the c word

So many loaded words begin with a 'c'. Some you write in lower case : cannot, cunt, cretin, creep. The c is a toxic curve of ink that starts resolutely and defiantly with pen stab and ends in a curt, arrogant upward flick of the wrist. Some you write with a capital C. Printed, it looks like a hook, the precursor to an entrapment, an instrument of pain. Cancer, Chernobyl, Chemotherapy, Catharsis. They look very melodramatic on a page.

I was reading a magazine when I found out that my mum had cancer. I was like, OK, That's no more real than this tattooed model wearing Marc Jacobs and CDG. These things are on the same ontological plane to me. We also have insurance. Things will be OK, OK? I'm not sure how I slept that night but I still dragged myself to Bedok the next day feeling marginally shittier than usual. 

A few days passed, the chemotherapy started, and the choir concert came and left. I returned home at eleven to the dim light of my flat when only the kitchen lights are on. I had the bouquet of flowers that Ms T returned to me ("bring them home to your mum" she said), and I left them on the counter. Minutes earlier, my teacher-in-charge called to say that the performance, in essence, frankly kinda sucked, and we had to do something about it. Or was it that I had to do something about it? Or was it also that I had to do something about myself? 

I can't remember clearly in the darkness, anyway. I found out that my mum had shaved off her hair earlier that afternoon. Patients usually say they do that to regain a sense of Control because it's better than seeing hair strewn all over your bedroom floor every morning. Control also begins with a C, but I didn't feel the sense of assurance and authority that capitalization afforded. I sat on a chair and wanted, there and then, to shrink to the size of a bean and collapse under my own gravity like a faint clap.

The popular conception of cancer is that it is a narrative, and the narrative of cancer has a duality to it — it is a story both of triumph and defeat, propelled by a moral will. (Cancer is a "battle", people "succumb" to cancer eventually.) But really, cancer has no narrative, has no insistence on the duality of fates. More accurately, it is circular and absurdist. It has no plot, no dominant style. There is no meaning inherent in illness. (I devoured Sontag's opinions in Illness as Metaphor and tried to make them my own, vainly.) 

My aunt discovered her cancer shortly after, and recently, two friends' mothers have also come down with cancer. Not one of them smokes. There is no moral undercurrent. She is a stall owner selling clothes, a doctor, a missionary. 

Here is a different metaphor that stems from inverting the provisional logic of the original. (The C isn't a letter; it's really just a bracket, the start of a parenthetical enclosure. It has an end but it isn't a finality.) See that? It is closed off and sealed like an aside in a paragraph, and the text goes on, and the text has more meaning in its holism than in its fragments, and the text is more important than the fragment.