David Gee on Cancer

This #WorldCancerDay, I want to share the words of my friend, David Gee, who recently died from #Cancer after being diagnosed last May.

David and I met while living just a few boats apart on the Oxford canal during the first lockdown of 2020. When I introduced myself, I spontaneously asked him—a complete stranger—to join a Bollywood dance workout on the towpath beside my boat. To my surprise, he immediately said, 'Yes'. That moment set the tone for our friendship.

We spent those strange, suspended months together—dancing, sharing stories, biking, swimming beneath the waxing gibbous moon, the rippling black water licked with silver, and living fully in a moment that now feels fleeting.

I've written a lot about David and that time, but today, I want to share his own words—specifically about Cancer. He personifies Cancer through a lens that is, at once, disarmingly straightforward, non-judgmental, intensely poetic, and quite challenging.

Our time on this generous earth is limited in 'clock time'. But through our words and stories, we can live on.

Below is an excerpt from one of the latest articles on his blog, 'Hope’s Work'. I encourage you to take some time and space to read his full piece, and especially 'III. Cancer, child', referenced below.

I assure you, it will be worth it.

'III. Cancer, child

I have heard it said that I’m battling cancer, even that I’m in a war with it, or at least that I’m trying to beat it, when that’s not how the disease feels to me at all. I know that some cancer patients find these martial metaphors helpful and I’m glad that they can be. For me, though, they sit ill with how cancer appears and how I experience it within me.

"When my friend Tim says that every human being is trying, with all due creativity, to survive in their own way, it occurs to me that this also holds for our every cell."

A cancer cell is in almost every way like any other. And just like a healthy cell, a cancerous one is so extraordinarily sophisticated as to resemble a person in its own right. I mean that, like you or me, cells demonstrably read their world, learn, adapt, even invent, and they evolve. Look within the membrane and you find something resembling a city, or a forest: a deeply crowded space, forever on the move, a masterpiece of internal synchrony. When my friend Tim says that every human being is trying, with all due creativity, to survive in their own way, it occurs to me that this also holds for our every cell. I see the genius of nature as pioneer, and I wonder at its adventurous innovation as the very secret to the evolution of the entire cornucopia of life, being and becoming itself over the aeons.

At the same time, the self-contained life of each healthy cell also participates in the life of the body as a whole, in a dynamic ecological balance with its neighbours. Healthy cells are such consummate team players, in fact, that if they think they’ve made some serious mistake they send certain proteins to the surface to plant themselves there like flags saying?Whoops. Along come the patrolling macrophages to register the facts, then the killer T-cells to recycle the errant pawn before it clones itself and causes trouble. Cancer begins the moment the immune system walks past the flag, or can’t find it because this particular wayward cell has forgotten to hoist it.

"Neither wilful nor mischievous, and certainly not malicious, the cell is still simply being itself, doing just what it was born to do, but now it enjoys dangerously free rein."

Then, that single cell does what all life tends towards: it divides, divides again, and proliferates. The prodigious talents of nature it carries within itself go rogue. Neither wilful nor mischievous, and certainly not malicious, the cell is still simply being itself, doing just what it was born to do, but now it enjoys dangerously free rein. The body has given birth to itself in a new way. It knows something is up but can’t find it. It now has a child in its midst and they’re hungry.

"I have a child, a wild one, within me... But its freewheeling ways bring havoc, and in the coming months my cancer child will bring an early end to its parent’s life."

Such is the physiology of cancer, as well as I understand it. And such also is how cancer feels to me in my body. I have a child, a wild one, within me. Like all children, this one is a beautiful, ingenious, I’ll dare even to say divine expression of its parent, and at the same time it’s ineluctably also now its own person, surviving in its own way, becoming itself. Certainly, and this feels important, nothing unnatural is happening in me, which is why this disease is so hard to treat: how to tell apart the body and its child when their natures are almost identical? But its freewheeling ways bring havoc, and in the coming months my cancer child will bring an early end to its parent’s life.

And so comes the paradox, because I do see an unnatural, alien invader in this picture. It’s not the cancer, it’s the chemotherapy. Synthetic, platinum-based compounds – literally liquid metal – and other genetic suppressants poison all the body’s cells the moment they begin to divide. The toxic cocktail just happen to catch cancer cells the most because they tend to divide the fastest. It’s a blunt coercion, and with it the martial metaphors return to me against my will. I violate my body to love it. Work that one out if you can, because it seems a hell of a fudge to me. I’ve spent my life believing in health and healing as an ecological phenomenon – an ongoing communion between the fullness of life within us and the fullness of life around us. Health – my own and that of wider world I share – is something to cultivate by intention, not bludgeon into being.

"I drink down the poison...[which] has lent me a little more life, as measured in clock time, and with it the joy of a few more months on this generous earth."

I drink the poison down all the same. Pass the cup. Its counter-natural?modus operandi?has disciplined my wild and natural child in ways that are harsh on child and parent alike. And yet this has lent me a little more life, as measured in clock time, and with it the joy of a few more months on this generous earth.'