Cancer 265

“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far From it.”

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

It has been suggested to me that I am frightened of death. But I am not. As I have repeated, I am frightened of dying. I had a foretaste this morning (though in reality I live with it constantly). My bowels were not working, and hadn’t for two days. When my bowels block up, probably because of the presence of a tumour, that will be – according to what I read – the agonising part. It terrifies me. It terrifies me because now it feels so close. The bowel has worked a little since this morning, but it is even more liquidy than before; suggesting to me that the channel is narrowing. I don’t know the biology of it. I only know how I feel, and I feel the encroaching tumours, and the struggle of the bowel as it attempts to let waste through.

I think the diet does help. I probably haven’t had more than 1,000 calories in weeks, and it shows. I am thinning out. I should soon be in the clothes that fitted me when I was a teenage bricklayer, but I will lack the strength. The days are gone when I could carry two one hundredweight bags of cement up a ladder to the top of the scaffolding. OK I was stupid as well as strong, but my main trick was to bend and break six inch nails with my bare hands. I tried it a few years ago and couldn’t even bend the nail.

I am not sure about sleeping in the hospital bed. I have to get out every few hours to urinate. This is a pallaver. It takes a long time to throw off the covers (no strength, remember?), twist to a sitting position, heave myself up using the zimmer frame, and so on. Sometimes I also have to throw off cats, and they don’t like that. The bed was extended due to my height, but the extension was added at the head end, which is useless. I need it at the foot end. It is a bendy bed so I can’t adjust my position when I have the head end lifted. The trivia of life at the end of life. I could go on.

Imagine if Cormack McCarthy is wrong and all the heaven lovers are right. I have always had a problem with the members of heaven. For instance, if a chap has a happy marriage, the wife dies, he marries again, has another happy marriage and eventually they die, which wife does he have in heaven? Both might be a bit much and the wives might not be happy about it, which could ruin their heaven. It is probably best not to think about it too much. My sense of post-death nothingness is probably the same as McCarthy’s. Be rid of the complications of life.