Story of a Hanging/Essay of an Elephant

 

      In my book collection is a series of essays by George Orwell (essays: not stories). One of the early entries describes his time with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in the 1920s and 30s. The entry describes a hanging watched over by him and conducted by whom we assume were local police and prison guards. Part way through the essay, a dog runs across the field between the prison cells and the gallows and begins to jump up on the doomed prisoner. According to Orwell,

​

“A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt around us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many humans together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airdale, half pariah.”

​

       For a moment, no one quite knows what to do about it until someone gets a grip on the dog long enough to slip Orwell’s scarf through its collar and bring about order again, and the prisoner is hanged. When, recently, I tried to find the essay, I couldn’t at first, as it was tucked away on four pages between longer essays, and I was surprised at how short an essay it was and at how short the part about the dog actually was. Furthermore, in my mind, the story of the dog was a story or, at least, a story within the story of the hanging, which it became in my mind almost as soon as I had finished reading it. Again.

        The next essay was about the shooting of a rogue elephant. This time, the story was faithful to my memory: a shooting of an elephant, but one that could no longer be termed a rogue elephant, and this fact changed everything that occurred in the story.

        My mind began to work immediately and both essays became stories in my memory, one about the absurdity of hanging a man when a dog is loose and therefore about the absurdity of hangings in general. The other essay became a story about the way that power is fleeting when the differential to which it is applied becomes absurd. In both cases, Orwell (still called Eric Blair at the time of publication of the essays) likely meant for the reader to note the absurdity of the universe in which such stories could be written, and read as, absurd, and I thank him for that pleasure. But, even more so, they became stories in my mind beyond the scope of what he’d written, and so I also thank him for that.

​

Stories and Cancer Treatment

​

      This is a blog about life, books and cancer. Furthermore, it is a blog about a rather absurdist view of life with cancer, reinforced by stories that describe the absurdism of all aspects of cancer from the diagnosis to treatment (and, in my particular case, death). However, is it really possible to adequately describe the experience of cancer without the use of stories? I believe that it is not possible for me and, perhaps, not possible for many of my readers as well. Until quite recently, as many cancer patients know, the effects of the treatment were far worse that the effects of the cancer (in fact, the cancer itself was not directly responsible for any of my current symptoms or difficulties, as painful as they are, but they are indirectly responsible through their weakening of the bones of my skeleton, the changes in my immune functioning, etc.). As I’ve said many times on this blog, my cancer was like some sea monster that I’ve never actually seen, but that experienced sailors assured me was real and nearby, lurking beneath me somewhere, determined to finish me off at a time known only to the monster itself.

      Kipling once said that, if we relied upon stories to teach history, no one would forget history. I don’t agree — not with the fact that what he says about the power of stories to control our memories is true, as it obviously is true — but his implication that this could be the purpose of stories. We may rely upon stories for their function as memory-enhancers, but do so in spite of that function (after all, the dog at the hanging is a story but it obviously didn’t help me to remember many of the other aspects of the story). Stories about living with cancer may be a way of learning about cancer but what those stories about cancer do that make them even more important is to provide a certain richness in understanding that is created by the stories. Orwell created a richness of his time in the destruction of both Asia and Europe and, fortunately for the rest of us, we created stories around that richness (try to imagine the writings of Orwell had he not worked in Asia for the Imperial Police, nor served in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. His novels would have been published, of course, but to the same reaction in readers?).

      When I was a child growing up outside of Port Arthur (now called Thunder Bay), I used to look out my bedroom window and think about what it would be like to just start walking straight ahead, into the forest north of our house. My window faced north and, if you were to walk in that direction, you would come across two paved roads and then (although my body would have given in to exhaustion long before this point), you would come across two or three unpaved roads — often following paths originally formed by generations of indigenous people going to and from various lakes north of town. Then, you would come across ... bush ... bush, for approximately seven hundred kilometres (you’d cross train tracks early on, and a few winter ice roads, but nothing else for the last few hundred kilometres). Finally, you’d reach Hudson Bay somewhere East of York Factory in Manitoba. I would look out the window and contemplate the distances of what many of my fellow-Canadians had convinced me were nothing but trees and lakes and rivers covered with snow and I’d find it terrifying. However, I recall, even at a young age, that First Nations storytellers saw a topography rich with signs of human activity and history: the fact that these signs live on in their stories and their songs and their art (especially their art, in my personal opinion) has blessed us — the colonizers — more than we deserve. We who saw empty space were handicapped by our lack of awareness of these traditions and we were the ones who tried to inflict that handicap upon the “others”. First Nations traditions, through their stories, taught that the North was full of communities of humans, animals and spirits. Most of us who’d heard some of these stories when we were young have lost the stories created by First Nations story-tellers and, as a result, we’ve become a nation of people who look to the north with fear and trepidation. I often think of my cancer as a sort of “north” that strikes fear in me because I have no stories, or have forgotten the ones I once learned, that teach me otherwise.

        I do have a story — a slight one — that begins the day before the chemotherapy began back in the Fall of 2014. I had to go to the hospital to have a portable catheter installed in my neck (just below the collar bone). Then they fed the tube under the skin so that it went up over my collar bone and came out a little bit further down and stitched the whole thing into me so that it couldn't be pulled out. The surgical nurse that prepped me was asking me general questions and so I told her that I'd been in the hospital twice already in the last 6 months and that the first time was for a huge abdominal abscess. She said something to the effect of "I remember that abscess! I was one of the people who drained it. I remember how big it was: we drained half a litre of fluid from it in 30 minutes! Etc. etc." She then left the room for less than a minute and returned with another nurse who was present that day and the other nurse was pleased to see that I was doing much better, the cancer notwithstanding.

        Wow, that’s a story. I'm a legend in the imaging department ...

        I can now try to describe my life in stories — good stories, if not well-told ones — but just what is a good story? There’s the sea creature story, of course, but that would leave out too much of what I consider to be necessary to my story. I must admit to feeling a bit of the thrill of discovery to learn of the success of the new movie, The Shape of Water, and it’s ability to flip the iconic nature of the sea creature story on its tail (and I’m sorry for the pun but I just had to, you know ... , and no, I haven’t yet seen it). After all, just as my cancer is only peripherally involved in my new life, the sea creature is only peripherally involved in most sea creature stories (recall that Moby Dick appears for only the last few pages of the book). How did I end up in a boat on this particular sea (or on any sea)? How did the sea creature come to find me? Why did it choose me? Why does it wait, beneath the surface, rather than attack and finish me off (my oncologist would have an answer to that: the chemo drugs are keeping it away, for now)? But then, why can’t we keep it at bay forever?

​

A Primate Story

 

       Here’s a story that only deals with primates. In February of 2015, I was about half-way through my first round of chemo (about the tenth chemo session or so) and we were at a weekend hockey tournament in Hamilton: the Sweetheart’s Tournament (so named because it was held each year over Valentine's Day). The tournament was set up with games scheduled from 8:30 AM on Friday through Saturday and most of Sunday. The downside was that only the teams that did well had play-off games on Sunday so, if your team didn’t win enough Friday or Saturday games, then you were finished on Saturday evening. All hockey parents knew that this made for some conflicting feelings. While you wanted your daughters’ teams to do well, there were distinct advantages to losing: mainly that you could check out of your hotel in time to get a refund on your reservation and return to your hometown on Saturday evening rather than wait until the end of the day on Saturday to see if your team was still in the running to play on Sunday. The worst case was to have a team that did okay but not spectacularly on the first two days: you couldn’t check out of your hotel on Saturday evening because it would be after the check-out time and, therefore, you would have to pay for the extra night in your room even if you weren’t going to stay.

        This particular year — the first year of my chemo — this almost happened to us. My youngest daughter’s team did well enough that we realized that, if they won their game on Saturday evening, then we would have to stay in Hamilton for their first play-off game on Sunday morning or, even worse, go home that night, set our alarms for very early Sunday morning and return to Hamilton in time for the first game. The tournament was extremely tiring for the parents, especially for me, and the thought that I may have to spend another day of standing in freezing cold arenas, after a night sleeping in the hotel, secretly led me to hoping that the other team scored against my daughter’s team enough to actually win the game. Still, we gambled that they wouldn’t win and therefore we cancelled our reservation for Saturday evening in our hotel while there was still time. The problem with that idea was that we now had several hours to kill in Hamilton and Burlington until the last game began on Saturday evening and, without a hotel to rest in, there really wasn’t much to do to pass the time until then. Some parents went to the bar in the arena and enjoyed the draft and the finger foods but, since I couldn’t mix the beer, or any alcohol, with the chemo drugs, we would be left sitting around drinking coffee for several hours while watching other hockey tournaments on the TV in the sports bar as our only activity outside of walking around a shopping mall, the prospect of which was even more horrid than sitting sober in a sports bar.

        Then IKEA beckoned and my family answered the call. Personally, I couldn’t bear the notion and so I told them that I would use the opportunity to catch up on some sleep for the drive home later that evening (assuming that our prayers were answered and my daughter’s team lost their remaining game that evening, so the nature of the prayer was left unidentified: curing me of cancer took third place that evening to prayers of both losing the game and to being introduced to new IKEA product lines for the kitchen: a loser's choice all around).

       When we got there, I dropped off my family at the entrance and told them that I would find a quieter part of the parking lot in which I could nod off for an hour or two and catch up on my sleep. Although the van seemed warm enough for a sleep when we arrived at IKEA, the temperature dropped quickly after I found a “quiet” parking spot and shut off the engine, and I soon awoke and found myself shivering in the sub-zero cold inside the van. I couldn’t find my scarf and toque and I could already see that the parking lot was full between my location and the entrance so, rather than drive through the parking lot in vain, I opened the van door and quickly headed for the store and, due to the effects of the cold on my chemo-induced peripheral neuropathy, my fingers couldn’t do up my coat and therefore I had to walk towards the entrance with my coat undone. The temperature difference between inside and outside the van seemed to have equilibrated in only the 20 minutes or so that I slept, and I stumbled over snow banks as I worked out my plans to find my family.        Unfortunately, when I got there, I recalled that, being IKEA, they had a layout that did not allow for ways of finding family members quickly. I was shivering uncontrollably as I went through the entrance and, cursing under my breath, tried to figure out how to intercept my family. Given how many minutes had passed since they had entered the store ahead of me, I knew that speed was of the essence. Still, I stumbled blindly through the store and quickly made it all the way to the exit to find my astonished family in the restaurant trying out a full array of Swedish delicacies, if that's what you could call them.

         “You look cold,” one of my daughters observed. “Really cold.”

         “Thanks,” I responded through still-chattering teeth.

         “How long were you looking for us?”

         “I dunno," I mumbled. "Maybe twenty minutes?” The shivering was starting to subside.

         “We came straight to the restaurant as soon as we got inside,” another daughter informed me. So I’d passed within 50 feet of them on my way in. “We thought about calling you but we didn’t want to wake you up. Why didn’t you call us? It would have saved you some time.”

         “Let me guess”, my wife answered. “It wouldn’t have been absurd enough for your universe”.

         I remembered how badly my hands shivered, how difficult it was to manage to do anything manually with my tingling hands shaking the way they shook. “Nothing absurd about it: I had a hard time using my phone,” I explained.

         My daughters went back to the counter to find more food selections while I stayed at the table, making sure that my wife saw just how cold I was. “I never did think that trying to sleep in the van was a smart idea,” she said. She was right about that, of course. She was always right about certain things, especially when it came to my overestimating of my abilities since I’d begun chemotherapy. I, on the other hand, began to tell my wife about the view from my bedroom window when I was a child and how, if there were no trees growing there, I'd be able to see all the way to the North Pole. Her reaction, as she explained curvature of the earth to me, was to feel my carotid artery to make sure that there was no blood clot blocking the flow of blood to my brain. She found nothing worrisome, which worried her, of course.

         Customers I'd elbowed aside during my earlier frantic search for my family were starting to arrive in the restaurant, watching me and warily keeping their distance from what they could only assume was a surviving member of the Donner Party. Eventually, I was able to eat a bit of food that my daughters bought for me, and we then left IKEA and returned to the arena. I walked behind the rest of my family and, as I entered the arena complex, a couple of mothers from our team took one look at me and asked me if I was all right. More specifically, they said "you look terrible," and then asked “what’s wrong with you, are you alright?” I told them what had happened and how I’d tried to find my family in the cold and, eventually, the other parents gathered round and took turns telling me how terrible I looked, how a trip through IKEA to find family members on a snowing evening could have fatal consequences, etc. The more caring of them offered to find me a chair to sit on but the other, smarter ones reminded everyone that there were likely to be no extra free chairs anywhere in the arena complex. That left waiting for the current game to end as my only hope of getting a seat — actually a spot on a freezing stainless steel bench inside the arena, but a seat nonetheless — to sit on. Luckily, our daughters' team lost their game (sorry Rachel) and so we were all able to go home afterward. Some, like me, drove for over an hour with the inside heater of the van at full high temperature. I, on the other hand, acquired a new nickname among the parents that evening: the IKEA monkey, and a couple of the parents would ask me at subsequent games what happened to my shearling coat.

​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ80Zpi7N-E

​

       That was three years ago and, still today, if I mention the event to one of the parents who’d been there to see me that evening, they will call me by my nickname and ask me again what happened to my shearling coat.

       Meanwhile, I will still be reminded of the view out of my bedroom window when I was a child, and the knowledge of my vulnerability will remind me that it’s not just sea creature stories that can reinforce our memory ...

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​