I have a new superpower - I can imagine your child, any child, with cancer.
I see a mother cuddling her cute baby in a cafe. I blink and in an instant, she is projected inside the walls of my eyes pacing in a hospital room and kissing that same baby’s chemo-smooth head. The infant’s skin is no longer rosy but pale, a central line dangles out of its onesie, and there is a feeding tube in its nose held in place by a sticker decorated with teddy bears.
That thing that no parent wants to imagine about their child, I imagine accidentally, casually. I see in a flicker how everything could change for their family.
And when I see sick children I reconstruct their lives in reverse, imagining how they were before diagnosis. I can see past the hair loss and tubes attached to their body, to the human being beyond the stereotype. Not everyone can do this.
My strange new power extends beyond cancer. I will be walking down the street, and cross paths with someone, anyone, and time will trip. The little sag at their jowls will vanish and I’ll see the child in them. Then time will jolt in another direction, and I will watch them melt with the gravity of decades.
These imaginative frames make it easier for me to see beyond the present to the prism of a person, a full life, a history, an ever-changing fabric of experiences and possibilities - what once was and what could be, all the ways we could fall or fly, the constant possibility of both the incredible and the tragic.
In A Heart That Works, the comedian Rob Delaney’s beautiful memoir about his son Henry, who died before the age of three from brain cancer, there is a passage that I think about often in which he invites us all to imagine the worst:
“Not infrequently, I find myself wanting to ask people I know and like to imagine a specific child of theirs, dead in their arms. If you have more than one child, it’s critical you pick one for this exercise. If you’re reading this, and you have a child, do it now. Imagine them, in your arms. Tubes are coming out of various holes, some of which are natural, some of which were made with a scalpel. There’s mess coming out of some of the tubes. There are smells. The temperature of your child’s body is dropping. No breath, none of the wriggling that seems to be the main activity of kids, no heartbeat. Even just that; imagine searching for your child’s heartbeat and you can’t find one. Their heart will never beat again. It’s not a nightmare you can wake from; defibrillation won’t work. It won’t beat because your child is dead. After a bit, someone will put them in a refrigerated drawer, like you do with celery that turns white and soft when you forget about it. Did you ever make funny horns on their head with shampoo while they were in the bathtub? You will never do that again. Did they ask for help with their shoelaces and their homework? Did you comfort them after a skinned knee? That will never happen again.
It’s unlikely I’ll ever ask anyone to do that face-to-face. Honestly, the idea makes me laugh. Where would we do it? A kitchen, probably. Do I make them tea first? But the point is that I feel the urge. That is one thing grief does to me. It makes me want to make you understand. It makes me want you to understand.
I want you to understand.
But you, statistically, cannot. You forget that my son died. Then you remember. Then you forget again.
I don’t forget.”
This is one of the most important appeals I have ever read.
People who have lost children and managed to survive and return to society seem to me like seers who understand life on a more essential level, prophets who see all we will lose and know what really matters.
I have not lost a child. I cannot know what they know.
But I feel I have peered through the veil that they have passed through and looked in the direction they have travelled.
I can imagine it.
I have imagined it.
There were many moments over the past few years when I was afraid. Afraid something very bad was happening. Afraid my son Zephyr would die. Rational or not, I have imagined it many times.
Just having travelled a small distance along that path has made me more able to engage with other people’s pain and loss, and more willing to try to imagine whatever they might be going through.
I saw Rob Delaney speak about A Heart That Works at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival in June. One of the first things the woman interviewing him mentioned was that as she had been preparing for the event, several of her friends had said, “Oh I could never read that book.” She then asked Delaney who he thought the book’s audience was.
I was struck by her friends’ unwillingness to even consider reading a book like this. I can only speculate, but my guess would be that they had children of their own, and the idea of having to imagine their way through the story of the death of a child, albeit someone else’s, sounded unbearable to them. They did not want to understand.
It’s not that I don’t relate. For most of early motherhood, I felt I could not watch movies or read books where harm came to children. I was already too raw and fearful, too keenly aware of the vulnerability of my babies’ tiny bodies and the vast and terrifying responsibility of keeping them alive.
There are times in life when one must protect oneself from certain kinds of imagery and ideas for mental health. But if we resist ever imagining the difficult and painful things that happen to other people, we are severely limiting our capacity for empathy and our development of a deeper sense of why we are alive in the first place.
We are all the audience for books like A Heart That Works for two reasons. Firstly - tragedy can happen to anyone and loss belongs to us all. Secondly, there are countless human beings out there, probably people you know right now, who are nursing their pain alone because we are collectively uneducated about grief and unpracticed at empathy. Many people who go through horrible loss also end up having to contend with intense loneliness because the people around them feel unequipped to be present with them and help bear witness to their pain.
There are many real-life consequences to our communal hesitance to imagine difficult things.
A few weeks ago I was at a literary event and I met a woman named Katie who works for a big marketing agency. We got to talking, as I so often do, about childhood cancer (yes, I’m a blast at parties). She told me that she recently worked on a campaign to convince more parents to put their children on the UK organ donor registry.
Although the UK initiated a “presumed consent” policy for adult organ donations in 2020 (which has already saved hundreds of lives), for children it is still opt-in. Katie told me it was very hard to convince parents to put their children on the list. What messaging do you use to get people to think about something they hope will never, ever happen? Do you appeal to their hearts or their heads? Do you use compassion, heroism, or guilt?
I believe superstition also plays a role in people’s hesitance. Studies by social psychologists have established that imagining a hypothetical event has the effect of increasing our belief in the likelihood that this event will actually occur sometime in the future. So as you put down your child’s name as a potential donor, you might get a queasy feeling that you are somehow invoking their loss.
If your child ever did die suddenly, it would be the worst possible moment to decide what to do with their organs. If I try to imagine it myself, I think I would be drowning in that moment, reeling with shock and horror. I would perhaps still be waiting for a miracle, unable to accept that my child no longer needed their heart or kidneys. I can even imagine initially saying no because I couldn’t cope with the idea of cutting open my beautiful child and letting someone steal parts of them away.
And then…I can imagine always regretting it. Because in truth, the worst thing would have already happened. Far from theft, donating their organs would allow part of my child to continue living while giving another child a chance to survive. When I take the time to imagine my way through all of it, my final choice would be a resounding yes.
In recent years, when children with healthy organs died in the UK, only 52% of parents gave consent to donate. That means nearly half of all children's organs that could be donated aren't. And each of those organs could potentially save another life.
However, parents who have put their children on the organ donor registry have never ended up changing their minds if the horrible moment came. These people have already done that imaginative work and come to a firm conclusion.
If all parents were willing to take a few minutes to consider what they want should the worst happen to their child, every year children that would otherwise die could be saved. Full stop.
Using our imagination can literally save lives.
Zephyr recently turned two years old.
I have been missing and grieving the baby he was a year ago - the simple sweet squishiness of him. Meanwhile, I have been relishing the person he is now - the delightful, laughing, mischievous toddler.
And that is the great fortune of all parents with children who survive - the luxury of watching them change day by day from one thing to the next.
But it is in my memory of and yearning for the weight and softness of baby Zephyr, that I can begin to imagine aching for the feel of your child in your arms, the smell of them, and the pressure of your lips on the tops of their warm heads, but have them be gone forever.
On Wednesday we were in the tube heading towards Royal London Hospital for another day of treatment, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how much time, money and human effort has been involved in keeping my little son healthy and safe over the past two years. And this seems just to me. In the UK in theory they believe in collectively protecting all children’s health because it is the right thing to do.
But that protection does not extend beyond these borders, where the average valuation of a child’s life plummets.
Make that make sense. I can’t.
In the weeks after October 7th, I spent a lot of time immersed in the losses and tragedies of others, both in Israel and Gaza. So many atrocities. So many dead. So many families destroyed. So many hearts broken. No one deserves such suffering.
Walking down the street here in London I see people with their children, holding their hands, and I feel the incredible tenuousness of it all, and the unbelievable luck of living somewhere where we can safely assume our children will most probably be alive tomorrow.
And the luxury of believing that we can protect them.
I have not been able to help but imagine what it feels like to not be able to protect one's children. To live in daily fear that they will be harmed or killed. And to not be able to do anything about it besides hope or pray.
And here I am amid the greatest luxury - being able to grieve the baby being left behind as the toddler replaces him. Being able to watch my child growing up.
Michael Bang Peterson and Lene Aarøe, professors in Political Science at Aarhus University, argue that imagination plays a crucial role in making mass political cognition possible. “Despite our nature as small group social animals, mass society remains viable,” they write. “How is this? The key, we suggest here, is that, although we cannot directly view most fellow citizens, we see them in our mind’s eye. On the basis of these mental simulations, our rich, sophisticated social psychology enables us to feel, reason, and judge about the mass societies in which we live.”
Our imagination is at the heart of how we understand each other and our world. It gives us the capacity to empathize with people who have very different life experiences, understand the current socio-political reality, and envision something better.
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein
Over the past two years, I have seen so many children who were living their normal lives in their healthy-looking bodies until one day those bodies betrayed them, and they were plucked out of normal childhood and placed in a hospital room. I have seen so many normal families whose lives went from something they had, in many ways, designed and constructed themselves, to something completely out of their control and unrecognizable.
This could be your family. Your child. No one is safe.
And it is never fair.
But we don’t want to imagine this kind of thing happening to us. It hurts. It’s scary. It’s sad. And we also don’t want to think too much about horrors happening to other people in other places because we feel helpless and overwhelmed.
So why do it?
Because our imagination is truly our superpower. We knew this as children. But then we forgot.
Around the ages of three to four, just as their narrative imaginations are developing in complexity, children often develop a fear of the dark. As they begin to be able to imagine the unseen, they start to fear all that the dark could be hiding.
This is a time of magic, wonder, and possibility - but on the other side of fantasy lies nightmares.
But most people (who had relatively healthy home lives) don't think back on their childhood as dominated by fear. At the time in life when our imaginations are the most active, although the frights co-exist with the fantasies, they do not overrun them.
The beauty and richness of the dreams are worth the fears.
“I genuinely believe, whether it’s true or not, that if people felt a fraction of what my family felt and still feels, they would know what this life and this world are really about.” - Rob Delaney
What if adults were willing to imagine more of the difficult things? Imagine losing a family member, imagine ourselves as a single parent on a small paycheck with no one to lean on, imagine ourselves hated or attacked because of our race, religion, or sexual orientation, imagine ourselves in a war zone, running out of food and water, imagine our home destroyed, imagine ourselves unable to protect the ones we love.
Let ourselves feel a fraction of what others are feeling.
Yes, it would invite in the fears - and make us aware of all that we could lose and all that is wrong in this world. But my hunch is that it would also make us conscious of new possibilities for better ways of living - individually and societally.
It is when we allow ourselves to imagine someone else’s pain and fear, as well as the love and dreams in their heart, that we are best able to fully believe in their humanity and understand the human condition.
It is from that place that we might collectively be able to imagine the path out of this mess.
Sometimes you have to make things up, to tell truths that alter outcomes. Without the power of the imagination, we lack the power to alter outcomes, so if we can’t imagine better outcomes in a better world, we cannot act to achieve these.
—Ruth Ozeki, author
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The power of imagination...thank you for this beautiful reminder Pacifica x
Your words are raw and so touching and real. Thank you