3. The Lucky Bird

I have a few questions for you. Did you visit the support chat rooms of the cancer charities? Did you see how that little word ‘Lucky’ popped up where you least expected it to?
From those very personal stories the Lucky Bird gathers trails of hope for you in its dainty beak, to comfort you in a nest of words, to give you a sense there is a safe place as you deal with your diagnosis.
It is a timid bird but keep watching and listening. How long before it becomes tame enough to hop around the garden of your conversations; how soon before it is making its nest in your opening sentences? Listen for its call. It is there like a blackbird singing sweetly, almost imperceptibly, weaving its song into the babbling brook of speech, your own cancer narrative.
Lucky is a sweet little bird, courageously flying in the face of the Invisible Hawk that is Cancer.
Its eyes unblinking, the Cancer Hawk sits and waits. It sits. It waits. It watches while we scurry around like tiny creatures in the undergrowth, oblivious to its watching, too busy to look up, safe in our little skins. It is the master of time, the master of stealth, ready to stoop. It chooses us.
This is unlucky.
Sometimes, because of all the good research and knowledge we now have of the possible causes of cancer, we blame ourselves, allow ourselves to think others will blame us.
We know so much about what can help prevent it. But we don’t always know why we got it. Most of the people I know who have had cancer, who survived it or who died, were not to blame. They didn’t choose it; it chose them.
They were unlucky. I was unlucky to lose people I loved dearly and miss very much because cancer chose them. We were unlucky as friends and family.
But unlucky doesn’t give courage, doesn’t give strength, doesn’t give help, or hope, doesn’t give you the will to fight, to pull your life out of cancer’s claws, to bite back, to affirm who you are.
What unlucky does do is give... give up.