This is a personal journey through cancer. Not a "battle". More an acceptance. Illustrated with images, video, sculpture and words.
To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
"If this can happen, anything can happen"
As a bastion of semantic clarity, Hitch [Christopher Hitchens] doesn’t miss the opportunity to dismember a number of the metaphors we use about and around death, echoing Susan Sontag’s classic and revolutionary Illness as Metaphor in discussing the “war-on-cancer” cliché:
"Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water."
From The Marginalian
"We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something?"
"Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward."
"I had a medical student shadow me all day in oncology clinic and, when I asked them at the end what surprised them the most, they paused to reflect & then said 'the hope'."
Mark Lewis
"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
Life = success. Death = failure. Apparently...
(From Hockney's Bigger and Closer exhibition)