04/10/2024
Hi friends.
I just read some very sweet comments on my donkey-post from way back in October a year ago, and I just wanted to say: I miss «talking» to you all too.
I miss posting photos and stories and getting your feedback and anecdotes and advice in return. I miss reading discussions between you that get nerdier and nerdier, where someone will pop up with incredible in-debth information and leave a comment that's 9 parahraphs about perlino vs cremello.
Every now and then one of you will message me and ask how I am. I am more touched by this than you will ever believe.
In the last «proper» post I wrote on this page, I was full of hope for the future. It was in April 2022 and Ulla and I was in Cairo, meeting for the first time since 2019 and doing so much catching-up with Mohammed and the dogs. Yes, the same Mohammed that worked with me at PFK since 2015, and whom many of you have seen on endless photos - or even met when you visited. The same Mohammed who basically saved my life by taking care of the dogs and cats while I was stuck in Norway waiting for Covid restrictions to end.
While in Cairo, Ulla and I noticed that Mohammed had lost quite a bit of weight, which he claimed was because of Ramadan and fasting. Ulla commented that he drank very little even after breaking the fast, even though it was 40 degrees every day.
We nagged him like 2 hen mothers to eat and drink more. We didnt know there was a spesific reason that his stomach felt full so quickly.
One day in the summer, Mohammed collapsed and vomited pools of blood. He was rushed to the nearest hospital.
In September 2022 Mohammed finally admitted to me that he had been diagnosed with stomach cancer and that he would have surgery after a series of chemotherapy. Or actually, Mohammed didn’t admit it. He wanted to keep it hidden so badly, but one day he didnt show up to a vet appointment and the vet called me. I called around to find out where he was, and Mohammed’s brother in law finally told me. I wasn’t to worry, he said, because the doctors had caught it so early, and they were very optimistic.
I immediately read a bunch of articles about stomach cancer, which left me ice cold with dread and panic. But Mohammed was so young and strong! Okay, the odds were bad, but of the few people who made it, he would be one of them!
I was in Norway at the time. I sat on my hands and my credit card, wanting to see him so badly, but thinking it was ridiculous to pay for my flight and take time off work, when that money could go towards his cancer surgery instead. I spoke to him almost every day, and every time the surgery would be «soon» and he was «fine, thanks to God».
As time went on, the flight tickets got insanely expensive, and I was waiting for the price to fall. I researched private oncologists and hospitals in Cairo, but in spite of my pleas and assurances that I’d handle the bills, Mohammed wanted to stay at the governmental hospital where he was getting treated.
In December he had completed the chemo and would definitely, DEFINITELY have the surgery, so I flew down to Cairo without telling him. I felt it was urgent to see him, and I’d gotten a Master card with very high limit to pay for his medical expenses, so the flight price wasn’t an issue I needed to deal with right then.
When I walked into his house and finally saw him again, my heart and my world fell apart. I would have walked straight past him in the street. Except he couldn't walk anymore.
I still have my voice messages to Ulla where I’m sobbing hysterically over and over. The only thing that kept me somehow together was that she came down to join me 2 days later.
One week, countless prayers and pleas to God, thousands of tears, and one extremely expensive hospital stay later (due to blood clots that needed urgent intervention), I sat by Mohammed’s grave, with the cement covering it still wet. I wanted to dig my hands into it and shovel it away, to get him out again and shake him alive, take him back to his wife and 4 children, away from that cemetery where he didnt belong.
I never felt bottomless grief like that before.
I never felt such panic that this was real life, that life could be just like your worst nightmare, and there is absolutely no way to wake up from it.
Sometimes at work, I’d have to stop and clutch the wall and catch my breath because the knowledge that he was gone just knocked the air out of me. I thought that kind of thing was only dramatic acting in movies.
Only 1 month and 2 days later, my dog of a lifetime, my canine child, mummy’s beautifullest and bestest boy Tassen passed away. I wasn’t there with him, and for that I will never truly forgive myself. I am violently nauseated just writing these 2 sentences.
I thought I was already at my lowest – my dr had already prescribed sleeping pills and antidepressants and tranquilisers because I was falling apart over Mohammed – but the shock, and immense guilt, over Tassen knocked me so solidly to my knees that I really couldn't imagine a way up again.
For several weeks I just lived and slept on a couch in my aunt’s house, like an animal in a nest. I only left to go to work (which I was actually way too sick for, but the fear of being home with my anxiety was too frightening). When I wasn’t knocked out by sleeping pills, I was reading post after post in grief groups on Reddit, to somehow soothe myself by others’ grief and try to forget the guilt that was gnawing on me every single waking minute. One of the posts was from a 12-year old boy whose hamster had died, and he apologised that he was sad for «only» a hamster, when others’ grief was «worse». All the beautiful replies he got had me crying my eyes out.
A few months after that, someone I trusted (not Sherif!) poisoned 4 of my dogs. I had to put them to sleep, one after one, as their organs were shutting down and they were suffering so much. I remember sitting in a meeting at work in Norway, in the middle of a long conference table with nowhere to hide, and discreetly typing on my phone under the table to my vet after getting the blood results «ok, then let her go and please be gentle and please give her a pat from me» while blinking and blinking to keep my eyes from flooding until I could get out of there and fall apart.
Then I had to put to sleep my cat that I’d had for 10 years. Little Toby could no longer live with FIV.
During all this, my warm, hilarious, witty uncle, with the most genuine interest in other people, was battling cancer until he wasnt anymore, and now some of his ashes are in a necklace around my mum’s neck.
It’s been 2 horrific, crushingly difficult years, but I often think of you all and our conversations.
You were my people.
In many ways you were, you are my soul mates – and I know it sounds so grandiose and pretentious, but in the PFK audience I met people like myself. Instead of being told that I was too emotional or unrealistic or impractical, I met you, other people with soft hearts who cried with me over the horses and dogs and cats and donkeys.
People with values like mine, who agreed that every little life is worth saving. Not to be used for something, not to serve us humans by working or being ridden, just because that little soul deserves to live, and to live well.
I hope all of you are living well, too.
Which is sort of ridiculous to say, as I know that so many of you are kind, generous and thoughtful people with huge hearts, and anyone with a heart will have suffered tremendously after 1 year of watching people in You-know-which-country, which I cannot even name because this post will be shadowbanned, being slaughtered and maimed while the whole world is watching.
But you know what I mean. I hope that you’re healthy, that your loved ones are healthy. I hope your dog is farting in your sofa, or your cat is driving you crazy wanting to go in and out all the time.
I hope you can feel secure and warm in your home in a world that is blowing up around us - We are so, so enormously privileged.
This was meant to be a short note but it turned into 2 pages.
See, how just the thought of you opens the floodgates of my keyboard?
Lots and lots and lots of love from me, Marte.
