Walter's War: The OG, my mother and me
Behold, my first podcast episode in more than a year
At my most mentally troubled, I would have dreams (nightmares) of being ambushed by masked figures wielding guns or bombs. In school, in a club, in a restaurant.
My dilemma in the dreams would be whether to play dead, to run, or to attempt to help others. The latter option, I always knew, would save no one.
I mostly opted to take a punt on playing dead, but I would always wake up with a breathless jolt as the killers were approaching me. Just like in the movies, I thought.
During my years of digging deep to get to the root of my difficulties existing in this mind and body, those dreams (nightmares) have been like clues. Crumbs for me to follow, like Hansel and Gretel reimagined by a mash-up of Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung and David Ireland.
- I thought you were a loyalist, I thought you liked the English.
- Nobody likes the English. We just pretend to like yous cos it annoys the fenians.
David Ireland, Sadie
Then I started paying attention to my granda Walter's stories… to my eternal regret, not properly until he'd already shuffled off this mortal coil.
One of my earliest memories is running alongside a hospital gurney that he was lying on, being rushed through the corridors. He was reaching out his hand to me, unable to articulate the words his mind was sending to his mouth.
I must have been with my mum when she got the call, maybe she’d just picked me up from school or playschool.
I was too small to reach his hand but, with my eyes, I told him that I was holding it anyway and that he was going to be okay.
The same hand he’d automatically take to our noses when we’d show up at 1 Brookmount Crescent, the grandchildren. Doing that thing of pretending to pull off your nose and slide it between his thumb and forefinger.
Somehow, when he did it, it was never not so, so funny. I think because he took such glee in it, every time. His eyes would literally sparkle, eternally a boy himself. Maybe because his own mum died when he was very young.
Walter lived to the age of 89. He passed away while I was living in Leeds for my first ‘journalism’ job (I wrote bullshit marketing copy, like so many ‘journalists’ do every day).
It had been Walter who’d casually said to me in my early 20s, a very lost literature graduate sat in his living room observing him being interviewed and photographed, ‘you could do this.’
He was right, I could. I promptly got myself onto a postgraduate journalism course, spending a year living by the beach in Cornwall.
I’d come away from my ‘journalism’ experience absolutely horrified by the reality of The Media and what we’ve been conditioned to call The News, but perhaps that was the bigger, metaphysical reason for my life taking the path it did. I wouldn’t put it past Walter and the mystical forces surrounding him.
So anyway, just as the ‘psychotic episodes’ of my late brother Niall featured terrorists and violence and danger, the landscape of my ’mares could be similarly gnarly, what with the balaclavas and the intimidation and the omniscient threat of rape, torture, murder.
Such slumber-based hellscapes were made a hundred times worse by ‘antidepressants’ and similar shite issued by the unwitting agents of The Apparatus we, as yet, still live under like the clueless, hoodwinked plebs we are.
It’s like they can open some kind of portal, those substances. A portal to suicidal seduction and dark thoughts you mistake for your own.
You don’t know unless you know and so, until you do, just believe me. And my late brother, who was denied the truth right through to his dying day.
I recorded a conversation with my mother, Walter’s daughter, in recent months. I wasn’t sure what to do with it because, honestly, it was sounding a bit shit. Was it that my mum just isn’t as good a storyteller as her Pop, or that she sadly clams up when being recorded?
She got up and walked off about half an hour into our chat, ending the conversation without saying that’s what she intended or wanted. The Great Unspoken: my favourite thing, always and 4eva.
Small-town concerns about ‘airing dirty laundry’ and ‘what people will think’ had crept in, unusually for the ballsy, rebellious, free-thinking beauty who birthed me and five of my six siblings. Maybe it’s an age thing.
Maybe it’s an unprocessed grief thing. An unresolved trauma thing.
Words and phrases that make her zone out and leave me writhing in my ‘abandonment wounds’ and the agony of her ‘emotional unavailability’.
Just therapy speak, innit? The post-war generation want nothing to do with it. They fed us, they clothed us, they sent us to school.
What more do we feckin’ want, entitled shower of bastards that we are?
So… we just want to be heard, to be seen, and to be reassured that feeling sad is okay and feeling annoyed is okay. Experiencing such emotions is not grounds to be blanked and/or told off like a child.
It’s also helpful to have it confirmed in real time that the bad things adults do to children are not and never were the children’s fault. We did nothing to deserve the shit put on us as tiny, innocent beings of light.
Let sleeping dogs lie all you want. Just make sure they’re lying somewhere comfortable and safe. Not on a big jaggy death slab being picked at by vultures with blades and acid tongues.
Dogs, asleep or otherwise, prefer peace, quiet and safety. Just like humans do.
So in this, my first podcast episode in more than a year, there’s some of my mum, some of me, and some of Granda Walter. Maybe it makes no sense, maybe it makes more sense than anything any of us are ready for.
Walter was interviewed in 2003 by John Carney of the Ulster Herald for the newspaper’s Thursday feature and it was published on 6th March that year. My granda popped up regularly in such interviews because he was a bottomless pit of expertly recounted ‘yarns’; the stuff of dreams for local meeja.
This is my thank you to him for being a survivor, not a victim. He wasn’t perfect, but he was real. I miss people being real in this world which is replete with so many dickheads talking so much bollocks and they don’t even take a breath to catch themselves.
The only ones I want near me are the real ones. It’s a health thing. It may even be a life or death thing.
My people-pleasing days are over and for that I have my cell mutation to thank. Honesty is truly the best policy: I urge you to try it, just for one day.
Cancer thingz
I guess the best way to sum up where I’m at on My Cancer Journey is to say: I’m doing it my way, and my recommendation for anyone else is to do the same.
For me personally, the focus remains on what caused my cells to mutate, where and how. If that’s not addressed or resolved, my body has no reason not to continue what it’s been doing, in all its infinite wisdom.
‘Cancer’ isn’t some external beast to be battled like a balaclava-clad invader, much as the medical industrial complex would have us perceive otherwise.
The human body is intelligent, designed with an intelligence our minds are too small to comprehend just yet, and it is only ever working in our favour. As cray as that sounds when one thinks of pain, or inflammation, or pus, or PAIN.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy.
Khalil Gibran
Toxicity is in me and I am addressing it from all angles: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. If the cause is not resolved, my ‘cancer’ will simply continue to grow.
Chemotherapy can kill shit, but guess what? That shit was growing for a reason and the slain cells can simply double down and get back to work when the poison has passed.
A bit like the ‘superbugs’ that have arisen from the insidious overuse of antibiotics.
Three cheers for any medical graduates who retain their integrity and authentic desire to help people in the face of the bribery and bullshit set up to turn them into brainwashed drug dealers.
My choice is not to be disfigured, ravaged by hormonal fuckery and defined by daily or even weekly hospital visits while my body goes through the process it is, for whatever its reasons are: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.
In the year that I’ve now been ‘living with cancer’, I’ve gone through that hectic initial phase of endless appointments and being told about myself, and I look back and feel tired and stressed at the memory. As do my loved ones.
The hospitals and the oncologists are all about your cancer, not about you. You, the holistic, multidimensional being who has to live and breathe in this body and mind every day and night.
Since stopping chemo in February and agreeing with the doctors that I’d prefer they leave me be for a bit, I have focused on the quality of my days. I don’t want endlessly scanned and pricked for blood samples; I go by how I feel, not by a given med grad’s given interpretation of some grainy images and a spurt of my plasma.
I don’t want to be thrust into a ‘surgical menopause’, I’ve had enough strife with my hormones my whole life. Mentally, I know what I’m able to withstand.
Some things, I simply don’t want to have to withstand. And that is my choice.
By and large, the more you are and stay in control of your own destiny, the better you will do. This approach may weaken the hospital staff’s sense of omnipotence, but before you allow people to play God with you, make sure they have the qualifications.
Lawrence LeShan, Cancer as a Turning Point
My body is weak and sore but my mind remains, I am still ‘me’. Chemo has affected my short-term memory a bit and I’m dealing with it.
I couldn’t be more relieved to have my hair growing back. Having no eyebrows or eyelashes is fucking weird - and sore. They’re there for a reason, not least to stop your eyes streaming with water and jagging you any time air hits them.
I’m making my way through my eldest brother’s Jewish Study Bible like the avid geek I am, being lit up with Truth and supernatural succour on the daily.
I’m studying the phenomenon that is ‘cancer’ from every angle and with the aid of fellow explorers of the unknown. It’s up to the outliers: same as it ever was.
I’m writing a play about generational trauma (but funny) with my creative soulmate, my fellow fenian nutcase who also lives for words and the redemptive power of storytelling.
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And Faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.
Emily Brontë
I’m currently staying in Bethnal Green, where my sisters are, and it’s only down the road from my beloved ends but it’s opening up a whole other miniverse to me. East Londoners are definitively my people and I am theirs.
My granda’s roots are in England so I guess it makes sense. I love Ireland and the Irish but we are a species ravaged beyond recognition, in many instances.
It’s easier (and more fun) being Irish outside of Ireland. That is my personal experience, always has been since I left for university and was hit by panic attacks, insomnia and sore skin any time I went back ‘home’.
I’ve not had a child during this life of mine. I am currently ‘pregnant’ with my tumour. Perhaps there are other things wanting ‘birthed’ through me? Perhaps they are gestating? Perhaps I am simply dying.
It makes no difference to my days, which are filled with the same soul food by which I’ve always been sustained.
Reading. Writing. Talking. Listening. Nature. Dogs. Art. Music.
There are bad days and very bad moments. There are good days and massively magical moments. I take them as they come: this inhale, that exhale.
Bad nights are as harrowing as they’ve ever been, but thankfully there are significantly fewer of them now and I count that as a major blessing. A major, major blessing.
I’ve experienced my first ‘cancer friend’ death this summer. Beautiful Sabine from the first mistletoe therapy clinic I attended last year.
She had her funeral in Epping Forest and I’ve yet to fully catch my breath following my attendance at it with my golden sisters.
Sabine’s dog, Phoebe the Shih Tzu, was there. A peacock and her peacock babies pottered around outside.
A dragonfly darted in and around Sabine’s wicker coffin as her soul was gently held by her nearest and dearest bidding her adieu.
The Irish priest cracked delicate jokes and promptly gave us his phone number when we approached him after. When you know, you know.
We’re all going to die some day. Can you imagine anything more peaceful than being cremated and buried with a tree?
I’m calling it: I WANT TO BE A TREE WHEN I GO. Whether with/from this cancer of mine, or whatever else the gods have in store for me.
I am so grateful to Sabine and her family for the inspiration, the food for thought, the absolute privilege of witnessing such an understatedly majestic send-off… and Phoebe.
She misses her mummy. She is encased in love and she will keep going, like we all do, all the time.
In a dark moment recently, in despair at the pain that was affecting my sleep and my will to carry on, I shouted at the gods surrounding me.
‘FUCK YOU, JESUS,’ I spat.
And still he did not forsake me.
I opened the sacred text, all like ‘COME ON THEN, DICKHEAD, SHOW ME YOU’RE NOT A BIG BAG OF BOILED SHITE.’
And still he did not forsake me.
I found myself at the Book of Job and within those pages and those verses, which send me to my knees in waves of humility and awe, I was comforted. I was reassured. I was educated.
Job’s struggle is a reminder that faith is not a shield against suffering. It’s a guiding light that can illuminate the darkest moments of our lives.
How can a human win a case against God?
Whoever might want to argue with him could not answer him one question in a thousand.
His heart is so wise, his strength so great - who can resist him and succeed?
He made the Great Bear, Orion, the Pleiades and the hidden constellations of the south
He can go rightly by me, and I don’t see him; he moves past without my being aware of him.
Job 9: 2 - 4
I surrender to the unknown. I open my arms, heart and soul to it.
I know nothing and I never did.
I have never felt more alive.
Patience, perseverance and persistence. Man cannot grasp the mysterious ways of divine providence, them’s just the facts.
Happy Birthday, Granda. Thank you for being you.