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.

Chapter 1: Death is a Distant Peace

I BEGAN to really live the day I was told I may soon die. One moment I was William de Cruz, the next I was gone, someone new stepped in. 9 November 2017 became the start of a journey that rebuilt my life. I was diagnosed with what some in the medical profession call the most dangerous cancer known, aggressive, insidious, invasive, potentially fatal. I am in remission as I write this, and I have never felt better about myself.

I was born on 25 June 1957, baptised a Catholic, the child of Malaysian-born parents. We have identity cards in Malaysia, which list name, father’s name, date of birth, race, religion and address. Hence, I am Malaysian by birth and citizenship, Indian by race, Malayalee by ethnicity.

Mum and I in 1958.

My maternal and paternal grandparents were from Kerala, a south-western state in India that holds the distinction of being the first geopolitical territory in all the world to have freely elected a communist government. In a country that has delivered 10 Nobel laureates, the state of Kerala has the highest literacy and numeracy levels. I have great respect for and am very proud of Kerala and its people.

As a Catholic, I received the sacrament of First Holy Communion at seven, took the name Martin for my Confirmation, at 12 years of age, thereby becoming a soldier of Christ.

The Higher School Certificate was my highest qualification when I entered full-time employment, as a journalist with Malaysia’s English-language daily, The New Straits Times. Two years before that, I had begun working life as a performing musician, playing guitar and singing folk songs, country & western, pop and a bit of rock & roll at Underground, one of the earliest pubs in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur. I picked up the guitar early, discovered music composition almost by accident and wrote my first song before I turned 18. Music is a cornerstone in my life.

In 1980, I married Helen Heng Tsu Lin, a girl from Kuantan, on Malaysia’s east coast. Helen’s IC records her as Heng Toch Len, but she told me of “Tsu Lin” early in our courtship. “Tsu Lin” is how her name is pronounced in Mandarin (“Toch Len” being Hainanese), and I have always preferred it over her official name. “Tsu Lin” means elegant bells.

Helen and I - Sydney, August 2017.

Our first child, a boy, born prematurely on 29 August 1983, lived only a few hours. While he still had the breath of life, I christened him with the sign of the Cross on his forehead, and we named him Christian. Helen and I now have three lovely children. We migrated from Malaysia with our Malaysian-born sons, David and Benjamin, in 1990, to Sydney; Sara was born in Australia in 1994. Since migrating, Australia has been our other home. I have worked here, as a public servant and a journalist.

In 2013, I became the founding president of a non-government organisation (NGO) called Global Bersih. It is the global arm of the most influential NGO in Malaysia, Bersih, which was set up and continues as a lobbyist for free and fair elections, human rights, equality for all Malaysians.

Bersih is a coalition of like-minded NGOs that has never registered as an organisation with the Registrar of Societies in Malaysia. It means the RoS cannot exert official control over Bersih. The coalition remains the only group capable of moving hundreds of thousands of Malaysians to take to the streets to demand justice and fairness, peacefully.

Global Bersih was formalised as an organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, and operated out of Sydney. We chose Geneva because it was literally close to where the UN was domiciled, and official representations to UN rapporteurs were part of our plan. Formalisation was made easier because one of our steering committee lived and worked there.

   Bersih rally at Town Hall Square, Sydney,
   on 29 August 2015 (Bersih Sydney picture).

At the time I was president, Dr Andrew Foong was secretary, Praveen Nagappan treasurer. Malaysians have come from far behind in the fight for justice, we have won and we have lost, but we have not given up.

My father, Eric Ross Peter de Cruz, died in 1963. He was 37, I was six. My only sibling, elder brother Errol, was 59 when he went in 2013. My mother, Margarita, left me in 2015. She was 86. I am the last in the de Cruz line Dad and Mum began.

My mother was one of 11 siblings. Including Errol and I, there were 26 first cousins — three have passed away. In the next generation, including all our children, 27 have been added to the family tree. To my great and lasting regret, I know very little of the people on my father’s side, apart from his parents and two sisters. I miss Dad, Mum and Errol dearly. They would have been strong for me. But I am glad they have been spared knowing and living with my diagnosis.

In late 2017, I became a different person entirely. I would not be this person if not for the cancer. I can’t say I wish I had not contracted the disease, because I am what I am now, and if not for that threat to life and living, more than likely I would have remained in a cocoon, not destined to become WdC V-2, the strongest version of myself.

Neither is it strange to feel this way. Being happy is not strange, and I am happy. Most days now, the warmest wind blows gently in my soul, and I believe in the omnipresence of human possibility. I don’t know how long I have, but whatever time remains, I know the person I now am is the man I want to be, the human being I am meant to be. Physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, I have never been more comfortable with myself, more embracing of my very own nature, gratified, joyous to be in this place I have arrived at. This is the human destination I didn’t know I should have headed for.

It will soon be about three years since I faced the likelihood that death was as imminent as the rain that follows darkest cloud, rolling thunder, blinding lightning. I have stepped from a devastating diagnosis to a state of being that is better than anything I have ever felt in my life. I began writing this on 7 June 2019, the day my marriage to Helen turned 39.

In the course of my writing, 44 years have come and gone since Elvis Aaron Presley passed on. It has been 75 years since Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by the United States of America. Three days later, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. More than 200,000 people in Japan were killed by these two atomic bombs, and most were civilians. The bombings mark the only times the US has used nuclear weaponry in armed conflict. No other nation in the world has ever committed such an act.

Kris Kristofferson is approaching 85. Bob Dylan has issued the best collection of songs since Blood on the Tracks, four years since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Leonard Cohen, who passed on more than four years ago, said that Dylan’s recognition, coming about 60 years since he began performing in Greenwich Village, New York, was a bit like “naming Mount Everest the tallest mountain in the world”.

On 8 November 2020, Joe Biden was declared president-elect of the USA. Kamala Harris, an American descendant of a Jamaican father and South Indian mother, became the first woman to enter the White House as vice-president elect. Donald Trump used his time till Inauguration Day on 20 January 2021 to cement his image as the most repugnant president the US has let loose on world order and a universal understanding of human decency.

My Malaysiakini story on the historic
Opposition win in the 2018 election.

Less than 50 days after I underwent about nine hours of surgery, the people of Malaysia overthrew a government that had ruled uninterrupted for nearly 61 years. That government had seen to it that Malaysians would suffer a severely compromised judicial system, rigged elections, a military and police service subservient to corruption in highest office, racism, the oppression of all religions other than Islam. Not one drop of blood was shed when Malaysians voted in the Coalition of Hope on 9 May 2018. The day after, I submitted a commentary to news website Malaysiakini, in which I referred to the achievement as a “gold standard” in the democratic process for all the world to see. Less than two years after that, the prime minister of the new government tendered his resignation, along with that of every member of cabinet. He was 93 at the time, and it was the second occasion he had risen to Malaysia’s highest office. History lists him as the oldest person to become PM. Many Malaysians remember him with hatred. His resignation opened the door to an illegitimate regime that stepped into the political vacuum and showed itself to be racist, incompetent and untrustworthy in the eyes of many.

Some four months before our 40th wedding anniversary, the human race found itself engulfed by the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 475,000 Americans have died because of the disease or related complications, many of them because they can’t afford medical treatment in the US health system. In the country of my ancestors, India, 155,000 have died. Nearly 2.4 million have perished worldwide. Malaysia's new government is hopelessly out of its depth amid the onslaught.

I don’t think we’ll ever return to the normal we used to know. For me, “normal” flew out the window in late 2017. I am more prepared to stare down a potentially fatal virus than most people. As mortality stares me in the face, every six months somebody in my medical team tells me if my lease on life has been extended another six. The building blocks of my life are now measured by the half-year, nothing is taken for granted, I pray that today will better than yesterday, that tomorrow will be better than today. I don’t know how long I have, but I have been saved, and I will keep walking this thanksgiving journey, one day at a time, for the rest of my life.

I had to be brought to my knees to learn how to stand properly. I had to nearly die to be re-born. I had to reduce myself to nothing in order to make something of myself. If there is anything here that speaks to the idea of ego, it is that ego has been cast aside. I have no need of it.

I am not preaching to you or trying to convert you. I am here to testify that God made his presence known to me, just when I was most in need. God has always been with me. I know that now. Human conceit left me deaf to the knocks on the door. The idea of death, that life is finite, has made every day precious beyond measure.

I have learnt that caring for others more than for myself is the best way to nurse and enrich the soul. I am not alone. I know it. Beyond the most loving wife I could ever wish for, our three children, a wonderful, noisy, loving extended family, my in-laws, my friends, beyond all that, when it is only me, I am not alone. I am still afraid, the darkest fears still visit, and that’s perfectly OK. It's OK to be afraid. It’s comforting to know this. Death is a distant peace.

The Heng-dC clan in Sydney, 2015: Helen and I with (from left) Sara, David and Benjamin.

Chapter 2: Man Proposes

FROM ABOUT August 2017, I had coped with two symptoms that visited daily, day after worrisome day, every time my waste disposal system came into play. My urine was constantly like teh-o, black tea. Awful bowel movements were forced on me soon after every meal. I was wretched, persistently tired. Cold fear was a constant companion. Puffing on a cigarette drained my energy. My body was screaming, something’s seriously wrong. I was very sick. I did not tell anyone, not even my wife. I couldn’t.

For as long as fate would allow, I would not further test my wife, add to the emotional wreckage of watching two sisters in Sydney pass away under very painful circumstances. Her siblings were already living in Sydney when we migrated from Malaysia with our two little boys in 1990. Before all this, in 2007, another sister, Dorothy, died of breast cancer.

Dorothy with Sara in 1995.

The elder sister in Sydney, Ginny, was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia in January 2014, and passed away in December 2015. Peggy relapsed into breast cancer six months after Ginny’s passing, in 2016. By the time of my symptoms in late 2017, Peggy knew for months that the illness was incurable, her time was finite.

Peggy told me about her relapse one morning when I was home alone. She said she didn’t want Helen to know for the time being; it had barely been a few months since Ginny’s passing. I look back at this encounter now, and I see that this was the first time I witnessed the extraordinary power a human being is able to conjure when faced with the most dire of personal circumstances.

Peggy had just been told of her relapse. And she was putting her baby-sister ahead of herself. Helen would come to know within a fortnight, with Peggy’s approval.

Up to this point in my life, I had been hospitalised thrice, decades apart. The first was for circumcision, when I was less than two years old. It was not done for any sort of personal belief my parents held, but to take away the pain every time I had to urinate. Mum has told me it was excruciating for me, and terrible for her and Dad, who could only watch. Circumcision was not a choice.

  Ginny with Sara in 1995.

Fast-forward to the early 90s, and I needed orthodontic surgery to remove parts of a cracked wisdom tooth and a bit of my jaw, the result of a botched attempt by a root-canal specialist too eager to get to the next patient. A year or two later, I underwent an operation for a hernia. Both these procedures were, in practical terms, considered “day surgery”, with no overnight hospital stay needed as standard operational procedure. Other than that, I had not been admitted to a hospital.

Then came the diagnosis that turned my life around. I was booked in for critical surgery seven days ahead. We didn’t know it that Thursday, 9 November 2017, but Peggy would be gone by the time of that scheduled operation.

*****

Since turning 50 in 2007, in the southern Sydney suburb of Oatley, with its tree-lined wide streets, I underwent annual blood testing, the occasional x-ray and clinical checks on my lungs and heart. My GP said I had “the constitution of a man in his 30s” — no diabetes, no high blood pressure, no cholesterol issues and, despite the smoke and drink, clear lungs and liver.

I played badminton with people more than 10 years my junior — we called ourselves The Baddies. I’d bounce around the court as they fought to catch their breath. I could last three consecutive sets, no problem, looking at more, against their needing to sit out every other 15-point run. And they didn’t smoke.

In 2012, after quitting a senior sub-editor’s position with The Australian, News Corp’s masthead Down Under, I also took long, brisk walks nearly every day, stopping only to use the open-air exercise yard by the man-made lake in Hurstville Grove.

 Hurstville Grove, a favourite waterfront
 destination on my walks around Oatley.

Five years later, on a blistering, southern-summer late morning in Oatley, the doctor told me a tumour had been discovered at the top end of my pancreas. More likely than not, it was malignant. The closest thing to a medical confirmation came about two weeks later, when the co-ordinating nurse at Royal North Shore Hospital said: “As far as medical science is able to confirm, you have a malignant tumour on your pancreas.”

My one confidant in the preceding months, Google, had already narrowed the origin of my symptoms down to either the liver or pancreas.

Recommending urgent medical consultation, it only pointed to serious illness and, in the cold, hard, matter-of-fact manner of the world’s best search engine, the likelihood of a terminal condition.

At the height of my symptoms, between late October and November, Helen and I were in Kuala Lumpur, visiting friends and relatives. We had planned the trip months before, to temporarily escape a situation in which all we could do was watch someone die, too soon after another loved one had succumbed.

Peggy Heng.

Days before we left Sydney, I had offered Helen the idea that we could just cancel that two-week break in Malaysia. It was her sister, I said. I would stay to be by her side. It was just money. Her response was immediate, certain, immovable. “I have to go, otherwise I’ll just go mad and break down and what good will I be to anyone then?”

In KL, I met up with a cousin, a surgeon. Over banana-leaf rice at Kanna’s Curry House, along Jalan Gasing, Petaling Jaya, Dr John Emmanuel Fernandez could tell I had a yellow pallor. Jaundice was part of whatever condition I was in. “But, it could be anything,” he said, “the liver or the pancreas.”

Tests could be arranged to pinpoint what was happening. But John also knew medical protocol would require my GP back in Sydney to ask that I undergo the same procedures in Australia, before treatment or intervention. I was desperate to find out, end the agony of not knowing, be among my people to cope with the news, whether or not I would tell them. The sense in John’s comeback was undeniable: “Will, you have to undergo treatment back in Australia. Am I right?” I spoke with Gerald Henry, another surgeon in the family. Gerald is married to my cousin Lucille. Same thing. Basically, they were both telling me, “Look, you’re here on holiday with your wife, so just enjoy what you can and tackle it in Sydney.” The considered, professional opinion was, a few days of waiting would not present any critical risk.

   "Man Proposes": From left, Uncle Joe, me, my cousins
   Matthew and John, and Aunty Florence, in Cheras, KL,
   during the 2017 trip when only John knew of my symptoms.

Without Helen knowing, I called the Sydney clinic from KL and made an appointment for a consultation the first working day after we would arrive back in Sydney. We returned on a Saturday night. I had one day to rest, during which, of course, I could not rest. Not knowing is exhausting. I finally saw Dr Medhat Magar of Oatley Healthplus to present my symptoms on 6 November 2017, a Monday afternoon. The doctor called for immediate blood testing. Wednesday, they called back. I had to undergo a CT scan. It was arranged for that very afternoon. Helen knew about the tests, but not my symptoms, not the fear. I locked the door every time I used the toilet in the last two months, ensured there always was air freshener.

Thursday morning, the report on the scan was in. That’s when the clinic phoned, 8 November 2017. So, when I took myself to see Magar, to hear about my diagnosis, and maybe prognosis, Helen was with Peggy, part of the bedside vigil at her sister’s apartment. As far as she was concerned, though, these were routine tests. I was, after all, 60 years of age.

I loved my wife. I was trying everything I could to delay telling her I was most likely in deep trouble. The news was simple and devastating: Sorry, just when you thought you could begin to try moving on, you’ll have to nurse a seriously ill husband. And that’s the good news. The bad news is, yes, I’m sorry, I may also be dying.

I was hoping fate would keep my secret at least till after Peggy’s passing and farewell. Timing is everything, and I was off by days. I had my pathology results, surgery was already scheduled. I had to tell Helen that day shall become night, again. We think we are masters of our destiny. It’s a human condition, that conceit. Truth is, as Uncle Joe always says, “Man proposes, God disposes.”

Sunset over Oatley: Backyard view from my bedroom balcony.

Chapter 3: “Early Discovery”

9 NOVEMBER 2017 actually began the day before, when the clinic called to say, “Doctor would like to see you tomorrow." The medical practice is heavily booked normally, and the secretary said an appointment had already been scheduled for me, first thing in the morning. There was no denying the numbing portent. The call had the same effect as water for powdered cement mix. I had been carrying a whole bag of it for a few months. Now it was being made stone, solidified, hard, permanent. Not going away too soon.

Me performing at Backyard, KL,
pre-surgery in 2017.

Dr Magar and his fellow practitioners had been our family doctors for more than 15 years, beginning soon after we began living in Oatley. He looked very disturbed that morning. Outside it was the standard, sweltering high of an Australian east coast summer, cloudless, blinding light, steaming cars, burning seats, wet t-shirts, muggy as anything. I had never seen Magar flustered, at a loss for words, drained of his grandfather-like approach to the guy who smoked and drank. My experience of doctors is, they like to shoot the breeze with journalists. Tell them you work for a Rupert Murdoch paper and they smile knowingly. On top of that, I felt like Magar liked me. He can talk a mile a minute with me.

But there he is, lost in contemplating his next best move, upright in his office chair, palms on his knees, staring at the pathology and CT scan reports on his flat screen, probably confirming for the umpteenth time he is not mis-reading the results. I can see red numbers everywhere on his monitor. He normally has his hand on the mouse, scrolling through each page, nodding away with a smile as he clicks on each screen-page. But he’s just sitting there. He must be searching for words.

Then, abruptly, he swivels on his chair, faces me from his desk. “William, I’m afraid the scan shows a tumour on your pancreas.” “Is it malignant?” “We can’t tell with a scan, but almost a hundred per cent.” He rolls over to me, knee to knee, switches his palms to my knees and says: “Don’t think ‘cancer’. Think ‘early discovery’.” That’s all it takes. Less than a minute. Your life changes. Bang! Cancer.

Any sense of hope in those two words, “early discovery”, evaporates when he opens his drawer, takes out an envelope and says, “I’m referring you for surgery. I’ve spoken with the surgeon’s office. They have an opening next week. They will operate on you next Wednesday.” Handing over the envelope, he says, “Here’s the referral.”

“Is it bad?”

“William, it’s major surgery. It’s not a simple thing. Worst-case scenario, they’ll remove your pancreas and you’ll be on insulin the rest of your life.” Pause. "Surgery won’t be easy.” Then: “Look. I have a 35-year-old patient who had the same thing five years ago. He’s fine now. Remember what I say, ‘early discovery’. You’re lucky. You have shown symptoms so we've found it early.”

I can’t speak. So few details. Too much information. All I can manage is a deep exhale. I know I have to get out, break out, escape. Then the grandfather in him speaks: “Maybe you should wait till Monday before you tell Helen. Let her have the weekend.”

Magar knows about Ginny and Peggy. I already know I can’t lie to Helen, not with surgery scheduled in less than one week. I remember wondering if the receptionists outside his room know. But I’m just too exhausted to go there. Most likely they do. Good. So bloody what? I can’t believe I have to get back in my car, drive, stop at t-junctions, keep my eyes peeled at roundabouts, watch out for elderly pedestrians or kids. I look out at the street and my vision has narrowed. I can only see what’s straight ahead. Everything else just doesn’t register, no peripherals. I am at the same time terrified I might cause an accident on the road, and wishing I would just die.

Another strange thought enters. My first family has been spared. They are all gone. Little mercies. Dad left us on 3 December 1963. My elder brother, Errol, succumbed to a heart attack on 10 August 2013. Mum passed away 7 May 2015.

My brother, Errol de Cruz, also at Backyard.

Mum would have been broken beyond repair. Had she been alive, she would not have been able to travel to Sydney to care for me, because of her age, and that would have made it one thousand times worse. Errol’s voice would have been a solace on the phone, but it would have been devastating for him.

Then, it begins, this thing that slowly comes to surround me, enveloping, like an electric charge from out of nowhere. The thought is planted in my mind: You can’t just lay down and die. You have a wife to take care of, and she’s been suffering and coping with death and dying for three years already. Children who’ll be looking up to you as Mum is faced with such pain. Again. She has stood by you through the thickest and the thinnest. She has loved you and cared for you, been your friend, your lover, for coming on 40 years, forgiven the worst of your excesses. This is the woman without whom you would not have been able to afford your first guitar, even before you got married. This is not about you. This cannot be about you. Though it is, it cannot be “you”.

And the train of thought morphs. Don’t worry. Remember that 80-year-old cardiac surgeon you read about, who had lost his wife five years back? He told his neighbour, “If I had worried about the things that I couldn’t control, I’d have been dead years ago.” Don’t worry. There’s no point to that. There are things you can’t control. Just go with the flow.

As we say at Mass: “Only say the word and I shall be healed."

Chapter 4: I Am Not the Centre of the Universe

BETWEEN the clinic and going to see Helen at Peggy’s apartment in Lugarno, a diversion to our home seems like a good idea. Ben and Sara are in, anxious, knowing I have been to see Magar. I need to tell them, if only to lose some of the chill that has come over me, unload some weight, take some of that look from my face before driving on to see their mother.

Ben is lounging in the TV room when I come through the front entrance. He stands, puts his hands in his pockets, doesn’t say a word. He just looks at me, immediately catches that it’s not good. He looks strong, ready. He takes charge, the elder brother. “Sara,” he shouts to his sister upstairs, in the tone he uses when he doesn’t need to add, “Come now”. In a few moments, there she is, sitting near the foot of the stairs, from where she can see Ben and I. 

“I’ve got a tumour on the pancreas.” Then the other scant details. “Early discovery”. Of course. And: “Magar thinks I shouldn’t tell Mum till after the weekend. I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. Mum will scream if she knows I kept it from her.” Ben and Sara are at a loss, momentarily. Ben’s in his very early 30s and Sara is seven years behind. They’re good kids, rock-solid pillars when I need them. Ben looks at Sara, agreement passes between them, in an unspoken, hidden code.

   Psalm 46: “To the Chief Musician”.

He turns to me, saying, “Ya, I think you need to tell Mum.” Then, “Are you OK?” From one to the other, I look them straight in the eye. “I’m OK. I’ll be OK. I know what to do. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of Mum.” Ben nods, I can see he’s fighting back disbelief, about all I have had to say. More than anything else, I imagine my defiance has left him at a loss for more words. He’s probably preparing himself for when I crumble, poor guy. “We’ll call David later.” He’s our eldest. It’s still early in London, where David has lived for a few years already, and he is probably still asleep. You don’t want to wake up your son with news like this when he’s living away from the family.

I drink some water, fill my bottle, vote against the cigarette and drive to see Helen. Along the way, I feel very grateful for Ben and Sara. They are worried as hell, but they are strong for me and I see an unqualified love in their eyes. They are also very, very sad for me. I know it as I walk out the door. I will reassure them later. I also know, come what may, these kids of ours will roll with the punches.

Oatley and Lugarno are about seven minutes apart by car. I travel a thousand miles in that time. I might be on an astral plane, traversing planets. The whole world has changed, quick as the flick of a switch. There is just a deep, abiding sadness, which I immediately realise I will have to endure for the rest of the life I have.

But something is different. I feel a presence, beside me and yet so close it’s under my skin. I am cold from shock, it is hot outside, but there’s also a deep calm within me. I am afraid, but fear is not important. “How am I going to handle this?” doesn't even arise as a question. Answers don’t matter anymore, questions are unnecessary.

For the first time in my life, just when “me, myself, I” should kick in, I am no longer the most important person in my life. I have to protect Helen and our three children. Out of nowhere comes the overriding thought that I have to become the husband and father who would not die crying for pity. If these are to be the first of the last impressions I leave on my wife and children, I have to become someone they will remember as strong till the end. If this is to be the last example I am to set, it will be five-star. I have never felt this way.

A realisation is growing, concretising in my soul. These thoughts have not come out of nowhere. I know I have felt and known this ever since I decided to hide my symptoms from the most important people in my life. I felt it, and didn't stop to think about it, because it was all I could do to keep the fear from showing on my face. Now, I am free. There is no need to hide anymore. You can not hide anymore. Now, I go through the formality of confirming it, nodding to myself in acceptance, like I am already walking the road to convalescence. This is the spirit of God, whispering to me, without words, conveying through a sense, a knowing. The feeling is so strong, it takes shape, clarifies: “Don’t worry. You look after them. I will look after you.” I feel a quiet strength building in me. It is an arrogant belief. I am no longer the person I had been until just two hours before.

In the backyard of the home Helen’s sister,
Peggy, used to own, in Newtown, Sydney.

I am not the centre of the universe anymore. I become last on the list of everything that is important to me. Never before has the path laid before me been so clear about where it will take me. Every bit of my life till now has simply been unspooling to this time. All that matters is what I will do from this point on, how I will do it.

My future reveals itself, clear as day, for the first time in my life. I know what to do. In the face of a horrible illness I will have to bear, major surgery I may not even survive, the whole thing becomes about my wife and children, my friends, the clan. And it makes everything easier. I have reason to fight. I have so many reasons to fight, and each and every one of them is a member of my family, the extended family, my friends. The rest of my life has begun. I am no longer living for myself. I can do this. I am not alone. God is walking with me. God will take care of this.

I surrender. And a peace comes with surrender, a relief. The peace, the relief, washes over me, like a second skin, warming. Surrender. Peace. A freeing from the earthly coil, even as I live. Another bolt of light. With surrender comes freedom. I do not want to turn back the clock. I do not want it to be someone else, not my cousins, uncles, aunties, friends. I’ll take this for the team. I don’t have to think too much about it anymore. I may not be that 80-year-old cardiac surgeon, but I’m not going to worry. At least I’ll die trying not to. It’s the best thing I can do for my big, lovely family. I will be strong. For them.

I am very, very grateful for one thing: I am the one with cancer in my immediate family, not Helen, not any of the kids. I would not have been able to take that, see any one of them in the position I am in. I will take this, I will be the statistic in the dC-Heng clan, the ball falls on my slot in the roulette wheel. This is part of the truth, part of the purpose, evolving around me. I am actually glad it is me, not one of them. I know. Life is strange.

  A section of our Oatley home: The Crucifix hanging over our family photos
  by the staircase, as it is reflected on the glass doors opposite. The building
  that “appears” above the downlight is a section of our neighbour's home.

Chapter 5: Who Says You’re Special?

  Jewfish Bay, Oatley National Park

IF THIS sounds like I’m setting myself up for sainthood, perish the thought. This is not about strength or selflessness in the face of pain and suffering. I want neither pity nor admiration. Many are the roads pot-holed by human weakness, and I have walked with a pick-axe built for tar and bitumen. That does not preclude me from telling my story.

So I have to do this, tell you what happened, what I came to believe, how the belief changed me, gifted me with a survival kit. We are not alone. You are not alone. Know this. God is with me as I drive to Lugarno. I know, as certain as the mountain stands its ground, God has always been by my side. In that short drive, I think back to all the times I have been saved, from accidents, tragedy, from death.

My first instinct is to doubt the presence is real, to see it as sleight of mind. The madness will soon descend. I have just slipped into survival mode, desperate for some direction to a road that holds hope for me. Why me? Why would God come to me, to help me? I have sinned and sinned and sinned again. Why do I deserve this grace? Who says you’re special?

There are some truths you hold that are marked in your DNA, as real as a molecule. But they are buried so deep in your psyche because you’re constantly focusing on frivolity, and awareness fades. Ego and conceit can afflict you with a certain spiritual blindness. That afternoon, the affliction bleeds out of me. I was blind, but now I see. Amazing grace. You sing it all your life and yet you just don’t see it.

The truth, my truth, comes to me as softly as the sound of rippling water in the little fish pond built into the wooden deck that leads to our backyard. God has whispered to me all my life, cautioned me on my worst meanderings. I have not listened. I have not seen. For so long. It takes a while to gel, but I can sense the guiding hand, that I am being directed, protected and, more than anything, comforted. I feel the most loving embrace. A peace descends that afternoon, where there has been madness and terror, like a light, as bright as it is soothing. In an impossible jigsaw comes design, and the gathering purpose.

Oatley Moon

I am not alone. The words “potentially terminal” have been like an engraving on granite. Now, footprints are imprinted beside my own, burned deeper than inscription on stone. I have not been forsaken. It is so simple. Give us this day our daily bread. Our Father. This is the holy bread, the mystery of the sacrament. Love, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, omniforgiving.

Once I have pinned this down, not knowing if I will make it through the night doesn’t matter anymore. Magar has unknowingly planted the seed, I don’t think “I have cancer”. Instead of “potentially terminal”, I can see endless opportunity. I understand that I now have my second chance, a second life, and this is the first day of that new life. I don’t know how many days there are, but possibility is limited only by vision.

That river of consciousness has continued to flow, and it follows now that every day is another second chance, a whole new shot at life — for all of us. We are all special. The truth is a whisper. There are neither sinners nor saints. We are strong and we are weak. God loves us like children. Unquestioning, non-judgmental. It’s not about “Please forgive me, Father”. We must learn to forgive ourselves. We are our worst enemies. We are the harshest of judges in our lives.

It will soon be three years since the doctors told me I had cancer. Quicker than I could have ever imagined, I have come to realise it’s just another name for another serious illness. It could be a massive heart attack, a deadly aneurysm that kills you in minutes. I have been broken very badly. You realise it happens. You realise it could be worse, it could be over. It can always be worse. You could get unceremoniously introduced to the front of a bus tomorrow. Every single person on this planet does not know if he or she will make it past the coming night, how many more days are ahead.

So here I am. There is no worry, because I have accepted I can’t see into tomorrow. And there is peace in knowing I don’t know. Not knowing does not matter for me because I am at peace. Since the illness, this simple truth remains as the most liberating force I have ever felt, and I hold onto it like it’s the love of my life. It’s not always easy to keep the peace. But I try. I try every day, every night. I am very afraid. That’s OK. We’re human. Fear can energise you. And there are times when a whole day passes without the thought that I am in remission.

In the face of a very probable death sentence, I have begun to live, instead of worrying about death. To serve. All of God’s children, everyone. This is not about worship, meeting the insurance premium that guarantees a place in heaven. Heaven doesn’t matter anymore. I am preparing to live, properly, in the here and now, for the first time in my life.

It is so simple when it finally comes together. I take myself out of the equation and I am stronger and bigger than I have ever been. I am not here to satisfy myself anymore. I am here for everyone else, first and foremost, and if that makes me feel better than I have ever felt, well, that’s just a bonus. Caring less about myself suddenly becomes a fine way to live indeed. I must embrace the heart of a servant.

Amsterdam, 2016

Chapter 6: Guardian Angel

HELEN sees the car pull up through the slats of the fence that run along one side of the apartment complex Peggy stays in. I see her walk quickly, nervously toward the gate. I get out of the car. I do not give her the thumbs-up.

“What, nee?” she says, using the endearment we use for one another, short for “honey”. When either of us goes, "What, nee?" in our book it conveys everything one human being can feel for another.

I just look at her as I cross the public driveway, slow, deliberate. Her knees begin to shake. I can see it. She can see me. She knows it’s bad. I just go up to her and hold her and break the news. “I have a tumour on my pancreas and it’s most likely malignant.” And she shakes, and shakes and shakes, and she keeps on shaking.

  Helen and I at Royal National Park
  in Sydney's south. (Picture by Fran Foo)

“He’s referred me for surgery next Wednesday.” I drive the nails in, and she begins a quiet wail, the saddest sound. If I’m not holding her tight, she will collapse. Her weight just goes dead in my arms. In my periphery are Peggy’s closest friends and Fook Pow, Helen’s elder brother. They look like they have been briefed before my arrival. Some of them politely turn away. Pow is like, I just don’t understand this… first Ginny, then Peggy, now this, and Peggy hasn’t even gone.

“It’ll be OK,” I tell my wife, whispering into her ear. “I will be OK. We will be OK. I promise.” For the second time in my life, I make a vow to the one woman I have come to love and learned to love. I make the promise, not knowing if I will be true to my word, only that I will try till my dying breath. I add the bit that will come to sustain us in no small measure in the days to come — “Magar said, ‘Early discovery’.” 

Of course it isn’t good enough for her. “No, no, NO! We are going back to the clinic now. I have some questions for him,” she says, still shaking. I say, “Come on, nee. The clinic is busy, it’s closed for lunch. He doesn’t know anything else.” But she will not be put off. “No, I want to talk to him, bloody hell,” she says, like she can fix this if she can just ask a few really good questions.

*****

“Helen, all this grey hair you see now,” Magar says, pulling at his crew cut, “is from my patients wanting to know how this happened.” Exasperated, trying hard not to vent his frustration at yet another patient, or loved one, who believes in the infallibility of doctors. “I just don’t know,” he says, arms stretched out in surrender to the power of the question he has no answer to.

I notice for the first time since coming under Magar’s care that he has lost a lot of his hair over the years. And I feel sorry him, not least because Helen then says, “But you sent him for all those tests, and he was fine all this time.”

The silence is broken. “Try not to worry,” the poor man says, like he must say to so many of his patients who think, you only have to go to Magar and everything will be all right. “Most people find out when it’s too late.” By the time he gently reminds us that scheduled patients are waiting outside his office, he has pulled out the magic bullet of “early discovery” again.

As we leave the clinic, we are both shell-shocked. There is not much to say. I am exhausted. We also know we must continue to be parents. There’s a quiet, unassuming strength we have, as a couple, knowing we can overcome a lot of bad stuff, which we have done, as long as we remain together. She knows it better than I.

But Helen cannot be left in charge of this. No. I make the calls from now. I have to lead my wife, my children, my family. Finally. I charge myself with easing her fear, and if the children see a promise of calm in their mother’s face, that’s their cue to allow themselves a bit of relief from the numbing fear, shock, horror they must be feeling. I must look after my wife. That’s the first step. The rest will follow. Don’t worry. Just believe. God will give me, this day and every day, my daily bread. I will feed on the bread.

Helen, at a Buddhist retreat just
outside Taiping, Malaysia.

Helen has ensured there are other arrangements for Peggy’s care for the rest of the day, and she has already switched roles, moving from watching her sister die to keeping her husband alive. Neither of us need return to Lugarno. Peggy is in good hands. I have the guardian angel I didn’t know God had gifted me with.

In the days, weeks and months to come, she is at my beck and call, and I don’t even need to call. Helen is just there, foreseeing every need of mine. She is at the computer every day, learning every bit she needs to know about the disease. At every appointment with a medical specialist, she is armed with the questions I don’t know enough to ask, notebook and pen at the ready. I notice she’s purloined the Moleskine given to me by Leslie Lopez, a cousin who’s like my brother, and a fellow journalist. By this time, I have switched off. Information overload. Days into weeks into months my wife reads all the brochures on the drugs I will come to ingest, the chemotherapy I will undergo, absorbing all the detail I have no energy to assemble and cast judgment on.

Meanwhile, I bide my time. I have to grow accustomed to my new face before I can safely allow, with rock-solid conviction, my actions to speak louder than any words I might conjure. I have to understand, in my bones, the lesson I will soon have to share with my wife. It is a strange connection, having to watch over your own guardian angel.

Another thing I don’t give voice to is the fact that I may, quite literally, have five days left to live, before I undergo critical surgery for the first time in my life. Five days “to settle your affairs, young man”, the voice tells me silently. So little time to think, to hold my wife, talk to my children, tell the family back home. Five days. That’s cruel. I know I have left all my worldly possessions to Helen. After a while, that’s all that matters.

Chapter 7: Surrender is Freedom

IT’S THE longest Thursday of my life. I am thinking of Good Friday. Every year, I play Jesus Christ Superstar on the sixth day of Holy Week, from start to finish. I see the 1970 rock opera as one in which the brilliant lyric and prose of Tim Rice is brought to life by the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, not the other way round. It is one of my all-time top five albums. It turned me as a Catholic and Christian and made the whole story of Jesus that much more believable. In my eyes, he became a revolutionary, a non-violent activist and leader who railed against the injustices of the state and religion of his time. Thinking of Good Friday and the crucifixion gave me a bit of perspective on my condition. A man died on the cross. I have cancer.

Still, there are moments when I just don’t want to contemplate the fight ahead. Perspective doesn’t guarantee protection, and it certainly doesn’t offer self-preservation. I know I will have to rise up to what lies before me, “man up” as they say in Australia, but there is no floor to the depth of sadness and despair. Take this cup away from me. 

I hid the cancer from Helen for a few months. I also never told anyone of the horrible thing I had kept locked away in my mind for years. I may have said it to Helen and Sara not long ago. I’m not sure. Committing it to this book in words marks the first time I am going public. In a sick, twisted, hated and vulgar replay cycle, the thought that I would fall victim to some form of cancer has visited almost daily, over several years. It would come at the worst times possible — in the shower, just before sleep descends, getting lost in Amitav Ghosh, on my daily late-morning walks. Where the thought keeps coming from, I cannot tell, but it has visited with regularity, I would hang my head down in the shower, pray for the water to wash away the recurring thought. I have known this bastard thing will one day come knocking on my door, but with its arrival, I cannot believe it’s happening.

Post-surgery in the highlands of Thailand, 2019.

Then, it rises out of the deep, dark well, fighting to climb over the edge — I have to be strong. This is my fight. Nobody else can do this for me. There are children here. Your children. Your wife. You have a reason to fight. You have purpose. I accept the fact of the trajectory of the vile expectation that began its course several years back. I am back in survival mode. Again, I remind myself: It’s OK that you’re terrified. It’s normal. It’s human. Use the fear. Turn it into energy. Fight. Do something about it. Wallowing in fear and sadness is no help at all.

Back home with Helen, Ben and Sara, I feel like I am watching myself. I’m thinking, I should be in shock, locked away in my room upstairs. Instead, a peace keeps resurfacing, breaking through the waves of despair. There is the strangest relief as my imagination becomes more and more tangible. I can feel what I am thinking. The fear, the despair that can demolish a soul, diminishes. I capture and revisit the thought that I have always expected this, feared the imminent visit, and I find solace in the idea that cancer is no longer a threat. I don’t have to live in fear, doubt and not knowing any more. I’m staring the illness in the face. You’ve arrived, you’re here, let’s get on with it. Now, at last, I can fight. Suspending disbelief is so hard as these thoughts swirl. I’m accepting it. The peace builds. What IS this?

Helen’s phone rings. It’s David, calling from his flat in Pinner, London. I can hear him on the phone-speaker, because it’s FaceTime, his preferred mode of keeping in touch. “Dad called. I just saw the ‘missed call’. We were both asleep.” He’s referring to Natalie, his fiancée. I want to tell him not to worry. Helen starts to tell him, and then decides it’s better to pass the phone to me.“Look, I’m really sorry to tell you like this, but you have to know. I’ve just been to see Magar. He thinks I have cancer. It’s the pancreas. He says it’s been found very early, and I’m lucky. Right now, I’m just holding on to that. There really is not much more I can tell you. Look, I can’t talk much more.” Then, I really believe it as I add, “The one thought I want to leave you with before I hand you back to Mum is this, I will be OK. OK? You heard me? I will be OK. Well… bye for now.”

*****

Hindsight is 20-20. Looking back now, it’s so clear. I had surrendered. Powerless in the face of this most unwelcome visitor, I give up to a higher power. It is not a matter of choosing what to do, how to do it. There is no choice in the matter. I have totally lost control of my life, of how to live. It doesn't matter. I am going through the motions, a puppet on a string, no longer in charge. 

Surrender is a place full of comfort, the embrace of an assurance that, no matter what may soon unfold, I will be OK. I have come a thousand miles in the blink of an eye. In the old place, I retreat into fatalism every time things don’t work out as I have wanted. It’s easier — blame it all on something else. Cut all comms. Leave me alone. You don’t understand.

Instead. There is no thinking about it. It just happens. I become a new person and I am in a new place. I have fallen, and my life has fallen into the hands of God. I do not need to ask, What do I do? What is your plan? It’s a master-servant thing, total surrender. Surrender into freedom, peace, turn myself into nothing, and at the same time, a sense of self bigger than anything I have ever felt.

“What IS this?” is still ringing, but it is a calmer voice. The cold is going, the insides that were shaking are slowly settling down. All those prayers you learn by rote when you’re raised a Catholic flare into life. I see myself as a microdot in a grand design I no longer have to wonder about.

Not having to wonder is wondrous. In reducing myself to this tiny pinpoint in a universe, I am bigger than I have ever been. I give up and I am free. I put my life in the hands of God and it doesn't matter anymore that I have no control over it. We say, God moves in mysterious ways. Well, God also speaks in mysterious ways. Thing is, you don’t have to be able to hear a voice. All of it comes down to one thing. Belief. And in believing, a tremendous weight is lifted off my shoulders.

The burden is mine no longer. There is fear beyond the sadness, and that’s OK. Death becomes the next big production that follows birth. When I die, God will walk with me. I know that, and it is a comforting truth. Ashes to ashes. No big deal. It happens, man. You’ve seen it before. The dice has rolled. This time it’s you. You saw it coming. Now it’s here. Accept it.

In the midst of the worst predicament I have ever had to face, everything is taken out of my hands, and the belief that it will be all right, no matter what, is an indescribable relief. It just fills me up and gives me the strength to put one foot in front of the other. Move on.

I am a character in a play, and a teleprompter tells me what to do, how to do it, what to say. It is a new stage. I am just reading my lines.

Stratford-upon-Avon, December 2012

Chapter 8: LSS 72

IT’S STILL that Thursday. Sara and Ben have retreated to their rooms upstairs. Helen and I are in the kitchen. She is washing up, beginning to prepare dinner. Everything has to be like normal. Words are few. Helen and I fall naturally into this. This is what has kept us inviolable in the worst of times, comfortably content and happy in better days. We are survivors. The unvoiced agreement is, life must go on.

Neither of us has been the type to cry “help”. We will both move out of this mode in different ways, because of my illness, and we will both find great sustenance in the change. On this day, I am desperate to reach out. For 20 years in Sydney, there have been very few friends, compared to the happy parade back home. Outside of Helen and the kids, my entire Sydney family comes from Helen’s side, and there already is a great, pervasive sadness among them. The friends I have made in Sydney are dear to me. But I simply cannot tap into them, or Helen’s family, for what I need. Not now, at this moment. Now, I need my history, the people I grew up with. I need to tell my people, put out an SOS, tell them I am in deep trouble. I need my people, desperately. Simple as that. I want them to reach out across the seas, put their hand on my shoulder, look into my eyes and see the sadness, the desperation, the tears being held back, queue up to each give me a big, long hug. I want the comfort of their caring, their love, their  wishing a way out for me, the best medicine possible, their prayers for a miracle. I need to stand naked before my oldest friends and family. I am needy. I am not too proud to beg.

Jerry Chong, bless his soul, years ago put together a WhatsApp group, made up of friends who have been together since 1963. We are all classmates from the very first year of schooling at La Salle, Sentul. The chat group is named LSS 72, for the school and the year we graduated, at the end of Form 3, the ninth year of school. We have studied and played and fought and loved together from the age of seven.

LSS 1972: Bala, Jerry and I are the front row, from left.
Behind us are Zul and Ho Pang Yee.

For the last two years at LSS, Jerry was head prefect and I was deputy. Another very close pal, Bala, was the school librarian. The three of us were as close-knit as you can get. 

Some of us have kept in touch as adults, into working life and marriage. We have not met often, but the bond is forever. No trip back to KL can feel complete, fulfilling, without a couple of sessions with LSS 72 at Backyard, a lovely watering hole in KL that Jerry co-owns and manages with a consummate, natural ability. After midnight, the mike and stage are always open to me to sing a few songs if I want to, and my former classmates are a ready, embracing, appreciative audience. It is a beautiful sound, when I pick a song I know they know, and so many loud, hearty, happy, lusty male voices join me on the chorus. No trip may feel complete without Jerry, Bala and I — along with Guna, three years our senior, who has made himself the fourth musketeer — meeting up separately for lunch or dinner. A extra special single malt or tequila from Jerry’s private collection is always around.

  Post-op with (from left) Guna, Bala and Jerry;
  Kuala Lumpur, 2019.

These are the people before whom I am secretly planning to spill my guts. They will hear me, they will be there for me. Helen has chosen to focus, single minded, on the kind of dinner I have grown accustomed to — meat, veggie, steaming rice, sliced chilli padi. I don’t tell her that, in my head, I am composing a message LSS 72. I know it will be a salve.

When I look back on these moments, when I commit to actions not normal for me, which seem to just fall into place naturally, I see the new normal that overtook me long before COVID-19. More importantly, I see another segment in the design, beyond my will, that opens up just ahead of every new step I will take.

I tell my LSS 72 friends about diagnosis, early discovery, major surgery in the next seven days. I tell them I am strong. I have Sentul in my blood, just like them. That God is on my side. Whatever happens, it’s been a good run. I tell them I will fight this and I know they will pray for me and my family. That I will leave the chat group some time in the night to follow. I will keep Jerry posted, and he will share everything with the group. Goodbye is left unsaid.

The childhood friends I grew up with, played a hundred games with, discovered girls with, take their rightful place as my immediate, unquestioning, loyal support system. My past reaches out to me in this new future. The support comes flooding in. I don’t know what they’re really thinking back home. I am not the first to take a punch to the guts like this. There have been others, different illnesses. “Willie, we’ve got you, man,” one of them writes back. The heart lifts in the madness.

With my LSS friends in 2017; from left are
me, Renaldo, Johnson and Jerry.

It helps to be able to talk freely. These are friends from when I was very young. Our shared history affords a rare intimacy for me, out here in Sydney. Their messages to me are like anxiety tablets. These guys are veterans at this. They’ve been through this before, they know what to say, and they mean it. One guy even asks, “How are you for money?” Straight out. To the point. Direct. Get to the important stuff. Like best friends do.

We’re Sentul. We know how to roll with it. Until it hits you, of course. Then you know there has never been a guidebook. But that’s OK. Your friends are with you, but you’re alone. Neither truth is cancelled out by the contradiction.

The next points of contact are just as important, and part of another chat group, Angammah Central, my first cousins. “Angammah” is a Malayalee term that refers to a person predisposed to the particularly dramatic, prone to emotional exaggeration and making Everest out of an ant-hill. It’s quite apt, and easily understandable. Prone to exaggerate ourselves, we like to think it doesn’t apply to Malayalees like us. The group’s initials, AC, are also the initials of our grandfather, Dadda, or Mr Anthony Christostom Emmanuel. To say we wear it with pride is to say the sun coming through the window at 5.30 in the morning wakes most of us up.

I give AC a version of the note to my school friends. With my cousins, I become more Catholic. I know they will pray for me. I need to know they are praying for me. And the magic is, I don’t need to ask. This is what “family” is, this is why you can presume their love for you, why I will do the same if the situation were reversed, God forbid. I ask them to tell their parents, my uncles and aunties. AC is the only chat group I simply cannot leave. This is blood. In spades.

LSS lunch at Gem, Petaling Jaya in 2017,
pre-op — From left are Selva, Ben, Mohan,
Mazlin, Pirahaspathy, Andy Kana,
me and Dhilli.

After a while, I put the phone down. I have held it in my hand more than an hour, Helen tells me. I realise it also means I have been focusing on being sick. And it tires me. So, I walk away for a bit. I begin to think of the best distractions for me. Music. Food. Prayer. I don’t want to eat yet. Can’t think of anything I’d like to listen to. So I lie down on the sofa, close my eyes, pray. It only takes a few seconds, a few words of prayer, and the calm returns. I am starting to really see that I can do things for myself, to slow the racing heart, cool the mind, warm the body. Praying is so easy. I listen to my own words. All I ask for is strength, to face whatever is ahead.

I’ve read that receiving a diagnosis such as mine “is like being handed a new passport”. In my book, it’s a passport you never applied for. And much more. Hearing I have cancer is an entire bio-remake. It gets into your DNA. Here is a new name to add to William, Willie, Bill, Will, bloke, sailor, mate, chap. My body will never be the same. The most everyday things will be different. “Goodnight” fills with a new meaning.

The guy with the new passport believes there will always be fear. That’s natural. It’s another part of the human condition. Leave it be. Dormant. Ignore it. Open the heart and the mind and the soul to strength, belief, peace. Peace is an army, assembling at the front line.

I can sense myself change. It’s an inner strength, recharging, revitalising. I am reclaiming some territory of self-determination. The idea that I have some say in all of this has more than reared its head. I am actually deciding how I will take all this, roll with the punch, pick myself up, stand straight, throw back my shoulders. Little by little, my strength returns, along with confidence, belief. I shadow myself. The shadow is amazed the man does not break down, scream in despair, fall into a simpering heap. It sees a man accepting of fear, not meek because of it. The shadow sees a very private man has stood naked, and it has been good. The shadow sees calm, a growing sense of knowing.

LSS Pulau Langkawi bash, 2017: In the front row, from left, are Mazlin, Sokhdave,
Jerry, Noel, Felix and Francis; at back are Ratna, Siva, Woo, Johnson, Zahriman and I.