It’s been a while since I posted anything on here; must remedy that situation. But when important things happen, sometimes you’ve just got to write them down.
And that important thing is…hair dye. And cancer. And death and loss and sadness and everything that goes along with it.
Why? Because I’m taking part in Today FM’s Shave Or Dye to raise funds for the Irish Cancer Society: that’s no surprise, it’s a worthy cause, but I also felt like talking about why I’m doing it, and what it means to me. (In case you want to go straight ahead and donate, you can do so here.)
Cancer and I, we didn’t have much of a relationship up until a few years ago: I guess that makes me lucky in some ways. Sure, there were mild flirtations: family members and friends had recovered from it, but most of that was before I could remember; “pre-cancerous cells” was a phrase thrown around when family members needed tests or operations; I even had a biopsy done on a mole once. Turns out it was just a big mole. In all that time, if I’m honest, cancer never really affected me: it was the bad smell when you walked into a bathroom, the bad shit had happened to someone else, and now you just had to hold your breath and get through it.
That was then.
About three years ago, my grandad was diagnosed with cancer; I’m going to call him P, because this piece is going to require that I differentiate between my two grandfathers. He got sick relatively fast; chemotherapy was on the cards, but was taking a lot out of him. He had been through two different heart-bypass operations, a different cancer scare a few years previously, but this was the one that changed him. Fiercely independent, he’d spend his weekends doing DIY in the house, or for other members of the family; he’d drive (and his cars were amongst his prized possessions); having looked after me as a kid, he’d even gotten used to the babysitting thing (used to is an understatement. He relished it.) They were amongst the first things he had to stop doing.
For me and my parents, it got worse. I was lucky enough that at 24 years of age, I still had three living grandparents. My other grandad (we’ll call him T) had also been through his fair share of health ups-and-downs, but was no less independent: this was another man that loved his family around him, hopping on the plane to London several times a year to see family over there. But he, too, got sick.
After T went into hospital, we realised how bad things were: not only was it cancer, but it didn’t look like he’d be getting out of hospital. For him, the cancer was too widespread to treat effectively, so we started playing the waiting game.
I don’t think I can explain how hard it was to visit him in the hospital, knowing the inevitable outcome of his time there. He knew, of course: I don’t think he ever said it, but you could see it in his eyes, when he smiled it betrayed the tiniest bit of sadness. He was a proud man, he wouldn’t talk about it to me, or my mam, but he was also incapable of keeping a secret. My parents were there more than I was, insisting that I still carry on with work and life as normal. Not that it was particularly easy to do so. Every time my phone rang, I worried that it was that phone-call. Towards the end, he might have been moved to the Hospice; but he was put on a morphine drip to manage his significant pain and keep him comfortable, and the move never happened.
On the 14th November 2010, I went into work (it was a Saturday…not a nice day to work by any stretch of the imagination), I came home, I sat down to watch that week’s 30 Rock and…about halfway through, my phone rang. It was the phone-call I’d been dreading, but also knew that it was going to come.
The next week was…difficult. It was the first funeral for someone close to me in a long time, punctuated with panic attacks, half-pint glasses of Bulmers (long story), an infamous France v Ireland soccer match and trying to maintain poise while a church singer that nobody really wanted to sing screeched her way through high notes of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
It was also that week when my other grandad, P, got really sick again, and ended up going back into hospital.
Things went somewhat similar there: sure, it was a different hospital, but things were close enough that it was like some sick deja-vu (in every sense of the word “sick.” Except for that new meaning that the kids are using.) This time, it progressed quickly, far quicker than anyone would have liked. This time around, my parents tried even harder to keep me from experiencing the exact points of the pain that was going on: it didn’t really work particularly well.
I spoke to him on the phone a few times, saw him even less. It’s strange what stands out about that time: I remember him specifically telling me “I’m really sorry about your grandad” (he was too ill to come to the funeral.) I also went to Top Gear Live, and spent most of the time there thinking about how much he would have loved it. (It also had a model of the 1960s Batmobile there, which was particularly poignant; my grandad had gotten so fed up with me renting out the Batman movie every time I stayed over that he’d resorted to buying it.)
It was the 14th December 2010 (check the date a few paragraphs up…yep, exactly a month later) that I rang my mam; knowing it was a month since T had passed away, I wanted to see how she was. I don’t know what made me ring her at that exact time, but as fate would have it, she’d left her phone in the hospital room while they all went out to grab a cup of coffee, and it was at some point during that phone call that he passed away.
The sick deja vu continued for another few days, only this time, things were a bit more difficult: it was snowing, and another snowfall started as we were wrapping things up in the graveyard. As we drove through my grandparents’ estate, the birds stood motionless on the field in the middle of it: that might not seem weird to you, but given that they usually got tossed the scraps of P’s meals or stale bread, it was their own eerie tribute.
One month: that was all it took for me to re-evaluate how I felt about cancer. That was how long it took for me to lose two really important men in my life.
I’d always thought that my grandads were invincible: doesn’t everyone? And not just grandparents, but parents too: whether it’s the folly of youth, or an aspiration, but they certainly always seemed that way to me. When P and T passed, it struck me particularly hard: as a kid, both of them had looked after me at various times, whether it was after school or during the holidays. Both had used those times to teach me about life: I learned as much from them as I learned from my own parents. In fact, watching my parents going through this loss was probably harder than going through it myself.
I miss them both, but I’m not naive enough to wish they were still with us; they’d both seen their children grow up, most of their grandchildren as well. If they had regrets, they didn’t share them before they left. Me, however? I think it’s fair to say that I regret not spending more time with them, especially over that course of a month when I only had one grandfather to spent time with. But I also consider myself really lucky to have known them both as an adult, to get to know them as people, rather than just their role in the family.
Of course, that didn’t make it any easier.
I’m finding it a lot harder to think of cancer in the same way since that month: I think our relationship has changed (and not for the better.) I’m also not naive enough to think that my own experiences are particularly bad; just 3 months ago, my partner’s sister-in-law passed away thanks to cancer, and I find it hard to feel that her three kids, her husband, and the entire family, haven’t been cheated.
And that’s why I’m dyeing my hair for the month of February: because I know that someone out there has to have had a worse experience than me, and I don’t want people to go through what I did. Or anything worse. So this week, I have red hair; next week will be blue; purple and black will come after. And if just one person walking past me on the street feels better knowing that someone is supporting them, their friends and their families, then I’ll have achieved my goal.
If you feel the same, please give what you can, or take part yourself. You can donate through the website (www.mycharity.ie/event/ken_dyes_2012) and the money goes straight to the Irish Cancer Society too, so no fiddling with cash. And you can even see a picture of me with red hair (no, I don’t like it either.)