— Frank Crisp, Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society
THE MOON IS USUALLY depicted in the popular imagination as a cover for mystery and menace: the furtive activities of the burglar, a cue for the howl of the werewolf. But it does incalculably more than we realise. Without it, the Earth would spin faster on its axis, our days would shrink, our tides grow weaker, and many creatures of the night — bats, possums and university students — would be lost. Some plants turn to follow the moon, responding to its pale curve and icy light; scientists talk of ‘tree tides’, or a ‘leaf tide’, whereby plants move with the moon just as the sea is pulled by the tides, this great force beyond us drawing waves and leaves in arcs of life.
Some plants even grow by, or respond in different ways to, the light of the moon, a phenomenon known as selentropism. It’s an almost invisible movement, happening in the dark, on the quiet: the plants slowly curling in by night, unobserved. Something similar happened to me after I was diagnosed with cancer: when the world grew dark, I furled and I grew. Inevitably, the illness changed me irrevocably. But what I did not expect is that my strength would also inch upwards. Quietly, almost imperceptibly, and often in the darkest moments, alone in the wee hours of the night, I developed an enduring determination that took even me by surprise. For most of my life, I had confided all the minutiae, agonies and triumphs of life to a cadre of close friends, but during this period I drew myself in and in turn grew calmer.
No doubt this was partly enforced by the suffering. I could barely acknowledge all I might lose or consider a future I was no longer certain of, any sense of abandon now replaced by a sedating caution. I could not comprehend the potential losses and did not want to. I thought of the poet Rilke, who said that grief is wild and ‘cannot be domesticated’, and also wrote in 1904, ‘I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief, so this massive darkness makes me small.’ Just the idea that I might not live to see my children grow into adults still makes me cry — leaving children before they are grown is any parent’s worst fear.
Yet, as Oscar Wilde said, ‘Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground’, and he was right, hard as it is to till. Sorrow humbles, flattens and forces you to acknowledge transience, to find peace with God, or your own spirituality. Jewish author Elie Weisel, who was imprisoned and sent to Auschwitz when he was only fifteen, told The Paris Review that his attraction to mysticism led him to discover that what all religions have in common is suffering: all try to address the basic problem of how to deal with it. Christianity, he said, ‘is almost solely based on suffering’. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, also a Holocaust survivor and concentration camp inmate, gained renown for his insistence that ‘if there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering’.
I OFTEN WONDERED WHAT it would be like to have a cancer growing inside your body, to suddenly discover you are carrying something that is eating you away, growing in an ugly, consuming mass in or around your bones or organs; to be blithely stepping through life, unaware that your insides are betraying you. I didn’t expect to find out, though, at least not for decades. I have always been healthy and strong; I regularly practise hot yoga and swim almost 2 kilometres across a bay teeming with fish near my home in Sydney, all while caring for my two little kids, hosting a TV show and writing columns and books.
But now I know: it felt as if I was carrying a baby. The enormous tumours that had been silently growing inside me suddenly ballooned without warning one weekend, pushing my belly out into an arc. It was so odd; in the months beforehand I felt bloated, and my clothes grew snug, but my friends laughed and gently drew my attention to the chocolate I consume when facing deadlines. I was exhausted, but my doctor put it down to my workload.
Then, one Saturday in June, I was struck with agonising pain and ended up in hospital. The suspected diagnosis was bad: advanced ovarian cancer. ‘I have to be frank with you, Julia,’ my surgeon said when I asked if there was a chance it was benign. ‘All the signs are that this is very serious.’
I spent two weeks waiting for surgery, not knowing if I would live to the end of the year. When I walked, it felt eerily similar to being pregnant: organs cramped, squashed up against one another. When I wasn’t concentrating, I was sure I’d feel a kick and my hands would creep to my belly, as though protecting an infant. Then I would remember: it was not a baby; it was a mass the size of a basketball, living in between my belly button and my spine. Soon I was almost waddling with it. A dark, murderous infant. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be operated on or exorcised.
Your world narrows to a slit when facing a diagnosis like that; suddenly very little matters. I told my family and some close friends, then went into lockdown. In some ways, it was like being taken by the ‘Mind Flayer’ on the TV show Stranger Things: you inhabit the present world and the ‘upside down’ simultaneously, while a mucinous mass threatens to overtake you, to devour and destroy you. You are reminded of this in flashes of lightning and insight no one else can see. By day, you walk on the earth. At night, you crawl through the underworld.
In the early hours of the morning I would wake gripped with terror and quietly contemplate the prospect of death before I rose to get my son and daughter ready for school. I was buttering sandwiches for their lunches when my surgeon called to tell me it looked as though it had spread to my liver. I bit my lip, sliced the sandwiches in half, and held my children’s little hands tightly as we walked down the hill to the local red-brick primary school.
In the days before the operation, I turned off my phone and shut down my computer. I prayed so hard I grew unnaturally calm, as though steadying in the light of the moon. I felt like a flower curling in on itself, bracing, preparing for the night, closing to a quiet stillness.
IT’S A PECULIAR, LONELY kind of impotence, a cancer diagnosis. Even if you ran a thousand miles, aced a billion exams or hit a dozen home runs, nothing could reverse or erase the fact of cancer. Except, maybe, surgery.
The operation lasted five hours. The mass was fully removed, but the procedure was far more complicated than anyone had expected. I was in intensive care for eight days, in a tangle of wires, beeping machines, with drains in my lungs and my liver. I was so drugged I was hallucinating — Donna Summer was doing water aerobics in the hall outside, Angelina Jolie kept trying to call me (I screened her), a reggae musician sat mute on the end of my bed, my older brother had three heads, one of my feet kept catching fire, and it rained periodically around my bed.
When I closed my eyes, the room was still vivid to me, but the nurses were all clad in Downton Abbey garb, and the walls were draped with velvet. I grew intensely attached to the nurses, grateful for their kindness, and lay wondering if there was a more important job.
I also grew attached to my surgeons, who were pleased to discover that the ovarian tumours — one on each ovary — were not malignant. I didn’t have ovarian cancer, but I did have another, rare form of appendiceal cancer, which can recur but is nonaggressive and has a much higher survival rate.
Following my first surgery, I was emboldened by the fact that I slowly grew stronger: after a few months I began to wake without scalding pain, was able to walk upright again and return to work. Since then, though, this cancer has returned twice, and I have had to endure two more surgeries, each more difficult than the last. I wrote the first draft of this book before my third, and finished it in the long, gruelling recovery afterwards, during which I struggled to see a single star blinking, let alone a universe strung with fairy lights. My hospital ward was hung with jellyfish made out of tinsel at Christmas time, and I stared at them glumly. My friends brought me champagne and salted caramel gelato when I was stuck in the ward for my birthday, but I threw up shortly afterwards. After this round, the pain was far more protracted and intense, and I had to fight even harder for my calm, which did gradually, slowly return.