Choose:

dementia or leukemia, since they don’t rhyme. 

Arno Bohlmeijer

For years I’ve cried, “Can I die before Alzheimer’s, please?”

“The test result indicates chronic lymphocytic leukemia,” states the young doctor, and he has no idea if I’m close to tears, will smash the phone, scream the room to pieces, or be stunned for a year – before any kind of relief might be due.

“If you’ll make that,” says Ann O’Nymous, deep in my head, with an energy that makes chemotherapy take to its heels, preventively.

For a minute I’m no mental rock, but waves in a tide – staying high or low? If the sea is a symbol of eternity, who’ll say what I hope, fear, know?

Close to home in green fields by the lake, my refuge after the hematologist, it’s all so pretty and pleasant, it’s giving me a headache. Just as well that these birds are drowning out the world, or else it would be too much, opposed to what I don’t want to know.

For goodness’ sake, not a soul in sight is listening to the message of a specialist. Look at those chicks in a row, there’s no ripple between them and me; they won’t come ashore right here, the smart geese don’t fancy this fuss. No need to shriek; I’m scared to death already.

During this crisis (we shouldn’t defy fate) pieces of prose are trying to hit me hard. There’s no trace of rhythm or rhyme, if loud like a thousand frogs in the reeds, with a fiercely vigilant swan, here where silence should mitigate, waiting for good news or a big mouth. One of the two has known for ages whether time will make it all this way and have another day.

For the sake of denial, I’ll walk at a firm pace along the marvelous landscape. Makes me think of this joke: “Drive fast before gas runs out.”

The north wind is worse than foreseen. It’s no storm, is it? From behind like a support, and the sun is pulling, good-natured, accordingly.

A full and blooming hawthorn calls, “Come here on soft grass in the lee. Feel it? So comfy, warm and quiet, sit or lie for as long as you like; nobody has to know a thing.”

Reminds me of Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge, or a child playing hide and seek with hands before their eyes. Oh, a boat is passing by, called “Beneficio,” by chance, or it’s a sign.

Defying lesser judgment, what’s ahead of me in the story taking place? Hesitant or resolute, the blood disorder specialist: “No expiration date for years.” Meaning two or three? Failed to ask. Today I could have gone to a land where lasting snow stands no chance.

Tender flowers like Will Pow, Rea Silience, Perce Verance, are water and medicine to me, the gleam of a meadow, a state of transience that will never end.

“You can really come and sit,” says a field of daisies, “for a moment’s eternity,” unknowingly wise, with a bow from cow parsley, while rising to the sky.

The biggest cliché on earth: live one instant at a time, prosaic. Monday, a call about leukemia, Friday, heart catheterization. During, before, and after: do solely the hour of now.

Precisely as I write this in dire earnest, a cuckoo cries in the oak beside me, clear above anything in quiet fields, closer than ever before in my life. No mockery or ironic defiance? Minutes later again, and again. The strangest thing: usually a cuckoo calls ahead of rain. I’ve seen that frequently here. But now the whole sky is blue, and the newswoman claims, “It will stay this way for ten days.”

No one cycles or hikes by. You’d nearly think I’m in heaven already.

No, a bit later (or time no longer exists) a woodpecker hammers – on my head, the operating table, or just the old acacia, and firm persons of grounds maintenance are coming this way with large spades. A mole seems to undermine something.

In order to dodge my own duties, I could moan and cry all day, “My body fails.” But I won’t.

“Because you’re so tired,” says my best friend Em Pathy, “your mouth shuts now.”

Too heavy, my eyes close. Can resignation erase the cynic in me? The scream of the year would agree with cancer, leaving the body in the lurch. Alright, look at the yellow irises with their feet in water among reeds, heads in the mild sun and a snug breeze. Thanks for trying, allies.

Nature three times daily. We’ve run out of medicine, words may be lost or failing, pens are down but will cure yet, with steps of little big interest, until I’m not trailing a day or minute, straight around the ravine, that will be a hill, a mountain that has no inkling of dread, or “a greener, lighter life on the other side.”

Wild orchids are a multitude of colors and scents, beside the gentians that have grown here for centuries, mown in the best month, to flower again from the ground.

Arno Bohlmeijer is a queer writer and winner of a PEN America Grant 2021, poet, and novelist, writing in English and Dutch, published in six countries – US: Houghton Mifflin, and in Universal Oneness: Anthology of Magnum Opus Poems from around the World. His novel Narrowly (2025) is about rare solidarity and re-integration after illness. Read more at www.arnobohlmeijer.com.