What comes next?

Last night we celebrated Samhain on Plot 44, the allotment I share with Gemma. A place where I garden, and where I share the cycles of nature that I find so calming and necessary to have in my life. And no, it has nothing to do with breast cancer, well other than being a place of solace for me.

30 October 2012, candles in the dark at Plot 44. Samhain.

And I need a place of solace, I mean I think we all do, I need somewhere to go to find peace, to turn off the outside noise and distractions. Even though I do have a two excellent tools – a very finely tuned shit filter (yes, you read that right, everyone should invest in one, and they’re free); I also have a well-oiled quack-o-meter (yes, I prefer informed discussion) – despite both of these essential tools, I still find there’s too much noise in my life at times.

And this is one of those times. I wrote on my last post, about how wearing it is. Nearly six years now since I was diagnosed with breast cancer. But despite the circumstances that propelled me into the breast cancer community, I’ve found some extremely supportive and valued breast cancer friends:

“But I am not turning away from that community, no. I’m still here, but just so tired, so worn out – by the years of being a breast cancer patient, and now after months of working on Rachel’s book reminding me sharply and keenly, and reminding all of us too, that we simply haven’t got the right tools at our disposal to stop women from dying of breast cancer.”

And this year has been a very difficult year for me. To lose Rachel so suddenly, my dear friend. The grief has been enormous.To be immersed in her words and work on her book has meant I’ve had little time for much blogging of my own, or reading other people’s blogs.  And over and over I hear the same arguments and questions about the mainstream breast cancer culture. The pink-washing, the lack of research, the lack of awareness of metastatic breast cancer. I don’t want to keep repeating myself.

1,736 days

Dream images of Venice kindly supplied by the internet.

OK dear readers, please don’t be alarmed but I am about to write about my dreams, those stories that play out consciously and unconsciously during the night. Because I know that ‘Dream Interpretation’ sounds like something from ‘The Journal of Wishful Thinking’ – but this isn’t like that.

This last week I’ve been to Venice every night. A recurring dream, which is almost the same every night. I am in a mansion, a huge place, in Venice which has an enormous garden that falls away to a canal and a vista across the city. Do they have sloping gardens in Venice? I’ve no idea, I’ve never been there. Anyhow, I’m with a group of people, not people I know, at least not people from my ‘real’ life. And when it’s meal time, I’m doing the cooking. And I have to make a meal for about 20 people, and I have one tin of tomatoes and a loaf of bread. It seems a stretch. Another night we actually go to a shop, a sort of supermarket, where there are lots of tins of tomatoes, but I am on my own and I have no bags and I can’t carry more than two tins. Sigh.

I happen to mention the dream to Ronnie, who says he’s been having a recurring dream too. In his, he is walking up a hill and every time he gets to the top he has to go back down to the bottom to get something he has forgotten. Like a cage with three hamsters. Bizarre.

But they are both difficult situations. We are both alone. We’re in some other place. Like the place we’re in now, called ‘hospital-land’.

The Day of the Dead

The Day of the Dead, Sefton Park, Liverpool, 2010

Guest editor Ronnie, with the final round up of our blog-a-day for October.

In the old Celtic calendar, the end of October marked the end of the year. All the harvest is in, the nights are darkling for winter. And they would celebrate with the ancient feast of Samhain. We still celebrate this day. We are celebrating it this weekend. Many of us call it ‘Halloween’. But also, many of us know it as ‘The Day of the Dead’. And here too, we remember those we have lost. And we name them:

Audre Lorde

JaneRA

Deidre

Linda McCartney

Dusty Springfield

Dina Rabinovitch

Jo Spence

Iris Berg

And thousands and thousands of other women who died too soon, because of breast cancer. We honour their memories and we celebrate their lives. On this Day of the Dead.

All of this month, with the help of our friends, we have been doing everything we could think of to change the conversation, and raise awareness about the reality of breast cancer.

World without cancer

Some days chocolate is a necessity. Real friends know when.

Let’s face it, Facebook has redefined what we mean by ‘Friends’. You know when someone asks if you know so and so, and maybe you reply, ‘Well I do know her/him, I mean she/he is my friend, well my friend on Facebook that is.’

Does it mean anything?

I’m one of those people who have in the past accepted every friend request on Facebook, only to regret it days later when my News Feed is filled up with Farmville requests or some other Jewel type annoying games. Well I think they’re annoying anyway. That’s not what I want to use Facebook for. Or announcements about what you’re watching on TV right now. No thanks, I’m just not interested. And it amazes me how the most banal comment can attract 28 comments. I just can’t do trivial. I mean I love to engage with real lives, and lives lived in joy and delight. And I do enjoy ‘normal’ now a lot more than I ever thought I could. But sometimes I feel that my world is filling up with trivia that doesn’t enhance it, and anyway, really how can anyone have 1,159 friends? Or 159? Maybe 59 at most? If you are seriously going to engage with them and have meaningful conversations as well as some fun. By the way, I don’t know the right answer. I hate those Facebook messages that go ‘post this if you’re really my friend, let’s see who is paying attention’, because what I think is well, no actually, if you’re really my friend – TALK TO ME.

So, I’m one of those Facebook users who does cull their Friend list. Yup, I unfriend people. And you know when I unfriend someone with 2,543 friends, I know they won’t even notice. If I wrote on their wall, would they even notice? And when I get a Friend Request, I respond with a message, ‘Do I know you? Have we met? Do we have something in common?’ Because I’m not interested in becoming ‘friends’ with someone if we don’t have something to talk about. I mean, real friends, that is people I know in the flesh, I interact with them, I chat, heck I even have lunch with them sometimes. And I am careful who I spend my time with. Because I know that time is limited. I feel that more keenly now. No, I’m not being a miserable cancer patient who’s predicting doom and gloom that will result in my early death. That’s not what I mean. I also know that I have less energy now too, and the energy I do have I want to spend it wisely. Not waste it. I can’t. It would be unfair on myself.

What I mean is, that doing this blogaday has shown me something. It has shown me how deeply affected I am by the conversations I have when they are real.

‘The enormity of our task.’

I’ve recently finished reading The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde for the sixth or seventh time. It’s such a deep and inspiring read. Every time I read it I find I am touched again on many levels by Audre Lorde’s insightful and skilfully expressed emotions – anger, loss, fear – they jump off the page.

I bought this book over four years ago newly diagnosed with breast cancer having recently had a mastectomy in March 2007. At that time I hung around in the cancer sections of bookshops looking for, well, looking for what? I’m not sure  – answers maybe to all the ‘whys?’ I had:

Why me? Why so young? Why so little choice? Why do I feel so alone?

And did Audre Lorde answer my questions? I think, actually, now looking back through the years which I see now as layers, I see there are shards of answers to all the ‘big’ important connections I’ve started to piece together, and they have all started from seeds in this book:

• the links between the causes of breast cancer and the environment;
• the sense of a ‘bigger’ industry, Cancer Inc.;
• and particularly about how women are encouraged to treat breast cancer so, ‘nobody will know the difference’.

Audre Lorde writes The Cancer Journals in 1980. That’s 30 years ago. 30 years. Wow – that’s a long time. For so little change.