Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The shocks started before I left the specialist’s consulting room. I knew the diagnosis of cancer was coming from the time I’d found the lump eight days earlier. But it was everything that came with it that undid me. Shockingly for me I immediately had control over my own life taken away. The specialist started rattling off a list of all the other tests I now had to have before the surgery I needed and I interrupted to ask what… when… where did I have to go for these tests as I madly scrambled to get my pen and notebook out of my handbag. Only to be told that all the appointments had already been made for me and his secretary would give me the details on my way out. I opened my mouth to explain I had other things in my diary. Important things. Trivial things. MY things. But I shut my mouth without uttering a word. Clearly everything else was going to have to fit around THIS thing.
Then the shocking realisation that I had to tell the people who love me. There’s a story in all these conversations. A story and so much love and gratitude for each and every one of ‘my’ people. This story is about one of those people – my Dad. I have always known that he loved me, never doubted it. And I had to tell this wonderful man my terrible news.
He lived hundreds of kilometres away. I had to call him. I felt sick. I couldn’t breath properly but if I tried to take a big breath I felt like I would throw up. Somehow I managed to make that call. Somehow I managed to speak the words I knew he didn’t want to hear. And then there was silence. I knew he was crying and trying to hide that from me. I knew he was trying to get himself together for me. To talk to me. To speak words of comfort. And I knew the shock and the terror had started for him too. But in that silence I could feel his love and I could breath again.
Over the months and months and months that turned into years my Dad never forgot any day when I was due to have a test, get a test result, have chemo, radiation, start some other type of treatment, finish that treatment, start some other bloody thing. Every time I would get a text from him. Every. Single. Time. From a man who was renowned for being forgetful. Who went and got himself a mobile phone and learnt how to send texts after vowing he would never do such a thing. That he couldn’t imagine what could possibly be important enough to want to carry a phone around with you all the damn time.
So here I am. Still alive obviously. But he is gone. He had to call me with his own terrible news. Terribler news because his condition was terminal. The terriblest news. And when he told me, I was silent as he had been years before. I cried and tried not to cry at the same time. Tried to hide my crying from him. Wanting to talk to him and not being able to speak. Already feeling the horror of the grief to come. And, in his beautiful gentle voice, he said: “Better me than you love.”