(but didn’t quite)
I haven’t written anything since last year (except in my diary). Not because nothing happened, quite the opposite actually, but the first eight first months feel oddly dim now, like they belong to a different year. See, somewhere around September the year split in two.
We usually go skiing in Sälen over New Year’s. Last year the snow barely showed up. Thin, patchy, a bit miserable really, though probably slightly better than this year.
Still, the time mattered. Long dinners, plates left out on the counter while the board games were set up, unhurried conversations, that easy family rhythm where you don’t have to perform or explain yourself. I didn’t know it then, but that time would end up carrying me through the rest of the year.
Coming into 2025, my body was already acting up. I’ve been dealing with haemoptysis – enough that I keep a sickbag within reach. It’s terrifying. Exhausting. It doesn’t slot neatly anywhere. And it’s unresolved.
I try to keep going because I don’t really know what else to do. Chin up, or something.
September didn’t knock.
Nine years ago Caleb had lymphoma and ever since he’s had regular blood tests. In August the numbers started looking wrong, and on the 9th of September he had a bone marrow biopsy. Worrying, yes, but it was still contained worry at this point.
The next evening he was outside getting the barbecue ready. The end-of-summer light was still hanging in there, but the air was cool and damp (it might even have been drizzling a little), when the phone rang. They asked him to come into hospital the next morning. No explanation. No context. Just enough to tip everything sideways.
The hours between that call and the morning were horrendous. Every thought ran ahead of me, inventing futures, and jumping straight to the worst possible scenario. And then it looped. I hovered between catastrophe and disaster.
On the 11th, he was told it was acute lymphoblastic leukaemia – ALL (later we’d learn it was a particularly aggressive form, Philadelphia positive ALL). There were many tears. The old, wordless kind that come from somewhere deep and instinctive. Grief, fear, disbelief, love – all tangled together, impossible to separate.
He started treatment the day of diagnosis. There was no pause to catch our breath. It became clear very quickly that he’d need a long stretch of horrendously intensive chemotherapy in Uppsala.
Because of my cystic fibrosis, I wasn’t allowed to be with him.
It made complete medical sense and emotional nonsense.
We did what we could. FaceTime, mostly. Messages and calls. Trying to stay connected across distance and hospital walls. But something shifts when you can’t sit beside someone, when you can’t see them properly, when you can’t reach out and touch their hand or read their face. I never quite knew when to stop talking but he ran out of words. Conversations shortened. Silence that would’ve meant nothing if I’d been there. He turned inward, and I couldn’t follow.
When he finally came home in October, I expected relief to take over. I thought I’d know what to do. Instead, we stood in the hall not quite knowing how to unpack. In hospital, everything had run on timetables and routines. At home, the days stretched open and formless, and we had to work out our own footing again.
I tried to be patient, to make space for his recovery, while my own health continued to demand attention. Caring for someone when you’re already stretched thin meant there was never quite enough of me to go round. I wanted to be strong for both of us, even as I felt myself starting to crumble.
As if one crisis weren’t enough, September wasn’t done with me yet.
Ronnie, one of the best people I’ve had the privilege of knowing and calling my friend, died just a few days after Caleb’s diagnosis.
Her funeral was in November. The church was filled with blue roses, as if the whole place had been dipped in her. It was beautiful and endlessly sad. The place was packed; radio voices I’ve listened to for years stood shoulder to shoulder with her oldest friends. That was Ronnie all over, she pulled people in without even trying.
Her platform shoes were placed beside the urn and seeing them empty made my heart drop. It’s such an ordinary thing, shoes, and yet knowing those particular, unordinary, shoes would never be worn again made the loss brutally real. And when her fave band Coca Carola started playing Blommorna jag får, something in me gave way. The tears came without warning, as if the song reached a place I’d been trying so hard to hold shut. The finality of it landed hard and merciless.
I keep expecting her to call. I’m still checking my phone like that makes sense.
Sudden losses undo me. Ronnie is, was, the punkest person I knew; sharp, bright, gloriously herself, and she believed in karma with an unshakeable purity. She was genuinely good in a way the world doesn’t often allow for anymore, showed up without fuss, without palaver – just steady, kind presence. She was the one who was always on top of things. I will miss her enormously.
And I will watch the birds and play with the dog; small, living things that keep me connected to her spirit.
Earlier this year, before everything tipped, I wrote in my diary about what it does to a person to be told again and again that their survival comes with a price tag. I wrote about how that language starts to cling. How it turns you into an invoice rather than a person – something to be justified, costed, weighed.
This year has tried very hard to reduce life to numbers: blood results, millilitres bled, transfusions received, days survived, the price tag of my survival. What can be treated now and what has to wait. What is allowed, what is too risky, what the body will tolerate, what it won’t.
But that isn’t the whole story. It never is.
There was a garden that grew exactly when it should have. Weeks at the summer house that were genuinely good. Friends who showed up without fuss, who sat with me, who helped with the house, who made room for chaos and grief and fear without trying to tidy it away. Family who carried more than their share when I couldn’t.
And in between all of that, there was love; even when it was frightened and strained. Loss, sharp and unfair. And the ordinary, stubborn business of staying alive in the middle of it all.
2025 nearly broke me. My body and my heart were pushed to their limits.
But I’m still here.
The year will end quietly. I won’t make it to Sälen this New Year, and that’s alright. Next year will begin with dear friends coming to visit, and that feels like enough to hold on to. Something to stand on.
For now, that’s where I am.