A couple of months ago I contacted Cruse Bereavement Care and asked for help - my Mum died of cancer last August and I am finding things very hard. After some waiting, I had my first appointment with a counsellor on Monday of this week.
About two thirds of the way through our hour she started saying something about cancer starting in the etheric plane with negative emotions. I was extremely angry and told her so in no uncertain terms. She stuttered a little and changed the subject.
I've just looked up what she was going on about, and it's this:
"Many disease conditions begin on the etheric plane and work their way down to the lower frequency of the physical plane and eventually show up in the body. By the way, most chronic disease conditions begin as stress producing thoughts, specifically negative emotions (resentment, anger, hatred, fear, jealousy, envy, etc.), which adversely affect your aura over time."
Ironically, found on a website called Educate Yourself.
She is not the first person to say something along these lines to me. Usually with fewer daft pseudo-technical words, but I am terrified by the number of people who think that cancer comes from having negative emotions. My Mum, I think, believed it. I think that's why she refused to admit she was dying until a couple of weeks beforehand. She thought you died if you "gave up" and stopped "fighting", that the will had ultimate control over the body.
It's kind of admirable, in a crazy way. This human determination to make meaning where really there is none. Magical thinking from scared people, trying desperately to make narrative sense of soullessly irrational random horror.
Because usually, cancer doesn't make good stories. There isn't a nice narrative arc. It wouldn't make satisfying theatre. If you dramaturged death, you'd change a hell of a lot.
I got very angry recently at a scratch of a young company's new work, when we were all made to imagine and write down the details of our own deaths: the date, where we'd be, who would be with us, what our last thought would be. I tried inarticulately to express my anger in the post-scratch discussion, and didn't succeed. I realised later that what enraged me so much was these 23 and 24 year olds innocently blundering into an area they seemed to know nothing about. I felt like standing up and shouting, "The premise of your questions is ridiculous! The last thought through my head before I die - before most of us die - will probably be incoherent drug-fuelled nonsense. We'll probably be morphined-up to the eyeballs, struggling through clouds of pain and inadequate anaesthesia to think anything at all. And by the way, why the fuck would I *want* to imagine in detail the moment of death? I'm spending most of my time trying really hard not to fixate on that, thanks very much. What happened to cheery plays with happy endings?".
And then Dan pointed out that most people haven't seen death happen. And that perhaps my experience is rather unusual anyway. And that perhaps I should be less harsh.
I make stories, I understand the power. We're meaning-making animals, that's what we do. But there is no meaning or rationality to cancer. Dinosaurs died of it - I doubt they had problems with their auras. And although I stand in absolute awe of my mother's will-power and spirit, I think in the end her body won. Or rather the cancer won over her body. And once your body's defeated, that's game-over, folks.
Everybody dies. "Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God." It's impossible to believe until you see it. But it's true.
Happy Thursday everyone.
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