Our Times will be defined by how we reacted to Covid.

Dead's a long time. I know this because three years ago this week, I was diagnosed with rectal cancer, which still has a high statistical potential to kill me.

In 2020, the world was colliding with covid and me with cancer. It was a stark time to be alive and desperately unwell. I wrote about it in a book called I Stood With Harry, and below is an excerpt from it.

Covid is our society's defining moment, just like World War Two was the Greatest Generation's defining moment. However, unlike them, we didn't build a welfare state; we tore what remained of the one they built down.

We didn't have to do that and we can blame our politicians, the 1% and news media for aiding and abetting the destruction of benevolence in society. But in some measure, we are also responsible because we didn't get angry enough or were too frightened of losing what little we had that we didn't act. We could have changed directions and saved humanity, the planet, and future generations. But we didn't- we choose a lifestyle of two-for-one sales instead of that thinking that ignoring death is a form of immortality. My book touches about these choices we made as individuals and societies before, during and during the pretend after of Covid. My book is about my dad but also the world I inhabited after he died.

Dear Dad:

I wasn’t physically well during those last two years of your life. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but things weren’t right in my body. I ignored the warning signs like I ignored the warning signs on our car when it flashed "check engine." I just put it down to exhaustion and stress.

Sometimes, you even noticed I wasn’t myself and asked, “What will happen to me if you die?”

I ignored your concern because I thought I'd be like you and have thousands of miles ahead of me as you did- when you were in your fifties. “Mate, you and I are as indestructible as Yorkshire Stone.”

Besides, there wasn’t time to tend to my well-being because you were old and needed more care and attention. I mean, you were still smoking until the age of eighty-seven. I told people it was your medical ignorance that kept you from dying because your vital organs didn't understand the implications of decades of cigarette smoke as you refused to read up on it.

After your health began to fail, I had to put all my efforts into keeping you alive. So, I shrugged it off when my bowel habits changed. I wasn't a candidate for colorectal cancer, I said to myself.

It is what I thought, anyway, as my GP inferred when I turned fifty that I wasn't a high-risk candidate for this type of cancer. He told me then- during my annual physical examination, "You aren't a high-risk candidate for colorectal cancer." This doctor suggested a faecal blood test rather than a colonoscopy was more appropriate for me because "it can be dicey for someone with heart disease such as yourself." Seemed good enough to me, and that test came back negative, as did the subsequent one, two years later.

I thought I was in the pink of health. But I wasn't. Not even close. My inability to recognise I was suffering from a health emergency was made worse because I developed cataracts during that time- when you needed the most constant care. It made it much easier for me, to dismiss shit in my blood as burgundy wine or the residuals of spaghetti Bolognaise.

So as my bowel habits changed subtly from month to month, I maintained a staunch defence of denial. From your death onwards, warning alarms from my guts became shriller, but I refused to listen to the cautions.

It didn’t matter where I was: Toronto, London, Calais, Madrid, Greece, Alberta and the Yorkshire dales. I’d shake away my doubts by telling myself; “it’s got to be the bloody wine, or I’ve got the piles that plagued Martin Luther.”

I kept ploughing on until I couldn’t anymore.

My health came crashing down around my head right after I finished campaigning for Labour candidates in marginal northern seats in the 2018 General Election. I went back to Britain from Canada for that election as I deemed it the best way to preserve your legacy that I helped build while you were alive.

It was a shit show for an election campaign because nobody seemed to be fighting it to win it, or at least use it to properly warn people what lay ahead. The whole establishment was against Labour but it seemed nobody was angry about this. I door-knocked, wrote essays for newspapers and gave some CLP speeches to volunteers. I travelled up and down Yorkshire and Lancashire but nothing sparked. I detected general disinterest in your name and books as well as zero interest in me trying to keep your mission to not make your past our future going.

I was supposed to give a small speech, in Wakefield to Labour campaign workers about your life. But it was hastily bumped by the sitting MP. Instead of me speaking about your connection to Wakefield, Ross Kemp former B actor and B social documentary maker spoke in my place. He talked to a crowd of fifteen that the causes of Brexit could be combatted with boxing clubs for young men in depressed northern communities. It was a bizarre irrational, and arrogant presentation. It was clear MPs not aligned with Corbyn were scuttling from either incompetence or disagreements with socialism.

By the end of the election campaign, I was losing control of my bowels and fearful of soiling myself in the company of strangers. On Election night, I knew it wasn’t the results, the beer or curry served at a Unison event that drove me to the toilet with the urgency of a POW with dysentery in a World War Two, Japanese Prison Camp. I couldn’t ignore it anymore; I was extremely ill.

Upon my return to Canada, I had a scheduled colonoscopy conducted in a rural hospital 30 minutes from my apartment. I didn’t think anything was going to be found except haemorrhoids, so I took a cab there. After the procedure was done, I woke in tears because I had dreamed you were giving an NHS speech. I was groggy when the physician that performed my scope said he found something.

“Something,” I asked.

“Yes, it needs to be biopsied.”

“Is it cancer?”

“When I know, I will tell you.”

But I knew it was cancer because the doctor had also scheduled blood work, a Cat Scan and MRI during the Christmas break. You don’t do that, I surmised unless you are almost 100% certain that the lesion growing in my rectum like a sprout on a potato was malignant.

I spent that holiday season drinking heavily and googling my symptoms to determine if I would survive until summer, need a colostomy bag, or dodge the cancer bullet.

Following the holidays, the surgeon who had performed my colonoscopy set up a meeting at his office in Belleville. I knew all through Christmas break unwelcome news was coming, my way. But my guts still felt hollow after he said, “I am sorry, you have cancer.”

To survive it, I needed radical surgery, and without it, I’d be dead in eighteen months. The news didn't frighten me at first. I guess that was because I was in shock. Peggy Lee's song, "Is That All There is," came to mind. I also heard in my head, Porky Pig's stuttering voice ending a Looney Tune Cartoon with "That's All Folks." I was resigned that I was a most unlucky person.

The surgeon pointed to a 3-dimensional model of the abdomen that stood on his desk. His fingers softly touched the intestinal organs displayed on the model. He outlined the surgery I needed. It was called a low anterior resection which sounded strangely automotive to my ear as if it was to fix the exhaust system of your car at a muffler shop.

During surgery many things might happen, I was told. He might need to build a j pouch from bits of my intestine, which would function as a crude rectum to give me limited bowel control if the cancer was too extensive. I was warned that I might need to be fitted with an ileostomy for a few months to allow my body to heal. If I was given one, my stool would collect in a sterile bag attached to the outside of my abdomen that required to be manually emptied.

The surgeon then added, "It might be a permanent bag because I won't know until I get in there and see the extent of your cancer." "You will know if it is a temporary or a permanent bag by whether it is located on the right or left side of your abdomen after you wake up from surgery.”

In my head, I thought, fuck most days, I can’t remember if I’ve flossed or not. How will I remember what is permanent and what is the temporary side after I wake up from surgery?

The surgeon then informed me that even if I didn’t need a bag to defecate into, my bowel movements were going to be radically altered by the surgery. He asked me, “how often do you now go a day?”

I responded with, “once, maybe twice a day.”

“Not after this, and he began to count slowly to nine as if he were the Count talking to the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.

“Sorry,” I asked, “did you say I could have upwards to nine bowel movements a day after my surgery?”

“Yes, it’s all about accepting your new normal.”

Outwardly, after my diagnosis, I was calm. Inwardly, I quaked with fear and dread. Sardonically, I remembered mum’s warning to me when we went to Alberta for a summer vacation in the 1970s. We ended up at Banff National Park and camped in our pop-up trailer that you towed behind our Reido 500 from Toronto to the Rockies. One night before bed, I flipped through a Time magazine and became fixated on an advertisement about colorectal cancer, on one of its pages. I laughed at it because shit is funny to a boy of eight. But mum was outraged at my insensitivity, and because she still grieved over her best friend, who had died of cancer seven years before, cried out, “you won’t find it funny if you get it.”

After I met with the surgeon, I understood I now had a best-before date coming up fast. I wasn’t surprised. For months, before my diagnosis, melancholy overwhelmed me for the passing of time that was more than grieving you. I was feeling desolation. Somehow, I’d been expecting death. I was having dreams, at night, where someone would tell me, I was dying. And during the summer that had just passed, I went on a date to Toronto’s annual end-of-summer exhibition and temporary amusement park, the C.N.E., and felt my end was nigh. I was at the top of a rollercoaster ride ready to come crashing down to the ground below, and a voice in my head said clearly, “you are dying.”

The surgeon asked me if I had any questions, and I said no. I told him I was prepared for this news and that I’d been in contact with an oncological surgeon in Toronto that specialised in rectal cancers, who agreed to treat me if it turned out I had cancer.

One thing I understood was that if I had the bad luck of being diagnosed with cancer, I wouldn't compound that bad luck by using a general surgeon for a specialised operation.

Going out of this doctor’s office, I needed a drink. I trudged to a pub where we had filmed your promotional video for Harry’s Last Stand. It was almost empty of customers on that mid-week afternoon of winter. There were only two men at the bar who looked like they had drunk from youth to middle age in this pub, and now couldn’t remember where all the time and their hopes had gone. The place reminded me of one of the many depressing pubs we sat in with your brother Matt in Bridlington when we would fly out from Portugal to visit him, in 2008. I ordered a whisky, drank it, and then ordered another one.

On the television behind the bar, a 24-hour news channel reported the steady push of the coronavirus towards Canada. I looked away from it because I remembered the devastation that the Spanish Flu brought to the world a hundred years ago, from a university history lecture. On that day, the apocalypse loudly knocked on my front door.

Inside of me was a malignancy growing and mutating cells, murdering me. I was ending as a person. The trajectory of my life was cascading quickly towards being buried in the soft ground. If I died in the next few months or years, no one would remember or mourn my passing. Too much death was coming for anyone to be able to absorb it rationally in their head. Plague loomed for our society like it had done in Athens during the time of Pericles or in Europe in the Middle Ages, or in 1918 for my grandparents' generation. So many lives were about to be snatched from existence as if death were a debt collector.

The past would be forgotten because nobody would be left alive who either could recall it properly or wanted to remember it.

We would all be forgotten. You, mum, Peter, and me- gone from history as if we were never here.

The covid approaching, Canada, Britain, Europe, America-everywhere, was going to transform society as the war did yours in 1939 when for five years, no one had time to mourn the dead.

Thank you for reading my latest bit on substack. 2023 is my father Harry Leslie Smith’s 100th birthyear. I believe this year maybe my last opportunity to make his legacy achieve the traction it needs to help motivate people to make some good trouble against the status quo. It’s important this his life story is preserved because his history is our history and the 1% are trying to steal our memories of how the working classes forged a better society for us all. So your subscriptions either paid or free help spread the word. Feb 25, 2023 would have been Harry Leslie Smith’s birthday and I will do my best to make sure that it isn’t forgotten Your solidarity with me as a subscriber to my substack is so appreciated.

Take care, John.

Photo by Yomex Owo on Unsplash