"I might be dying, but I’m not quitting."
(Editor’s note: It’s been two-and-a-half years
since Dr Sean Mitchell aka the below-the-line shark and contributor
Offrocker died of colon cancer aged thirty-six. Although I never
met him in person, shook his hand, examined his face or made a
judgement of his fashion choices, I think about Sean frequently. I
think about the brevity and chaos of life, of the importance of
loving while you can, of family, kindness, health and maintaining a
brave optimism in the face of it all. I don’t think it’s possible
to read his words enough. The story below was written, from memory,
around eighteen months before he died. And, yeah, death comes to us
all, but this brother was taken from us far too early.)
It’s three am and I can’t sleep.
I have had a pretty heavy fortnight, diagnosed out of the blue
with metastatic colon cancer at the age of thirty-five. It’s all
through my pelvis, and I have secondaries in the liver.
I’m currently lying in a hospital bed awaiting my second
operation in ten days, this one to fix complications of the first.
What I would give to eat solid food, and sleep in my own bed.
I have been probed, scanned, pumped with radioactive dye, and
spoken to three specialists in five days. My odds would not tempt
even our most inveterate gamblers. The word “inoperable” is
bouncing around my head.
So why, at this time, do I even care enough to write an article
for the Grit degenerates?
Because I learned something invaluable on my last surf that I
want to share with the quitters. An ethic you won’t find espoused
in the sanitised corpo-surf culture, an attitude you won’t find in
the hearts of those that wade around in the shorebreak between the
flags.
And that’s the reality that no-one gives a fuck in the lineup. I
got backpaddled by smiling hipsters on twins. I got dropped in on
by murfers on logs. I got shoulder hopped by aggressive entitled
adolescents unaware that their post-grom transition is complete and
they are now legitimately bottom of the foodchain, no longer
protected by minority.
That day was just like every other day, except it was my last
surf for the foreseeable future and maybe forever.
It has given me reassurance that the world will go on, with or
without me. Everywhere else I go, I’m surrounded by crying
relatives, well-meaning do gooders who “have just heard the news,
I’m so so sorry.”
Life in the ocean is fast and brutal. Bobbing around the lineup
with my ten kilograms of weight loss and the dead fatigue of
metastatic cancer eating me from the inside, I was a weak and easy
mark. Easy pickings for the hungry mob. They had no idea, but knew
just what to do nonetheless.
It was the only time since I was diagnosed I felt normal, and at
home in the order of the world.
And in the midst of this, I had my own perfect moments of peak
existence. Crystaline waves, sliding across poorly formed
sandbanks. Mini-closeout shoreys giving me that one last moment of
vis, aka orders of magnitude less, but the only order magnitude I
could currently handle.
This aspect of surfing gives me strength as I face a long road
of multiple operations, chemo and radiotherapy: knowing that peak
moments of transcendence intersperse the shite even on the worst of
days in the worst conditions.
Also that I am four-fifths salt water and I may be going back to
Mother Earth after my three dozen goes around the sun.
I’ve done my time watching the tides.
Sandbars form and melt away.
Storms.
Rock ledges.
Learning winds, and how they swirl down valleys, equating it to
long-period swell wrapping around seafloor features.
All little tidbits of info with no relevance to my now
landlocked life, but it gives me joy to know the natural world by
force of confronting it and understanding my place in it.
Surfing has taught me to not be greedy with my expectations, to
take opportunities as they present themselves, to fight and hunt,
and the capacity to dine out on those very few peak moments for
weeks and months – and that’s just what I need now to get me
through this medieval ordeal.
I might be dying, but I’m not quitting.
