dancingthroughchaos

‘

Our people die well’ – John Wesley (1703-1791)

The past few months have given us all a great deal more time and space to think and reflect.  If you’ve now read War & Peace, congratulations.  If you’ve joined the throng mastering Banana Bread, well done.  If you managed to blitz your loft, the garage, the shed, the cupboard under the stairs and/or your sock drawer, all of which I mentioned in the last blog, then give yourself a pat on the back – a bit of self-congratulation doesn’t go amiss.  If however, you’ve spent more time in your head than in those dark and neglected places you may have found it was not dissimilar.  Thoughts clutter and accumulate and these days, especially with so much going on in the crucial civil rights movement at the moment.  If you’ve waded into educating yourselves about BML and BAME then keep going; we all have a long way to go. I find there is less and less time to process these before yet more come crowding around demanding attention – yet another reason why a good hour or two roaming the countryside does me good.

Now, I’m not know as much of an optimist, in fact and in keeping with the atmosphere in which I was raised, if something can go wrong, I very much expect it will do.  And, even on the occasions when it doesn’t I tend to suffer from what the engaging Brené Brown calls ‘foreboding joy’.  Truth to tell, everyone else suffers with me to a degree as my self-doubts and misgivings inevitably spill out around me. 

Just had a book published after several years of slog?  Yes, indeed!  Well break open the champagne, give yourself a treat, shout it from the rooftops and sing, ‘Hallelujah!’.  Or – swift  and painful reality check here – contemplate the looming possibility that absolutely no one will buy it, I’ll have to give away almost every copy my contract obliged me to buy and then use the rest as doorstops for the rest of my life…

The recent combination of Covid & cancer has been a cocktail of potential doom particularly in those bleak moments when tiredness and uncertainty have elbowed their way into centre stage.  This, by the way, is why feasting at the table God sets and prepares for us is a cold-blooded decision not a gooey, whimsical, saccharine-laden fantasy  It’s sobering to think of one’s own mortality.  I remember classes of English poetry in which we considered the passion and pain of long-dead writers who toyed with,  and explored, the transient nature of life with their anguished metaphors and rhyming couplets.  A class of fifteen year olds handled it all lightly and with dismissive smiles: we were so alive ourselves that eighteenth and nineteenth century poets seemed to be speaking in faint whispers of a foreign language which we neither understood not cared to appreciate.

The upside of considering one’s own passing – and I have funeral plans in folders on my laptop as I write, just in case anyone needs them – is the opportunity to consider all the times it hasn’t happened so far.  Really; try it.  It’s worth reflecting on because, if nothing else, it ignites immense gratitude for the present.  Let me elucidate.

Over half a century ago (yikes!) my mother had a home birth with me, haemorrhaged badly and consequently had to be taken to hospital.  This could have made things quite precarious for me in the early 1960s, but we both survived and flourished.

As a teenager, I had the unnerving experience of being followed one morning on my way to school in Epsom.  I was engrossed in a book when an adult male came down the path toward me and I heard him stop, turn and begin to walk back after me.  With all my senses on high alert and a heart rate that escalated alarmingly, I knew I couldn’t outrun him or out-punch him.  I prayed.  Like mad.  Just at that moment a woman came around the bend in the path towards us, and seizing my moment I did run: all the way through the park gate, down the ‘cabbage patch’ path (as it was known), until I tumbled through the gates of school and sanctuary.  He would have risked discovery himself by running after me.  What might have happened remained a sinister phantasm of nightmares only.  I never told a soul but I never walked that route again either.

During the time I was a learner driver, I was fortunate to have the experience of a few long drives, one of them from Surrey to Devon with my mum.  Bizarrely we had just been talking about the things which can go wrong in a car, specifically what happens when a windscreen shatters.  Not five minutes later another vehicle threw up a stone which shattered the entire glass in front of me rendering it instantly opaque, thus obscuring everything.  Without hesitation I  put my fist through it immediately in order to see.  The adrenaline flowed, the blood pumped and clotted in record tine, but I was able to drive onto the grass verge where we both took some deep breaths and thanked God for no on-coming traffic and a quick reaction.

My post-student years in Winchester saw me whizzing around the city on my trusty bike as I enjoyed my new employment as a peripatetic teacher of speech & drama at an independent girl’s school.  St Swithun’s stands atop St Giles’ Hill, where the old medieval markets used to take place, on the road out to Alresford.  It’s a pig to cycle up, but a dream to freewheel down.  Unless, that is, the drivers fail to give cyclists the room they need…  That was my next brush with possibly signing out sooner than planned, but, again, I made it home unscathed in the end.

Jumping on a few years, married and a very new mum, I caught an infection from the hospital; after daughter #1 which in earlier years would have granted me a swift exit out of family life for ever.  I am so grateful for modern medicine, penicillin and the antibiotics of which my great-grandmother could only have dreamt.  Daughter #2’s arrival saw such a loss of blood that I literally felt the life drain out of me, which actually made me rather angry even in my incapacitated state; it was not at all how I had planned to leave.  Fortunately, once again, medicine and health care came to the rescue.  #3 was a dream (though she will tell you, as she tells me frequently, that she has made up for it since) and #4 necessitated a blood transfusion which, once again, would not have been reliably safe much before the 1940s, even though the first successful one took place in 1665  – it’s come a long way.  Thank goodness.

Two years later and we had three brushes with the Grim Reaper during our South African sabbatical in 1998/9.  First, our vehicle suffered a puncture leaving us stranded on the side of a road where tourists had been shot the previous week and contemporary advice was to steer well clear – literally.  We felt very white and very vulnerable as darkness fell.   It’s a story that ended well (obviously) but still leaves me in a cold sweat at times.  Our next encounter was actually an avoidance.  We left Port Edward a day earlier than planned and consequently missed the tornado that ripped through the town of Umtata leaving several people dead.  Had we kept to our original schedule the story might have unfolded rather differently.  Then, on the long, straight road through the Karoo, between Cape Town and Bloemfontein – renowned for accidents caused by drivers falling asleep at the wheel – I leant forward to pick up snacks from a bag for the kids on the back seat at the exact moment that a stone was thrown up from an oncoming lorry and smashed the windscreen at my head height.  Three brushes in three months; I wondered if that would be the ratio of life-death moments if we lived there…!  Yet here we are.

And, of course, there’s the recent unwelcome intruder of Stage 2 cancer.  As I lay on an examination bed, watching the biopsy needle probe into grainy tissue on the ultrasound screen I had one of those moments you read about in books.  Not so much an epiphany but definitely a few seconds of undiluted clarity and the certainty that one day we will all face the end of the line.  Few of us will get to choose in what manner we do that, but perhaps some of us will be able to choose the attitude with which we face our last universal enemy.  In that strange, quiet space I was truly flooded with feelings of gratitude: for my husband, my children, my wider family; for my parents and my secure upbringing amongst cousins who still connect to laugh together; for the people I’ve been privileged to know around the world as well as the amazing places I’ve been allowed to see.  My life has been very full, and in that moment I knew a contentment that even if this unwelcome invader which had violated my body was to gain the upper hand, it would have been a worthwhile life.  There’s no doubt that some of that surety comes from my living faith.  I thought about others I’ve known from childhood who have walked the same path of faith in Jesus and how fantastic it would be to see them sooner rather than later.

Since then, I’ve travelled 12,000 more miles, to Cape Town and back, taken daily tablets and been under the surgeon’s knife.  I’m delighted to say that when she rang me in the last 24hours, she had only good news.  The cancer has not spread; I am officially, a ‘survivor’.  Her only regret was that she does not always have the same news for all her patients and I felt the weight of her responsibility in speaking to other women today.

Cats supposedly have 9 lives; I’ve itemised more here from my own experience and it seems that I’m not done yet.  How many more are there to come?  Of course, like you,  I can’t say.  But today I am more grateful than ever and have chosen to banish foreboding joy to the far reaches of my mind for now.  I know the day will come when my Maker calls me home; I am trusting that it’s a journey I will be able to make with focus, faith and thankfulness.