I’ve begun reading a collection of short stories by Alice Munro. She writes exquisitely, so much so that sometimes I have to put the book down. It is too much pleasure. I finished one of the stories yesterday in which a woman has cancer but has just been told by the doctor that the chemo has reduced the tumour and she has longer to live than they thought. Rather than be happy with the news she is thrown, unsettled, even angry, I think. I remember that feeling. It was when that letter came with the notion that I might be dying. And we went through all that rigmarole in London carrying my pee and so on. So when the doctor told me that I didn’t have it, I felt the same as Munro’s character. I was lost, without purpose, and without that promise of an end in sight. I couldn’t tell him why, or that I felt that way about it. He wouldn’t understand, how could he? That promise of an end was a jewel to me. No more anxiety, no more not feeling good enough, no more. Just that, no more. She writes of things I know, like the ice left in the furrows of a field when the winter has gone. I know this.
I picked some more bramble berries and ate them for breakfast.
