Fumbling & Tumbling
From Dusk til dawn....
As the temperature plummeted to 5 degrees during the night we kept the little heater on throughout. None of the pets moved an inch and I slept non stop until half past six. That’s almost a proper night’s sleep (can’t remember exactly at what time I blew out the candles last night and switched off my iPad)
No internet as we wake up. I look what meditations I have in file. Only two (Deepak Chopra’s Healing and something called from the beginning from a lady whose voice I cannot stand) and I’m not I the mood for either of them so I get up to make coffee. I haven’t made real coffee since I got here. Need to fix the grinder. It comes out too coarse.
I reset the modem while the water boils.
I have three plum cakes Lankanini gave me yesterday. They are delcious when fresh, but a bit sticky and pudgy the next day. I want chocolate but I gave the last one to the neighbour who dropped off a package, yesterday late afternoon. He was working in Malnas, the next village, and was handed it. Couriers sometimes do that to save themselves the trip on the steep and wobbly dirt road through the forest.
Suddenly the WiFi connection starts to work and I read some notes on Substack.
Gaza is being further blown to smithereens and I cry. These are angry tears. They are like bears and lions roaring in the shape of tiny salty water droplets.
I have an email. It’s Sarah Dobbe from the socialist party responding to the email I sent last week. I sent all members of parliament a piece written by Ahmad Absais. Apparently it finally hit home and the parties who actually are virtually begging our government to take action are slowly starting to reply.
I want to know. I want to know what ties my country to Israel.
I have a seven page unfinished essay on my laptop full of memories and questions. It’s also full of self reflection, the power and privilege that come with being Dutch, while I would gladly hand my passport to anyone who needs access to safety and health care.
Not because I am dying and doctors can’t help me. Because I don’t believe those should be exclusive rights reserved for a few.
We have fucked up. Moral outrage is easy, a little harder is look myself in the eye and ask: Did I really do all I can to be an aware and awake and accountable human being?
Not by a long shot. But still here and willing to love, live and learn. They’ll be hard lessons, as this is the way of the world.
In between the gazillion notes on the total annihilation of Gaza (which no will never be normalized for me and will never numb me) there is a photo of an odd looking brown thing. It looks like a long and lean turd.
It’s not. It’s a vanilla bean and the story attached to it brings on more tears. It’s a note from Becks (I have mentioned her before, as she often touches on aspects of her experiences that open my eyes to my own in a way) who I started following not that long ago. She is in the bewildering circumstances of having to navigate life with a terminal cancer diagnosis.
She has a recurrence of breast cancer which has metastasized to her bones. Similar to the woman the TV mini series Dying for Sex is based on. I watched all 8 episodes in three days. It left me bawling my eyes out, with a single sentence: “I have spent years believing I was healthy but all the while my body was just waiting to give me more cancer…”
Becks was just told that in terms of pain management modern medicine can’t do anything for her. They have reached the limit.
The vanilla bean is for the dessert Becks made as a fuck cancer fuck pain.
Grab life while it’s here, no?
I recognize these fuck it acts of defiance.
What I also recognise is all she wrote here: the full post of the oncologist meeting and the words said. How they land, and what they mean going forward.
Early yesterday evening I was lying on my bed after watching the last episode of DFS. She had been given a prognosis up to five years. Her friend has taken this as a promise: She will have five years.
She didn’t.
I’ve not been given anything concrete. A rough estimate was that my life can be at risk in a year or ten years, or never (bear attack, piano falls on head, fall of kitchen step decorating X-mas tree could in theory all happen before cancer eats me alive).
My body has proven to be unpredictable in the past so doctors now refrain from giving any prognosis.
Through the sobbing my mind went in a very human, likely ego based, direction: What would be enough life to make this all worthwhile.
I know I can occasionally stretch time or fall out of it completely. So maybe time is an illusion as the quantum leapers say. It feels very real to me though, especially these days, when there doesn’t seem to be a timeline on anything for me to hold onto.
I wrote to Becks:
If life were about checks and balances you would be owed decades of easy and joy.
I wrote it last year for myself too, the list of what I felt life owed me after too much hell: safety, support, and hugs… lot of heart warming comforting reassuring hugs…
I think about my aversion to the local transaction based interactions, how people have been conditioned to treat each other as tools and resources to be (ab)used. Where kindness and generosity barely exist because everybody is too busy counting favours exchanged to make sure they’re not being taken advantage of.
Is life like a person who owes us something?