Spend, spend, spend or "You Can't Take it With You"

Goodbye Keanu my multiple myeloma story

My whole concept of the future had blown away as well. I didn’t have to worry about the next twenty years anymore. It was scary but freeing in an absurd way. War, meteorites hitting the earth, the rise in taxes, retirement savings, none of it mattered anymore. Greenhouse gases were no longer my concern. I was wiping my hands of disease, pestilence and poverty. When the envelope arrived asking for a donation to the cancer society I figured it was like donating to me, so I passed on it. Domestic jobs seemed a pointless waste of time as well. I had to keep the house clean of course, but why waste precious hours painting or decorating? Alex bought bricks to build a retaining wall in the garden. I smiled at his enthusiasm but in reality I thought it was a waste of money. Why spend the time building a retaining wall that a. takes time away from me and b. I won’t appreciate because I would have rather spent the money on disposable goods like a hot stone massage and dinner at my favorite restaurant.

      I became fanatical about leaving my affairs in order. I wanted things to be as easy for Alex as possible, at least in the first few months after I was gone. I worried that he wouldn’t remember to pay bills so I paid them as soon as they arrived. I cleaned out and sorted the filing cabinet so Alex could find anything he needed, all tagged, coded and in order. I got advice on making a will, something we had never done before, because we could never agree who would get the kids. On the form I listed all the expensive possessions including my car, my diamond ring and my computer. I decided the family could fight over the cheap jewellery, half-used cosmetics and five pairs of reading glasses scattered around the house. I got friends to witness the will and told Alex where it would be kept. That finished, I called the phone and utility companies to make sure they put Alex’s name on the accounts with mine. When Alex’s father died in England, his mother wanted to cancel their internet provider. His father’s name was the only one on the account and they asked to speak to him. My mother-in-law explained that he had passed over and wouldn’t be coming to the phone. But they insisted they couldn’t do anything with the account until they spoke to the account holder. In a sitcom it might be funny but in reality it was unnecessarily traumatic and I didn’t want to put him through that.

      The positive side for Alex was that I no longer cared about money. I had always shopped at bargain stores and used discount coupons. I always insisted on waiting until an appliance just about died before buying a new one. When Alex bought an expensive sub-woofer for our small lounge I made him return it. It wasn’t practical. But what difference did it make now? So even though our television still worked, I agreed to go look at new flat screen TVs. At first my old practical side kicked in and I wanted to make sure we got a good deal. Then when Alex asked me how much I wanted to spend I heard myself saying: “Now I don’t care” meaning, now that my life had been shortened why not spend the money? I’m dying so let’s get a big TV! We got a 52 inch screen. We almost couldn’t get it home. 

Watching TV itself went from meaningless to full of meaning. Every show seemed to have a story line where someone had cancer. I recorded a movie called My Sister’s Keeper. At the time I recorded it, I honestly didn’t know the storyline. It was about a girl who died from leukaemia. Normally I would cry a little at a sad film. This time I went through a whole box of tissues.  It was sad and strange that I was familiar with so many terms that they used in the film like HLA tests, stem cell transplants, GCSF injections and bone marrow biopsies. We rented some old episodes of Boston Legal and coincidentally a character had multiple myeloma. He wanted the stem cell blood from his child’s umbilical cord that they saved when he was born. When the character said multiple myeloma the first time, Alex looked at me and nodded, like these were my people. I hated that having cancer was now a club I unwittingly joined. Watching an episode of House or Grey’s Anatomy was never going to be the same.