I am so thankful that I am now clear of cancer. My thrice-cut scar runs the length of my torso; I have tried, as Atticus Poetry advised, to wear my scars like wings, but I feel permanently altered. I dread another surgery. It always feels strange returning to normal life. When I came out of the hospital for the first time, everyone suddenly seemed consumed with irrelevant, foolish, temporal worries. Reading the fine print of your mortality is a great sifter of rubbish. I frowned at the complaints posted on social media when I was recovering — people who had the flu, who were annoyed by politicians or burdened by work, or who were juggling jobs and children. I wanted to scream: ‘BUT YOU ARE ALIVE! Alive!’ Each day should be a glory, especially if you are upright and able to move with ease, without pain.
I am still grappling with what all of this means. But during this time, three age-old truths became even more apparent to me.
First, stillness and faith can give you extraordinary strength. Commotion drains. The ‘brave’ warrior talk that so often surrounds cancer rang false to me. I didn’t want war, tumult or battle. Instead, I just prayed to God. And I think what I found is much like what Greek philosophers called ataraxia, a suspended kind of calm in which you can find a surprising strength. One that can be developed quietly, in a world of dark, lit faintly by the moon.
Second, you may find yourself trying to comfort panicked people around you. But those who rally and come to mop your brow when you look like a ghost, try to make you laugh, distract you with silly stories, cook for you — or even fly for twenty hours just to hug you — are companions of the highest order. Your family is everything.
Third, we should not have to retreat to the woods like Henry David Thoreau to ‘live deliberately’. And it would be impossible and frankly exhausting to live each day as if it were your last. But there’s something about writing a will in which small children are the main beneficiaries that makes the world stop.
My doctor asked me how I became so calm before my surgeries. I told her: I prayed, locked out negativity and drama; I drew my family and tribe — all big-hearted, pragmatic people — near. I tried to live deliberately.
‘Can I just say,’ she said, ‘you should do that for the rest of your life.’
Chapter 20
Lessons on Hope from the Hanoi Hilton
Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! . . . We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work; but in a minute a cannon batters all.
— John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
What is to give light must endure burning.
— Anton Wildgans, Helldark Hour
AS I WRITE THIS, I am acutely conscious that it may seem as though I am suggesting we all Pollyanna our way through life, always looking for the glad things, the bright parts, the shiny bits. In truth, life is often ugly and awful, and in the face of it we can grow small, angry and obsessed with crumbs. We may end up grieving loss or lying in hospital beds with our fists clenched in fear and anger, enduring the diabolical pairing of pain and impotence. I have had black periods during my illness, mainly when eroded by bodily torment or trapped in my house by my own physical limitations, leading me to withdraw from people I don’t want to burden. Recovery can be a long march.
I don’t articulate my anxieties much, largely because it generally doesn’t help if I do. I favour repression over other techniques of coping, just focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. But when I crack, I crack. My body has betrayed me, and at times the pain has been terrible. I have watched my patience ebb as nurses inserted needles clumsily or tightened blood pressure straps too hard; when I’ve been woken repeatedly for routine checks from 5 am; when a physiotherapist left me sitting upright in a chair for hours just two days after surgery that had sliced me in half. (On discovering me doubled over the next day, the pain specialist cried, ‘Is she a masochist? This isn’t a gym, this is a hospital!’) I resented being told how to eat, how to breathe and how to walk. I am not an idiot. I am usually pretty fit and strong. I have finished long and complicated tasks, including books and a PhD, run a newsroom, spoken in front of large crowds, written hundreds of thousands of words, passed difficult exams, worked through the night to meet deadlines.
Still, there is something about a cancer diagnosis that can make people around you treat you like a child. Like the pale young hospital psychologist who sprang an unwanted surprise therapy session on me during a check-up. I had never met her before. When I asked if she followed a cognitive behavioural model, she shook her head: ‘No, because that is all about recognising false fears. With people like you, all the things you are most scared of might come true. Your fears are real.’ Cheers.
What I have had to hold onto is that hope is real too. My friend Briony kept reminding me of this, and the fact that a resilient, hopeful kind of realism was articulated perfectly by a man who endured seven and a half years of torture.
IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to find a human being made of sterner stuff than Admiral Jim Stockdale. His full name is, almost incredibly, James Bond Stockdale, but his brand of heroism was not rooted in babes and martinis, but broken bones and a Medal of Honor. In 1943, Stockdale entered the US navy at age nineteen, and became an aviator. He graduated to commanding Fighter Squadron 51 and flying supersonic F8 Crusaders, firstly at a naval air station near San Diego, then at sea, on aircraft carriers in the western Pacific. In 1965, he led the first bombing mission over the jade-coloured hills of North Vietnam.
Sitting on his bedside table throughout his air force career, no matter what he was involved in, were two books, Enchiridion and Discourses, by the philosopher he admired most, Epictetus, a Roman slave who would go on to be a Greek Stoic philosopher; Xenophon’s Memorabilia, a collection of Socratic dialogues; and The Iliad and The Odyssey (Epictetus expected his students to be versed in Homer plots). By studying Stoicism, Stockdale wrote, he became ‘a man detached — not aloof but detached — able to throw out the book without the slightest hesitation when it no longer matched the external circumstances’. Stoics were familiar with the concept that shit happens. Stockdale quotes Epictetus: ‘Would you have someone else be sick of a fever now, someone else go on a voyage, someone else die? For it is impossible in such a body as ours, that is, in this universe that envelops us, among these fellow creatures of ours, that such things should not happen, some to one man, some to another.’
Around midday on 9 September 1965, when flying not far above the treetops in North Vietnam, Stockdale’s small A-4 airplane was hit by enemy fire. He ‘punched out’ and watched his plane land in a rice paddy and burst into flames. In an account written almost thirty years later, he described what he says happened next: ‘After ejection I had about thirty seconds to make my last statement in freedom before I landed in the main street of a little village right ahead. And so help me, I whispered to myself: “Five years down there, at least. I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”’