My Cancer and Me

A lost post from Feb...

bbc.co.uk

It's not often you hear the ins and outs of terminal illness. The BBC doc 'My Cancer and Me' told us not only what it was like to battle it, but what it was like to try and explain the explainable to our closest friends. It was not as somber as the title would lead you to believe. In fact, she even takes pleasure in organising her own funeral, trying out caskets for size dressed as wonder woman. It's not every day the morgue gets to fit a living human into a box, especially not every day they get asked to make it comfy. We follow her send-off plans behind the curtains of a crematorium which was far more clinical than most would expect. It felt almost disrespectful as we peer into the flames of someone's burning relative with Rowena commentating, saying things like, 'it doesn't seem that bad'. It's not like they will know about it though I s'pose. And at least Rowena has a say in where she ends up, unlike most of us!

mirror.co.uk

We do, along the way, get brief glimpses of pain through the comedy and see just how important our friends and family are, even if they will never quite understand fully. We visit other cancer sufferers, where we discuss bucket lists, love and what's most important. Apparently in our death bed the things we regret most is not the things we wish we could have done, but the people we wished we'd spent time with. It was not sentimental, as you would think. It was an in your face emotional display, Filtered through comedy and her outrageous laugh. Rowena keeps us at arms length. She does not dwell on relationships and marriage, nor on the things she never got to do. She has to find happiness in the little things, to stay strong and see each day through, she must muster strength we can't imagine and pass incredible sadness off with a smile until her 40th birthday, a day she thought she'd never see.

mirror.co.uk

She's a young woman with dreams, just like me and it was sad to see how easily our lives can be cut short. If she's taught me anything, it's not to dwell on the little time we have here, not to hold back and wait around, but to appreciate the world and the friends and family around me. A nice change to bbc1's usual output, going far beyond the medical studies and statistics and humanising the story of our everyday victims of cancer, reminding us that every moment in life counts, and the moments are ticking away.