It was about the same as today, four years ago. A white day, with a sky eaten by clouds, snow proudly accumulated on the edges of our roads, in a winter which had taken a long time to decide. I had let myself be swallowed up by whiteness, as I sped down Highway 10, looking for an answer, for relief, for confirmation of the bad intuition I carried within me.
My winter of strength had begun that day, at 4:30 p.m. precisely. There had been this encounter with a black-ocean-on-ultrasound-screen, words and pain. We said “tumor”, we said grade 3, we said words that transform an existence for good. I had just been “thrown in spite of myself into the human condition”, as Jacques Quintin, the man who would become my thesis director, writes so well, for this very accurate way of thinking about illness, in particular.
My universe of meaning had collapsed, and I would spend months wandering through the debris of myself, in order to reconstitute something like a person, who is not dead, again, for the moment, another day, then two , then a few months, then four years today. Yesterday, when I realized the date, and the strange effect of the calendar came back to move something that I thought was fixed within me, I miscalculated at first, thinking three years. Then, when I said it out loud to my friend, he replied, “No, Nathalie, four years old.”
I began to cry at the end of another year. Four more years. What luck ! There are a host of strange and fascinating phenomena in survival, such as never really realizing the thing, and each time being overwhelmed by this dazzling reunion with this knowledge.
Four years ago, a woman stayed on that exam table forever. I never found that one. I still miss her sometimes, for this total absence of fear that she carried, this attitude that boxed life without really realizing its value, this invincible summer that inhabited her, even in winter. Now it’s often winter in me, long before it gets cold or snows heavily. I know the snow from the inside, the one that freezes me before scans of control, which makes me tremble at the idea of the return of words that kill.
I made a friend of her, sometimes negotiating with her, telling her that we must also live, that it is not a question of handing over the guides of my life to her, that she does not dictate the rest to me. I just let it remind me how everything I hold in my hands means little. I let her remind me that it’s about living the days with the true joy of being alive, as often as possible.
Daily life settles back in, fortunately, letting me forget where I came from, what happened to me, then there are the dates, the blank day that enters me full-blown, placing me back on this examination table, then on the sleet-filled steps of the clinic, a telephone to my ear, announcing to my husband in the Far North that he will have to come back more quickly, to pick up the remains of his frayed wife, to carry the children , draw a giant shelter around the house, make a fire, because it was going to be cold for many months. I return to it like a pilgrimage, to mark the space and the place with a few words, a few thoughts, a few stones. Saying “it was me, yes, it was me”.
Ghosts are sometimes very boring for those who no longer want to hear about this survival. The ghosts need to talk at length about this strange place from which they return, precisely this place where there is nothing left, apart from the very small light of oneself which shines. They sometimes tell us about a God that they met at the end of the rest, still rambling, even after four years, five years, twenty years, this moment when they lost a part of themselves, forever. We don’t leave the Facebook groups that held our hand, we are now elders, gone from “cancer baby” (my nickname at the time in my survivor group) to “cancer grandma”, the more the years go by, The more the “Port-a-Cath” scar whitens, the longer the hair.
Every week, I gather from these groups pearls of wisdom, lessons of courage, reminders of how my friends are strong without wanting to be, they too thrown, younger and younger it seems to me, into the human condition. We say “welcome”, “I understand”, “we are with you” and sometimes we say “farewell”.
Four years later, I allow myself to fly to this column in which I really like to talk to you about you, a little from this space to tell you my joy at being here, today, to write to you, to write to you my true joy that transforms many winters into spontaneous springs. And for all my friends who have not returned, for those who have just entered their afterlife, I lay down one more stone, and this poem.
“Behind a window someone smiles cautiously / At noon spring is louder than a jay / And love comes out in a white coat / The whole street is an azure collapse / We have no history and the weather is as beautiful as ever. » – Marie Uguay