A Glimpse of Fiction

A Dream Lies Dead

When I was younger, somebody told me I should always have a dream, something I should aspire to do. Since that day, I always had a dream.

When I was four, I wanted to become a princess.

When I was six, I wanted my mum to be okay again.

When I was seven, I wanted to be a doctor.

When I was eight, I wanted to make my daddy stop crying.

When I was eleven, I wanted to find a cure for cancer.

When I was thirteen, I just wanted my mum to live.

Now, at fourteen, a dream lies dead.

~

Cancer. Nobody likes cancer, yet it still roams among us in our daily lives; it kills our loved ones. It's an incurable disease that has the power to torture families more than any war or political disagreement ever could. It has authority that outnumbers that of any government or monarchy and strength that no army could ever defeat.

Cancer is unstoppable and for years I had a dream just to try and stop it from taking the one woman that meant everything to me - my mother. And that dream lasted six years. Six whole years of pain and torture, struggle for everyone. It pushed our family to the limits, tore us apart and in the end it left us shattered.

I heard this song once. It was playing in the hospital waiting room where I was waiting while my mum had litres of harmful chemicals pumped into her. But it was the lyrics to that song stuck in my head: "Have we been seeing the world through a piece of shattered glass, 'cause something so beautiful can fall apart so fast."

Our family was perfect. There was only four of us: my mum, my dad, me and my brother. We were close, much closer than most people are now, even before the dark days. Our perfect life was quickly destroyed after my brother's fourth birthday.

I remember it well. My mum had been feeling nauseous constantly, as well as feeling tired. She'd thought it was stress-related but after a visit to the doctor, it was confirmed as cancerous activity in her brain. Within weeks of finding out, she was underway with treatment and chemotherapy, trying to slow the spread of the cancerous cells to any other place in the body. It looked promising, but the doctors were too late.

The tumour in her brain was in an inoperable place, and the therapy was doing nothing to prevent it from spreading. She was given twelve to eighteen months to live, and for her time was ticking down unless there was some miracle.

I was eight and then, when her health was deteriorating, the doctors offered her an opportunity to trial a new medicine. It could only have helped her and her body was so weak that any drug that could fight the disease was being pumped into her.

That was her miracle. The drug miraculously managed to control the tumour size and prevent it from spreading. She was definitely not NEC but she had a few more years, and with chemo it was dearly definite that she would live through it.

We still took precautions: no extreme events or plane rides, we lived each day as if there was no tomorrow because we didn't know if there would be. The drug was being trialled and could give up on us at any point. We lived on a knife's edge for so long.

We lived on that knife's edge, the blade, for over three years. After 42 long months of the miracle drug that my mum had been testing, it gave up. No one ever said enough about it but I think my mum's body just gave up on the medication and rejected it. Once again, there was no treatment. The tumour grew and started spreading, mainly into her lungs and around her heart, but it was the one in the brain that would kill her. She was given less than twelve months to live. I was told that my mum wouldn't even live to see me become a teenager.

I couldn't even comprehend what I was thinking when she told me that. I was only 12 and I was being told that my mum would even live a year to see me turn 13. So, in that year, I grew away from all my friends and at school, I excluded myself from everyone. Especially the people who kept asking questions. I spent all my time out of school by my mum's hospital bed; when she was discharged and sent home, by her bedside. My friends could wait, but my time with my mum couldn't and as a result that took priority. It took over my life completely.

I never felt so amazed that she actually lived to see me turn 13, but we knew that she was fragile and extremely weak. She came to my party which I had organised with a few of my friends (ones I had kept brief contact with) and even baked me a cake. I think that day is my favourite one in my memories.

She didn't have long after that and in her worst state I never left her. I would want to say more about those times but hid them away in the vaults of my memories: somewhere safe. Even now, a year on, I don't think I could bring myself to find them and remember them; I'd break down and end up sobbing.

~

It's all the fault of cancer, and it's the biggest reason I want to become a scientist. I want to devote my life to finding the drug that could have cured my mum, and put it to use in other patients - to give them more time and help save them.

Cancer. I hate it. The power of thousands of armies, the authority of all leader and the destruction higher than a nuclear bomb. It's deadly, it's living and it's made of us. The saddest part of all of this, is that at the end of the day, you are fighting a losing battle against yourself. Everything that makes the cancer is provided by your body. You lose to yourself. It's not the cancer you're fighting, it's your own body and that's what makes it so heartbreaking. It's almost like suicide, only one you don't choose: your body does. It's deadly and terrifying because we don't even know if we can beat it. Maybe in the end we'll have to kill you before yourself takes you. That's what frightens me.

A fourteen year old girl, with a dead mother and a depressed father. A brother who's answer to life is violence and she is broken.

Is the cancer to blame or is it something deeper?

~

Based off the poem 'A Dream Lies Dead' by Dorothy Parker:

A dream lies dead here. May you softly go

Before this place, and turn away your eyes,

Nor seek to know the look of that which dies

Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,

But, for a little, let your step be slow.

And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise

With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.

A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:

Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree-

Though white of bloom as it had been before

And proudly waitful of fecundity-

One little loveliness can be no more;

And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head

Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!