Sinclair on life: 'Not brave, just ordinary'

By PETER SINCLAIR

"I am saddened to hear you are not well and I wish you all the very best through your ordeal; your words covering life were good. I am 52 this year and, sometimes, as I look at my nippers growing up, I think how bloody short the whole deal is. The whole magic of life is in ourselves ... how we see it is how it is ... "

This is just a fragment of a marvellously meditative and philosophical e-mail from Gregar Haycock in response to a column I wrote in which I mentioned Muriwai Beach and its tumbling surf - endlessly breaking, endlessly mended - where I once lived.

Gregar had the wisdom not to leave Muriwai and is still there, hovering over its dunes in his hang-glider, speeding beside them on his windsurfer, after more than 20 years. A wise and contented man, with more sense than I have.

"Thank you for your graceful article," he says at the end. "It reminded me of the beauty of life. Thank you for writing so bravely."

How many I get, these days - e-mails, I mean - and how they strengthen me. It's as though in dying I am being given a last unguided tour of life before I go.

Many remark on my "bravery." But I'm not brave, I'm just ordinary, as British writer John Diamond says on the cover of his book, Because Cowards Get Cancer Too.

No, any "bravery" I may have is borrowed, for I am continually comforted and strengthened by others, some of whom I know and some I don't. If you're one of those, let me thank you for so often taking my mind off things.

You need that sometimes when you're where I'm at.

I've just come through a week of chemotherapy - a week of pain and dark thoughts and night fears - and yet there have been small glimmers through this darkness.

Last week I wrote about our favourite perfumes, the mosaic of fragrance to which we are all adding, piece by piece, throughout our lives.

Since then you have been telling me yours: the crisp smell of washing left flapping in the sun, the sweetness of old-fashioned roses, the smell of boiling water just as you pour it over the tea, even the salty freshness of newly caught snapper ... each e-mail lets me share one or two of your memories. That means a lot in the small hours when my spleen is thudding away like a jackhammer and dawn won't come and the pain won't let up.

Because morphine isn't always all it's cracked up to be and, in my case at least, there aren't even the consolations of genius - if I was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, I would at least have knocked off Kubla Khan by now; but decree as I might, not so much as a single stately pleasure-dome has appeared to date.

A number of you will now contact me to say that of course I'll be in pain just so long as I maintain this mule-headed stance of refusing to drink my noni juice ("a natural health miracle from Paradise"), and declining to sniff a cloud of Ylang-Ylang night and morning, and failing to heed my daily diet tips from Hallelujah Acres - "Recipes for life: a dietary challenge!" as expounded in Genesis 1.29 ("John, just you eat up every bit of your nice parched locusts!")

Others will send me e-mails, more in sorrow than in anger, to let me know the fault is entirely mine; that my attitude is insufficiently positive.

You may be right, as may be all those beseeching the Almighty on my behalf; but every study I've ever heard of suggests that cancer doesn't understand about attitudes, of any voltage.

So I'm not brave - resigned, maybe; but even now my horizon still feels as limitless as yours.

I was just thinking to myself the other morning - one of those bright, brisk, business-like winter mornings with the birds all chirping away like so many executive secretaries and the cat busy trying to purr itself to bits at the end of the bed - if it wasn't for this one gigantic looming fact, this one unbearable thing, I'd be as content as I've ever been in my life ...

* pete@ihug.co.nz