It landed in my life at the same time as these words, picked up after a week of surviving the anguish: “no trace of reactivity”; spring, the real great spring following what will have been the longest winter of my life.
The famous PET scan has revealed some data that will have to be monitored, but “nothing to call his mother”. I called her anyway, my mother, she who had been holding her breath with me for more than two years.
“Mom, it’s over. »
My mother will finally be able to leave all “her dead” alone, stop invoking them in prayers, in her nights of anguish, yelling at them, sealing all sorts of secret pacts with them, in exchange for some kind of protection on a large body out of his over 40 years ago. She will be able to allow all her lineage to rest in peace under the Breton soil, to thank her great friend Josée, who died of breast cancer, to extinguish the candles, to put away her charms and other talismans.
“Your prayers have been answered.
I am cured. »
We remain a mother forever, and the suffering experienced by our child is possibly one of the greatest moral pains we can go through. We never really get over having carried a human being within us, having cradled, swaddled, fed, calmed him. Parenthood automatically throws us into this delicate posture, all in tension, where a body that evolves totally beyond our control nevertheless becomes the one that we will have to protect, more than anything, much more than our own body, beyond distances and physical realities.
I thought about it every time when I called the hematology-oncology floor, I had the good fortune to press “1” to reach adult oncology, instead of pressing “2” which led to pediatric oncology. I thought about it every time I considered my death not from the point of view of my disappearance, but of the gap it would create in the lives of my children.
At the same time as spring, my mother-Demeter is therefore celebrating today the return of her Persephone, finally out of hell, grown up, never again naive like little Kore before the great sorrows. With the family, we will bring out the champagne, we will dance and we will celebrate this very simple thing, so strong, so fragile: we are alive.
This knowledge will be enough for us to feel filled with a joy that will spring from the precise place where, the day before, there was only anguish and terror.
As my friend Sarah Bertrand-Savard puts it so well in her Vital forces“sometimes you have to die to know”.
Joy is not fashionable, any more than optimism, a question of lucidity, of course. But today, allow me the impropriety of an absolutely uncontrollable joy, bursting out like this sun which finally beats down on the still cold earth of my garden.
Only for today, despite the April Fools, the war that continues to spit its horror on our helplessness, the endless mental health waiting lists, the sixth wave that spoils the party, I am spring.
Tomorrow, I will start the month of April with you, a month devoted to this climate emergency, to our ecoanxieties which are more akin to symptoms of lucidity than to real psychological dysfunctions, to ecopsychology, to the upheavals necessary to that real change will occur in the face of this more than bleak future.
I will reflect with you on the psychological suffering associated with the climate crisis and I will collect your stories in order to continue to nurture the dialogue that serves as a counter-posture to the ambient despair.
Today, however, I’ll turn off the news and, like an old Stephan Eicher song, I’ll take the chairs out to the balcony, have lunch in peace, and pretend not to notice the future. I will curl up on mine, in a soft denial that will make me believe that they will succeed where we have failed again, them, our children.
Today only, because tomorrow, already, we will have to start thinking about the emergency again, to do more than think, to move, even to actually change.
From my place of joy, I can almost believe it.