When I got there the doctor said, “You know when we call you in at seven in the morning it’s not good.” She had called me in at 7.15am on Friday to give this news. I have cancer. She used words like ‘chemo’ and ‘metastasize’. She emphasised that these are words I may not need to learn. In my head there was only room for three words, the same three words recurring all weekend.
She gave me the name of a surgeon I’m to meet today, Monday, who will try to cut all the cancer out. She said, “You’ll be reassured to know that everyone’s going to be treating this as the utmost urgent priority.” I sort of half-laughed. “That is not reassuring,” I told her, wryly, and she made a comical face. I am proud of that wryness and that half laugh. Those are my courage.
She said she thought what they first found might have been inside me maybe a year. She said, best case scenario is I go into surgery this week and the new doctor, a man, cuts all of it out, he gets the lot, and after that I keep getting scanned and checked and tested for the next five years then for the rest of my life I will have to keep an eye on it and keep meeting from time to time with these doctors (“you’ll get sick of the sight of us, I promise you.”) Then there’s some spreadage and there is no cure so we irradiate it or poison it with chemo which doesn’t poison just the cancer but the host as well — me, in my body — and then at the far end is, the scans reveal it’s in your blood or lymph glands or your organs are riddled with it, we are sorry, there is nothing we can do, you have a few months, set your affairs in order.
Until the first tests come back there is no way of knowing how much cancer is in my body at this stage nor how far it may have spread.
The call from this doctor’s receptionist came as I walked out of the hospital from seeing Mum. That morning, Thursday four days back, I woke to texts from Mum at 4.30am saying hello I am very very sick and then from my brother at dawn, we are at the hospital with Mum, pneumonia and it’s not looking good. I went straight in to see her and I’ve never seen anyone so sick. She was shivering with fever and delirious and vomiting up coiling tubes of bright yellow foam like a pool noodle, like those batts you put into ceilings for insulation. We thought she was going to die. The doctors seemed to think so, too, and they told us, the family should come. When I came out of my own appointment next morning Mum had turned a sharp corner and by some miracle of resilience was sitting up in bed eating a sandwich. I was thinking what if she dies, what if she really does, what if she is dead already and she is gone and she’ll never know I have this. Instead, Mum seemed so much calmer and stronger and I visited again and made her comfortable in the too-short bed and listened to the doctors and my mother told me a story about her aunt, my great aunt, who died only two months back at 96. This great aunt had cancer, and I never knew. She had it cut out, and recovered to live this long life. Since returning from Africa at the end of 2022 I had been asking when could we drive up to see her. Instead, she died, and the day of her funeral I happened to phone and Mum said, Can’t talk now darling, we’re all in the car on the way to Warwick, and I said, Why, what’s happening in Warwick, and she said, “Auntie Berta’s funeral.” I said why — but why — how come I, and she said, smoothly, your brother put his foot down. He told us, if she goes, I’m not coming. And he’s a pallbearer.
I don’t know the source of this estrangement and no one can explain it to me. Soon it may be immortal, as far as anything human. I don’t know why my mother’s 84th birthday in November was held at this powerful brother’s house and I was not invited. I had been lured back from Ghana on the promise of the long-overdue reconciliation I had been asking for and working towards for more than a decade. That she let one of her last birthdays be celebrated without me, the whole family gathered just down the road, when I had been gone some twelve years and was actually living under her roof at that stage — I cried for days. And, in an aching gap in the crying I went to my first decent painting class and worked round the fire in my throat on my first decent painting. The boy’s name is Atta Bonye and his wry, thoughtful, sweet and spiced expression speaks to my heart. All I know is we are humans here together and life is turbulent and short. All Ghanaians know we cannot heal nor even address these painful things if the other party does not want them resolved. All we can do is cling to those things which bring life and give health, and try to distance ourselves from toxins, from cruelty in others and the impulse to cruelty if it should surface in ourselves, try to balance painful honesty with life giving kindness, try to be as real and as present as we possibly can, though it cost us everything, as they say in Accra, you have to “happy yourself.”
Tag: family get-together
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wait what
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sharing a desk
Brother is staying for a few days & brother and Berliner are sharing a desk. They don’t know each other very well. I walk in on them sitting side by side with their computers open, both are typing furiously and music is playing.
Cathoel: so are you just taking turns between the songwriters and the techno, then?
Berliner: yup.
Brother: and we’ve been making remixes of your songs. Just by playing a song of yours over the top of what’s happening, so that~
Cathoel (sings): Tuesdays I lie in bed with my ex…
Brother: exactly, sometimes it works out perfectly. You should do remixes!
Cathoel: let’s! We can mix them with Tony Abbott’s speeches. Or, you know, sing-song public speakers.
Berliner (still typing): yup.
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making everything diamond
Two boys scribbling either end of the dinner table. “What are you drawing?” 6yo: “It’s a diamond. With a rainbow inside it.” 4yo: “This is a machine for making everything dead.”
Their mother, breastfeeding, laughs telling us how the 6yo asked her could they play “jumping over Amelia on the couch.” Amelia is three weeks old. She was wrapped and asleep and her brother said earnestly, “It’s okay Mummy. We’re not going to jump on top of her.”
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beekeeper
@…………..
Sister-in-law: “Yeah that was my uncle who used to be a beekeeper. But then he lost all his bees.” Brother (mournfully): “Yeah. ‘I used to be a beekeeper but now I’m just… a keeper.’” Mum: “But he didn’t keep them, he didn’t keep them at all!” Brother: “‘I used to be a beekeeper, but now I’m just… a bloke.’” Nephew: “We have four chooks. Salty, Fairytales, Slippers, Goldie, and Superchook.” Second brother: “Only Salty turned out to be a rooster so we sent him out to a farm. He’s died now.” Me: “Really?” Brother: “Yeah. And the neighbours have two chooks that turned into roosters. The neighbours closer to town.” Nephew: “We could play chess. But there’s too many of us.”
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brandy barter
I must have lived in Berlin too long because it’s screeching hot on a Sunday afternoon, I am exhausted, and somehow the idea has crept into my head that I would like to drink a martini. It won’t dislodge. Opening my parents’ liquor cabinet is a dispiriting experience. It is a small, oval, glass-panelled thing on turned legs and inside, it resembles a brown mouth half-filled with decayed molars. An uneven semi-circle of discoloured flasks: these are the bottles of something your old workmates gave you for Christmas and that no one enjoys enough to actually drink. Plus a bottle of cheap brandy from which I made the pudding butter five days ago. Outside, Brisbane sprawls on all sides, as far as the sea and the hills, suburban and stupefied by shimmering heat. I cannot accept that there isn’t some strange punk bar or pirate bar within a block’s walk, opening late and staying open even later, candles on the tables, dogs under them, where a charmingly incompetent twenty-five-year-old bartender will make me a martini that begins with him holding up a Cinzano bottle that is actually labelled ‘Martini’ and showing me, “It’s empty.” After that I will explain that you don’t need a bottle marked ‘Martini,’ you need gin. I wish I could buy a vile martini for three euros, or a sublime martini for four, and have the bartender bring his black leather wallet to my table afterwards and have to remember that when you pay, it is customary to tip, but advisable not to say “Danke” when you hand over a twenty-euro note: this means, in the German sense, “Nein, danke,” which means “keep the change,” and it took me almost all of an eighteen-month stint there to learn this.
On Christmas Day I met for the first time in three years my uncle, with whom I had been having a feud. He lives across the road and is stubborn, a unhelpful family trait shared by us all. Our feud arose because three years ago I was staying with my folks a few months before moving to Melbourne. During that time I had set up a writing room in their dining room and pinned out the manuscript for my poetry book along the tongue and groove walls. It was a quiet, dim, and sacred space. The first song in my album was recorded there, on a single microphone propped by the couch. But for now it was just me in there every day, working, working. The walls were lined with shelves and high up above the rows of books lay three ugly old clocks, stained wood, with various pieces missing. I made a joke, apparently: we should sell these on Ebay. My uncle, who spent his childhood immersed in the story of these clocks, one of which had belonged to a great-uncle who died in the Great War, took me seriously. It had not occurred to me that such hideous objects might be of value to anyone. I was at my desk one afternoon when the door opened without a knock and my uncle strode in. He is a train driver. He was wearing hubcap shorts and a huge pair of dusty boots. Without a word he climbed onto my desk and started reaching down the clocks. I was milling at his feet, wringing my hands, saying Please get off my desk! Don’t stand on my stuff! That’s my work! If you want the clocks I will get them for you! My uncle took all three clocks in his arms and climbed down, grunting. He set off down the hall with the clocks anchored under his chin and me beside him being flicked aside like a fly. He confiscated the clocks and later told Mum it was in order to protect family heirlooms from being sold online. The idea that I could live in my parents’ house whilst secretly selling family treasures online was disgusting to me. I marched over to his house to demand he apologize. I could not accept that anyone could know me all my life and believe me capable of such selfishness. We had been mates since I was three or four – how could he not know that hey, she’s a royal pain but at least she is painfully, irritatingly honest? The feud simmered slowly for all the years I was away. No one had been sure whether to invite this lonely uncle to Christmas lunch or whether to leave well enough alone. Christmas morning everybody cooked. My sister-out-law made a magnificent salmon and wrapped it in foil, my brother cut up foothills of potatoes, we worked out that we had almost one whole joint of meat or fish for every adult at the table. I made a pavlova and a Christmas pudding and followed the most labour-intensive recipe for custard I had ever seen. It required the milk to be slowly heated to a simmer and then allowed to cool. Halfway through it said, “Now transfer custard to a clean saucepan.” I made the brandy butter. Then I went to the phone. I rang my uncle. “It’s Cathoel. Are you coming over soon? Because I have a problem and I need your help.
“My problem is that I made the brandy butter and it’s got so much brandy in it that it literally won’t absorb any more. There’s actually a puddle of brandy sitting in the top of the butter. Everyone’s telling me I’ve wrecked it and I need you because you are the only person in the world who can come over and tell me ‘this needs more brandy.’” My uncle said, “You need back-up.” “Exactly,” I said. “I’ll need to make myself beautiful,” he said. “I’ll need to have a bath.” I said, “Don’t get too beautiful. The rest of us have settled for only moderately attractive, so don’t be too long.” When he came in the door half an hour later he handed me a drinking straw. “Is this for slurping up the excess brandy off the top?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. Then he took a spoonful of my brandy butter and said, wonderfully, “It’s perfect.”