The death of the before times is a grief that we can't overcome.

What we took for normal throughout our lives died in March 2020. As individuals and societies, we've been striving ever since to find it again like it was first love. We have been searching to find our balance ever since and without much luck. What happened four years ago when Covid came was a ground zero that now defines our age the way World War Two defined the generation that endured total war.

I will remember March 17th 2020, until I am dead. It was when the world stopped- and Canada, along with most other countries, went into lockdown. It was also the day, I began, in a city far from my home, radiation treatment for rectal cancer. I honestly didn't know if I was going to make it through cancer during a time of plague. I some how did as did many others. But there were millions wo didn’t.

Below is an excerpt from my book, I Stood With Harry. The Covid pandemic and Cancer, for me, are different sides of the same coin, and no matter which way the toss is made, it always lands on precarious ground. I am not out of the woods from either, despite the time travelled.

Chapter Nine:

Alone in A covid world

Dear Dad:

On the ride home from the hospital, it was hard to converse with my friend. She wanted to. But I couldn’t. I was still trying to process the enormity of what happened. I was in shock from the operation and the change to my body after it while trying to comprehend the world in lockdown around me.

My life was irrevocably changed because of my cancer operation, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel normal again. But my society was also altered forever because of covid. I was too exhausted both physically and emotionally to speak to someone who hadn’t had a similar life-altering experience.

It reminded me of when I returned from a trip to  Cuba in 1991. I witnessed much hunger and desperation in Cuba. The people of Cuba were starving because of the US embargo and the Soviet Union’s collapse, which ended Russia’s support for Castro. People fainted in the streets of Havana from hunger while workers in shops empty of goods shooed from their front entrances stray dogs who were more skeletons than flesh. I couldn’t describe the desperation I saw because they had nothing to compare it to.

The world outside the passenger van that took me home was an alien landscape because it was empty of humanity. The route home should have been as familiar to me as a worn trail a horse takes to his barn, after working in the fields. But the highway didn’t look normal without traffic. Covid drove humanity indoors which made everything outside my window appear sparse, abandoned, and wan. On and off ramps, to the highway were barren. Truck Stops were empty of parked long-haul rigs or automobiles filling up for gas. Without people, nothing looked familiar or safe.

When we pulled off the highway at my exit and drove into the city, it was a ghost town. The streets leading to my apartment were as still as on a Good Friday. Everyone was sheltering indoors due to the pandemic. I saw no dog walkers, joggers, or kids wandering around in packs trying to burn off boredom in tomfoolery.

At my apartment’s entrance, it was as still and absent of people as when I left for my operation at four in the morning, a few days earlier. I was relieved no one was about to ask me how I was or show surprise I had been away to have some cancer cut out from me. I was delighted not to run into anyone who could expend the little energy reserves I had with clichés or narcissism about how they had “a bit of cancer too and survived it.”

After I slipped through the door to my apartment, I rushed to the bathroom. I needed to check my pants to make sure I hadn’t soiled myself because I was no better than a half-potty-trained toddler when it came to understanding my body’s defecation signals. I tried to piss in the toilet, but I couldn't, nothing came out despite my inside feeling full to bursting. I whispered to myself, “I can’t be catheterised, I can’t be catheterised.” I remembered too much the problems you encountered when you were catheterised because of an engorged prostate and how it led to infections that made you delirious. But catheterisation was a definite possibility, for me. You see, during surgery, my bladder was moved around, like when someone searches for a jam jar at the back of a cupboard and moves a tin of beans to the side to find it. My operation stunned it. So it had no idea what to do once full. If I didn’t get it sorted, I’d need to return to a hospital emergency department to help me piss.

I jumped into the shower and put my back towards the stream of hot water, which relaxed my bladder sufficiently to urinate. As I hadn’t been permitted to bathe in the hospital outside of a sponge bath, it was a luxurious experience.

It reminded me of the story about your 18th birthday. You went to your local baths at the bottom of Boothtown Road in Halifax because the next day you were ordered to report to RAF Padgate for induction and wanted to enjoy the luxury of clean hot water rather than a tin tub in the scullery of your mum’s one up one down.

Afterwards, I changed my underwear, shirt, and pants. I brushed my teeth, and then I sat and rested in the apartment. I was out of breath and spent. I panted in exhaustion from that small amount of activity.

In 2018, when you were released from the hospital after your first bout of pneumonia, you were as breathless as me. You must have been scared then because I certainly was when I came home from the hospital.

My body didn’t know what to do with its new normal, as it sent warning signals that I was on the verge of soiling myself. Like a faulty check engine light in a car, sometimes the signal was accurate and others not. I was now a slave to the whims of my bowels and enslaved to a bodily function that few paid any mind to, except during the odd bout of the stomach flu.

My friend made a sandwich for me, and a cup of tea, and I pretended it was good. But I wasn’t hungry; I was nauseous, from sleep deprivation, the metamorphosis that had occurred in my intestines, and worried about how I was going to take care of myself both physically and financially.

It was not her fault, but my friend was out of her depth and beyond her pay grade when it came to mates with cancer. She didn’t know what to say or do with me.

Nothing registered for her because she was dealing with anxiety over COVID-19 and worried about her own family. So before leaving my apartment and noticing it looked dishevelled, my friend suggested as if I had just come back from the dentist with freezing from a cavity, “Tomorrow after you have rested; you should do a thorough clean-up of your apartment.” I smiled weakly and thanked her for her suggestion and gave her my love. With that, she exited my apartment to return home to her family in Toronto.

After my friend left, the silence in my apartment rolled against me as the tides spread against a deserted beach. A grey sky filtered through my window blinds. I was alone and I realised my survival was up to me and no one else because there wasn’t anyone volunteering to be my caregiver.

I fell asleep for forty-five minutes, and then an urge to defecate woke me with hasty anxiety. Coming out, everything burned as if it were rubbing alcohol against an open cut. After I finished, I sipped from a bottle of water because I’d only been given two instructions before leaving the hospital, well actually three. The first was to drink plenty of water. The second was to avoid MacDonald’s food, and the third was should things get tough, to go to your local emergency department.

I wasn’t worried about developing a craving for a Big Mac, as I had an aversion to most junk food before my cancer diagnosis. And, after my surgery, I began to comprehend that eating food was a punishment, not a pleasure, as it caused me to defecate multiple times an hour. So, I resolved to keep my food intake to the smallest amount possible to lessen my trips to the bathroom.

Not sleeping was playing havoc with my emotions. It was all too much; the pain, the change in my body, the sheer desolation that cancer created in my personality. I was a mess, which was not helped by being in the vortex of COVID-19 because it made everything appear as if nonexistence was just around the corner. Lying in my bed, on that first day after my release from the hospital, I saw myself like an animal recovering from sickness in the wilds that tries to fend off predators.

I was surviving by a proverbial thread. It would have been so easy to stop breathing in those first few days, and I only kept going out of instinct. Never was I that close to death in my life before. Even after my heart attack, when I came to your house to recuperate. I was depressed and weakened, fearful even of the future. But I did believe I had decades ahead of me. But at that time, I had you to help me recuperate. It’s a much different experience when you know you must survive without the love and assistance of anyone.

On the afternoon I returned from the hospital I lay on my bed. I stared at Pete’s paintings that adorn the walls. Looking at them made me long for you to return to me, in flesh and blood, rather than the two dimensions of my imagination. They gave me so much calm and reassurance. In those paintings, I could gaze beyond the frame of the images and remember what was happening during Pete’s creation of them. I could see you and Mum working in your garden, unpacking shopping, or resting. I could hear Mum’s call for afternoon coffee, and Pete putting down his paintbrush and lighting a cigarette whilst surveying his canvas with uncertainty. Pete always doubted whether his painting captured the moment.

Thirty years later, all of you are dead, but those fleeting moments we shared still exist in those paintings of his. All the love, expectations, and ephemeralness of our time together are held in place and eternal on those early canvasses and sketches he drew of us and the society he lived in. Those early works of Peter’s each possessed a gentle beauty and softness. They were so unlike his last efforts, where he reflected on the environmental crisis, loneliness, mental health issues and the politics of consumerism. In those final years of his life, Pete created huge multi-formatted canvasses- that were feverish and electrified. He knew that he was soon to die and wanted to spit out as much of his personality, his spirit, his anger, his beliefs before his music stopped. Why else would it be that one of his last paintings is of him lying on a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of his throat, other than because he somehow understood the grim future that awaited him?

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co- morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost of living crisis times. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I am offering a 20% reduction in a yearly subscription to ensure my prescriptions can be purchased today. One new subscriber covers that cost. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John