Tuesday 7 May 2013

The season for mushrooms

At the end of 2011 my father Archie was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. He had put off visiting his doctor, suffering weeks of difficulty swallowing, until at last he was unable to swallow water. Even then he waited until he was severely dehydrated and suffering excruciating headaches. By then the cancer had taken a hold; a tumour had spread three quarters of the way around Archie's oesophagus. His doctors told him he might get another six months. Archie said he hoped for a year.

The doctors could do little more than patch him up. They inserted a stent to open his oesophagus so that he could swallow. They put him in touch with the Macmillan Trust, who allotted him a visiting nurse for palliative care. Eighteen months later he is still alive and, even if "well" is not the right word, mentally vigorous and independently mobile. Yesterday was Archie's birthday: he is eighty-eight years old, but let's have none of that "he's had a good innings" bullshit, he's no more desire to die than you or I have, and he's as much right to hold on to life, even if he smoked heavily until he was fifty and was overweight most of his life. Before he became ill he weighed over two hundred pounds, now he's down to a hundred and thirty.

Archie isn't "battling with cancer", he lets his doctors get on with that. What Archie is battling with is pain. He refuses to take higher doses of morphine because he fears it will dull his mind, and that is all he has. He endures frequent avalanches of pain. I don't think he dwells on dying, just treats it as a fact of life (as it is for us all) and tries to grab what he can of life between spasms.

He refers to his tumour as a mushroom.

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Archie isn't the only one who's had to come to terms with his terminal illness. My aunt, whom he has shared a house with since my mother died, has had to become his carer. But she is not in great health herself: before he fell ill, Archie used to take care of her. She has been very kind and has done all that anyone could have asked of her. My sister has been a rock, too, making sure that all Archie's affairs are properly in order to his liking. What little money Archie has accumulated in his life will go to my brother, who has advanced multiple sclerosis. If Archie could give his life to restore my brother's health, I'm sure he would.

But Archie's protracted enactment of the dying process has affected us all very deeply in other ways. We have been through mourning for a man who is still very much alive. I remember the shock I felt at first when my sister phone with the news of his illness. (I live two hundred miles away, so can only visit occasionally.) I walked downstairs, feeling numb, trying to make sense of the meaningless facts. I sat on a piano stool, closed my eyes, and, because I am a Buddhist, tried to think of Archie, my suffering father, in terms of loving kindness, and to think about the impermanence of all things, which gave his dying some proper context. It helped, but I think the passing of time has had as much to do with my acceptance of what is happening.

During those first grieving months I also channeled my feelings into my poetry, and several of the poems in my first collection, A Limited Season, arise from my dealing with my father's illness. The two that were most directly influenced were "Deadly Nightshade" (previously unpublished, but discussed below) and "Steak and mushroom pie", which was featured in the April 2013 edition of Popshot (the "Imagination Issue"). Another poem that was affected by my grieving for my still living father was "After disconnection", which, although it makes no direct references to Archie, I am unable to read without visualizing my childhood home.

Here is the first of the six stanzas of "Deadly Nightshade":


A mushroom lodged in the damp
stump of your throat. It smelled
like the inside of an old shoe
and now your breath smells of brie,
or athlete’s foot. It grew fat
and got greedy; the more you fed it,
the less it left for you. You shrivelled
as your pipeline silted up.


You can see how Archie's tumor humour became a central motif in the poem, one that is carried through the other five stanzas, and is revisited in "Steak and mushroom pie". The motif will occur in another poem, which must remain under wraps, for one of the consequences, for a poet at any rate, of witnessing the drawn out death of a loved one is that there is more than enough time to work on a worthy elegy.

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