My treatment continues to go well and the side effects continue to be manageable, and somehow I am finding it a little bit easier now to be more optimistic about my prospects to survive healthily for perhaps another year or even more. But I am learning that that mindset comes with emotional side effects too, and they are not always quite so positive.
For most of the time I find myself feeling more and more blessed by this bonus time. I have even found ways to enjoy the dreaded New York summer rather more than usual, primarily by escaping it for as many as 55 days. We had 31 days in Portugal, then seven in Italy. Then this month I enrolled on a ten-day singing course in Massachusetts, followed by a week in Canada with my wife visiting her brother and his lovely family. Even the time stuck in New York has been more bearable than usual, with our weather on the benign side while it seems everybody else has had extremes to deal with.
One thing I have noticed as I move further and further into bonus time is that I feel less need to talk about my cancer. Partly that may be due to my own expectations of healthy survival time. The odds on lasting five years or more have not budged much, but the chances of getting half that far certainly have. When I recall the expressions in the eyes of medical professionals and loved ones and people with relevant experience, around the time of my major operation, I saw an expectation that I was not long for this world, and inevitably that affected my own expectation too. Now I am more optimistic, and the urgency of explaining the situation to others has diminished as a result. Partly it may also be physical, specifically how my head looks. After the operation and the start of radiation therapy, the scar on my head was clearly visible to all, and perhaps that led to some need to explain it. Now a lot of hair has grown back, weirdly in its original dark brown colour. Weird hair colours are commonplace these days so don’t beg an explanation, but it has covered over the wound, so fewer people look at me quizzically.
Perhaps I am also more cognizant of the preferences of others too. Most people going on a singing holiday want to cheer themselves up by singing, not depress themselves by hearing tales of the failing health of their fellow singers. I think I judge better now who to share with. Anybody under thirty, even close relatives, have no idea how to respond, so now I save them the bother by avoiding the topic altogether. On the singing course, I was selective and, I hope, smart, in choosing who might be interested in my story.
Then I have noticed a new darker side of optimism. While every waking thought was about cancer, I found it easier to move quickly past any other possible sources of anger. I would follow the news less closely and less critically, perhaps because a part of me was always thinking that the consequences of that news were increasingly irrelevant to me. People I would previously have been annoyed by no longer had such a detrimental effect on my mood. And I even became somewhat less critical of the USA, after a period earlier in 2022 when its flaws became close to an obsession for me, one that only made me feel more and more judgemental and miserable. After the diagnosis I found that I could be more serene in many situations, especially once the steroids had been removed from my list of medications.
On my travels I found my more critical traits to have returned. On the singing course, why could I not simply celebrate day after day of singing in lovely surroundings and the chance to meet many truly wonderful people? I could do all that, but I also found myself comparing the charms of Northampton and its Smith campus unfavourably to its European peers, and noting how much even a small fraction of the alumni generosity showered at Smith could improve the decrepit public school system. I also started griping about some singers who talked too much and caused us to learn pieces more slowly than we could have, and the many flaws I perceived in the workshop design and teaching. This was the old curmudgeonly Graham re-emerging, to the detriment of everyone, including me. By the penultimate evening I was really quite angry, and it took me some days to realise how this anger only rebounded on myself and those unfortunate souls who happened to be in its path.
The same sort of thing happened again in Canada. Why could I not simply celebrate a joyful, relaxed week with my wife and her impressive, generous and kind family? I could indeed do that, but less benign thoughts came to the fore as well. We visited the splendour of Niagara Falls, but I could not help but feel angry about how the pristine natural wonder had been compromised by the horrors of US and Canadian urban planning, pandering to ugly corporate interests and the worst aspects of human nature. Then we returned to Mississauga, as ugly a sprawling suburb of an ugly city as could be imagined. My wife’s relatives have found happiness there and made wise choices, but I could not stop myself becoming angry at the endless rows of boxy houses, all with multiple large cars parked outside, interspersed only with shopping malls and parking lots.
This sort of negative thought came frequently to my mind during the long anti-US phase immediately prior to diagnosis, and now I see how I managed to move past them over the months when cancer expunged almost everything else. But in bonus time, cancer sometimes takes a welcome back seat, and the negative stuff occasionally takes its place alongside the positive emotions centred on gratitude. For a long time I managed to avoid becoming too angry with the US news, but now the prospect of another Trump-infested election cycle starts to fill me with horror, as does the other relentless garbage that passes for news, while real public policy issues are completely ignored. How can somewhere so wealthy tolerate so many of its people living in abject poverty? What on earth is the rationale behind China policy, beyond a childish macho desire to remain top dog? Six months ago I felt ready to delegate such challenges to the next generation, but now I find myself being sucked back into the ugly mess.
Fortunately, most of the time I still find myself able to move past these negative thoughts, relying on the good practices I acquired during the period before the start of bonus time. Anger and bitterness help nobody, grief and sadness are fine but can be overcome by love and kindness and gratitude, leading to companionship, acceptance and peace. I can be thankful to have been granted this bonus time to strengthen these positive emotions, for my sake and that of those that I love. It is not so difficult.
