Gifts are for Giving

IN LATE 2017, doctors told me I had a malignant tumour on my pancreas. In the five months or so leading to surgery, I nearly died on two occasions, as a direct result of the pancreatic cancer. The surgical procedure I underwent has a mortality rate of 1:100 — my surgeon wasted little time before he dispelled the notion in my head that these were pretty good odds.

I have been saved, saved and saved again. My journey has shown me that believing we have the answers is the deceit of conceit; that human beings have been gifted with a powerful spirit that resides within us.

This is not a guidebook for coping with an illness that may be terminal. This blog-book, this “blook” of mine, is simply an account of the journey I found myself on after I was diagnosed. I began writing this on 20 February 2021. As we approach Christmas on this same year, I cast my eye one last time over my words.

I write this book for people who may fall into the same dark place I found myself in, and for their carers. I write this book only because it is possible that relating my journey may help someone, that it may bring comfort, belief, hope. There is a strength and an endurance in all of us that we may not be aware of. Be assured, it is there in you. You can fight as well, if the time comes. You are not alone. A spirit lives in all of us.

*****

THIS IS a book of thanksgiving.

The condition I found myself in is potentially fatal. It is one of the worse forms of cancer you can be afflicted with. Remission is at best a permanent temporariness, and there is a high likelihood of relapse. Like anyone else might have been, I was consumed in fear, an arctic terrain of terror. Fear became like a flood I would drown in.

Within hours of the diagnosis, however, I felt something altogether strange and new growing in me. Searching for the right word to describe it was and is futile. All I know now, as I go back about four years, is that it brought comfort. I was brought up in the Catholic tradition, and I naturally fell back on the vocabulary of my faith, which recognised and named what I was feeling as a presence. The chokehold of fear loosened. I did not overcome my fear, but I saw that the rest of my life was what was most important, not the cancer; that being very afraid was a very basic, simple human reflex, and it was OK to feel that fear. I saw the fear as something born of survival instinct. We drive carefully because we fear we may have an accident. Fear can protect you. It didn't happen overnight, but seeing fear as part of my armour helped me arrive at a place of resilient peace.

Between the time of my diagnosis and the major surgery I underwent, I could have died twice.

Dad: Eric Ross Peter de Cruz.

Additionally, my surgeon told me the operation itself, Whipple’s Procedure, was right up there in the danger stakes, just like or worse than a multiple heart bypass, or brain surgery. If I live till 23 March 2022, it will have been four years since surgery.

I have been a journalist for many years, and this is the biggest story of my life. I am also a musician and songwriter. I don’t see these abilities as skills. The ways in which melodies, lyrics, sentences and ideas for written discourse come to me, sometimes deep in the night, compelling me to commit them to memory, or actually write them down, even as notes on my smartphone, speak of something more than the tangible result of practice or competency development. The Catholic in me defines these abilities as gifts. In the same way, I don’t see myself as having survived a disease. I have been saved.

As I lay in beds across three hospitals in Sydney — after diagnosis, up to and following surgery — I could not understand why I was still alive. Why me? Why am I saved, when others less fortunate with life's circumstances are abandoned, left to suffer and suffer and die? What did I do to deserve being saved? Again and again? Little by little, the lexicon of my upbringing once again presented me with some deliverance, until I began to believe that finding cancer had led me to find my purpose. Like my life depended on it, I knew what I had to do. There came a compulsion to share what I had always been able to offer, the 'gifts' of writing, and music, share it all in thanksgiving. The focus moved from a devastating illness to making use of the rest of my life, whatever I would have of it. My biggest wish remains for clarity of purpose, time enough to tell the story, give the music, keep on keeping on. Because it may help someone.

Gifts are for giving. Writing this book and sharing my music, putting it all out there, is part of the journey of the rest of my life. It does not matter how my words or music may be judged. The only way to make sense of all this is to make the most of the life I have been given. Maybe it's the life I have been given back. It's a journey of thanksgiving I will chart day by day. Being the father, husband and human being I need to be is the other part of the life ahead, and no less important.

Mum: Margarita de Cruz

nee Emmanuel.

This book is also a remembrance, a respecting, of the people, places and pieces of my life that have made me and brought me here. I am a rich, rich man for the love of my Dad and Mum, my wife, our children and the children who will follow them, my brother Errol, my grandparents Dadda and Amma, the Emmanuels, the people they married and all of whom helped raise me, first-cousins, my nephews and nieces, my wife’s family, St Joseph’s Church in Sentul.

Malaysia.

I am a sum of these parts, people and places. I am nothing without them, there is no story without these building blocks.

This is not a memoir.

This blook would not have been possible without a few people. The first are Patrick Pillai and Lim Siang Jin, my former colleagues at The New Straits Times, with whom I first discussed this project. They were both immediately encouraging. I am deeply indebted to Patrick and Siang Jin for helping me to believe, ever since that day in early 2019 when we drove out of Kuala Lumpur in Jin’s 4WD, visiting places in Selangor and seeing that certain irrefutable beauty of Malaysia.  

Siang Jin has come along to set up this blog, and take on various maintenance issues without my having to ask, foreseeing and pre-emptively putting in place the guards that now prevent potential trouble spots from developing. When this project began, he told me: “We have to bring our training and experience as journalists to bear on this book now. You have to arrive at the point where you stop writing, proof-read the thing and just submit it.” Which is what I began on the second day in the Year of the Ox. Thank you, Siang Jin. You champion lah.

Two people read the full draft to Part One that I was happy with, my daughter, Sara, and my wife, Helen. I can “write a blook”, but it is very very difficult for me to express my gratitude for how their words spurred me, and convinced me to put on this particular finish.

My daughter says I’m “doing a Star Wars”. Some of you may remember that when the Star Wars epic came to be, in 1977, its creator, George Lucas, chose to begin in the middle, with episodes IV, V and VI. The story then went back in time to ‘the beginning’, and episodes I, II and III were released. So, here I am, some ways past the middle of my life, when everything keeps changing whether you like it or not.

You can find some peace if you ever have to face the fear that hit me. You can. It's alright to be afraid. Fear can protect you, and you can learn to use it. There is a place of quiet amid the madness. Close your eyes. Listen. It's there. 

This is not a guidebook for people with cancer. I am simply sharing my story. If any of this helps you, don’t thank me. I’m only the postman.

Mum and Dad marry at St Joseph's Church, Sentul, Kuala Lumpur, in 1953.