Thursday 30th July

It’s amazing what you can learn by answering questions, sometimes. As opposed to asking them.

My students and I are working on a performance piece based around the blog. In preparation,  I was asked why I didn’t go for a reconstruction. Turns out (as I found out by trying to formulate the answer), that there is not a simple answer to the question. I had to think through what had happened to recount the process and to arrive at the reason/s.

There is so much in life that does not have a simple answer. Of course, sometimes it is simply a matter of ‘chicken or fish’, but much of the time the answers to questions seem to be multi-layered; and even multi-dimensional.

With the reconstruction thing, it could so easily be explained by the fact that my body started rejecting the tissue expander. There was so much more to it, though, much of which I can’t remember in detail. I had to really think through the process to try to arrive at an explanation that worked as a comprehensive answer to the question.

It’s funny how time and distance do that to memory: you can know what happened in broad strokes, but it is the details that often elude us after a while. At the time, though, it is those details that seem to occupy the mind and drive the whole process.

Time can also be an alienating process. I know that I don’t feel as strongly now about a lot of things I have felt very keenly during the cancer thing, mainly because I am no longer living through them directly.

Time can, of course, also be an immensely healing entity. I still miss Mum very, very much. I am still devastated by her loss. More than a year later, though, it is mostly somehow not as debilitating a feeling as it was closer to her passing.

It is true to say that time blunts the edge of things. It cannot take them away, though.

I suppose the short answer to the reconstruction thing is that it just wasn’t the right thing at the time. As I go along, I don’t think there will ever be a correct time and it is something I just won’t do because I don’t have to 🙂