Cancer is like being haunted
Living in a body that has cancer is like being haunted. There is the literal haunting feeling of being followed, watched, and hunted by a spectre that wants to kill you; and you also have the deeper emotional suffering that jumps out at you when you least expect it.
All of my favourite books are classics -- The Secret Garden, Little Women, Carmilla, Brave New World, Peter Pan, The Turn of the Screw, Swallows and Amazons, The Hobbit -- and at the top of my list is Wuthering Heights. I remember the first time I read it was in the summer between grades eight and nine at my Aunt Leslie's cottage in the Kawartha Lakes. The summer before I had read the excellent Guests of War trilogy by Kit Pearson (my absolute favourite Canadian author) and had built a reading list for the following year based on the classic books that the main protagonist Norah had read and loved in that series. I had just finished Rudyard Kipling's Kim when I picked up Wuthering Heights, and I was looking forward to a girly romance novel after the somewhat unsettling colonial Indian adventure.
Obviously, that's not what I got. Instead I got to experience my favourite novel in my favourite genre -- gothic horror.
I love gothic horror for two main reasons. One, it scratches my deep itch for over-the-top romantic drama and purple prose; and two, it helps me to identify and process the deep inner horror that we all experience in this life, which is something I find contemporary suspense and jump-scare horror novels severely lack. Wuthering Heights had me hooked from the start with the dark and unmannerly welcome received by Mr. Lockwood, and dug in with the terrifying depiction of his dream of Cathy's ghost on the moor:
The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, "Let me in--let me in!" . . .
As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, "Let me in!" and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.
Horrifying and perfect way to start the novel. I was hooked. Then came Heathcliff's "gush of grief" reaction to Lockwood's encounter, the element my young and inexperienced mind clung to and made this novel and this genre my favourite:
"Come in! come in!" he sobbed. "Cathy, do come. Oh, do--once more! Oh! my heart's darling! hear me this time, Catherine, at last!"
This ghost on the moor whose appearance just terrified me, being sawn open by the broken window while begging to be let in, was now being begged to return by a broken man desperate to catch a glimpse of her again. Instead of being frightened to see such a macabre sight, Heathcliff welcomes the horror into his life like it's a sunbeam here to warm his cold and empty existence. This is a recurring theme in the novel; my other favourite and classic passage is Heathcliff's "You said I killed you--haunt me then," monologue later on.
So what does any of this have to do with cancer? One of the things I struggle with on a daily basis is grief, which feels both like being relentlessly pursued by a monstrous entity and like a familiar and welcome ghost that I would sorely love to sit with and get to know sometime. For every expression of love or comfort in my life, there is an equal measure of grief. For every, "Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same," there is an equal and opposite, "Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”
Dealing with the grief of cancer is like desperately inviting the ghost on the moor into your house while also not being able to watch while it soaks everything in blood. If you invite it in, the sun may come out, you may get some measure of comfort in acknowledging it, but ultimately, it destroys you.
