Paul Cox - Tales from the Cancer Ward

Paul, when they had cut me up and harvested my body to patch up the damage, you called my wife Chaz to say you had dreamed about me. In the hospital the next day she gave me this news and I remember her crying, although your dream contained good omens. She cried because she loved you and you cared, and at a certain point in illness care is the only thing we have. Care for those we love, care for ourselves. Of all the people I have met in this life, you seem to care the most. Your fierce anger leaps out at injustice, bigotry and stupidity. You rightly condemn in these pages the way we live now. You write: Some people spend a lifetime in a job they dont like, living a life they dont want, and the money they earn is spent on things they dont need. You have not done that. You have made it your business not to. You care that others not waste their lives.

Reading these pages, I found you mentioning experiences I must have had and cannot remember. My troubles were often a blur, and weeks have disappeared into a fog of medication and confusion. When they were taking me home from hospital after my first surgery, a carotid artery ruptured. They thought we had lost you, Chaz told me. They thought you were dead. She refused to believe it. She told them I was still alive, and I was communicating with her. I am writing these words, so she must have been right. She called you to discuss these things, and emails passed back and forth while for me the only reality was the hospital routine you describe: the tests, the gowns, the nakedness before strangers, the cries from another bed, the endless checks of the vitals. Yes, my heart was beating. Yes, the plastic clamp on my finger found oxygen in my blood.

You write about that so well. You spent your years in good health and curiosity, discovering in Australia you had the spirit of a dreamer and a traveller. You loved and were loved. You had three children you are proud of. Although in my imagination they might have been raised in a household like that in My First Wife, it must have been a house with intelligence and passion in it. And you were the workman, upstairs over the store, still using his old tools. The good workman respects his tools, my father told me, and when you write of making your films in the same way you always have, of your indifference to digital tools, I understand. If those tools were good enough for Keaton and Renoir and Buuel, they would serve for you as well. I use the dictionary I bought in London in 1964. There are better ones, but thats the one I got started on.

Such practices imply a certain care in moving through life. Things can become habitual without becoming casual. We caress them as touchstones. Ive always been here and shall always be here, you write of your stone house in France under the starry skies. I too revisit treasured places to show that they are still here and I am still here. Is that what brought us both back to Cannes in 2009?

On the night of your dream in 2006, you were not yet ill. In 2009, we knew of your illness, and had written messages back and forth. Sometimes you went off email for a few weeks, and I asked Nate Kohn what he had heard. Or Kyra would write me. Reading this, I know you were stunned by the horrors of chemo. I had radiation, which made it impossible for me to eat real food (at a time when I still could!) for five months. It was on my first morning at Cannes that I took my ritual dawn walk to a particular chair outside a particular cafe and ordered a cafe au lait and a croissant, because that was what I always ordered, and I had a breakfast for the first time since December that wasnt Ensure chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. So I was still there. Madadayo, as Kurosawas old teacher said.

Ive always been here and shall always be here, you write. And now you were returning to Cannes. Nate Kohn had told me you were weak. He said you insisted in speaking with his students, and said you enjoyed it. He brought you into town. We saw each other in that tent on the beach, and I am looking right now at a photo of us hugging. What wrecks we were. The chatter filled the space around us, and we sat side by side like two old soldiers, with Pierre Rissient making a third. I couldnt talk and you had no need to. I felt comfort flowing from your presence. We were there. I know now, reading these pages, how precarious your condition was at that time. How uncertain. Death was your companion. You imagined the white light at the edge of the void. And you had your old corduroy jacket and your ridiculously long scarf and you and I looked at each other and smiled philosophically, perhaps, or bemused, at this place in life where we had washed up. Chaz was so happy to see you.

Chaz believes in dreams, and thinks there may be some healers who have gifts, and some psychics, not many, who might be able to help us. I say I dont. Yet I had one particular dream I will not describe here that came true in a very short time and in great detail. Dreams themselves in any event are real they take place in our minds and we remember them. What they mean is hard to say. But if dreams and thoughts did not inhabit our minds, we would not know who we were, or that we are here, and would not be alive in the way we are.

I believe you consider your life as a work of art. You have political and philosophical principles and try to live according to them. You, like me, believe heath care is a human right, and we are disgusted by those who fight it on selfish grounds. You are spiritual, but not much for organised religion, and Im with you there, except that I believe the spiritual life is all of this earth, and you leave open other possibilities. Fundamentalism is a hideous curse, you write, and I agree, which is one of the reasons I admired Salvation. In this universe of miraculous perplexity, what wilful ignorance is required to believe one has the answers and the right to enforce them on others. Yet in Father Damien you have your saint. Chaz believes he was instrumental in your recovery. Whether he was instrumental in heaven or in your mind can be discussed, but as you absorbed the spirit of his corner of Molokai and the people he loved there, I believe something grew inside you that helped you to heal.