The first stage is denial …

If I had a God I’d pray to him or her or it for fortitude and the strength to transcend fatigue, obtuseness and pettiness. For all the tens of thousands of hours spent over thirty years of meditation, I still fear my own lawless mind.

On the phone the other evening my younger daughter asked how I was. I couldn’t find an answer but a Bob Dylan couplet came to mind:

While I’m scufflin’ and I’m shufflin’ and I’m walkin’ on briars
I’m not even acquainted with my own desires.

My previous post on Jackie’s cancer – Before the hurricane, written seventeen days ago – is already alien to me. It came from a space I no longer inhabit. I’m in a state of disconnect; a thinly enveloping skin of mundanity belied by the facts but abetted by the masking effects of steroids whose respite from a raft of symptoms, we were told yesterday at Sheffield’s Weston Park Cancer Centre, is temporary. In any case seven days from now she’ll come off them as a precondition for the treatment she has opted for: a mix of a new drug taken as a daily tablet – available only because her type of small-cell lung cancer, not linked to smoking and having in recent years reached quietly epidemic levels in women in their late fifties and sixties, argues for its palliative success – along with traditional chemotherapy.

Ten percent of those who took this path are still alive after two years, five percent after three. For a few it doesn’t work at all and they have to stop.

I’m anaesthetised by the ordinary. I rise at seven. Downstairs I potter till seven-thirty then put the oven on for Jackie’s croissant. The steroids give her appetite and that too brings a deceiving normality I called the lull before the hurricane. When the oven’s hot I pop in the croissant, place two ramekins, a teaspoon and a glass on a waiting tray then move to the fridge for yoghurt and soft fruit – blueberries, strawberries and raspberries from the shops, blackberries I picked in our friendly neighbourhood woods – and bottle of smoothie: red and yellow alternating like daily traffic lights. Shame we abandoned the green as not to Jackie’s liking.

I put the kettle on, reach for the Thompson’s tea, turn the oven off and slip in a plate to warm in its slowly dying heat.

Greek yoghurt goes in one ramekin, berries in the other. At eight I ferry them – with hot flaking croissant, glass of smoothie and cup of weak black tea – upstairs. Jackie will be awake now, and sitting up. This is her favourite meal of the day, taken with the first of her two lots of steroids.

I part draw the curtains, take the armchair in the bay window. We talk, mostly practical stuff as life goes on ob-la-di, ob-la-da. This is our blessed hour.

Me, I’m numbed by the normal, by shock, and by the vicarious ripple effect of the steroids about to cease. I’m not acquainted with my feelings because, I suppose, I’m in the first stage of loss as per the five stage model set out sixty years ago – with allowance for their not always taking a clear linear trajectory – by the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, whose work with the terminally ill in Chicago hospitals gave her a ringside seat at the dying game:

1. Denial: The initial reaction where individuals may refuse to accept the reality of the loss, often feeling numb or in shock.

2. Anger: This stage involves feelings of frustration and helplessness, which can be directed at oneself, others, or even the deceased.

3. Bargaining: Individuals may attempt to negotiate a way out of their grief, often making promises in exchange for relief from their pain.

4. Depression: A deep sense of sadness and despair can set in as the individual begins to understand the extent of the loss.

5. Acceptance: This final stage involves coming to terms with the reality of the loss, allowing individuals to find a way to move forward while still cherishing memories.

As I write, Jackie sleeps a thousand miles away in the next room. Am I at the cusp of stage two? I sense rage buried deep, alien but ever ready to surface in destructively small-minded form. Can I direct and channel it? Give it meaning and purpose?

I know which way to turn. One of ’em at any rate. Caitlin, yesterday.

“What Radicalized You?”

I dunno man maybe it was all the wars based on lies or the corporate ecocide or the live-streamed genocide or the people sleeping on sidewalks while billionaires become trillionaires or the plundering of the global south or the mass surveillance or the police drones or the Israeli torture prisons or the IDF rape dogs or the starvation sanctions or the proxy wars or the acts of nuclear brinkmanship or the encircling of our planet with hundreds of US military bases or the CIA black sites or the Epstein files or the government secrecy or the increasing persecution of journalists and whistleblowers or the fact that the US just openly assassinates and kidnaps the leaders of sovereign nations or the internet censorship or the way all western media and all Silicon Valley tech platforms operate as propaganda services for the US empire or the aggressive push to outlaw pro-Palestine demonstrations or the legalized corruption of western governments or the way AI is being shoved down our throats while data centers choke our ecosystem or the thinly disguised rush to develop militarized robots for domestic use or the glaring plot holes in the official 9/11 story or the glaring plot holes in the official October 7 story or the complete impotence of electoral politics in an oligarchy where the rich get everything they want or the vanishing ice caps or the vanishing rainforests or the vanishing wildlife or the plummeting insect population or the ocean desertification or the giant continent of plastic in the North Atlantic or the microplastics in our brains and in our blood or the fact that we live under a globe-spanning empire that cannot exist without mass-scale violence and exploitation or the fact that younger generations are economically far worse off than their parents and grandparents or the fact that ordinary people are having to work harder and harder as everything gets more and more expensive while the capitalist class reaps record profits?

At this point “What radicalized you?” is a much less interesting question to ask people than “Why aren’t you radicalized yet? Seriously, how is that possible? How have you successfully managed to avoid conversion to a radical political worldview despite everything you are seeing right in front of your eyes?

Because to the rest of us, that shit looks like a goddamn magic trick. It looks like a superhuman feat of willpower to continue believing everything’s basically okay and our leaders will sort this all out for us if we just vote for the correct plutocratic meat puppet in the next election. You’re just chilling out while everything burns, like that Buddhist monk sitting calmly in meditation after setting himself on fire. How are you even doing that?

It’s not yet six but Jackie just came into my study. I never did learn to type quietly. She reminds me we have visitors today, and not to waste my all too finite energy, then goes back to our bed.

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.

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