TODAY, I am feeling sentimental, soppy and sorry for myself. Some days are like that, when you have cancer, and when you grieve. Some are like diamonds, some are like rust.
The reason is the haunting, lilting song of that name, Diamonds and Rust, by Joan Baez, and it is filling my flat on a loop as a result of just having heard a moving Radio 4 programme about it in their Soul Music series. (Links at the end of this piece.) Playing music, vinyl preferably, is my Saturday morning thing. Today is more poignant than usual.
I’ve loved Joan’s music since first buying one of her albums as a right-on 16-year-old, into protest and folk music, working in a seaside record shop at weekends. Qualifying for discount helped. Diamonds and Rust is her account of her love affair with Bob Dylan from the perspective of a decade on. It is bitter-sweet, recalling a time when she was the star and he a rough new Greenwich Village folk singer, though she knew quickly that he would be a sensation – “the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond.” It contains many lines you wish you’d been talented enough to write. She cites Dylan’s eyes as being “bluer than robin’s eggs.”
In the Soul Music programme, it was a quote from an old interview with Joan when talking about the song that set me off. “I was crazy about him,” she said. Once, exasperated with me and my reluctance to commit fully to her in the early days of our relationship, Vikki shouted at me: “Can’t you see I’m crazy about you?” Since her death, it comes to my mind often, sometimes bringing a smile of gratitude, sometimes bringing a tear of regret that some things took me so long and left her in limbo.
(And some days, I can berate myself, too, for still feeling these intense moments when it is nearly six years on and think that I should be over it all by now. But then, like others who have lost, I just know there ain’t never going to be getting over “it all”, only less immediacy of sadness and a learning to live with the emptiness walking beside me.)
Soul Music also featured people telling tales like that of their own partnerships and how the song had mirrored or informed them in some way, whether those relationships had been doomed or fulfilled. About memories overwhelming and understated, uplifting and downcast. “We both know what memories can bring,” Joan sings. “They bring diamonds and rust.”
I currently don’t have the strength to don my armour against this sentimentality and sorrow, and so I wound easily. I’ve had three days of side effects from last week’s chemo kicking in, of lassitude and aching limbs, that have meant that leaving the flat is a potential ordeal. I’ve been offered the chance by the hospital to quit after these six cycles. Studies suggest that the more that can be tolerated, however, the time until the next required treatment increases, not that it is that simple. People and their tolerance differ. Bodies do not react predictably to chemicals. The emotional cost can offset the physical effect and gnaw at time.
I think of Vikki’s cheerfulness and courage through all her chemos – at least half a dozen spread over the 12 years of her secondary breast cancer - and feel cowardly and curmudgeonly, though in my defence I don’t recall her ever having more than six cycles in a row. And, when I remove the rose-tinted filter from the past’s camera, I can also recall her sad, angry days too. But I don’t feel brave. What really is the point of going through these three-weekly trials by toxicity if you don’t have energy to see your darling grandchildren or go to a football match? And worry about getting back home again if you go for a short walk? Or fret over getting Sepsis again? My reading mojo has left me. I write only infrequently, mostly in desperation.
I have 10 more days to decide whether to continue with the Docetaxel and the price it extracts. It’s not desperate if I don’t. There are more treatments left - but they will come sooner, the time they work for shorter.
There’s been too much rust lately. All that can be done is to own it and endure it - to be real and feel all this rather than ignoring or denying. It’s the human condition that encompasses love and loss, as Joan captured so beautifully. It would be good soon, mind - for it is getting late - to get back in touch with the unbreakable lustre of diamonds.
Diamonds and Rust, by Joan Baez:
Soul Music Radio 4:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0023wj0