For Mira, getting diagnosed with slowly progressing bone cancer – having a ticking clock placed on her life, hearingdoctors talk in hushed voices aboutlimited lifespanandexperimental treatment options– none of that had given her a new lease of life. None of that had made her want to live, to get better. She’d wondered if there was something very wrong with her inside: could she be the only person in the history of time not to be spurred towards survival by the fear of impending sickness and death?
Because when Mira found out she had cancer, her first thought wasn’tI need to live. It wasI think I’m OK with dying.
No one could understand it: Mira’s placid acceptance of the fact she had only a few years left at best, that she would most likely die not long after she hit fifty. Her friends thought she was in shock; depressed, maybe. But Mira knew she was not. She was content, in many ways, with her life: she had a decent home in an area she liked and felt part of, she had her music, and a kind and attentive husband. It had been hard finding someone like Ezra, happy to agree to a life without children – but she’d known that was what was right for her, unlike many in her community. She’d never wanted children; had known being a mother wouldn’t suit her. She relished the freedom the two of them enjoyed.
And yet underneath all that, she acknowledged, there had been a listlessness, a passivity towards life. A sense of having used up all her energy on the first half, then having nothing left in the tank for the second. After her diagnosis, Mira found herself researching life expectancy in Roman times, the Middle Ages, the Victorian era. She discovered that for vast spans of history, forty-five, even forty, was a perfectly respectable age to reach – certainly not one that would be proclaimed a tragedy.
The thought gave her comfort. In any other epoch, she’dhave been considered to have had a good innings. It was simply her time. So, when the second round of chemotherapy made her vomit until blood poured out of her throat, and forced great clumps of hair to fall out in the shower, she’d decided that it would be the last time she’d put her body through this torture.
The chance of an all-expenses-paid retreat in the Costa Rican rainforest with a famous wellness influencer who openly rejected modern medicine, who thought chemo was toxic and did more harm than good – it had been what Mira wanted to hear at that exact moment. And applying for a place had been a last-ditch attempt to do something –anything– with the time she had left, knowing that she wouldn’t put herself through more chemo, knowing that the end was coming soon.
That was why she’d gone to all that effort when she made her video – piling on her niece’s bronzer and blush to add colour to her cheeks, drinking three cups of coffee just before she filmed it so her crushing fatigue wouldn’t give her away. She didn’t everreallybelieve it would work, though. And if it didn’t – well, then. She hadn’t lost anything; she was slowly marching towards death either way.
But now, lying under the weight of the cold, heavy earth, for the first time Mira though she might be changing her mind. That she might truly – deeply – want tolive.
As she lay there motionless, she wondered if she was – far too late – moving past what she’d convinced herself to believe for so long: that life was meant to be short, and death should not be resisted when it came. She wondered if she’d emerged into a new truth: that her mere existence was an ordinary miracle and something precious. Something to be fought for,to hold onto. That perhaps a part of her was hoping that Hannah’s spiritual principles for healing might actually work.
Visions of the last time she had satshivaflashed into her mind; of the matzah ball soup she’d made for last Friday night’s dinner; the way the cool ivory keys of her mother’s old piano felt beneath her fingertips. Of the look of despair on Ezra’s face when she had told him she would not put her body through more chemotherapy.
She saw all of it, and every moment of it was beautiful.
Breathing was getting harder now. Every time she tried to inhale, the sludgy mass weighing on her chest constricted her airways, made it impossible to take the full, deep breath she was increasingly desperate for.
Why is it getting harder?
Could it be that something else – something more, not just mud and soil – had landed on her body? A rock, more than one rock, even? Was there any chance she was making it out of here alive – or was this how she would die? The idea that it might not be cancer that took her in the end, but standing in the wrong spot in a jungle after rainfall, was the kind of absurdity Mira might have laughed at if it had happened to a character in a book, or a play, or a movie. Not in real life – not if it happened to her.
Her breaths were coming shorter and faster now, and the movement of her lungs was beginning to hurt. An awful burning sensation was starting to move through her chest. She wanted to struggle in her panic, but the only thing she could move was her head, and even that was becoming almost impossible.
This is it. I will die here.
From far away, as if from an alternate plane, voices were drifting towards Mira’s ears now: urgent, frantic voices that she could tune into, and then lost again.
‘Mira! I think I can see her – I’m going to try and get her out from under there!’ said one.
‘Naya, you can’t, it’s way too dangerous. Another mudslide... any minute... we’ve got to wait for it to settle. If we don’t...’
‘She’s going to die under there! Scott – come on, help me! We can still save her...’
‘We have to make sure the ground is solid...’
‘I don’t give a shit about the ground...’
And then something moving now, closer to her. Then a voice, Carly’s voice, yelling at the others, ‘I’ve found her – she’s here, everyone, I can see her!’ And then a face – Naya’s face, her expression a perfect snapshot of terror, and hope, all mixed together in one desperate look.
‘Quick, move that earth away from her nose and mouth – help her breathe!’
Hands, then, pawing at her face, stripping away the mud and the soil, allowing her to taste the air with her tongue.
But still, she could not breathe.
‘It’s... my... chest...’ she managed to gasp.
‘What was that?’ It was Carly, confident, competent Carly, right there in front of her. ‘Your chest? Oh God, the weight on her – she can’t breathe! We have to dig her body out...’
Their words were fading now; the pain in Mira’s chest was becoming so strong, she couldn’t think about anything else. The urge to struggle was leaving her body too.
‘Mira! Stay with us...’At least I won’t die alone.
