Borrowed time

I welcomed the new year with music, champagne and my mom, video-chatting with the rest of my family in Argentina and then my sister’s family in Germany.  It was a brief uplift from a rather somber week.  Now I'm back in a flat that is mostly empty and eerily quiet, despite the CDs I keep feeding to the stereo.  I miss the children’s laughter, yelling and running.  I miss playing Duplos with them (though when I do, in normal times, after work, I’m often tired and not always keen on it).  I miss drawing with them, writing, making a mess.  The flat feels like an hollow cave, or a grave.

Outside, it’s also quiet, cold and cloudy.  It is as if the world stood still, if it hadn’t yet made the jump into what most call the new decade (which, technically, starts in 2021 only).  There is no motion in the air, no commotion on the ground.  People are in their homes taking it easy.  The tall trees that are visible through our living-room windows are stripped of all of their life-giving leaves.  Their tiny branches are crisp black lines against the dull grey background.  They look like finely executed ink drawings, inanimate and inert.

I’ve been inside for most of the past week, venturing out only occasionally when my mom’s insistence to go for a walk became too strong.  We had a sunny but cold day of climbing along the ridge of the Lägere crest, an exposed hike not for the timid that you wouldn’t expect a fifteen-minute walk from a busy town center.  You would also not necessarily expect a seventy-year-old on it, but my mom did just fine.  We took another hike on the other side of town, crossing a hill as the motorway tunneled through it.  There was no sun on that walk and hardly anything to recommend it.

Thus I’ve preferred to stay inside, though it’s not doing me any good.  As I slow down and stop moving, energy is sapping from me as if it weren't needed anymore.  Instead of recovering from a tough year, I slump into the next as if I were unwilling to carry my own weight.  I don’t do hygge.  I need activity but find it only on my exercise bicycle.  Picking up work again in a few days will be an uphill struggle.  The children will be back by then.  They’ll help me get into gear.

The new year will bring another seven chemotherapy sessions, the first one only a week away.  By Easter, this irritating but vital routine will end.  This is all I know so far.  This is all anyone knows.  After chemo, I will live on borrowed time, pretending to be healed while fearing recurrence.  There will be periodic checkups, tests and consultations, but there will only ever be two outcomes, doubtful health and certain illness.

I shouldn’t be looking forward to this, and yet I do.  Every day is a gift.  Every day is life.  Every day I can do something, learn something, teach the children something, have fun, be myself, enjoy life.  Coming out of chemo with the cancer in remission would be wonderful, even if recurrence looms, unstoppable.  There will be more cloudy days, there might be dark days, but the bright days will outshine them and outlast them.  Survival starts in the mind.  I’m ready for it.

Happy New Year!