by Raz Shaw
MINIMISE THE WHOOPING
That’s why it’s hard for me to say that living with cancer and surviving makes me appreciate life more. So much is governed by fate. So much is out of my jurisdiction. So much is about good or bad luck. The finest way we can honour those who didn’t make it is just to get on with our lives without too much whooping and hollering.
He says, having just written a book about it!
It would be a lie to suggest that living when I could have easily died has not made an impression on my life. Of course it has. But I don’t skip around town, loving everyone and everything, shouting, ‘Woo, I love life. I so love life.’ Just the opposite, in fact. I am less tolerant of things or people that seem to waste my time. Because the clock is always ticking.
PERSPECTIVE
The realisation that it’s a very thin line between existing and not existing does offer you perspective. I say ‘offer’ because it is so easy not to accept it. Or, more to the point, it is easy to forget that it’s there. But it is there, with a positive stealth-like life of its own. In the midst of a moment of overblown stress, perspective will appear and insist on you calming the fuck down. And that’s a bonus and a blessing.
It affects every part of my life, especially my work. It’s the reason that most of the time when there’s a crisis, I find calm. Ice calm. There’s no point in getting too worked up about stuff. That’s really not going to help. Anybody. When I look back at my twenty-eight-year-old self, I see a boy trying to be a man wanting to be a boy. At fifty, I am learning to be comfortable in the skin that I am in. I am learning. I am close. There is no cigar.
BRUSHING SHOULDERS WITH DEATH
In nine months I became more intimate with death than I might ever have imagined. I not only brushed shoulders with it, I shared a bed with it, wrestled naked with it and exchanged bodily fluids with it. I might not like it, it might not be my friend, but I am very comfortable with it. I am not lost for words in its presence. I am not in awe of it. I have debilitated its power and allowed myself the luxury of living without fear of it. And that not only gives me the confidence to take risks where previously I might have been more cautious, but it also affords me insight that can be used to help others.
POST-CANCER BANDITS
Death, however, does like to remind you of its presence now and again, just in case you get too blasé about the whole thing.
I was in Mexico City about four months after having been given the all-clear. I was in full post-cancer recuperation mode. I had been there for a few weeks staying with friends when some other friends came out for their summer holidays. We all decided to take a trip to see the Pyramids of Teotihuacan, just outside Mexico City. We got a bus there. Had a rather lovely time. At the end of the day, got a bus back. Six of us and eight other tourists.
The journey from Teotihuacan back to Mexico City is quite a straightforward one. In fact, that’s exactly what it is. Straight and forward on an A road/Mexican motorway-type thing. It was fiercely hot. The bus was old and lacking many things. Including air conditioning. Along the way, there were a number of stops. They didn’t seem to be official bus stops. The bus just stopped. About twenty minutes into the sweaty journey, the bus made one of those impromptu stops and five people got on. They all seemed to know each other. Four men and one woman. I noticed that they didn’t all sit together. Odd. Another ten minutes went by and one of them stood up quite sharply. It was all a bit of a snapshot blur after that. A man stood in front of me brandishing a toy gun. I say ‘toy’ because that was exactly my first thought: ‘These Mexicans, they have a strange sense of humour.’ I interrupted that thought with an ice-cold realisation that this was no toy. The five of them were spread around the bus, systematically ridding everyone of all their possessions. There was screaming, and guns to heads, and sweat. Lots of sweat.
A man with a comically large moustache calmly, and with half a smile, put a gun to my head and beckoned me to give him all my stuff. I gave him my wallet and he took the cash. He took my camera. I didn’t want him to have my camera. It had pictures of my trip, and despite my lack of nostalgia, pictures of this trip represented something. They represented the now. They represented recovery and, more importantly, they represented the beginning of tomorrow. So I pleaded for it and amazingly he dropped the gun from my head and gave it back to me. The camera, that is. Not the gun. I think I was so shocked by the fact that he was actually giving me my camera back that I was all fingers and thumbs and accidentally pressed the shutter release and the flash went off. Oops! There was lots of shouting from all around the bus. The gun returned to my head and moustache man grabbed the camera from my hands. At that moment I genuinely thought he might pull the trigger.
Eventually the banditos got off the bus and ran into the fields. They disappeared through the long grass like a Mexican Field of Dreams. We stopped at a motorway police station. The police – clearly bored – rounded up ten police cars and two helicopters and managed to capture them all almost immediately. They brought them back to the police station while we were all still there and, much to our liberal confusion, they beat them to a pulp in the back room. We could hear every blow. We spent the next eleven hours in a one fan/one typewriter police station, giving endless sweaty statements.
And that night I had a meltdown.
It was due.
I had been sailing through this trip, sailing through my recuperation, not really stopping to think about all that had happened over the last year.
Then some amateur bandits got on a bus.
The irony hit me hard between my gringo eyes. I had exhausted so much energy in my cancer sparring match only to be killed by a rusty gun on an old bus by a sweaty, stale-smelling, terrified Mexican on a rickety road back to Mexico City. Bueno!
The ridiculousness of that notion seemed to strike right at the heart of me. I realised, almost for the first time, just how close to death cancer had taken me and quite how seismic the last nine months had been. It was only at that moment that I understood quite how much effect the events of the previous year had had on the person who came through the other side.
At that moment, fear and pain and anger and pride and buckets full of relief poured out of me. At that moment I realised what the biggest lesson of this whole cancer experience was going to be. And it was this.
THIN LINE
You can only truly taste life if you accept that there’s a thin line between pain and pleasure, love and hate, and, yes, life and death. If we expect just to feel empty of darkness because we have survived a life-threatening illness, then we are going to spend the rest of our lives chasing something that can’t be reached. The elephant is always a mere trunk’s length away.
Cancer taught me that it’s OK not to be happy all the time if I can allow the possibility of being happy some of the time. In other words, I have given myself a guilt-free pass to be grumpy. Perfect.
Cancer has taught me that there are always smiles to be found, however dark the situation. Those smiles are always restorative, even for just one moment. One moment of joy can loiter and linger much longer than you might ever have imagined. One moment of joy can help you deal with the hideousness in front of you because it doesn’t just exist in the now. It exists as a resonating memory to draw on whenever you most need it. A tiny steam spurt in the pressure cooker of cancer. Tiny maybe, but a much needed release nonetheless.
HIGHS AND LOWS
Having said that, people often question why I never seem to get overexcited about anything. Except a Bruce Springsteen concert on a balmy summer’s night, of course. It is absolutely the product of this whole experience. BC, I was the addiction adrenaline king. And I would demonstrably express life’s peaks and troughs. But that was before perspective came into my life.
Perspective is like a good wine. It deepens with age. It is an open gateway to calm. And calm is the promised land. Calm feels like respect for those around you. Calm feels like a realistic appraisal of the truth of the situation as opposed t
o a made-up reality seen through self-obsessed eyes. Calm feels like the thing to chase. Not highs and lows. I have trained myself not to get lost in over-exuberant highs. They are both egotistical and risky. The higher the high, the more painful the crash. An over-indulged high can be the beginnings of losing that perspective that I have nurtured and cherished for so long. And calm feels achievable.
Do I always realise that calm? Hell, no.
Was I calm when a bandit held a gun to my head? Externally maybe, but my still skinny arse almost pooping itself might have been a bit of a giveaway. Besides, a little bit of fear is a good thing.
Walking through a door to a new world, tackling something you don’t completely understand or dealing with people who are relying on you can be petrifying. That fear feels paralysing to start with but then it becomes the fuel to spur you on, move you forward and deal with whatever the thing is. Fear keeps you real and keeps you alert.
Surviving a life-threatening illness doesn’t make fear disappear. It just takes the edge off its power and affords you the insight, clarity and courage to walk into it rather than run away from it.
THE CANCER ROAD
Everybody has their moment. It comes at different times in different ways for different people. Even though I always wanted to be a wunderkind, cancer made me realise that it’s never too late to make your mark.
And that’s why, if I had my time again and I was given the choice, I would absolutely take the cancer road. The other one is calmer, less bumpy and nowhere near as challenging. But I am learning that I need a challenge. That is the way I win. That is the way I make my mark.
Challenging cancer has also blessed me with clarity. The self-same clarity I thought I didn’t possess as a frustrated twelve-year-old. Clarity to see straight to the emotional heart of a situation. Clarity to find the right words for the right person at the right time. Clarity to jump into a difficult situation rather than shy away from it. I don’t always succeed but the act of trying is often just as powerful.
Cancer was not only the biggest challenge; it was also the greatest teacher. It educated me not only about human emotions but also about humanity itself. It allowed me to engage with feelings I might have otherwise buried, and encouraged me to try to see the world through other people’s eyes. It taught me that self-obsession is much more harmful than any cell-eating disease and that one word of useful advice to someone else is worth a thousand first places and ten thousand winner’s trophies. I didn’t really know any of this three years ago. It was only in the act of writing this book that I made these discoveries. Prior to this, they had lain dormant in the dusty cellar that is my soul for years.
TRIPLE-COOKED CANCER CHIPS
After all, I’m a would-be spiritual person. A spiritual wannabe if you like. And a cynic. I am not sure that the two are not mutually exclusive. The older I get, the less cynical I want to be and the more I am trying to embrace my experiences rather than run away from them. Which is why I am writing this book now and not fifteen years ago.
For a long time, I had a big old cancer chip on my shoulder. I can’t really define how that manifested itself, but I know it was there. I could almost smell the Sarson’s vinegar. To other people and often to myself, I was really upfront about my cancer experiences. I appeared honest and open. I loved being told that my story was a remarkable one. I loved shooing away the ‘you’ve been so brave’ comments as if it was water off a duck’s back. The truth, of course, was that comments like that puffed me up. They validated me. They were my new drug of choice. And it was all just a bit of a façade. It was a great mask to hide behind. The honesty mask. The bravery mask. The ‘he’s dealt with it so well he can even make inappropriate jokes about it’ mask.
What was the mask really hiding? I am no guru when it comes to myself, but, in very simple terms, the mask was a shield to stop me having to deal properly with stuff. The ‘honest and open’ me was a brilliantly manipulative way of fooling everyone, including myself, that I was embracing the future without ignoring the past.
Only now am I realising that my cancer was a much bigger deal than I allowed myself to perceive at the time. I have lived in its shadow for years. It had been haunting me, in fact. I was the fifteen-year-old again who – ferociously searching for a unique identity of his own – walked into a theatre and found a home.
Cancer had become my master. My unpredictable master. My safety blanket, too. My mask. Whenever I needed to make myself feel unique I would reel out the cancer story, and people would inevitably sit forward and listen. And for a moment I would feel special and different and free. But I also felt cheap. This is all hindsight, you understand. At the time I wasn’t aware of bringing out the cancer card and I didn’t really equate feeling a bit shit with all this. This had become my Unique Selling Point if you like. It had become so much a part of me that I couldn’t see the join.
And, looking at it now, I buried my personality inside my cancer story. Because that was a comfortable place to be. A place I understood. A place where my innate shyness disappeared and I had a captive audience. A place where I seemed to be what I always wanted to be:
Winning and Unique.
And it’s only really been in the process of writing this book that I have realised the extent to which I submerged my own self into my cancer self. The extent to which I had truly hidden. I am good at hiding because I hide in a very loud, abrasive, larger than life public way. While people are seeing me one way, the real me is usually cowering behind that giant-sized mask. And it’s draining. More than that, it’s unsettling both to me and to whoever I am with. And even beyond that, it never allowed me to be truly one strong, focused individual.
The more I talked about my cancer, the more I was able to convince myself that I had dealt with it. With the enormity of it. When I came to write a book about it, I realised I hadn’t. I really hadn’t. All that free and easy talk was just that, really. Free and easy. It hadn’t penetrated the surface at all. And then something changed.
SURPRISED BY YOUR OWN STRENGTH
It changed when a close friend of mine had the honesty and courage to share with me the pain and fears about the cancer of her mother. These conversations normally took place while watching Arsenal. A pain of a different kind. My friend’s honesty was so moving to me, so beautiful, that it changed my life. It made me realise that if I could help her just a little bit, even if only for one moment, then it will all have been worth it. And by helping her, by helping Jo – I’ll call her Jo as that’s her name – I was also helping myself because after eighteen or so years there was a lot of my own stuff that I had conveniently buried. Jo’s honesty and her mum’s determination to find joy amidst the pain and the suffering was incredibly inspiring to me. That inspiration springs from an awareness of how much effort it takes to not cave in to the pain, both physical and emotional, that you encounter daily when dealing with a life-threatening illness. It’s the surprise of your own strength and spirit that I’m really fascinated by. A spirit that you almost definitely don’t know is there until you are forced to search for it. And it’s that very spirit from Jo, her mum and countless others that inspired me to revisit my twenty-eight-year-old self and write some of my thoughts and feelings down.
And I pretty much found my identity again when I started helping others deal with their pain and forgot about my own. Almost by osmosis my numerous selves began to merge. And a new, calmer, more singular me began to appear. And for almost the first time, I was in control of myself and of the perception of myself that I was able to give to others. And, seven years on, I find that I quite like myself. Quite. I don’t need to hide behind cancer to have a large personality. Just the opposite, in fact.
I am still the inappropriate, sometimes loud, often needing to be centre of attention guy that I always was. More so, even. And I like that side of me. It makes me smile that I can be like that. I just have much more of an ability these days to control it when the time is right.
And the writing of t
his book has made me understand that change in a much more conscious way. It has made me appreciate the now that is today. It has allowed me to express the larger side of my personality more than I might have ever felt comfortable doing. And it has made me more able to step away from my cancer story without the fear that I might lose myself in the process. (Apart from writing this book, of course – contradictions, contradictions, contradictions!)
It has made me realise that the darkness of looking into the face of death and embracing what’s there or what’s not there is the very thing that reawakened the lightness in my soul.
I can’t describe it any other way. Finding the beauty in this hideous illness is hard, sometimes impossible. But beauty comes in many forms.
Clarity is beauty.
Insight is beauty.
Generosity is beauty.
Forgiveness is beauty.
Acceptance is beauty.
Fear without bitterness is beauty.
Discovering that soft, sweet-smelling baby hair is growing back on your misshapen bald head is beauty.
Above all, the writing of this book has made me realise that it’s absolutely not about first place or second place, it’s about finding the right place.