Ep.32: Love song to the lost
Sunset over Loch Ness from the Byre.
Looking back at the blog entries over the past few months I wonder if it all looks too relentlessly bleak. Themes of death and discomfort and frustration surface again and again. And of course getting cancer is pretty bloody bleak but – even if it sometimes feels like it haunts my every waking moment – it’s not the whole picture. I suppose if you tried to figure out what love was about by purely listening to love songs you’d think it was all about misery and heartbreak because that’s the easy stuff to write about. As human beings we’re better at expressing the difficult, chewy stuff perhaps, than we are at emoting about how great life is and how happy we are. But all those songs aren’t about love, they’re about lost love, they’re like a reverse print of the thing you should actually be looking at. Flip the heartache on its head and of course the root of it all is the amazing thing that love is. I feel the same way about writing about my cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery. It’s all a reverse image.
23 years ago, close to the start of 1997, when I’d just started working at Radio 4 as a young and very green trainee continuity announcer, my friend Lindsay was killed in a head on collision. One Saturday, having finished working on the football phone in he produced, he was driving to Fife to take his parents out to dinner and never made it. I remember taking the call on the Sunday evening from Angus, my former boss back in Scotland. The impossibility of Lindsay’s death was overwhelming, he was 32 and bright and funny and my friend, how could he be dead? I took time off and headed north, desperate to be away from London. We gathered in the office where we’d all worked together and shared stories and tears while the next weekend’s phone-in programme was quietly, gently handed to a different team. So many of us wanted to go to Lindsay’s funeral the BBC put on 2 coaches. As the humanist leading his funeral said ‘Lindsay didn’t just have friends, he had fans’.
A bit like my feelings of frustration and outrage at the injustice of cancer that I now push ahead of me each day, at the time I couldn’t get past my fury that someone as young and talented as Lindsay could be ended, just like that. The grief hung with me and I couldn’t shift it. I returned to London shaky and lost by this fresh revelation that life could be so fragile. Walking with my mum through the flat wintry Cambridge fens I kept circling back round to the source of my misery. ‘You’re sad because it was so good’ she told me, ‘we don’t mourn and grieve for things we don’t care about, we’re sad about losing the precious things, Lindsay was a precious friend, try to see this grief as a celebration of something special’.
I limped back to work and to London life and of course over time the pain of losing him receded but I’ve never forgotten that advice from mum. We mourn the good stuff, not the bad. So while this blog may well be sad and grief stricken in parts – and there is no doubt I am absolutely grief stricken about the loss my cancer represents, a loss of floating through life innocent of any idea that this could happen at all – peer into that grief, search through those painful cracks and creases and you see a celebration.
The trick as I now see it is to learn how to write a love song to this current life, to find the joy in every breath of this post-cancer world and find a way to express that celebration rather than its mirror image.