It’s a quarter to eight on a pitch-black morning in the middle of a January weather warning, where the forecast high is −30°C and the windchill is −40°C. Perhaps it’s no small wonder that in the cold and the dark I’m thinking about death.
I pull into the parking lot, turn off the engine and take a moment in the car to brace myself—not wanting to leave the heated seat. But if I’m honest, I’m also less than keen to keep this appointment.
It’s time for my mammogram.
Actually, that’s a lie.
It’s way past time for my mammogram. The last one was in 2019, before the pandemic began. And for several years now I’ve used the threat of COVID-19 as an excuse to put off this procedure. When that excuse got too stale to sustain, I blamed my Senate travel schedule and the amount of time I needed to be in Ottawa. But the Senate doesn’t sit in January, and today I’m out of excuses.
A lot of women find mammograms incredibly uncomfortable or terribly embarrassing. That’s never been my issue. Sure, it’s not delightful to have your bosoms squeezed flat between the scanner plates. But I’ve never found it particularly painful or humiliating.
I’ll admit it. I don’t like to go for my regular mammogram because I don’t like confronting my own mortality. It’s absurd, I know. The whole point of cancer screening is to save lives. I know this rationally. If I did have breast cancer, I’d have a better chance of fighting it if it were caught early. I know that I’m blessed to live in a time and place where such tests are free and readily available. But all the rational thought in the world doesn’t help me fight down the frisson of terror I always feel at the thought of going into the scanner—the fear that this time the news will be as dark as the January morning.
In 2010 I was diagnosed with an entirely different type of cancer, a very treatable one. With surgery and radiation, my prognosis was good. Yet the word cancer was daunting. One night, not long before my surgery, I was lying in bed, unable to sleep. I told myself sternly not to worry, that this cancer wouldn’t kill me. That was indeed a comfort. Until another thought pierced my brain. “Sure, this cancer won’t kill you. But something will.”
Watching a person die, seeing and hearing them draw that last breath, is an extraordinary experience.
Up until that very minute, I’m not sure I’d ever accepted the reality of my own mortality. I worked as a journalist. I’d reported on murders and plane crashes, drug overdoses and suicides, all sorts of fatal tragedies. Perhaps that gave me a false sense that death was unusual and newsworthy, something that happened to other people, to people who’d been unlucky or made mistakes.
But in that moment I realized that of course I would die—and that my story would be over.
Since then, I’ve had the bittersweet dark fortune to be present at the deaths of my father, my mother and, most recently, my mother-in-law—to bear witness to the very split second when their life force left their bodies to go… who knows where?
I am not a religious person. I don’t believe in any kind of life after death. And yet. Watching a person die, seeing and hearing them draw that last breath, is an extraordinary experience. Nothing could be more gritty and harsh and real. There is nothing numinous or transcendent about it. At the same time, though, there is something strangely mysterious. What made them alive? What gave them consciousness? Was it all just a matter of electrical signals and chemical reactions? Or was there something more? How could this person, this individual of such power and unique personality, this vibrant soul, just be gone?
For my mother-in-law, a devout Anglican, a practising and practical Christian, the answer was obvious. She believed in a God and a heaven. Assuming she was correct, then she is surely there now, for few people I’ve known in this world were ever more quietly deserving of eternal reward.
But I can’t bring myself to make or take Pascal’s wager, to hedge my bets by choosing to believe in God and an afterlife, just in case. When my time comes, I’m pretty sure I’ll just be gone, with only my words in the Senate’s Hansard records, or in the digital archives of various publications for which I’ve written, to give me a temporal immortality, to be an imperfect record of my life in this place. To let me speak to readers across the years, when my true voice is silenced. And I remind myself that even this temporary form of immortality is more than most mortals get—and that I should consider it a gift.
So. I squelch my fear and self-pity. I go into the clinic, shrug off my warmest winter coat, and slip instead into my little pink medical gown. Open to the front. Ready to face whatever comes next, boobs to the fore. Grateful for the certain hope of spring to come. Even if it still feels a lifetime away.
Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.
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