Leisure is not all its cut out to be

I have become increasingly disinterested in leisure. When I wasn't sick, leisure was something to which I looked forward. Now it is a nuisance, another symptom, something I need, but something that isn't wanted. Fatigue gives me leisure. Chemo gives me a break from responsibility. So even leisure is eaten away by tumours. When you work, you work forty hours, more or less, cancer is full-time, day-time/night-time, like an infant. There are no breaks. Only sleep. You become a Dickensian workhouse child. Cancer requires full payment, full-time labour.

We cancer patients are full-time workers. We are married to our diseases, as if they were our spouses. Even if we are truly married, it fills up the space netween husband and wife. It punctuates our sentences. It is a condiment spread over shared meals. The energy required to fight, requires us to give something up, and requires those who love us also to give. But we go on, like unpaid labourers, just for the free meal. The meal, when it comes, will lead to either to extinction or life. It is only partially up to us to choose. And sometimes it is entirely out of our hands.

In King Lear Cordelia tells her father that she will not marry to love her father all, but that half her love would go to her husband. Half her love is not much to give Lear thinks and accuses her, "So Young and so unkind." "So young, my Lord," she replies, "and true."

It is her unwillingness to love her father all that condemns both of them to death. It is what comes between them, as cancer comes between sufferer and loved one. Only mutual understanding can bridge the canyon between sufferer and loved one. The bridge must be built from love, hope and shared lives. But when we disappear into our illness, it is not through lack of love, or lack of desire to do so, only the willingness to survive and continue another day. Pain must be suffered by only one, but it must be endured by all. Pain trumps love, if only for a moment, an hour or a day. It is temporary. Thankfully. But we do not forget love, only have it pushed aside by survival.

Leisure - the ability to put aside all but what is most important and revel in that - is what disappears most and first. While we do not work, we work. While we are sick, we survive. While we rest, we are fighting. A boxer in a ring, running to steal second, a marathoner bursting past fatigue to continue on. Leisure is sacrificed to survival, because cancer does not allow us to work, it also does not allow us to not work.

"Freedom," Writes Camus in The Rebel, "is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, Justice seems inconceivable..." (Camus, 1991, 105). Equally, is the motivating priciple behind all disease. Without it there is no justice, only despair. There is no hope, only grief. I do not believe that we can throw away hope, because it helps us to survive. Survival, against all odds, is our greatest triumph. We march to victory on a path of dead cells. Our loved ones beside us, helping us to regain our strength. Our victory arches our are protruding ribs. They remind us of the struggle. They remind us of our fear and what we have gained.

"The apples emerge, in the sun's black shade, among/stricken trees,/A straggle of survivors, nearly all ailing." Ted Hughes writes in Apple Dumps (Hughes, 1995, 134). We are the trees, bringing forth the apples of our lives. We asre leaving the edens of previous lives, for the knowledge of new, perhaps better, but certainly different, land. We have escaped. Survived. And at the end of a bitter race fall to the ground.

References:

Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Translated by Anthony Bower. Vintage Inernational, New York. 1991.

Hughes, Ted. New Selected Poems, 1957-1994. Faber and Faber, London. 1995.