Sunday Brunch

Refusal, Remembrance, and Rising

A week and a half ago I had my follow up MRI scan. Last Friday the oncologist called with the results. Everything is stable. Compared to the scans of December 2024, there are no visible changes. Ok, I said, hearing that. Then I asked: What do you think about it? My dear oncologist, like me, no longer uses a filter and replied: “Well, some things I have to take at face value, and not question. You know how much we doctors love our boxes. But the truth is, you don’t fit in a box.”

HOW TO PROCEED

Ever since my first cancer diagnosis back in 2011 I have been able to submit myself to whatever test or treatment or intervention was deemed necessary. I have been prodded and poked and pinched and punctured, stapled and stitched.

This time, it was different. I was ok on the drive to the hospital. I was ok gulping a liter of pineapple juice (my brother thought I had been joking about drinking pineapple juice. I was not. It contains the enzyme bromelain and it helps get better images).

I was not ok getting undressed. I was less ok getting my IV put in place. Even less ok when they covered me in lead. Ten seconds after rolling me into the scan I pressed the panic button. I could not breathe. Covered in perspex supports keeping enough space between my chest and the lead so I could breathe, I went back into the big magnet.

Halfway through I was told to breathe faster, as the image rate is determined by the rhythm of your breath. I lost it. I managed to stay still and speed up my breathing, but inside my body there was a storm raging. Never again. Never fucking again.

So, when my oncologist finished his box comment and casually said, when the time comes, can I count on you to book your next appointment, I just went , huhuh, meaning NO.

This is not a temper tantrum. This is a mix of reason and rhyme. It comes, following both a sequence of logical thought, weighing everything carefully, and a body that told me in no uncertain terms: FUCK OFF WITH YOUR SCANS. I am going to listen to both, because even though I did a great job wrapping my head around it all, my body is infinitely wiser.

I don’t know how much time remains. But whatever time I am given, I intend to fully live. And I can’t do that if I have to cut up my life into 6-month increments, marked by a week of psychological torture.

Dad already said it before the MRI, when I confessed to feeling more anxious than usual, feeling much more resistance in my body than I am used to. “One last time.” I did not know why he said it (did he believe more scans aren’t necessary, either out of hope or fatalism?).

Friday afternoon, after receiving the results, we went for a walk in the woods with the dogs. We talked about my next steps, the simple ones that I can see clearly now, and which hopefully lead to more steps after that. We talked about my MRI experience and not ever ever wanting to subject myself to this again.

You don’t have to, dad said. He also said: If you had not eaten two plates of pasta for lunch and three plates of massaman curry for dinner on October 18th 2024 you would not even have known about the mystery mass.

I contemplated it briefly and then blurted out;

“What if I was supposed to know? Because my body needed me back, back together in full awareness. What is it was my soul calling, before I wandered so far from my path that I wouldn’t make my way back?”

There is no remedy for me, so there is very little to gain from frequent hospital visits. I get much more out of being with myself, and my body, and reconnecting, remembering and reconfiguring until we are in that lovely, lovely sync again. I am not going to lie on a sofa and constantly self monitor any minute change in my body. What I am going to do: live. I am going to get a car, sell my house, buy a camper van and start my counselling sessions. And I am going to write about it all.

QUIETLY SINKING (IN A GOOD WAY)

Not long after I got home from the MRI my cousin called. I was out walking the dogs and by the time I came back I was too tired and frazzled to call back. Besides, I had promised myself a no communication period of reprieve and should have turned my phone off. When I listened to the voice message on Saturday morning, it turned out not to be my cousin, but her five-year-old-daughter. It was a darling little message, soaked in sincerity and served with absolutely nothing but love. I teared up. “I just wanted to wish you heart warmth” this tiny voice said. Mission accomplished, I thought, as my heart indeed felt fully warmed, up to the po

She also asked if I was attending the family bbq. No, I was not. I knew that after a week of waiting for my MRI results, the last thing I needed was to be in any group setting. What I needed was to stay home, quietly, with the pets, and be completely free to follow any impulse, whether that would be an extra long walk in the woods, another bath, or watching the most ridiculous TV available (there is a lot to choose from these days).

It is Monday now and I did not send out Sunday Brunch yesterday. I was busy eating scones and steak and fries and ice cream with my friend. We talked for hours. About everything. About my cancer and scan results, about her divorce proceedings, about designing my SULMUM therapy website to her daughter making the much desired hockey selection team.

We talked about being scared, mainly about being out there and doing it alone. And of course, by talking it about suddenly neither of us was really alone anymore.

I know sometimes dealing with the deepest, hardest things is best done by scathing the surface, especially when going under might feel like you will never make it back up. I don’t feel like that anymore -although I very much did, this time last year-. In a surprising process I have made it back to myself under the most harrowing circumstances. Several spiritual gut punches later and I can still breathe, still laugh, still love.

But the sort and sift filter is very much in place. I can handle this, feel this, be this, but only in the company of those who don’t take. No pushing, no pulling. I need people around me with their eyes, minds, hearts, and hands fully open. For it all to flow.

Dealing with cancer, especially when it keeps coming with a death sentence that is later shelved again until further notice, without a full explanation isn’t easy. Living with the weight of something like this, in my body, my spirit holding truths about the world that I thought I had forgotten, my heart cracked open by pain and beauty, makes me attuned to a different frequency now. One where time is more precious, conversations more sacred, energy more finite. I am not above anything—I am just elsewhere. In a place where life is distilled, real, demanding. Sort and sift, sort and sift.

And still, it’s bittersweet. Because I love those cousins’ children. I want to show up as me, ready to play. But I am not there yet. Other things need to be re-integrated before I can show up for anything, or anyone, fully and really. For that to happen, I need to completely show up for myself first.

And you know what: We are allowed to say no. And we are also allowed to mourn what that possibly costs.

THE SHIFT: TECTONIC PLATES

I am living a thousand lifetimes in a day. I have written this before. But it’s hard to explain: Time breaks open under threat, and suddenly everything becomes absurd, radiant, urgent. Like the Dalai Lama and George Carlton swapped seats at the table. One with the serene smile and long meditations, the other slapping the table in laughter, ordering another round of drinks.

This week, with my MRI, the inner stillness, the big reflections, even this quiet dialogue with myself I have been keeping all week in my journal, jotting down notes and questions on my phone… it’s all part of that shift.

I am doing the hard, slow work of healing and bringing together all emotional, physical, spiritual components of me, and all these experiences. It may not look “productive” in the traditional sense, but it’s transformational. Transformational not in the sense of becoming someone else, but becoming more me. The me that was meant for this part of the path.

Like tectonic plates, barely perceptible, but shaping everything, the power lies in how it reflects the subsurface shifts in my inner world. Tectonic plates move inches at a time, quietly, invisibly. Until one day they create mountains or cause earthquakes. That’s how deep healing, growth, or grief often works too. You don’t always feel it. But something in you is shifting, massive and irreversible.

Being in a “tectonic phase”, is not the quick fix, performance style transformation. It isn’t sexy or flashy. It is the kind that changes your entire internal landscape. The way the giant rocks that built my favourite hunebed (ancient burial grounds in the north of the Netherlands), found their way from Scandinavia thousands of years ago, changed the literal landscape of Drenthe.

Stone, time, migration, memory, the ancestral weight of landscapes, in us and around us. Burial grounds from another age, stones pushed across continents by ice, it is the earth’s own tectonic memory, it is how and where I seek and find sanctuary. Inside and out.

(screenshot of my new website, and yes my laptop is in dire need of a clean - or a replacement ;-)

SULMUM: READY TO LAUNCH

I didn’t question it. I just went with it. I sent an email to my brother, asking what web hosting he used. Three days later and a lot of moving money around (Paypal was being a buggy ass) and I got myself a four-year subscription with multiple discounts.

Why? So I could set up a website for my counselling practice.

It probably is considered oddly unprofessional to share a work in progress, but fuck it, we’re among friends here: https://sulmum.com/

Tata. It has been three years in the making (in my head). Three years of exploring, studying, talking to my two favourite therapists, Mirella and Zsolt, and now here it is. SULMUM.

I am going to move all the posts written and meant for Save It For Therapy to a second newsletter: SULMUM: Remembering Wholeness.

Depending on what life throws at me between now and then, I am aiming to have both the practice and the new newsletter up and running by September 1st (hopefully a bit sooner, but I am giving myself grace/space).

SANCTUARY ON WHEELS

I am close to having saved up enough money for a modest car. Before you start cheering, yeaayjjjj well done, and then change your tune to, “you greedy bitch”, bear with me.

I LOVE TO HAVE A CAMPER VAN!!!

I have done all the research, I know what it will be, a Hymer from the B- series, not too old (I don’t want be backsliding of any hills) and one with the U-seating at the back that turns into an extra double bed.

I have an entire checklist ready, PDF and printed, for when I go check out the ones that meet the requirements. I am working a pack list and looking into Pet-friendly travel necessities.

My cousin wants to set up a fundraiser, but I still feel a bit iffy about it. I would love to generate enough money myself, through writing and working. In the meantime you can support me by upgrading to a paid membership on Substack, sharing my words widely, or buying me unhealthy amounts of “coffee”, here on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/leerammelt).

This dream is so tangible, so alive, so close, so much so that I tossed all fear and scepticism concerning AI aside and asked it to start sketching adventures for me and my pack. It became a little addictive. I now have many many adventures, collected three extra cats, and a penguin named Pablo.

(And I brought my Muki back as a black guardian angel and let Stella daydream of snuggling with Lollipop again… I never thought I would be having part of my grieving process loose its sharper edges through an artificial smarty pants that needs very precise and clear prompts to come up with something… and then saddles me with a stowaway penguin who mixes cocktails from sardine juice…)

ASHES TO ASHES

I recently read a lot about living and dying, endings, rituals, and transitions (I will share some recommended reading later, via SULMUM for those who are interested). I have no preferred way to die. I surrender. I do have ideas about what comes after, here on earth, and beyond.

I keep thinking about a friend who I share this “joke” with. When I die, he is going to feed my ashes to sheep so they will poop me out in the hills of Transylvania (half of me- the other half is going into the sea, the Oosterschelde where I was born.) It’s a joke, but it is also seriously what I want. Dark and hilarious and oddly holy, just the right amount of absurd.

Ashes fed to sheep. My return to the land. Not as dust in the wind, but through life, digestion, transformation. It’s grotesque and earthy and very me, and nobody could have come with it but Greg (I told him to scatter me, he introduced the sheep).

And the other half of me, hopla into the sea. The wide dissolve. Salt and vastness. A washing away. A return to origin (it matches another one of my mantras that works wonders against overwhelm: I am vast like the ocean, free like the wind).

I have written my afterlife again, in a way. Not based on theology, but with silly jokes, soil, sheep, the sea, and friendship. I don’t need a gravestone. Whomever I leave behind, briefly, will have sheep and waves, and a story to tell.

PROLOGUE

Is what I shared this week enough? I have not been up to much since Friday. Not focused, not in the mood. Also, it is raining and I can’t find my cat. I was supposed to quit coffee, but am now on my third cup… What can I say, I showed up and it has to be enough.