Re-entry

 The French have a word for this time of year; they call it la rentrée. For the long summer break, including the whole of August, everything revolves around les vacances. Schools are empty of course, but so are offices, and forget about trying to find anyone resembling a plumber to fix your drain. Then comes September, and normal life returns, and everybody has to find a way to respond to the sudden change of pace once again.

 

It is less extreme, but even New York has une rentrée. For many of us, the summer is a time to dread rather than embrace, because the humidity is unrelenting and the noise of air conditioners a constant nuisance, yet we are still expected to function. Now, in September, all my choirs have restarted and the routine of the week has resumed. Yet for us, this year, our rentrée has assumed an exaggerated significance. I did not expect to be embarking on this season in such good health; indeed it always felt that this might be the season when things started going downhill fast. Yet a chance remark by our oncologist last week has helped to create a very different atmosphere, one of unexpected optimism. Of course that is very welcome, but it has created its own challenges. Bring them on.

 

I can’t fully explain how it came into my head that this period might turn out to be a milestone of decline. When I first received a preliminary diagnosis last October, I still recall the words of the surgeon after he had breathed dreaded words including “aggressive” and “high grade”. “Sometimes we are looking at years, and sometimes months” certainly came across to me as a warning to prepare for an early demise. The hope offered by the discovery of “unusual features” never amounted to much, since they were obviously not so unusual as to warrant any sort of unusual treatment. I avoided Google, but still could not avoid discovering the statistics of an eighteen-month median life expectancy after diagnosis and a five year survival rate under 10%.

 

Then came the operation and a period my family still describe as a temporary insanity, backed up by a series of quickly arranged visits which told their own story about what family members expected. Even when the intense treatment seemed to have suppressed the cancer and the MRI reports started to lead to medical smiles, our hopes were still cautious ones, and it spoke volumes when the oncologist encouraged us to visit Europe but warned us to “have our affairs in good order”. All of this led to what I characterised as “bonus time”, a period to enjoy as something of a last hurrah.

 

I am not sure that very much has changed now, except in our heads. Finding myself still healthy at rentréetime, with its resumed choirs and other routines, and seamlessly passing the halfway mark in the chemotherapy, were perhaps surprising enough to reset some expectations. But my wife and I surely sat up and took notice when the oncologist reacted to the latest clean MRI scan by starting to wax lyrical about patients of his who had thrived for ten years or more after a diagnosis like mine. Now, talk like that would be irresponsible if he did not feel such an outcome was a realistic possibility, and this general is certainly not irresponsible. 

 

We both decided very quickly not to go overboard with our reaction, and after a long cuddle and some tears we have not had much further discussion so far. But it was clear immediately that the remark, together with the other hopeful indicators, has had some influence on us. We will remain hopeful but also remain ready. After this treatment phase will end, all being well, in February, there will be a period without treatment, standard practice to allow to body to recover from months of well-intentioned poison. The most likely scenario is probably that the remaining cancer cells will remain docile for a while after that, but will then use the treatment lull to begin to reform into clusters and eventually regain their potency.

 

Still, the change in tone feels like a clarion call to convert hope and vague intentions into action, and not to waste too much time in going about it. Our intention remains to return to Europe next spring, but now the many complications involved have to be worked through rather than used as a reason for procrastination. Further, those plans have to somehow remain valid for a longer time period. As an example, until now my heart has not really been engaged in the plan to upgrade the villa. Perhaps a part of me doubted it would ever happen or felt that the project would surely no sooner be executed than become outdated by adverse medical changes. That is still quite likely, but we are now much more likely to find the energy to advance the plans. The mood will still be one of holding our breath and hoping and handling as many contingencies as we can, but that is no longer a reason to put things off.

 

So this September rentrée somehow feels especially poignant now, and in a different way to how I contemplated a few short weeks ago. True, it is a return to the old routine, albeit punctuated by some nausea and plenty of medical appointments, and that return would have been a source of immense gratitude anyhow, signifying a milestone I did not expect to arrive in good health. But now the return somehow feels rather more than one more extension of bonus time or one more section of an elongated coda. Now, even though very little has really changed, it almost feels like a temporary reprieve from the coda altogether, perhaps more of a da capo section to the piece. And da capo sections can have a propensity to be longer than the orchestra anticipated, to demand a renewal of orchestral energy, and offer an opportunity to discover something completely new in the music.

 

Our oncologist is indeed an accomplished orchestral player, a talent held in abeyance while his work is so demanding but something he frequently muses about restarting when he hears my wife and I banging on about our choirs. Perhaps he is ready for a more poignant and more fully encompassing rentrée as well? After all, I imagine he could almost see France across the Rhine from his college campus. No doubt this journey has many surprises to reveal yet, some of which will surely be devastating, and we will remain as ready as we can. But we are grateful to have been alerted to the possibility of an altogether more welcome surprise. Danke schön, Herr Doktor.

Storyworth

My daughter has been especially active in trying to create memories of me before it is too late. Part of her motivation is having a two-year-old daughter of her own. Her grandparents all died before she was born or early in her life, and she no doubt keenly feels some absence of memory and knowledge. She has made a lot of effort to see me physically since I received the diagnosis as well, despite living fifteen hours away by plane. 

One of her initiatives has been to sign me up to a website called www.storyworth.com. That is a service that offers the chance for members to write a series of short stories, not unlike blogs in some ways, to selected close family. It is all online and very simple, and Storyworth provides prompts for subjects to write about once the inspiration dries up.

 

In common with some other initiatives, this one has a rather morbid element. The context of impending death is ever present, and perhaps that would inhibit some people from signing on or from writing frankly. With our policy of openness and history of blogging, I have not encountered such issues, though of course some topics do make me weep on occasion. Overall, I welcome it despite the deathly overtone. It is a gift to be able to leave something meaningful to my granddaughter, even if her physical memories of me will surely be minimal.

 

I recommend Storyworth for anyone in a similar position, and perhaps more widely too. My sister did a great job in encouraging my mum in her later years to write some things about her life, but the structure offered by Storyworth might have helped her shape some of her writing more helpfully. The risk of the morbid aspect should be a prompt not to leave it too late to start something like Storyworth too. Many people of my generation are quite comfortable with writing: later generations, bought up with a lot less written language and a lot more visual and immediate content, will probably not take to it as readily.

 

I have a second and lazier motivation to create this particular blog post, beyond the recommendation of Storyworth. I can save myself some time today by simply copying and pasting a recent story. My sister recently invited me to create a Storyworth posting as though I were a guest on the long-running UK radio show Desert Island Discs. There have been over 3,200 episodes of the show, starting around the time I was born, though I have never listened to a single one in its entirety. The guest of the week, who these days I suppose we must relabel a celebrity, is invited to an interview to talk about what they would bring to a hypothetical desert island that they were hypothetically marooned on. The standard choice is eight music tracks, a book, and a single luxury item. It is a nice format for a show, and I enjoyed creating my own list after the prompt from my sister. Here it is.

 

Thanks for this Jacqui. I would surely be hopeless on a desert island, unable to start a fire or do anything practical. Ben Gunn was miscasting, unless he was supposed to be played in parody, which I am sure is how I executed the role, deliberately or not.

 

I shall start with tracks that remind me of my parents. For mum, Let’s Twist Again by Chubby Checker comes to mind. She would always be the first on the dance floor and was quite talented at the dances from that generation. For Dad, let us go with Downtown by Petula Clark, a quality Tony Hatch song of the 1960’s. Hatch was a British Burt Bacharach and wrote many great numbers for Clark and others. Mum always claimed that Dad had a crush on Petula. His choice of her songs showed some good taste at least. We saw her perform live once in Eastbourne, mum being typically quick to point out Clark’s colostomy bag.

Then a couple of songs from my own youth. I always rated Paul Simon (and loved seeing him live in his late seventies at Forest Hills) and my favourite track of his is Late in the Evening, an energetic dance number I would always turn up the volume for in the car or wherever else I was listening. My dating and dancing era was short, mercifully for any of the female gender, but in my last year at college I did some clubbing. The music was post disco and punk and pre synth and rap, and was often angry (thanks again, Maggie Thatcher). Let us take Tainted Love by Soft Cell as a typical example that comes to mind.

A bit earlier, in my teens, I came to appreciate small ensemble singing, epitomized by The King’s Singers. They made an album of songs by Flanders and Swann and by Noel Coward, which I played again and again. I could probably list every track in order even now. I’ll come back to that choice (which I guess would be my desert album if I were allowed one) later.

Now we move forward to when I rediscovered choral singing and classical music during my forties. I’ll take Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis because it is peerless, and because it especially recalls my transition year of 1989, because the piece was on an album I played relentlessly while depressed and full of guilt from my separation. It was also during this period that I discovered early music through a choir set up by my first singing teacher. Our first concert included Jesu Dulcis Memoria by Tomas Luis de Victoria, as brilliant a short anthem as ever was written. Later it turned out to be the last piece of music I sung in church before the pandemic in March 2020.

Back to Noel Coward. The third wedding reception for Carmela and me doubled as a farewell to our community in The Hague, so I chose to sing Coward’s I’ll See You Again. A couple of years later I wanted to sing it again at a cabaret, and somehow a friend discovered the guy who had written the arrangement for The King’s Singers all those years ago, and sheet music duly arrived from him - he was flattered to be remembered for his work. I still have the sheet music and it would be great to perform it one more time, but other tracks from the album have become staples in my cabaret repertoire too.

For my last piece I have tried recall the many concerts I have had the privilege of performing in America, and I landed on one from a holiday/workshop at Princeton. A wonderful young choir came together with a few token oldies to perform the six motets of JS Bach. It was the most memorable concert, because by its end the whole choir, orchestra and audience were on their feet dancing with joy. Who said classical music was dull? From the motets, I love Komm, Jesu, Komm, with its middle section that just demands a dance.

So there are eight tracks. What about a book? I am going to cheat a bit. The film Philomena from 2013 had a profound effect on me; I was gushing tears for weeks. Judy Dench and Steve Coogan were magnificent, and the plot was brilliant and rang so true. My ex-wife suffered trauma with similarities to that portrayed by Dench’s character, and the film helped me to understand her anguish more closely. The film was based on a book by Martin Sixsmith titled The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. I guess I should read it.

For my luxury item I will go large and take our villa in Portugal. Nowhere has so many happy memories for me. If I could bring along some restaurants, chefs, boardwalks and nearby cities, all the better.

Thanks again Jacqui. Would you care to have a go at the same challenge yourself?

 

There it is. I have reached my target word count without the normal level of effort. That is especially welcome this week, as it gives me more time to process another change of attitude regarding my cancer, something that may signal another new phase. I continue to produce MRI scans that delight my oncologist, and this week I got the impression that he was inviting us to prepare for the possibility of a longer period of remission than we have been imagining so far. We know there are no guarantees, or even likelihoods, of rare good outcomes, but even thoughts of possibilities are encouraging and need thinking through. More on that next time.