In 2020, when in sync with the rest of the world, my life held its breath long enough for me to doubt what was next, I took out my rosary.
My rosary contained neither the Hail Mary nor the Our Father. Rather, it was made up of a large string of beads, each distanced from what we could imagine in a “spinning time”, that required to acknowledge the shocks.
A pearl, a loss.
The inner ritual had taken hold during those long weeks when, in bed, I learned to recognize the shapes drawn by the shadows of the tall pine tree on the wall of my bedroom, depending on whether the sun was morning, midday or evening. .
The window became the place of entry for everything that now escaped me: life, its exterior, its noise, its repeated throbbing.
Me, I was rather stretched out in my survival, hoping that the cells would know how to sort out the poison and the antidote, in the middle of a great war in which I was neither general nor soldier, but only ” territory “. The metaphors of war, as we know, are often only useful to those who want to see us as “brave people who will win their fight against cancer”.
From the inside, many Cancer patients would say that they feel much more like cities, mountains and plains, on which a terrible charge takes place between squadrons which, on both sides, slaughter the landscape for them.
Not being dead never made me a brave person.
Lucky, yes, this time, yes.
At odds with all those who summoned me then to “stay positive”, and to whom I simply no longer responded — we learn to preserve our energy in these moments — I allocated all the time necessary to each of my identity breakdowns. The illness stripped me of many draperies which, in everyday life, ensured the few necessary illusions that must sometimes be maintained in order to resume the circus of existential agitations.
I was 40 years old. And I lived, in a nutshell, what many take years — and a few impulsive decisions grouped together under the term “midlife crisis” — to integrate: I was getting closer to the reality of my death.
I then recited my rosary.
Here, a small/big/huge pearl: the certainty of seeing my children grow up. Finished.
I will now have to honor every moment, rejoice in the dawning adolescence, hope only to witness their trajectory, whatever. “If only I can be that mom waiting for her son at 4 a.m. angry, if only. »
Yes, the rosary sometimes took the form of prayers, without my really deciding. Without knowing who, what I was praying.
As Regina Spektor sings: No one laughs at God when the doctor calls / After some routine tests / No one’s laughing at God / When it’s gotten real late / Their kid’s not back from that party yet.
Here, this other pearl of loss, that of all these little betrayals of my integrity, of all these unreasonable accommodations for the benefit of the consideration of egos, mine, that of others. Finished.
It just wouldn’t be possible. I understood him.
Like what, losing sometimes becomes a great process of liberation, too.
There, a whole day, stumbling on this pearl in my rosary which is difficult to describe, but which, I think, resembles what, in a context without illness, would be called “aging” only, this process which consists to recognize that youth is no longer our home, that we are gradually becoming part of those who no longer trace the world from their designs. I hear you telling me I’m only 42. But, under chemo, those who know know, we are 150 years old. Forever after, in a small room of our interior museum, we have become and will remain ancestors.
I ritualized in various thoughts and gestures the parts of me that I had to let go and, whatever those who claim that healing only happens on the bright side of things think, I crushed all my dark, patiently grinding it. My melancholy had never been so useful.
Then I survived. I have known the joys of all-white scans.
I thanked God again, by reflex.
Then, in this summer, I discover a new rosary, the one made of the beads of all the unexpected, of all those things that I no longer thought I was living, which burst into my life, like gifts, bonuses, “cherries on the sundae », making my daily life an event.
I give you one of them, echoing what you may taste in your summers, my pearl of Thursday evening.
There was a crowd, a sky after the shower, my lover, an IPA and The National on an outdoor stage near the river.
The crowd, like me, had aged, along with the singer who, if he still dares to step into the crowd to sing terrible loveno longer throw bottles of wine on stage.
Turn the light out, say goodnight / No thinking for a little while / Let’s not try to figure out everything at once / It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky / We’re half awake in a fake empire.
And it was at that moment that I thanked the disease.
No Matt, I’m almost not “half awake in an empire of the fake” anymore. I am fully alive, exaggeratedly happy about this fact. I rolled between my fingers this pearl more on the rosary of the unexpected ones.