It had been a while. A long while, actually. And… if the bird would like to cover its ears… I was really fancying roast chicken. I don’t usually cook much for me, you see. I have cooked at my son’s house pretty much every day for the past decade or so anyway, so coming home to roast a chicken for one doesn’t really cut it.
The dog, of course, would disagree. In her eyes, I am not roasting a chicken ‘just for me’… it is mainly for her, but I might get leftovers. And, on the odd occasion that she has been ill, that has happened. This time it is me who is unwell and I fancied roast chicken.
So, I duly bought and roasted, smelling the enticing aroma as it filled the kitchen. Simply cooked with a little olive oil, seasoning and herbs… nothing fancy. A few potatoes and some carrots… my appetite is not what it should be, so why overface it? Even though the thought of making a nice , fluffy, Yorkshire pudding was tempting. It isn’t as if I am on a diet or anything. On the contrary… having eaten everything I have fancied and still lost fourteen pounds this week, I can not only afford to indulge, I am almost duty-bound to do so.
With apologies and profound gratitude to the bird on my plate, I have to say it looked wonderful. Smelled wonderful… and tasted like the contents of a chemical waste plant. About the same as pretty much everything else I have tried to eat this week. I was devastated. I had just so fancied a bit of chicken…
I expect it is the pills. I’m told it will get worse if I start chemotherapy. Maybe I should have made a curry.
But there was nothing wrong with the chicken… except, I’ll admit, from the chicken’s personal perspective, with which I can currently empathise. The expectation caused the disappointment. Yet why, after a week of such disappointments, should I have expected anything else?
It is impossible to walk through any ancient place and not wonder about its story. In somewhere like St Davids Cathedral there are many stories, from those of the craftsmen who built the place, to the Story that inspired their work…and the tales of every pilgrim, priest and visitor who have passed through the old Norman doors.
For the most part, those stories have slipped silently into the forgotten vaults of history, unknown and now unknowable. Who, for instance, will know whose feet passed through the arches on the day we were there? The annals of the cathedral will record the mayor-making that had delayed our entry. They may record the names and stories of the civic dignitaries who were there… but the stories of pilgrims, the faithful and the curious who were also there on that day will leave no more of a mark upon the building’s history than their shadows.
Yet none who enter fail to add their own story to the great stream of history. Even on the physical level, each person who breathes alters the air and how it preserves or damages the building over time, each footstep adds to the wearing of the stone, each hand that touches leaves a trace behind that adds to the maturing patina of the building. Every story matters.
As we sat drinking soft drinks in the heat of the day and watching the innumerable butterflies flitting by we googled for other things to see in the Velehrad area. It was I who found reference to a dolmen – the King’s Table (Kraluv Stul) in the area. I had never seen a stone in the Czech Republic – not one so this seemed like a reasonable objective.
Quickly, Jan started looking for references to it as did I and we both found it on Google maps and on several websites. Finishing our drinks, we got in the car and punched in the name of the village nearby where the stone was supposed to be. After several kilometers, I pulled over. Where we going to the right place? Still 33km and yet the stone was supposed to be nearby? We then discovered that there were two ‘Jankovices’ in the area…
There is blood in friendship, it irrigates gardens, distills in the colours of sunsets, pours like nectar from the honeysuckle or rain from storm clouds.
Whispered voices blow in blue winds, shaking the roses, and petals fall with the clang of bronze, but the sea still laps the shore in the sweet salt breath of the tides,
and the moon’s hand strokes the waves, gentle as a mother, kissing her child’s hair.
I was going to post something… then wasn’t… then thought I ought… then knew how private it was… then remembered what I’d told others. Maybe being honest might help someone else going through the mill…
When you get slung into surreal situations, there is a sort of fail-safe that plays out scenarios in the safety of half-buried imagination. Lets you try them on for size, if you like. Get a feel for how they fit. The calm, unfazed acceptance, the screaming fury, the sanitised sanity of philosophical serenity…
In none of them does your oxygen canula keep filling with snot when the tears even you don’t understand keep coming. When it is a relief to have answers you would cheerfully scream at. When the dying becomes the easy part and living, knowing how much it is going to hurt those you love, becomes the hard bit.
And then you have to tell everyone. And no, you still don’t really have answers… just a few facts and generalisations.
And what you really want to know why they said, just a few days ago that it might even be treatable…
Because it isn’t.
It is small cell cancer. It has spread to the equivalent of stage four-plus. Which means they can’t treat it with any view to making me well again… though the palliative care may well help me live in good condition with it for a while.
The prognosis is not good and that particular doctor… a chest specialist, not an oncologist commenting on my case, will only generalise and say ’months to short years’.
Well, what’s different between me and everyone else then, except a bit of fair warning? We’re all in that particular boat really. Death can happen any time and I just get chance to be a bit more organised about it.
I’m determined to make it to Cairn Holy with Mary in Spring.
I can work with that.
Will I see the heather in bloom again, though?
Can’t handle that idea. It makes me cry.
And all of a sudden, I’m fed up of being reasonable. Sensible. Logical.
I actually want to be unreasonable about this. To break things. To say it isn’t fair that I won’t get to a ripe old retirement. That I can’t share time with those I love just because I can… because now there will always be a limit on possibility. Because I’ve been here, you see. I know what it is like to lose those you love most to cancer. It changes how you see things, how you experience and remember things… how you store memories.
It can and often does make everything more precious.
But for one night, you almost wish no-one cared at all, because then, you wouldn’t feel them shake in your arms, or see the hurt and loss looming in their eyes, knowing that you can do nothing at all to stop that.
And that, after all, you shouldn’t.
That you know, deep down, that this is part of their story and learning too. No matter how well or how badly you handle both the news and the fallout, tomorrow will be a new day.
You will learn how to walk through a world where the rules have slipped sideways a bit. Because we do… we are adaptable creatures, humans. And your loved ones too will find their own path through their shadows… hopefully a path where we can all share laughter and lunacy along the way. Making the Living of it worth its capital ‘L’.
But for one night only… maybe it is okay to get it all wrong, go to pieces and just say oh,bollocks.
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It is difficult for our modern eyes to imagine the colour that would once have been present within our oldest churches. The carved and decorated facades, often covered with statuary, would have been brightly painted. Walls that we are used to seeing in mellow stone and whitewash, touched by the ochre ghosts of medieval paintings, would once have gleamed in the flickering candlelight as the frescos borrowed life from the flames and processed through the shadowed aisles.
It is in the great cathedrals that we can still get a glimpse of the light and colour that provided such a contrast to the homespun world when dyes were expensive luxuries reserved only for the wealthy. At St Davids, a high, painted lantern still crowns the arches of the Crossing, drawing the eye ever upwards to the heavens.
Delicate traceries of contrasting stone mark the vaulted ceilings of the chapels, punctuated by highly coloured shields and bosses displaying designs both armorial and symbolic. In the 13th century Lady Chapel at the Easternmost end of the cathedral, I saw a symbol I recognised, the three hares who share their ears.Each hare has two ears…yet only three ears are depicted.
In Christian terms, it symbolises the Trinity, though it has older and other meanings that include and transcend the artificial barriers that we erect between our various cultures and religions. It is a symbol I frequently wear, reminding me of a much-loved friend whose physical presence is far across the ocean yet who is never far from my heart. Other bosses in the little chapel show the Dragon, the symbol of Wales as well as demonic creatures apparently devouring the unholy or perhaps just those who are tempted…
I should have woken, on my birthday, to a view of a Scottish loch and autumnal hillsides… perhaps even a glimpse of late-blooming heather…and a humungous Scottish breakfast. Instead, I woke to the knowledge that I could not eat all afternoon until the CT scan was done and there would be a long wait for answers ahead. Still, I was not alone and it was a glorious day.
Two days before, we had not only been allowed, but invited into a church. We had visited a stone circle for the first time in many months… even shared a cider outside a pub. It almost felt as if normality were beginning, slowly, to return. We took that as a good sign.
“Let’s go to ORC,” said my companion. ‘Our rainbow chapel’, where so many of our adventures have taken flight, is a very special place, both to us and in its own right. A tiny church, tucked away behind an avenue of old yew trees, it stands upon layer after layer of history, from the farthest and most ancient to the more modern. There is a ‘feel’ to the place that has touched everyone we have taken there but, if the visitors book is to be believed, very few people call in for a visit, in spite of the windows and medieval wall paintings.
I am not religious in the traditional sense, nor do I belong to any specific Church, but there are places where, in all simplicity and with centuries of veneration and prayer infusing the very walls, you feel close to the Divine. There is a peace in such places that heals on levels far deeper than the physical. It should not be so, for, if you believe in a god at all, you know them to be everywhere… but there are places where Divinity seems to bend close.
Our Rainbow Chapel is definitely one of these.
But, in spite of a picture outside the church of the Good Shepherd welcoming lost sheep, the door was firmly locked. It was a bit of a blow… and I was already feeling a tad on the fragile side of emotional that day. We have never before found the doors to this little church locked, no matter when we have visited, and it has always been a place of profound peace, healing and spiritual strength. The notice, not updated since the late June, stated that the church will remain closed to protect its team of cleaners, in spite of the re-opening of other churches for private prayer. There were no alternative chapels listed in the area that might be open, no acknowledgement that this tiny church has a special place in the hearts of many. Just old, bald facts and, for me on that day, an unmitigated sense of loss.
“…Thou art Everywhere, but I worship thee here:
Thou art without form, but I worship thee in these forms;
Thou needest no praise, yet I offer thee these prayers and salutations…”
Hindu prayer
On a day when the comfort of old familiar forms were what was needed, the Door was locked and there was, it seemed, no-one home. I found this incredibly sad and wondered how many, in the confusion of Covid, the losses and griefs of so many months of stolen normality, had sought the solace of these simple walls only to find the doors closed against them.
We sat instead in the churchyard, perched on a rickety bench in the sun, remembering that the last time we had sat thus, the snowdrops had been in bloom. I hope they will not bloom again before the little church can open her heart once more to those who come seeking.
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Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 