THE BIG GIANT FOOT

I used to read about a flood in Thailand or a car bomb in Iraq with a remote indifference. Not that I wasn’t horrified but I wasn’t personally involved. Now I was. I sat up until 4am drinking whisky and reading tragic news stories online.  Instead of a cursory “oh what a shame” when there was a story of a fire, or an accident or murder, I took special note of those who died like I had been personally tied to each and every one. I thought about their ages, their jobs, their ambitions and their families. Every death affected me deeply. I had never really thought about it before but it was shocking to think how many people died every day. All those victims were part of someone’s family and all those families were in mourning. It was horribly sad. I wanted to get a notebook and write their names down. I thought if I remembered them, I could somehow give their life further meaning. But I knew that would make me look a little psychotic.

      A particular story grabbed my attention. Shortly after giving birth to a baby boy, a 35-year-old woman was diagnosed with breast cancer. By the time her son was two-years-old she had been given only weeks to live. She said she had been angry for a long time but then she thought of what she had already accomplished in life. She had a loving partner, a beautiful son and wonderful friends. She was telling herself that she already had it all so it was okay to die. She had found dignified acceptance. She had rationalized that what was happening to her was somehow fair. It was uplifting and horrifying at the same time. I wanted to grab her and shout:

      “It’s not okay. It’s totally unfair. You are so unlucky. Why you?”

      But I was impressed by her for being so reasonable. In a way she was right. Instead of living to the age of 35, she could have been killed in a car accident when she was say, twelve. Then she would never have met her husband nor had her lovely son. She was right to look at what she had attained, instead of what she wouldn’t finish. So was she actually lucky?

      I started to think a lot about luck. About four people out of 10,000,000 in Europe get plasma cell leukemia each year. With those odds, you’d have to call me pretty damn unlucky. If you asked me I would say I had always been an unlucky person. I had gotten close but never really been the star of my own life. If success is the centre of an archery target, my life was in the next circle out. I could see success, I could feel it, and occasionally I dipped my toe in it but I never got a bull’s eye. It was a frustrating way to live. I have been waiting my whole life for my life to start. Now I was dying and I was still anticipating the moment when the starting gun would go off.

      I always lost at board games and card games. Alex said it was because I didn’t believe I would win. There’s a proverb that says: No one is luckier than him who believes in his luck. Alex always believed in his luck. But I could never understand how having negative thoughts could influence the roll of the dice. Alex rolled sixes when I rolled ones. How could I control that? Wasn’t that just blind luck?

      I had never been a risk-taker and I’m sure people would tell me that was the source of my failures. I know big risks can lead to big rewards. But when I never got a good roll of the dice in a board game, it was hard to justify rolling the dice that would profoundly affect my life. That kind of thinking always made me cautious and always held me back. But certainly you had to be lucky to take big risks didn’t you?

         I compared my luck to others. Every time I heard a story of some fisherman getting swept off the rocks or some guy getting killed in a bar brawl, I thought well, at least I’m luckier than that poor bastard. I thought about the 35-year-old woman who died of breast cancer and considered that I was lucky that I had seen my daughters grow into their twenties. I’m lucky that my husband is such a good provider I was able to quit my job to look after myself. We have good friends and a nice home and I have a million wonderful memories that I treasure. So instead of being inherently unlucky, I had to compromise my thinking. I was luckier than some other people.

      This led to a complete reversal of my conception of luck. In fact maybe this was my lucky time. Maybe all of the unluckiness I had known would fade in the wake of the luckiest moment of my life – that I would survive this cancer.

      Perhaps I was exaggerating the importance of my own luck. I started to consider that being sick might have nothing to do with my luck. It might just be that I was a pawn in someone else’s luck, like an extra in a TV show. I might simply be part of my mother’s bad luck. Now she had two sick children. Or maybe I was part of someone else’s good luck. It could be that when I was forced to leave my day care job someone who needed it more was hired. Or perhaps there is a woman out there who, like Camilla Parker-Bowles, has been waiting for twenty-six years for me to expire so she can marry my husband. I might be part of her very good luck. She won’t have to wait much longer.

      Or is luck just another word for fate? Is our path laid out before us from the moment we draw our first breath? In the short story “The Monkey’s Paw” by WW Jacobs, the White family obtains a magical monkey’s paw which will make three wishes come true. Their first wish is for 200 pounds to pay the mortgage. A man comes to the door to tell them their only son Herbert has been mangled in machinery at work and is dead. Their compensation is 200 pounds. They bury their son and a week later Mrs White insists they use the paw to bring him back to life. Soon there is a knock at the door. But Mr White is so afraid of what they will see he quickly uses up the last wish and when they open the door there is nothing there. Did the monkey’s paw change their luck or was it always Herbert’s fate to die the way he did? Is the expression “be careful what you wish for” legitimate because we can influence our journey or is it all just coincidence?

      In 2011, before I knew I was sick, I had already decided that I didn’t want to work in day care anymore. I wanted to take time out to write. In 2012 the girls would both be out of the house for the first time and I’d be on my own so it would be the perfect opportunity. If only I had an excuse for not going out to work. Then I got cancer. My illness ironically gave me the time I wished for. But was it good luck or bad luck that I had to quit my job because of my illness? Coincidence or fate?

      It was mind-boggling so in the end I decided there was no such thing as luck. There was just randomness. To counteract randomness there was religion. Religion said there had to be a plan, there must be. Otherwise what was all the suffering for? But I had come to the conclusion it was for nothing. The cosmic BIG GIANT FOOT determined everything.  The path the BIG GIANT FOOT took was without meaning, without direction, without reason. It just was. You would either be stepped on today or you got another chance tomorrow but eventually you would be stepped on and there wasn’t a hell of lot you could do about it. It didn’t matter who I was or what contribution I had made to the world. It didn’t make any difference to the BIG GIANT FOOT whether I was here tomorrow or not. It was purely, utterly, frustratingly, totally random. Floods, hurricanes, car accidents and disease, all of it reminded me we were just ants. We were ants humping the weight of the world on our backs not knowing when the cosmic BIG GIANT FOOT was going to step on us.

      After I got over the frustration of it, the randomness of the universe and our complete lack of ability to predict or steer the giant foot gave me comfort. We were all equal under it. You might have millions of dollars or you might be a small child in Afghanistan but you never knew where the giant foot would land that day. So it was my turn. It almost made me laugh, like it was some great cosmic joke. If I had made different moves or if the celestial furry dice had come up with different numbers I might have missed the foot for years. Who knows? Who’s laughing? God? The giant foot? Me?

      I had the BIG GIANT FOOT revelation at about 3.45am in the living room while reading a newspaper. At 4am Alex opened the door and asked if I was alright. I was slightly annoyed. He had interrupted me discovering the secret of the universe. I said I was fine and he went back to bed. I stayed awake and got drunk. It stopped me thinking about my disease. It stopped me thinking about the randomness of life and it stopped me thinking about being unlucky. The BIG GIANT FOOT would step over me tonight that I knew. But it was all I knew. In the universe I was nothing. I was just a vessel, a little pissed and on its way to sleep.