2021-some reflections
01 January 2022
Sadie Windmill
I have been lucky that since my third cancer diagnosis, Leukaemia Care have offered me some counselling sessions. I didn’t think I needed them but I have found a lovely counsellor and have enjoyed chatting and found it really helpful. She gave me a book to read called, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, by Victore Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. In the book, he looks back on his experience in the camp, through the eyes of a psychologist.
He felt that even in such a horrific place as a concentration camp, hope can always be found, and those that couldn’t find hope or some kind of purpose gave up very quickly and saw no point in carrying on. He said that the sudden loss of hope and courage affected the immunity of the body and had a deadly effect. For him, he found special moments- a two minute break when the guard wasn’t looking or when he was last in the soup queue and got a potato from the bottom of the pot. He even found joy in being in the sick bay full of typhus patients as it gave him a day off from digging. It amazes me that in such dreadful conditions, people would still sing or quote poetry to support each other. Last night I was disheartened to hear lots of people say that they couldn’t wait to end 2021 and start a New Year. I think they will be disappointed to find that it is just another day and very much the same. That’s why there are sadly so many suicides in January. As Worsel Gummidge would say, there was a lot of ‘mumble grumbles’ going on. People hadn’t been able to travel, they hadn’t been abroad, nightclubs had been shut, their liberties had been squashed and they couldn’t celebrate New Year the way they wanted. It was the people who had endured real hardships in 202I that we didn’t hear moaning.
We personally started 2021 shielding and have ended it being very careful again, but there has been so much hope and joy in between. Christmas alone has been magical. On Christmas Eve, we walked along the coast at Whitby and ended up in Beck Hole on the moors. There is a little pub there, which is no bigger than your living room, with a roaring log fire. Magically, no one was there, so we sat with a glass of Porter and a bag of scratchings letting the fire warm our bones from all the sea air. We had a video call with Carol and Bernie in America and had a real hoot at Carol’s singing tree, but were envious when they showed us all their snow. We spent Christmas Day with friends Paula and Dave, and Boxing Day with Kate. It was so lovely being social in a way we could only have dreamt of a year before. Thank you to the inventors of for the Lateral Flow Test, without which we would have felt a lot less confident.
Viktore Frankl felt that no matter what you are going through, there is so much beauty in art and nature that should be admired. He recollects a memory of men, including himself, digging a pit in freezing condition, which would be filled with the dead bodies of friends and fellow prisoners. Yet, even in that moment, everyone stopped for a second to watch the most spectacular sunset. I think this year has been full of beauty - deer wandering in the roads due to lockdown traffic levels, goats coming down from the hills and wandering the streets of Wales and the silence that we experienced from so little transportation. We personally, have seen more dolphins than ever before, as well as rainbows and seals, and of course without Covid we would not have travelled to the white sandy beaches of the Scillies.
Another weapon Viktore used to survive was humour. He believed that it is another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self preservation. He argues to see things with a humorous light is a trick learnt whilst mastering the art of living. Viktore laughed with his fellow prisoners, about (when they got back to the ‘real’ world) what their hostess would make of them fighting for the last dunk in the soup pot when invited out for dinner. In the last year we have seen Tik tok videos of front line workers making light of a situation which otherwise would have been unbearable. On our street we had fire pit parties. One night in the first lockdown , huddled round the fire with a glass of wine and slice of pizza, on a cold February night, we heard a siren in the village. You have never seen 6 adults run back to their own houses so quickly. If the police had been coming for us we would have been easy to spot as all you could here was us giggling from our respective gardens.
Viktore strongly believed that when people are going through a particularly difficult time, they experience an intensification of inner life. Things take on more meaning. He felt that minor events of the past took on a glorified existence. He spent hours imagining answering the phone again, or opening his front door when someone knocked. In lockdown, we all imagined seeing family and friends again. Jules and I thought about our first trip again on the boat and where we would go. This summer I remember standing at the bus station in Jersey about to get on the bus to the other side of the island, and having tears in my eyes that we were doing something so ‘normal’. The reality lived up to the dream.
I know that it is having a cancer diagnosis that intensifies my joy of life. It makes me smile over the little things and makes me want to hold on to Jules and the dogs and never let them go. I began 2021 worrying that my cancer had come back, and I ended it happy that the tumours in my neck weren’t big enough to be blocking my windpipe! I try to see every day as a beautiful gift. Viktore felt that suffering fills the conscious mind and soul, no matter how big or small it is. “ The ‘size’ of suffering is irrelevant, it is like the gas in the gas chamber, it will expand to fill the space”. He urged his fellow prisoners to find joy. He recalls a bunch of emaciated men jumping for joy when their train dropped them off at a new camp when they heard there was no gas chamber there. One of the men went missing, and the rest had to stand outside all night on roll call, but no one died. He believed that their joy of not going to the gas chamber carried them through the cold winter night.
My hope for 2022 is of course a miracle cure for Covid and for cancer, but I also hope that more people can find joy in their lives. As Nietzsche said, “he who has a WHY to life, can bear with almost any HOW”.