People tell me they admire my strength
because of my posts about Ms T and I, both here and on Twitter.
It's not strength, it's just life.
“Here's what happened: deal with it.”
And I'm now going to retreat into what
a writer does if he's a coward, and call upon metaphor. "Deal" is the keyword.
I don't have many obsessions. I did,
once, but they get shed, one by one, when reality becomes too
pressing. But I have protected one thing that reconnects Richard in
2013 with Richard of 1970.
I play cards in a world that's slowly
forgetting how. My game is Five Hundred. Since there are so few
real-life card-playing people, I play my games online, sometimes
against humans, sometimes against computers, never for money.
“If you need a particular
distribution of cards to exist, assume it exists. If it doesn't, you
weren't going to win anyway.” – This is a paraphrase of a line
delivered by a character called Vector Shaheed in the five-book epic
Sci-Fi “Gap Series” by Stephen Donaldson.
In Five Hundred, it's advice that
works. I can have a week without losing a single game, and on a good
day, I can win a game without losing a single hand. I've sometimes
wondered about dollars, but no: the game I can reliably win at doesn't have any
significant play-for-money community, online or off. Oh well.
But it really does work: I can
construct my bids (six hearts, seven hearts, misere, whatever) around
the assumption that everyone else has the cards I need them to hold,
and I can outplay them if I'm wrong.
Then it goes wrong, and I'll lose
for weeks at a time. That's just how probability works. Sometimes,
all the distributions run wrong.
Out in life, I can't just ignore it
when the cards shuffle badly. But the only way out of the forest (to
swap metaphors for a moment) is to keep going. Keep shuffling, keep
dealing, keep bidding, and wait for the win.
The wins happen. They really do. At the
moment, if I sound down, it's merely because three years of
broadsides have left me (probably clinically) depressed. But the
objective part of my mind can count off the wins.
Ms T will soon move to three-monthly
chemo. That hints at a new balance in the war of attrition between
cytotoxins and the immune system that's trying to kill her. And it's
a huge win: it means there might be six week stretches in 2014 when
she's suffering no side effects of cyclophosphamide.
After eighteen months, she's broken
through the pain specialists' waiting lists. If that gets results,
2014 could see us bushwalking together again. I don't hold her hand
over rocks or steps because she needs me to; I do it because I like
it better that way. To hand her down the Den Fenella (a small walk in
Wentworth Falls that was laid out by someone with soul and a taste
for drama) would be beyond price. It's our own, personal, her-and-me
pilgrimage and it's been three years since we walked it.
Death, right now, seems less imminent
and more distant. We both know the cold equations will take her
from me, but not now. Since
she's shy four major and two minor arteries, this is a big plus.
But
none of these things represent strength. To me, strength is exampled by someone like Nelson Mandela: not because he was a saint
all his life (read the bio), but because he chose to assume burdens
that he could have ignored. Mandela could have done as I do, and
devoted himself only to the small struggles of his own life.
I wish
I was strong. I wish I could take my struggles and build out of them
something that changed the world. But I cannot: I'm too small, and
too devoted to the heart that beats next to my own. I can't be away from Ms
T to fight larger battles, because keeping her alive and holding her
is more important to me than the world outside.
Which
makes me not strong, but selfish, and I don't mind it if you tell me
so.
Where I can devote my strength, I will. But most of my thew and
sinew, my mud and muscle, my heart and soul, I have promised to the
small and simple, because in 1991 I stood in front of a wedding and
made my promise.
I will
carry my love to the grave. Deal me the bad hand, I'll play it to my
best and hope I can squeeze a win from the rest of the world.
