Blossomest Blossom

By Queer and Bookish

Content notes: death, family

My only sibling, in his early forties, has untreatable advanced cancer. He has a life expectancy

of about eighteen months.

The embroidered quotation is from an interview the playwright Dennis Potter gave in 1994,

when Potter was dying of cancer. As a young teenager at the time, with a mum who was also

terminally ill with cancer, I found this interview especially poignant.

Now, as I contemplate losing my brother in the not-distant future, I am reminded of this again. I

love my brother dearly, though we live hundreds of miles apart and can be sporadic about

communicating. Without living parents, grandparents, etc., we're the only ones left to share our

deeply textured childhood memories. I marvel at and admire the person he has become and

am deeply grateful we are friends. Life is amazing, and fragile, and fleeting - Potter's interview

illuminated that to me nearly thirty years ago - and yet I can't fully express how still not okay it

is that my brother's life on earth will, now, end sooner rather than later.

I always expected to be the one to get cancer at the same age as our mum, not him. In many

ways I have previously lived more closely with death than my brother, yet he, with his young

family, is the one now thrust into the nowness of now: this or next year’s blossom may be his

last, he'll not see his children through their teens and onward, what remains is both ephermeral

and everything that there is, all that will be. And all I can do is try my best to stay alongside him

in wonder, sadness, gratitude, futile rage, helplessness, and love.