You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead by Marieke Hardy Read Free Book Online Page B

spend a long and absorbing hour listening to Don McLean’s song ‘Driedel’ and talking to your friends about how deeply meaningful it is instead of reading further. This is a cancer story that has some jokes in it mostly because the main person in the story who has cancer is the funniest person I know. I never intended to write a funny cancer story because cancer is, by nature, inherently unamusing. Michael Cera is yet to star in a feelgood buddy cancer comedy featuring dick jokes and pop culture references (‘Hey Chemo-Sabe, if I radiotherapy my balls will I become like a porno Peter Parker and shoot spiderwebs instead of semen?’). Comedian Bill Hicks had some fairly poignant stand-up shows after being diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer but even then he didn’t necessarily make jokes about his condition, nor were many people in his audience even aware that he was dying. If you Google the words ‘cancer jokes’—look, we all have our dark evenings at home alone trying to find distractions from the recesses of our respective souls and I’ll thank you not to judge—one of the first websites that appears is the rather timidly titled ‘Are You Ready For Cancer Jokes?’ It manages one—just one—joke (the clumsily worded ‘Q: What do you call a person who has a compulsion to get lymphoma over and over again? A: A lymphomaniac!’ Look forward to reading this one aloud from a Christmas cracker next December) before retreating rapidly, hands raised in surrender, with five lengthy paragraphs explaining that the person who runs the website has actually been diagnosed with prostate cancer so drop your burning torches, cease your poisonous emails, we’re all dealing with our healing process in different ways and laughter/medicine, so forth.
    Gen was the first person I knew to get sick, properly sick, and it hit our group of friends like a train. We were in our early thirties, still dancing around the concept of recklessness, dawdling irresponsibly with commitment like bored, aimless teenagers. There were carbon copy nights of hard drinking where we would inevitably end up back at Blair and Angie’s house in East Brunswick at three o’clock in the morning, talking too loudly and attempting to crump and knocking over furniture. It was a ten-year summer; nobody could be bothered getting pregnant and everybody kept going to gigs and sticking powders up their noses and nothing really changed. There was the lazy expectation that with any luck it would stay like this forever. We were old enough to know better. We just didn’t feel like knowing better.
    People our age didn’t get cancer. Grownups got cancer. Friends of parents, distant aunts, paper thin grandmothers with a plethora of pre-existing ailments. Or that one sad and strange kid from primary school who kept turning up to class, month after month, with considerably less hair and a big brave scared smile, until one day they didn’t turn up anymore and the principal said something adult in assembly about happier places and peace of mind that nobody really understood.
    Cancer was maudlin and sentimental. Cancer was in Beaches . Cancer was a dull reminder that we wouldn’t be spared those difficult, painful feelings of process and grief the rest of the adult world had to experience. That it had happened to Gen—a woman whose brassy, milk-curdling laugh was so robustly impossible to ignore she and I were often asked to leave restaurants so other diners could continue their meals in peace—was simply absurd. She was an independent, forthright, guitar-playing smart alec. A band she had been in years before were briefly the darlings of Triple J and teenagers had lined up around the block to see her play. On stage she was all snarl and sass and 1980s prom dresses. She was known for her quick wit and collection of sequinned windcheaters. In the days of Myspace she had competed with our