Cancer – Page 2

And then … a story of caregiving and poetry

27 August 2018 4 Comments

Benita Helen Kape

Pat & Benita 40th anniversary (1993) — Benita and Pat on their 40th wedding anniversary, three years prior to Pat’s operation.

It all began when my husband Pat, always a keen sportsman, had difficulty walking off the course one morning after a round of golf with his mates. Within a week we were in Auckland Hospital and Pat was in the process of recovering from a major spinal operation. This was a school of learning neither of us ever for a moment thought we would have to face. Both of us were healthy, even seeming young for our age. Pat had been retired for two or three years, and I had only a few years of work ahead of me before I would join him.

Things didn’t go well; the operation took longer than expected. Pat was cheerful, a tone that wavered little until much later. He was a man who saw the best in people. Bravely he struggled with rehabilitation, and we returned to Gisborne. Several days later, he became seriously ill. Meningitis was managed and contended with. We are forever grateful to all the doctors, nurses and agencies involved in his care. [Read more…] about And then … a story of caregiving and poetry

“XYZ of Happiness”: C is for Harriet

9 July 2018 7 Comments

Mary McCallum

We were a very new press, barely begun. The daughter of an old school friend had been diagnosed with cancer and was writing a blog. A bunch of us who’d been at school together began to read it. One of our group, illustrator Fifi Colston, sent me an email: ‘You could do worse than make a book about this.’ I agreed. This young woman knew how to write. Her blog posts had strong read-me titles and energetic don’t-argue-with-me first lines. They were focused on one event or idea and they told that story with economy and humour and knew where to end. She didn’t feel sorry for herself. She celebrated life. She often said how lucky she was.

Harriet came to meet with us – that’s me and my son and publishing sidekick Paul Stewart – in our shoebox office. This vibrant young woman with creamy skin and a red shiny coat that squeaked when she walked, who adored food – brownies, pizza – and friends and skiing, had osteosarcoma and things weren’t looking good, but she had an enormous love of life and capacity for hope. She was 19, after all. We talked about what a book would look like.
[Read more…] about “XYZ of Happiness”: C is for Harriet

Euthanasia and the common good

2 July 2018 10 Comments

Charlotte Paul

When I started thinking hard about euthanasia, I visited my friend who has a progressive illness affecting his body and mind, and who is in hospital-level care. His partner has moved into the same residence to help look after him. She responds to his suffering with love, and you can sometimes see in his eyes that he recognises this. I honour them both: his endurance and gratitude; her generosity.

But, with euthanasia in mind, I think about them both in a different way. Is his suffering unbearable? Although he wouldn’t be competent to make a request for euthanasia, should it become legal in New Zealand, their situation calls into question the value of his endurance and her generosity.

In what follows I explore my intuition that actively ending suffering by causing death undercuts the meaning of suffering.

“All hitched up”: a chemotherapy story

11 June 2018 5 Comments

Elizabeth Brooke-Carr

How many New Zealanders are receiving chemotherapy this week for cancer and other conditions? The number must be in the thousands. Yet this common medical intervention can never be a commonplace experience, evoking as it does such wildly fluctuating levels of both hope and anxiety.

Poet Elizabeth Brooke-Carr writes of receiving her first round: [Read more…] about “All hitched up”: a chemotherapy story

Clive James: “I am here now”

12 March 2018 2 Comments

Sue Wootton

Poet, essayist and all-round international man of letters, Clive James, was diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema in 2010. He wasn’t expected to survive long, but he’s still here, and writing the best work of his life. And this is largely, he says, because of death. There is nothing like intimations of your own mortality to sharpen your focus on what makes life worth living:

I am here now, who was hardly even there.”

In 2015 he published what he thought would be his farewell collection of poetry, Sentenced to Life. Last year, kicking on, as it were, like “an exhausted footballer with legs of lead”, he published another collection, called (with typical Clive James wit) Injury Time.

“Undying: A Love Story” by Michel Faber

12 February 2018 1 Comment

Sue Wootton

Michel Faber is the award-winning author of several novels and collections of short stories, among them The Crimson Petal and the White, Under the Skin and The Book of Strange New Things. Born in 1960 in the Netherlands, Faber’s family migrated to Australia in 1967 where he was educated and for many years worked as a nurse. Faber now lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands.

In 2014 his wife, Eva Youren, died from multiple myeloma. Undying: A Love Story is a collection of poems that chronicles Faber’s grief. He wrote two of the poems while Eva was very ill, and most of the rest on the other side of her death, in the strange new world of bereavement – “a world”, he writes, “that did not have my dearest friend in it”.

I hadn’t known such need for poetry before. I wish I’d lived into my nineties, with Eva at my side, and never written these things.”