Sunday Blog 251 – 20 September 2026
After Saturday morning yoga, I sat having a coffee with my teacher and we got to talking about cancer, and the concept of the “cancer personality” Gabor Mate explores in his book When The Body Says No. In extreme summary, his research revealed that cancer can often afflict people who do the following; meet others’ emotional needs by suppressing their own; identify with responsibility and duty; repress healthy anger when boundaries are violated; believe they are responsible for how others feel and believe they should never disappoint anyone.
While I resonated with these research-based insights, I also said immediately, “yes, but also, shit just happens. Cancer tears through a family like a wrecking ball even if they tick none of these boxes.”
“Yes, as the Zen buddhist saying goes, life is 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows.”
I had to bustle off soon after; I wanted to see the movie Holy Days before it disappeared from the big screen. There were hardly any sessions to choose from, so Saturday morning it was. How rebellious, decadent even, going to the cinema while the rest of the world are ferrying children to sporting fields, cramming in the shopping, cleaning the house.
The movie had a poor IMDb score, and the Guardian had panned it (two stars). A nun road movie with the three nuns played by Judy Davis, Jacki Weaver, Miriam Margoyles; no matter how worn the tropes might be, I knew I would love it. I marinated in the paradigm of 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows as I farewelled my yoga teacher and drove to the cinema.
Walking the alleyway between the car park and Windsor Cinema, I was accosted by memories of my last trip there, years ago with my daughter; we had chaperoned my mother. It was a three-generation outing to watch Mumma Mia. Mum tottered along the laneway between us, and because I am somewhat time-blind, we arrived when the ads were already starting to play. The theatre was dim; and Mum clutched my arm.
“I can’t walk in the dark,” she said. As a young thing in the 1940s she had gone out for a late night jaunt with friends in Kalgoorlie and was sauntering arm in arm with her best friend until she stepped on the edge of an old mineshaft and plummeted to the bottom. One broken pelvis later, she survived but so did the fear of walking in the dark.
“Sometimes my feet just won’t move forward.”
Chastened, I got us safely to our seats and promised I wouldn’t do a last minute dash to the cinema next time. But I never did get a chance to accompany her again. So I treasure the precious memory of sitting on my velvety seat, flanked by mother and half-Greek daughter. We marinaded in the poignancy of Abba’s Slipping Through My Fingers song, Mum singing for her daughters, me singing for mine, tears because our daughters always grow up, that we all have to say good bye, that we know we’re going to die.
Holy Days delved into a child’s grief of losing his mother, admittedly without nuance, but I wept all the same.
“Death is a journey, and journeys are nothing to be feared,” the Judy Davis nun said. It was trite and true and false all at the same time.
I emerged into Saturday lunch time, the flowers in the verge garden bed nodded in the sunlight, and everything sparkled.