Stolen

"Words have much more power for me than anything else. Ultimately they are one of the most basic, fundamental, methods of communication available to us. Whether they are spoken or written matters not - except, of course, for the fact that    written ones can be physically around for far much longer." - Allen Ansell




It exists to rock your world,
to make your ground unstable.
It waits to make you cold,
to bring the taste of fear.
And when it’s cloak unfurled
is lain beneath your feet,
your soul will be on fire.

In a far distant office, in a small private hospital, eight words were spoken. They careered down the copper highway at lightening speed before instantaneously de-accelerating as they malevolently reformed themselves into thirty-nine letters in my telephone earpiece, “I’m afraid that there were some cancerous cells.”

Inside my head, those words impacted with all the ferociousness of an Exocet missile.

These were the words that formed the unwritten result of a biopsy that I had undergone. To say that they were devastating is an understatement!  In the time that it took for my brain to decipher them, my body, my life, underwent the most colossal change. It was immediate - at least it only took only as long as the time required for the adrenaline to thump its way around my blood stream. I was completely overwhelmed; annihilated even. The ground beneath my feet no longer seemed so firm, so certain, and I felt the cold hand of Death upon my shoulder as surely as if the moment was that of my last and final breath.

I was then a fifty-eight year old male. I had lived a fair few years. Had tucked a wealth of experience beneath my soles. And even so, I did not recover from the effect of those words. It is true that over the course of the following three days they metamorphosed as the reality of their pattern evolved so that I recognised them not to have been quite the sentence of death that my shocked brain at first perceived them to be. But they were nevertheless forever embedded, along with the memory of my immediate reaction to them, inside my very being. I think they are locked there for ever.

Some time later I witnessed a similar event in someone else’s life. This time I was the voyeur, peeking into someone else’s devastation, and because of my own experience was able to imagine just a small part of the change being impacted in their life.

Those same words being spoken: The same thirty-nine letters.  But this time aimed at a ten year old boy. A boy who had not tucked much experience under his soles. A boy who had none of the advantages that I had had.

Tafari had, however, experienced more pain and suffering in his young life, than I could ever have – inside my convenient, cushioned, and relatively hedonistic western lifestyle. In his life there were no computers, no plush beds, no cars, insufficient food, and even his shelter from the weather had always been superficial and inadequate by comparison. Plus, if such deprivation was not enough, for the past year he had suffered progressively worsening pain in his left leg. Tafari lived, when he could, in a mud walled house, in an African country where the concept of plenty was as alien as his lifestyle was to mine. And yet I recognised within his young eyes the same devastation that I had felt.

Can you imagine that moment? When what is always an unknown moment, far off in the everlasting future, is suddenly brought forward to become perceivably a very short span of time? He would have felt the cold reality of an imminent demise, and it would have seemed absolutely inescapable.

There is, for a moment, an internal struggle; whether it is to comprehend the enormity of the moment, or an attempt by the brain to escape from reality,  I cannot say. I can only liken it to a brief, yet futile, attempt to free yourself from some escapologist's chains and ropes that have suddenly become bound tightly about you. He would have felt that all his power had been taken away from him, all his choice, all his free will… all his future. And what dreams he might have had, perhaps of one day escaping from his poverty, would have been torn away by just those eight words.

In his case the doctor had diagnosed a cancer in his leg. There was no alternative but to cut it off in order to stem the pain. The doctor, a western charity worker, didn’t speak Tafari’s language. A friend translated the words so that he could understand. They were, otherwise, face to face. Tafari allowed only one tear to begin a sorrowful journey towards the parched soil.

In Ethiopia, the meaning of Tafari is ‘He who inspires awe’. His quiet dignity at hearing this news, inspired awe in me.      Particularly because there were more words that followed, and each one of them progressively worsened the situation. Though the doctor didn’t say, ‘This will be only be to take away the pain, and will do nothing to improve the prognosis that you will only live for another six or seven months, and there will be other pains during that time.’  He may as well have. It was evident that this was the truth of the situation.

No matter how much money might have been freighted into his country, it would have been highly unlikely that Tafari’s life would have been given a longer duration. That is the tragedy.

I couldn’t even wish for Tafari that his little life would go on to further mimic mine, and that four days later his doctor would tell him, as did mine, that it was all an awful mix-up – notes had become confused – and that he didn’t have cancer after all.  I couldn’t even wish for him that miracle in my life, because there was no room for a mix-up in his; the cancer was already spreading through his little body. The weight of knowing that you have to endure a painful and terrifying disease, is very great. When the doctor told me of the mistake, I felt that weight lifted from my body. Tafari never will - only at the very very end when his soul will be set on fire by the energy of his God.

I believe that this miracle in my life, gave me an advantage: In no other way could I ever have conjured up in my mind, with so much accuracy, what so many brave men experience every year when faced with prostate cancer. And I am left wondering (without a satisfactory answer) what possible advantage this event could be to young Tafari.  The infinite mystery of life and it’s meaning, remains.




© Allen Ansell 2023