Skip to main content

To Be Or Not To Be


It's been a long day. I'm on study leave but I didn't get much study done today. At 9 I was invited by the Urologist to come to his office at 4:30 and have a chat. The receptionist who made the call was pleasant and matter of fact and didn't give away any information but there's no way of disguising the intent of a call like that. Something is wrong.It's been a long day, which, as an introvert, I was pleased to spend on my own.

Clemency came home a little early and we went to see Mr. Samalia together. He's a tall man, white haired, dark skinned. Large gentle brown eyes. He spoke with great kindness but with absolute candour. I have cancer, in my prostate. Cancers have a rating system - a number assigned to them from 1 to 5 to mark how much they have disrupted the cells around them. I have a patch of 4 cells, and some, who have been trying particularly hard, have made it all the way to number 5. None of your namby pamby little 1s or 2s or 3s for me, thank you very much. The rotten bits are not very big at the moment but it's not a good thing for them to have appeared so quickly in a man my age. This particular brew is little but very determined. There's a number of ways to treat prostate cancer but for me, given the speed of growth and the likelihood of it spreading if left too long, it's probably most sensible to have the whole prostate removed. Mr Samalia outlined what would happen. He spelled out the risks and the likely side effects. He is a Hindu, a man of faith; a man of considerable spiritual stature. We made a mutually knowing and respectful connection and I trust him.

So then it was phone and txt and email to family and friends. There's no way you can keep this sort of thing secret and neither would I want to - this is life; this is where I am now. My Catherine rushed home and held me. My Bridget is coming tomorrow. My Nick is a globe away and I hope I'll see him soon. We all know what has to be done but over the next couple of days we've got to figure out when. Is the sabbatical trip to the UK and Israel still on? Mr. Samalia thinks it would be OK, but perhaps it might be as well to get the deed done as soon as may be.

I took this study leave to reflect on Being: what does it mean to exist? What does it mean to be conscious? What does it mean to be a self? I am also interested in the church's Being: what does it mean to be the Church, the body of Christ? What can be changed and still have the Church be the Church? And now I have another set of issues prompted by my unexpected and involuntary contemplation of my own non being. It strikes me tonight that these three sets of questions are actually the same ones being asked in three different contexts. Perhaps I will be able to come up with some answers. After all my concentration has been sharpened up amazingly in the last few hours.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
What to say ...? Sounds glib to say "thinking of you (all!)" ... but we are. Greg and Jane
8 May 2008 at 07:34
Anonymous said…
Best wishes
8 May 2008 at 10:45
Anonymous said…
Hi Kelvin
I just read your news and wanted to let you know I will be thinking of you as you make your decision. I have worked the past 19 years for a Doctor and know that this is hard news, but a positive attitude is half the battle and a good Doctor the other half. Please take care and let us know how you are doing. Greetings and hugs from, OKLAHOMA. Susie
8 May 2008 at 14:39
Anonymous said…
Oh my.
8 May 2008 at 14:59
Anonymous said…
You came to B@tCH as an unwitting messanger last week to bring encouragement and neighbourliness. As we read about ourselves we were given privy to your life too in the surrounding 'Available lights". Our B@tCH candles will be lit for you. Our B@tCH prayers will go out for you tonight. ....Your friend Barry and the gang in the Coronation Hall
8 May 2008 at 16:03
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more