There's a lot about cancer that's terrifying. You can give yourself all the positive talking-tos and try all the diets and alternative therapies you like, but if you're me, anyway, there'll still be at least a few minutes every day when you think about your death.
You wonder if you've made sufficient preparations for it, particularly financially so your loved ones don't have to sell the family silver to see you off. You wonder if you've made your funeral wishes clear enough, and if they're achievable.
You think about your past too. All your mistakes. The way you misunderstood and misjudged so much. All the people that you've hurt. You wonder if there's time to say sorry. And you feel an aching nostalgia for old places, old scenes, your childhood -- everywhere you know you will never go again. Or might never go again.
That's the kind of emotional world you live in (it occurs to me it's not dissimilar to the torment of a severe mid-life crisis). And for me, humour acts as a balance to all of that. I deflect the impact on me of dread and sadness by what Sherwood Anderson called, in a different context, dark laughter.
Some thought it distasteful or unsettling when I called the cancer in my bowel my 'meatball'. Or when I joke about having had a multitude of fingers and cameras in my rectal passage during my treatment. But it's my way of making it easier for me to deal with, temporarily anyway; my way of taking back some of the power that the cancer, and what I've been through since I was diagnosed, both have to rob me of my peace of mind.
Please excuse me if I ever seem like a flippant, insensitive so-and-so.
Bruce Hodder
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