Hope Springs

Leukaemia and climate change don’t sound like they have a lot in common, but a brush with death gave this environmental researcher renewed optimism.

- Alison Spodek Keimowitz

I WAS DYING. Not just in the way that we’re all inching inevitably toward our own deaths each moment; I was hurtling towards a specific death with a name, a shape and a timeline. I was 37 years old and I was dying of leukaemia.

I was lying in a hospital bed, so ill that diagnosis – when someone finally named the doom I had been feeling in my body for months – was a relief. At least the sense of vague terror and impending catastrophe I had been feeling had a name. A cure, in the shape of a stem cell transplant, was possible, but it required the complete and utter dissolution of myself, dangling my broken body over the edge of the very cliff a cure is meant to postpone.

It wasn’t just my body that dissolved in those weeks: my mind and soul were also broken apart, fragmented and brought to the edge of ruin. In medical terms, I became depressed, hallucinatory and delusional. And the team of doctors really didn’t have jack-shit to prescribe me except for patience.

I was visited by a mindfulness practitioner during this time, but I was too far gone for prolonged mindfulness practice, unable to bring myself to a set of exercises that had sustained me prior to my illness. There was simply no self to bring. Instead my visitor asked me to count to four, in line with my breath. And then to do it again. And to come back to this simple counting whenever I needed it. I could get to four, and then four again. I could get through my pain, my nausea, my misery, for the count of four breaths. And then I could ask myself to do it again.

This practice didn’t make me feel better. I was still miserable and broken and absent. But it gave me the space to sit with that misery, call it by its name and know its shape. That was valuable, just as the name and shape of the leukaemia diagnosis had been valuable some months before.