Message from the non-place

Where memory vanishes

Before you read: This piece discusses cancer and the death of a parent. Please take care.

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“Histology: Glioblastoma WHO Grade 4. This is an aggressive form of incurable, primary brain cancer. Any treatment offered will be with the aim of trying to slow tumor growth, not curative.

You must not drive. please inform DVLA.”

This is the reductive, cruel message my mother and I received eight months before she died. I am only able to call it reductive and cruel now, six years later, having fished it up out of the nightmare and given it a name. Before yesterday, this message didn’t have its own quality, form or sense. It was a non-thing. Data.

Our last eight months are a non-place in my memory. They are a non-place where words fail me. I am trying very hard to give you an impression, because for six years I have wished for one myself. So that I could have a language or a guide for this non-place.

Let me put it to you like this: When I try to speak of our last eight months, a black wall descends over my body from the neck down and I become rudderless. Emotions abandon me, and my words become a grey, formless data. You must not drive. please inform DVLA.

Let me put it to you like this:

This place is not a place of honour... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center...

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

This is the warning on nuclear waste disposal sites, designed to be read thousands of years into the future.

What I can tell you is that when I try to step toward the non-place, the non-place speaks to me in familiar but distorted voices. “Do not come here," "Something horrible here," “Leave.” The warnings don’t hurt, but they numb my senses.

I take a deep breath, one, two, three steps toward the centre, I open my eyes and I’m back at the edge.

This time, I return with another fragment. Sometimes I don’t. I return with a sense of the cruelty of that message. Any treatment offered will be with the aim of trying to slow tumor growth, not curative.

And I manage to gasp, breathless and shaking with tears, that it was an awful, indescribable horror.

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