Ep.39: Chosen

There’s a rough track that leads above our house and the others on the croft, it weaves up through scrubby gorse and rubble from the new build, takes you besides the burn, over a single remaining strand of a wire fence and into thick pine forest. As soon as you enter the trees a moist mushroomy smell hits you. There’s a damp, ever present dusk here, light hardly filters through, even on a startling, gold day, like today.  Turn left and you follow a mossy, muddy trail in a gentle arc up round the edge of the pines towards the more open birch and bracken of badgerlands.   But today is much too beautiful to go through the dark forest fringes so I turn right, hop across the burn, full and fast from the recent autumn rains, and clamber up a stony, gorse covered rise, emerging onto forestry tracks.  From here it’s a zigzag up the damp red clay, up, up, up to the top of the hill.  It’s not pretty here, scars of de-forested land lie barren and shorn too short, but it’s a means to an end and I take my time, pausing to puzzle over curious petals of bright orange fungi dotted through the gravel at the edge of the track. I make a mental note to look it up when I get home.

The decision to climb up high came suddenly.  I was watching my friend Chris’s book launch, he’s a wonderful writer whose work always makes me look at the world through freshly widened eyes, but the wifi kept glitching and throwing me out.  Frustrated and itching to be outside where my senses could play, I threw a chunk of cheese, an apple and some tomatoes into a rucksack along with some tea and extra clothes then grabbed a stick and decided I’d see how far I could get before the light and heat left the day.

Impulsive but deliberate acts have become a feature of my new landscape.  I seem to choose my way through every day in a way I don’t think I ever have before. Each act is weighed and measured, given a value before I add it to my day and I’m conscious that this hot and sticky act of climbing is a deliberate one too.  Chosen.

I’ve been thinking a lot about choice.  I have the sense I’m much more invested in the whole concept of choice than I was before I got cancer. I’ve always instinctively known that its important, felt it held a particularly solid form in my life but now, now it’s almost like each day I seek it out. Today I choose to do this.  This moment I choose to do that.  Its inverse is important too. I’m choosing not to do that because it’s a bit shit and I can’t be arsed.  So I don’t. And I’m starting to wonder if this carefully balanced placing of each foot each day is connected back to my diagnosis and treatment.

When we learned I had breast cancer the choices rapidly became pretty stark.  Do nothing and you die, do something and statistically you’re likely to remain.  I remember the outrage swelling in my cancerous breast, making me nauseous.  The very idea that unless I chose death then I had no choice but to have a mastectomy still makes my jaw tighten.  What was it my friend Susannah called it? Not mastectomy but ‘amputation’, a word which captures the brutality of the situation more eloquently. When I think about it, I’m not sure there has been another occasion in my entire adult life when I felt so disempowered, so choice-less. Even the choices I did have were rubbish.  Every one a mass of compromise, disfigurement, displacement.   I still cry at this.  Even after all these months. I still feel trapped by that lack of choice and I wonder that I can’t spin it to feel differently.  I chose to live, didn’t I?

There’s no one to blame either, no one you can focus your fury at, like a fox in a snare you can only snarl at the mechanics of the mess you’re in.  But snarl and gnash your teeth all you like, cancer does not care.

Did I think of the doing nothing course of action? The course of inaction?  Yes, of course.  I wanted to bolt, run, but as I’ve written before, you can’t run away from yourself, you can’t outrun your own cancer.  And I could never have run from B and David. Never.

Passing through the deer fence at the top of the first hill I pause to look down at the loch.  The Byre must be directly below me but tucked underneath and out of sight.  To the South I can see a thin slither of Loch Ashie and what must be a wink of Loch Duntelchaig, above them a windfarm and the Garbole, a legendary local climb for cyclists.  Tucked away at its foot, glassy Loch Farr with its lilies, I can’t see it but my skin remembers it.  There’s a quality to the light at this time of year that touches on the surreal.  The gold, amber, burnt ochre tones make me ache for something I can’t quite place, seeing this landscape I love, bathed in sunshine as it is now, makes me pulse with loss.  There’s a permanence about all these hills and lochs, coming up to a height so I can line up my own impermanence alongside them is the greatest leveller I know.  I feel so very small.

I almost consider turning back, wondering if I’m in too sharp a mood, but I press on, skirting the hill in search of a path that will give me a way to climb higher still, I’ve a yen to peer over the top to Abriachan. 

As I walk I play with each step in my mind, silently mouthing ‘I choose you and you and you’.  The thought comes to mind of something B said a few years back, 3 maybe, she said ‘you are my boss, you choose everything for me, you control me’.  At the time I was deeply shocked, un-nerved by the image of my holding all her strings.  ‘You tell me when to get up, when to go to bed, what to eat, you decide everything’ she said and she was right, I did.  After that I consciously started trying to relinquish my parental reigns.  I’d put food on the table and tell her to help herself instead of my plating it up, I’d look for other ways to loosen my grip on her.  But while it’s a sign of her growing up which makes her demand to make more and more decisions, there’s no doubt there’s a security in having others decide.  I love being invited out for dinner because of the very fact of not having to choose what is going to be for tea.  I adore relinquishing that control, which is odd when you set it against my response to my diagnosis and makes me think context must be everything.    When we meet, my great friend Susannah usually has us timetabled to the nearest minute and it makes me giggle, I instantly revert to being a child, allowing her to make the decisions because I find it as relaxing as a warm bath.  I trust her to get me to the train or restaurant at whatever time she’s calculated we have to be there.  

I check my watch, swithering on whether to push on a little further or turn for home.  I message David, giving him directions for where I’ve gone, suddenly conscious that I’ve climbed this hill alone and without a soul knowing where I am.  I figure I’ve got 20 minutes more so I turn off the path and push up through the heather, grasping at tufts to pull me up a sharp rise til I come to rest by a stunted, wind-bruised pine standing on its own.  We’ve seen better days this pine and me but here we are, still standing in spite of what’s flung at us, up on top of the hill on this glorious day.  I feel a tenderness towards it. The sun hovers just above the brow of the hill, spilling on to the bracken, setting it ablaze.  Hunkering down to eat my cheese and apple I look along Lochness to Lochend beach, following the line of the river, then canal with my finger tip, narrowing my eyes to squint as waters flow into the Moray firth and, in the distance, to where they wash the sands of Nairn then Findhorn.

Maybe, if I go back in my mind, take this same finger and re-trace, re-visit and re-play the decision making processes connected to my cancer, I can retrospectively re-position them to feel less jarring and jagged.  Remind myself that we have choice within a given situation, but we can’t always set the scene.   I have choosen to spend this beautiful day walking up this hill but I didn’t get to choose whether this day was sunny, any more than I got to choose whether my body got cancer. So perhaps being angry at cancer stripping away my sense of choice is as daft as being angry at the sky for turning grey.  It just doesn’t make sense.  I like this thought, it feels like it’s been sitting up here, waiting for me to climb up and find it.  So I pick it up, wrap it carefully in my hand and put it in my pocket while it’s still warm, then I turn and make the choice to head back down the hill and home.