my childhood right through to the last few years, people who know the value of life, of how devastating a loss can be, and how messed up your mind can get after those moments. I was fortunate to be off that week, because I could barely keep it together last week being back at the office. The worst thing about these losses is that they leave you reeling, it's the emotional equivalent to boxing KO...you know nothing of anything else but your own grief, and it's hard to comprehend why the rest of world isn't reeling with you.
Tomorrow night, I fly into Wales, and I'm dreading it. I'm dreading having to really, truly acknowledge that Dai is gone, that Brian is widowed, that those three gorgeous girls won't have their Mum beside them as they grow. At least here, I can pretend it's not really happened, that the phonecall a fortnight ago didn't never happened. I cannot bear to be saying goodbye to such a sweet friend who's barely three years older than me. If we'd had another 20 years, folk would still say she was too young.
3 & 1/2 years ago, I stood, arm in arm with several other friends at my friend Neill's bedside, listening to his gasping staggered breathing just after he'd been given his last rites, the day before what would've been his 30th birthday. I told myself then that I wouldn't let myself get caught up in the bullshit moments in my life, that I would keep my head up and remind myself that nothing in life is important than these moments, when life and death, love and heartbreak are so present. The grief from that room that night is etched onto my soul, but stronger still is the love that emanated toward him from every single one of us present that night, and that day, until he took his final breaths, and that resonates with us all still.
Last night, I walked through a quiet village, my head reeling, my knee aching, and my heart shattered. I cannot believe that if this doesn't work, my Aunt,my Godmother, my friend, could be gone from us soon. I've always joked that I'm a pessimistic optimist...that I constantly believe that bad shit will happen, but that we'll get through it in the end. You always say you'll assume the worst, but you don't really accept it.
When Mum first said a fortnight ago it had spread to her lungs, I thought that it couldn't get more devastating than that. But of course it can. Because while you register that information like that usually means the end, you don't really believe it. You don't really believe it until it's happening. And now, the worst part, the waiting. The waiting for the chemo today, the waiting for the blood markers, the waiting for the pain to kept at bay, the waiting for the news, one way or the other. The wondering, the constant wondering, should we look for a second opinion, have we time for a second opinion? How could this be happening? How have we gone from nausea and stomach pain to something that's possibly terminal in less than three weeks?
There's no doubt about it, this news is hitting hard, and that pain and grief is manifesting itself in all the stupid ways only pain and grief can. I'm getting angry at an edit, frustrated by someone's speech pattern, by the cameraperson's choice of angles, by the outside noise on an interview; in fact, pretty much by everything else in my surroundings-the hum of the computer, the office noises of folks on the phone and the general trivia of office life.
So it's to music I turn, for a few minutes respite....I first heard this song well over a decade ago, and I think this video encapsulates perfectly. As I've gotten older, almost every lyric has resonated at some point. And, to finish a rather depressing post with a smile, even the first time I heard it, at the age of 14/15, I was grinning at the irony of knowing the truth of this line... "be kind to your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone"
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