On the 6th Feb 2019 my mum told me she had stage 3/4 lung cancer that was incurable and it had spread.
This is when my heart broke for the first time in my life. Really broke. Not been dumped by my boyfriend broke, but actually, ripped my heart out and snapped it into teeny pieces broke.
This so far was the worst day of my life, and truthfully, made worse by the fact that it followed two of the best years of my life. Whether that makes this news any worse or not, I will never have any idea, but all I can say is, for me, in my own context, it made this moment in time even more surreal and devastating.
There has been and is still, a roller coaster of emotions. Ones that I have no idea how to put into words. Without any of them sounding cliche too. I suddenly feel aware I am writing this in public domain. I am writing this so my mum will see and I am writing this without giving much context. But this is the beginning. None of it makes much sense.
The beginning seems a bit awful. The beginning of the end I thought when that came to my mind. But what I mean is that this is the beginning of something new, a whole new chapter that nope, neither of us wanted to explore, but these are the cards we have been thrown and this is what we now have to do. Embrace this new moment in time. This is the beginning of my mums new life. The beginning of her real self acceptance journey and the beginning of new, more real, more heart felt connections. This is the beginning of us, in a new light, in a new direction and we WILL make the best out of this shitty awful situation. Because if you cannot get love and light out of a scenario, then you are fucked.
Since day 1 (6th Feb 2019) whats been ringing in my ear is “Thing happen FOR you not TO you” Which sounds like philosophical bullshit, but truthfully. This is the beliefs that I have grown up with. My mum taught me every self helpy hippy dippy zenny pinterest quote there ever was before pinterest even existed. And our philosophies on life (and death) are shared. She is everything I know about life and love and she will, even in this fucked up mess, is showing me the way.
We cannot guarantee that this blog will be a master piece of writing. So far it’s apparent that this will be a mind dump. Of emotions and thoughts and weird and wonderful things we will discover along this journey. 100% guaranteed the SEO will be shit and no one will ever find our account of this. I am sure we are not the first to think a blog would be a good idea in this moment. But we don’t care.
My mum has always been a drama queen (I get it from her) She has a “special” complex where by she has the need to “be” or believe she is the most special. We have joked about it for years. She’d be all “everybody hates me” and id be all “you aint that special” It is a running joke.
And here she is. Gone and got bloody cancer and she is hell bent on milking this cancer journey for all it’s worth, get loadsa bloody attention and all the sympathy in the world. Well, if there was ever a perfect moment, now would be the time and if there is potential for her to share how she is feeling to the world, she bloody well will.
Her bucket list consisted of… write a blog with Danielle. We have been meaning to write a blog or our story or A story together for so long. And it only took death approaching, to get us into gear and do it.
So here we are. Sharing the heartache, the funnies and the honest feelings of how we are both dealing with this cunt. Cancer. You fucking cunt.
But me and mum have decided that “darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that” If this cancer thinks we are going to hate it, it’s got another thing coming. Me and mum have decided, we are going to embrace this. Accept this. Surrender to it, live with it and not beat or fight or try to hate it away.
We are not saying we are going to lie down dead. We are not here to just take a prognosis and agree to that date and let it kill us. But we cannot be angry. We cannot let the anger biol up so much that it takes away the life she does have left. Anger will only make it breed. Love on the other hand. Kindness. That will only make things better. We are not saying that we can love the cancer away, but we can love the pain away. We can love the heart break away. We can love each other so so so very much that the cancer will NOT HAVE WON! It will not win.
Miracles happen. Every day. And if the miracle is that my mum is full of love not fear, love not hate, kindness not resentment, then that miracle is miracle enough.
People will not understand our ways. I know people will find it odd that we may share so much of what we are going to share. But this is “our” way. We are over sharers (I learnt from the best) and nothing makes us feel better than being open, being “special” lol and being as honest and authentic as we can. Because we both truly believe that connection is the key to life and authenticity and honesty is the only way to truly connect.
If one person reads this and resonates to it. Feels comfort in the real, awful, rawness of this pain that we will not let beat us, then my mum (and I) have been successful. And if only we ever lay eyes on this, then we too have been successful in just letting this shit out. I am not bottling up how cancer is making me feel. Even if the truth is painful. Hiding that truth will always be worse.
There will no doubt be days I do not feel as zen, one love, about all of this. and I will share those days too.
This is not a philosophical account of how to love cancer away, but an honest account of how we will not let cancer ruin what joy we have left in us. It has sparked more joy (as Marie Kondo would say) in the last 72hrs than I ever thought cancer could do. Fuck, if it sparks this much joy we wont wanna get rid of it. My mum has always been a hoarder. Fuck, she might start hording cancer cells.
Of course “cancer” itself has not sparked joy this last 3 days, but what has, is knowing that we have each other, and all our other loved ones. Its knowing that we have some time. She wasn’t taken from me suddenly. We have time. If this is a message from the universe at all, we hear you, loud and clear. WE ARE GOING TO LIVE each day the best we can. Sometimes that will be movie days and others that will be standing watching butterfly’s. But we hear you. We will use this time, to love, live and laugh!
And PS: No this is not spell checked (despite that will pain you mum) but “aint nobody got time for that” Quite literally. This is a conscious stream of thoughts and feelings and in my head, nothing is spelt right anyways. We are not writing a novel. And if we are ;) we will have editors for that! :)