We Live in Time

Photo: Still from We Live in Time

I must confess that I may have developed a taste for cancer porn.

Now, don't laugh. I say this flippantly, but as I move into the third year of being on the other side, I’ve become more and more drawn to watching movies about people - specifically women - grappling with cancer.

I mean, I guess it makes sense. There is now enough distance in my life from the visceral trauma that is cancer treatment to be able to dabble in consuming information about cancer again. There is distance, there has been time - but most importantly, together, these offer a seductive sense of safety. V and K, each in their own way, tell me that I’ve moved on from the season of survival to the season of thriving.

In the season of survival, the body and mind are consumed with only one goal: to get through this thing alive. To make it to the other side. The troops are rallied, and the focus is on this minute, then the next. But the season of thriving is different. The fight-or-flight mechanism has abated, to a large degree. There is safety, and with that, the capacity to slowly peel back the covers thrown over the harder-to-swallow bits- the real fears and the deep pain of the unknowns.

You're in the season of thriving, they remind me, as I lie slumped in my chair, eyes swollen, slightly hiccuping.

If I'm in my season of thriving, I croak, why do I feel so bloody lost?

This season of thriving has bloomed in several ways. I find myself moving at the speed of light towards everything. I feel voraciously hungry for something - though I’m not sure what. I am constantly seeking. Seeking, seeking. Cue the cancer porn - books or movies that depict the experiences of women who have been diagnosed with cancer. Stories that make me feel a little less alone as I navigate this life and answer the questions that keep haunting me. Stories of pain and hope, life and death, and suffering. Stories that, inadvertently, make me weep buckets - a cathartic process unto itself.

Which is why, on my first holiday in six months to the Maldives, I find myself sitting on the plane, choking on my phlegm while trying to blow my nose, as the closing credits of We Live in Time slowly roll across the screen.

===

I am thirty-four years old. So is Almut, the protagonist of We Live in Time, played by the luminescent Florence Pugh. There is something feral and wild and alive in Florence’s Almut - she is a Michelin-starred chef specialising in Anglo-Bavarian cuisine, used to be a star ice-skater (which we only learn about halfway through the film), and doesn’t really want to have children. She meets Tobias, a recently divorced, Weetabix guy (this is a running joke in the film), when she runs him over on the road one day. The film flashes through various vignettes of time as we begin to understand their relationship - and what happens to Almut.

In one pivotal scene, Almut has begun another round of treatment for relapsed ovarian cancer (we only find out much later how she was first diagnosed), and she has also secretly decided to participate in a prestigious culinary competition (“the Olympics of the culinary world”) - scheduled for the same day she’s supposed to marry Tobias. Almut begins to have a nosebleed just before her team is called onstage. She rushes into the toilet, pulling off her clothes and stuffing tissue up her nose. She’s gagging, pale, head recently shaved. As she sits on the toilet floor retching, her competition partner comes looking for her in the bathroom. Seeing her with a bruised arm and a bloody nose, the chef asks, “Are you using, Chef?” and Almut bursts into laughter.

Watching this scene, I burst into laughter too - because the absurdity of that situation is something I am familiar with. There you are, feeling like your body is breaking apart, and someone asks a question so left-field, so ludicrous, that you can’t do much but laugh.

You have to laugh - because the alternative is one long, keening cry that will never end. And sometimes, that just doesn’t cut it.

===

Almut and Tobias have a child, Ella.

Yes—Almut, who ended her previous relationship because she didn’t want children. We find out, through flashbacks, that when Almut is first diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she is given the option of a full hysterectomy. “They will remove everything, which obviously reduces the chances of recurrence,” she says, her eyes red as she discusses her options with Tobias. In the film, Tobias is a quieter character, a stabilising force to the hurricane that is Almut. He asks what she wants to do, and she haltingly replies, “I think I want to have the possibility of a future where you and I could possibly have children.” He doesn’t speak, but his eyes fill - because this is big, this is huge. And it is the possibility of irrevocable loss that seems to have pushed Almut in this direction.

We witness Almut go into remission, and go through round after round of IVF. I choke up here again, because I have been there. I have uttered similar words to P. I have told him that I’ve always felt ambivalent about children - an absolute heresy for an Indian woman of my age. Ambivalent, because I have always believed, as someone who has worked to mend the traumas of my own life, that to raise a child requires an unflinching commitment to continuous self-work. To ensure that the next generation does not suffer at the hands of intergenerational trauma. S has always said this is precisely why I would be a parent worth having - because I’d go into it with eyes wide open.

Still, I have remained ambivalent for a long time, and continue to swing on a pendulum of indecision. But P, my beloved P, has always wanted children. And I know, without a doubt, that he will be an incredible father. Not because he has miraculously healed from his own wounds - but because he has a capacity to nurture and nourish in ways I’ve seen very few people do.

Two weeks before I started chemotherapy, faced with the same decision as Almut, I said the same words - that I wanted the possibility of a future where we could be parents. And if that was the possibility I had to protect, then I would undergo the living hell that is fertility preservation.

Readers, we now have 12 embryos frozen and waiting somewhere in a lab - for the day if, when, we make a decision.

If, when.

===

Almut forgets to pick Ella up from school - she is too busy training for her secret competition. Things are not looking great: her first round of chemo has failed, and her cancer has metastasised. When she finally returns home, Tobias confronts her in rage, his voice breaking as he says he was “this close to calling every A&E.”

Almut confesses about the competition. Tobias crumples. He screams at her, asking how long she’s prioritised cooking over her health - why he and Ella are not enough. Almut yells back, saying she needs to be remembered for something other than being just a dead mum. Because she wants Ella, if she ever looks back at her childhood, to be proud. “I just don’t want to be forgotten,” she cries.

At this point, I have to pause the show. I cannot see the screen - I’m crying, hard. Because isn’t that the truth? Isn’t that the very thing that underpins my own life, the actions I’ve taken every day since I found out I had cancer? This impregnable fear that I will die before my time. That I will be forgotten.

My nose is blocked, and my heart feels like it is bursting as I repeat Almut’s words to myself: I just don’t want to be forgotten.

The sound of the plane’s engines drowns out my muttering.

===

A decade ago, I was at a spiritual retreat with a crazy guru whose teachings my family followed at the time. One thing he said has stayed with me: that most human fears stem from a root fear of death. The fear of death drives so many things - obsessive behaviours, greed, vices. Death is the great unknown, the final obliterator. When you really unpack your behaviours, he said, you’ll often find they lead to this root fear.

For a long time, I didn’t understand what he meant. I dismissed it as more of the hogwash he was known to spew.

But now, I suppose I understand it a little more. The fear of being forgotten is tied to the fear of death. To accept that life is a fragmented existence. That it may never mean anything at all, no matter how much importance we assign to ourselves and the journeys we’ve taken.

Almut’s fear was the fear of death, too - that in dying, her life would be erased. That it would disappear into the void. It is a legitimate fear, one I understand so deeply in my own travails on the other side.

I don’t know where I’m going with this - this essay, the cancer porn, the seeking, the doing. Sometimes I try not to think too much, because the only truth I have is this present moment - me, sitting on a plane, typing this out on my phone as I wait to land in the Maldives. Sometimes, I can’t help but be overcome by the utter fucking grief of this awakened human existence. This constant navigation of what it means to be here, what it means to be me. And how I may never really have an answer, after all.

My mother will say the answer is prayer. There is truth in that, because what is prayer, if not a cry to God, the universe, for something, anything? It’s the understanding and the humility that comes with confronting this fragile existence.

But I think there’s more to it. I think there is also power in action, in being. In making sure that however long or short we remain, we make it count. Perhaps not for ourselves - if we’re all to turn to dust anyway - but for those who come after. So that they walk a brighter path. No less thorny, but hopefully, one where they are more awakened.

Perhaps. I don’t know.

Anyway, don’t ask me what happens at the end of We Live in Time. It doesn’t matter.

Almut, Tobias, and Ella had each other till the very end.

That’s all you need to know.