Dear Editor,
I refer to the SN article of October 12, captioned, “GTT Pinktober campaign touches GPH cancer patients.” I seek the courtesy of consideration and space to share what is close to me from personal histories that remind daily and inspire always. It is of what could possibly lift a few other survivors, too; perhaps many other citizens.
I commend the management and staff of the GTT for launching this initiative and staying with it for several years now. It is a wonderful corporate gesture, which I have been near to on at least one occasion. I am buoyed by it, and I think that others are provided succour from the efforts of the team of volunteers that plan and organize and who then reach out and touch. This year, all those components are compounded stubbornly and negatively by the frightening local realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is what makes the GTT endeavours to deliver as part of what is now a peculiarly Guyanese Octoberfest in the form of Pinktober even more warming. At least, I think so and I so welcome it.
Pink is a colour I know well and am proud to wear all year round, be it via shirts or ties or a ribbon. And one does not have to be a survivor (in the extended sense of the word) to wear pink in any of its lush hues. It does not have to be Octo-ber only, either. For there is the awareness, as we grapple with this raging existential virus currently before us, there is also the sweeping menace of cancer in all of its forms and bodily afflictions that is of undeclared pandemic proportions, too; except that cancer is still not so recognized, though generally feared from the spectre of the brutalities that could come. Ah, I have been too close to those and on more than one occasion. It has been with the closest family, and then with totally unknown strangers.
This is one of the reasons why I write today, as I turn my back momentarily, and take the break that we all need, from our battering, bruising affairs, those other diseases that degrade us all. We do not have to be strangers where cancer is concerned, not in this community, where everybody knows everybody, especially of the bad things. We do not have to be distant and unconnected and unconcerned strangers where cancer and COVID-19 and the host of other plagues that imperil us are concerned. As I laud the GTT people, I also extend a salute to our volunteers-strangers no more-who man our hotlines and visit our hospice ill, among a range of embracing gestures.
Editor, believe me when I say that there are few things that comfort as much, that humbles as much, and that brings home how vulnerable and helpless we are – physically, psychologically, and materially – when disease comes and stays. These moments of a hand extended in the strangest, yet so familiar, of human fellowships remind me of what we can do and how we can be when crises creep and existence is threatened.
There are the unheralded many who do such little things which mean so much to those on the receiving end. Those little unspoken things are meaningful in the grandness of their bigness, as they are delivered in the fields of health and suffering; and before those with and without. They raise the bar on what could be shoddy hourly survival, and on those who give of themselves, as well as they who receive and welcome what is given so wholeheartedly, so caringly.
And as much as I hesitate to tarnish this writing by going to other detested places, I must if only to expand the horizons of our visions and devotions, as to what could be possible. If we can do this successfully, so very well, in the realms of struggles and needs, and make others better, if only for a moment, then I venture that we can contribute the same in the communal and national wards that cry out for similar healing. The receptions may not be as generous, but the agonizing pains are definitely present.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
