writer's moll

Rob’s illness has brought a surprising revelation - an obvious one if you think about it, as most of life’s big issues usually are - that just as we often find the way others choose to live incomprehensible, it’s as true of the way they choose to die. Rob copes by denial which I find baffling so I have to remind myself that he has the right to deal with it any way he chooses. Of course he can see that his head and neck movement is becoming restricted, that his pain has to be controlled by opiates and that poisonous gunge now oozes from his tumour, but he keeps up a stream of optimistic chatter on how well the chemotherapy is working and continues to make long term plans. So we discuss all his treatment but never the implications of his illness. A McMillan nurse (they provide support for the terminally ill and their families) who visited my daughter and me says that after twenty years in the job she’s found that people have an idealised version of dying which exists only in films or in our heads. There is no normal, the dying don’t ask awkward questions when you’re ready, but when they are, families can be greedy and selfish, they don’t always ‘pull together’ and are often overcome with feelings of guilt for wishing that it were over. And the most difficult of all to accept is that illness doesn’t change your character and suddenly give you a spiritual dimension if it wasn’t there in the first place. So it’s ridiculous to expect Rob to start thinking about ‘important things’ when nerdy stuff, flash cars and gadgets are the important things to him, the same as they’ve always been.