My cancer's worse than yours (11)

Though lovers be lost...

IT WAS, is, Vikki’s birthday today. She would have been 62. I took the picture above six years ago on her final birthday alive, at Claridge’s, where I’d booked afternoon tea. She was struggling, just 10 days away from the hospital telling her that they had run out of treatment options for her. Still she smiled. Still she laughed. The gleam of mischief yet to be made - though for but three months more - still burned in her eyes. And still she looked beautiful. Cancer robs people of much but never the beauty that shines from within.

I feel her loss keenly on her birthday, probably because they were big deals in our household. As an only child, she was used to her parents making a fuss of her each November 8 during her formative years. In our years together when they no longer could - her father dead, her mother suffering with vascular dementia – I was happy to pick up the baton, knowing over the dozen after her diagnosis that they would not stretch into her sixties.

This morning I went for breakfast with Vikki’s best friend from our old village, now a great friend of mine, and we shared some memories. Then to V’s grave, where the orange – her favourite colour – Fox and Cubs wildflowers of summer cling on. Like her, they are resilient and defiant as the cold takes hold.

I had my own flowers for her; red roses of course. And as I sat on her bench, I was reminded of Dylan Thomas’s line from his poem And Death Shall Have No Dominion, to which an old friend, Mike M, pointed me a few years back and which has become a comforting mantra: “Though lovers be lost, love shall not.”

At the top of a tall tree a red kite perches, whistling its call, and I muse that love is thankfully unending and infinite. It is not like tea that disappears from a mug as you drink it, nor like the mug itself, capable of holding only so much liquid. Love refills itself, cannot be contained. My love for Vikki, her memory and her legacy, grows with each year, each birthday, though it does not mean there is no room for others. And these days, I have two adorable grandchildren gifted to me as living recipients for my love.

At the village church where we were married and which hosted her funeral – and will host mine – I light a candle for V and run into some friendly old faces and we reminisce. I sit and meditate for a while, get in touch with how grateful I am to have been awarded her love and shared her life for 25 years. Grateful that I have survived Covid, chemotherapy and sepsis this year.

Yes, by the way, I did decide to stop the chemo last month after six cycles. The oncologist said that I had had the main benefits and that it might well be sensible to take a break for treatment given the toll it had taken on my body and thus my quality of life, and because no specialist could guarantee that continuing for any more would increase the time before the next treatment would be needed. And so for now, they will monitor me, with blood tests and scans, at regular intervals and we will all hope the respite continues for some time yet.

After the mutual decision to call time on the chemo, and with strength and energy returning, last week I overdid it, catching up with friends here, there and everywhere, getting too out and too about. This week and next will be more balanced; perhaps, metaphorically, a gentle walk, then a little jog, interspersed with a short run, before a stroll again.

As I came out of our old village church today, the sky imposed again the grey blanket that has gloomily covered England this past week. We always do seem to get our weather from the direction of the United States. (And you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind’s blowing.) But it mattered not. I love this time of year, the leaves that crackle on the ground, the darkness arriving with tea and buttered crumpets and PM on Radio 4.

I felt it walking to the shop yesterday just for milk, this pleasure in the mundane, in the simplicity of having the energy just to be able walk somewhere, to go and buy flowers, to light a candle in a church, to cook a proper meal from scratch.

At home now, I am gazing at a poem by Wendy Cope that Vikki printed and kept on a window ledge in our old house. It reflects our life together in its latter years, when the turbulence of striving for perfection in personal and professional lives was over, to be replaced by acceptance of ourselves and our relationship. It’s about a couple but its core of being at peace can be for a singleton, a widower, too. On this bitter-sweet day, a day when she has slowed me down to help me reconnect with what matters most, I thank her for that too.

Being Boring

By Wendy Cope
'May you live in interesting times.' Chinese curse

If you ask me 'What's new?', I have nothing to say
Except that the garden is growing.
I had a slight cold but it's better today.
I'm content with the way things are going.
Yes, he is the same as he usually is,
Still eating and sleeping and snoring.
I get on with my work. He gets on with his.
I know this is all very boring.

There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears and passion - I've used up a tankful.
No news is good news, and long may it last.
If nothing much happens, I'm thankful.
A happier cabbage you never did see,
My vegetable spirits are soaring.
If you're after excitement, steer well clear of me.
I want to go on being boring.

I don't go to parties. Well, what are they for,
If you don't need to find a new lover?
You drink and you listen and drink a bit more
And you take the next day to recover.
Someone to stay home with was all my desire
And, now that I've found a safe mooring,
I've just one ambition in life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.