My illness persisted and I finally went to the doctor and had a series of checks made. One was a chest x-ray that showed a shadow on my lung. In case it was a lung infection I had a course of anti-biotics, but this did not clear either my general malaise nor the shadow on my lung as indicated in a second x-ray 6 weeks later. I was directed to a lung specialist who had me undertake a CTC scan and a few weeks later a PET scan; he was clearly concerned that what was showing on the x-ray was lung cancer. By now Eva was in Australia again so I wrote to her telling her what was going on and pointed out that the 5–year survival rate for lung cancer was 5%. Suddenly my preoccupation with death and utterances of ‘not having much time left’ a year earlier were becoming very real.
Whilst all this was unfolding I visited my wise man to seek advice on how to take care of myself and, once again ask whether there was anything I should be doing before my time was up. As usual I spent quite a time explaining to him the background to my questions, including how I felt about my life in general. He said:
The most important thing you have told me is about your contentment. How you are no longer striving or wanting – these have been constant features of how you have lived your life – and for them to be replaced with contentment is a remarkable transformation. It is a completion of your retirement and whenever you die you will do so in peace, you will die a contented man. Not many people are blessed with that!
You are starting to recover from the bug you contracted, and this is a difficult time – beware of over doing anything. It is inevitable, as you get older, that health issues become more significant – you cannot make plans on the basis that you will always be fit and well.
Ironically, I was now starting to feel better from the bug I contracted almost 9 months earlier. But the lung consultant wanted me to make a decision about dealing with the growth in my lung. Eva came with me to the key consultation and saw for herself the growth in glorious technicolour as revealed by the PET scan. We agreed that the only way to proceed was to have it out.
I had a consultation with the surgeon in Bristol and a date was set for an operation in June. The key-hole operation would be in two parts. In the first part they would extract the tissue with growth on it and send it to the lab for analysis. If it was cancerous then they would then remove a third of my lung. If it was not cancerous then they would simply stitch me up again. One of the more alarming statistics he gave me was that 6% of the people undergoing this operation did not survive – and if the growth was cancerous the death rate rose to 8% – that was 1 in 12! It raised the question of whether I should tell our children the odds and make a point of saying goodbye to them – or not. I decided not to, but it made the whole confrontation with death a lot more real.
The operation was a complete success. I did have lung cancer, but it had been removed well before it had embedded itself too far or metastased. As a doctor put it on my follow-up visit “you are cured”. But it didn’t feel like it. I was breathless going up a single flight of stairs and my stomach was giving me serious grief. It turned out that this was because my right-hand diaphragm had moved up about four inches – compensating for the lack of lung above – and this had stretched all the intestines below it. When I asked for advice on my stomach problems from the aftercare nurse I received the reply: “we are thoracic staff, we do not deal with anything below the diaphragm”. As much as I admired the specialists who treated me I was appalled at their lack of awareness of knock on complications.
An important turning point in my recovery was how I felt after a treatment from a gifted craniosacral osteopath. For 24 hours after the treatment I felt better, more energised and breathing more freely. The effect didn’t last, but it demonstrated to me that I could recover – which was extremely important – it meant I was working toward that level of recovery rather than accepting anything less. I had checkups for the next year during which I recovered most of my lung capacity. However it took me more than 18 months to recover from the impact of the operation. Eva was shocked. She saw me as a fit and healthy man and couldn’t imagine me having cancer. We were facing the reality of being old and frail as never before!
Even before the lung operation I had been discovering that I could do less and less – but the operation accelerated the process uncomfortably. Each year we use a wood-burning stove in our living room to provide a good proportion of heating during the winter. This requires me to fell trees, saw them up, chop the logs and store them for a year or two before transporting them into the house to burn. I estimate that we use between 3 and 4 tons of wood a year – so there is a lot of chopping and sawing to do! I started to notice that my shoulders ached if I chopped wood for more than 30 minutes, so I made sure that I interleaved it with less strenuous work. A year or so later and I could only chop for 15 minutes at a time. Now I have to use an electric powered log splitter. I still enjoy the process, but nowhere near as much as when it was all powered by me. At the moment, in 2017, I have a problem resulting from the scars from the operation that means it is best if I do not undertake any heavy chain sawing work – so I can see the time when I have to give up on that as well.
As I age and become less strong and more frail I have to continually adjust what I think I am capable of. And each adjustment is always in the same direction – that of being able to do less. Each step is a loss and I experience grief each time I have to face up to it. I have had a lot invested in being a strong competent man, able to provide for my family. As I can do less I have to relinquish that aspect of my maleness which is both sad and painful.
When I was writing this I had very strong memories of meeting Lena’s father, Vitali, in the Ukraine. He had been a physics professor at a military academy until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Shortly after that he and his wife, a doctor, were out of work with no income. So he found some land outside Karkiv and built a dacha, a house all his family could stay in during the summer. And he grew the food that kept them going through some very tough years. He planted and harvested enough potatoes, cabbages, tomatoes, cucumbers and so on to keep his entire family fed – including his children, their spouses and his grandchildren. He was a few years older than me but did not mind the hard work involved; indeed, I think, like me, he revelled in it. When we met in 2000 we immediately recognised that strong male quality in each other and got on really well. Indeed, we grew to love each other. He adored it when I was able to show him around the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge where so many famous physicists worked. But the basis of the bond between us wasn’t physics; it was being a strong man willing and able to work hard to support his family in any way necessary.
Every day I work outside for 4 or 5 hours. Every day I repair something, I do something to provide us with fruit, vegetables, eggs and firewood. There is a lot to manage and I love it all. I don’t love killing chickens or rabbits, but I do it as part of engaging with life and the food we eat. It feels right and appropriate in a way I would never have guessed whilst living in a town and buying everything in shops. I love being inventive, finding ways of reducing the effort to maintain the house and garden, or finding ways to use my small tractor to substitute for my declining strength. And I know that one day looking after this house, the six barns and acres of garden will be beyond me. I am not looking forward to that day – something in me will die.
The loss of physical strength and stamina is only a part of what advances with age. I have also discovered that I cannot handle stress. I remember vividly one time I was walking through St. James Park on my way to interview someone in the Home Office. Before I left home Eva and I had been having a fierce argument about something and I was very upset and angry. As I walked through the park I felt my chest tighten and my breathing become shallower. I had to stop and sit on a bench to recover; I was afraid I was having a heart attack. Whether I was close to that or not, it was very clear that I was no longer able to handle the level of distress a fierce argument between us caused. At a physical level it was too much for me.
I often talked to Yuri and Sheila about the power issues involved in facilitating and being a teacher in groups. So they invited me to come and run a three hour session with their Teacher Training course and talk about power and how to handle it. Eva came with me, reluctantly at first, but contributed a great deal. Nevertheless, it was my responsibility to design and run the session. I did so competently. However when it was over I sat in an armchair outside the group room and immediately fell fast asleep – I was totally and utterly exhausted after three hours in front of a group. This was very different from the man who sixteen years earlier had held a group of 24 people for 16 hours a day for 42 consecutive days!
At one level I am pleased that I cannot handle stress any more – I don’t think it ever did me any good to do so. However it has required a radical shift in my appraisal of what I can and cannot take on. And it has exaggerated the negative effects of some of my characteristics. Earlier I mentioned that I become irrationally stressed whenever I travel. My lower tolerance of stress has made this much harder.
I have also noticed that I find it harder to overcome my shyness, my introversion. A couple of years ago, when we were visiting some friends in Ibiza, they took us to a gathering for the screening of a new movie. Our friends, Eva and I walked into a room full of people who were all complete strangers to me. Our friends immediately engaged with people they knew well, Eva dived into a conversation with someone who ‘looked interesting’. I stood feeling awkward and decided I couldn’t cope – it felt too stressful – so I went back outside and sat on my own until the movie was about to start. I have always had to make an effort to engage with new people, especially at parties and social gatherings, and this effort is now often more than I can handle.
I have also noticed that as I age and become more frail I am becoming more intolerant. I cannot stand being ‘talked at’ by people who are out to impress me or a simply looking for an audience. I cannot stand ‘small talk’ about news stories or, worse, TV shows. I cannot stand being around people who are being ‘unreal’ in some way – usually by saying one thing and behaving in a completely different way. In all these situations I find it stressful to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself because I think that if I spoke my mind it would cause some combination of upset, injury or discomfort for everyone involved. Maybe it is just that I know that I do not have a great deal of time left in this lifetime and so I don’t want to waste any of it talking bollocks to people who have no interest in me or what I’m up to in my life.
My intolerance is a surprise to me. I expected that as I became more mellow and wise I would generally become more accepting of other people and their trips and nonsense. This is not how it has turned out. Eva shares the same trend, so it is not a source of conflict between us. But it does mean that over time we see fewer and fewer people. We have ceased seeing people who used to be counted as friends and some members of both our families. Is it a direct result of being able to handle less stress? Is it because we have less time left? I do not know, but my growing intolerance sometimes causes me to question whether I am going backward spiritually.
There are a host of other aspects of becoming older and more frail. I now need to wear glasses most of the day. However my hearing remains good – in some respects too good. I can no longer tolerate very loud music, so many of the parties that we used to go to are now too stressful for me. I also find that very loud bass sound rattles my diaphragm uncomfortably. I have to watch what I eat, for example chilli can aggravate the lichen planus in my mouth and give me grief for a few days. I have a sensitive stomach and find most processed foods give me bad indigestion. I cannot imbibe many of the drugs that I enjoyed previously. The effects on my body of hallucinogens now outweighs any good time and I notice that I am a lot more cautious in my use of ecstasy.
I no longer have a regular meditation practice, instead I meditate whenever I feel out of touch with myself or a need to go deeper on an issue. However recently I have noticed that if I meditate for more than 45 minutes several days in succession then I have quite severe pains in my legs and knees. So I now have to adjust either the time or posture in which I meditate. It’s not a disaster, but it is a loss to me because I rely on slotting into a familiar groove to enable myself to meditate deeply. Changing posture and needing to be aware of time make this more difficult. There are days when I hate my loss of capacity and rail against getting older. But most of the time I am deeply content and satisfied, as my wise man recognised. I love using my body and energy to create things and grow food. When I am too unwell to be outside I become bad tempered and my body starts to seize up – it likes to be used. When I have had a good day planting stuff, repairing the chicken coop and digging over part of the vegetable patch I have a level of satisfaction and contentment that I did not know was possible. I feel engaged with nature in a way that is hard to put into words, but is nevertheless profoundly rewarding. I notice the seasons, I befriend the birds and have learned how to generate my own seeds so that each year my crops are more suited to where I live. It is an ever simpler way of life, but one that still provides me with enough challenges to keep me engaged. I am no longer interested in trying to change the world – even though I still think there is a great deal wrong with how our affairs are organised and executed. My self-image still has me as a strong man, but he is now a much older and wiser man. Still proud to be a man and satisfied with what I have accomplished; no longer striving or wanting. A man at peace with himself.
Next.
A Master's Path 