If a couple learns that one or the other is suffering from a terminal illness, something happens to the relationship between them. I am sure that must be so, although I have not studied the subject.

I happen to know a couple in that situation, and am fascinated by how they seem determined to concentrate on enjoying each other and enjoying life together more than they ever did before, more, even, than when they were courting. The sharpness of tone of voice outsiders often discerned in their discourse, is gone. There is a softness, an attentiveness between them that makes me wonder: Will not the grief and the loss seem all the greater in the end?

For some people, perhaps, the very announcement that death will come within – say, half a year – is received as a signed and stamped death certificate, as a fait accompli. Knowing that life as they know it will end, they turn from each other, turn off the light, as it were, in advance, waiting for sleep to turn off the pain.

And there must be a multitude of other reactions, more or less chaotic combinations of the two extremes described. There must be, after all, innumerable unresolved past issues – “you called me a stupid bitch!” – there may be former lovers; there may be “my children”, “your children”…

Moreover, living together is not only a matter of emotional attachment: There are also the house, the bills, the debts, the cost of treatment and, finally, the purely physical burden of having to care for one who is bedridden.

I have never lived with a person who was dying. But I can to some extent imagine how it must be, because I am living with a planet that is dying. To be more precise: It is being killed.

We are all effectively impotent in the face of this atrocity. We know who the killers are, or rather what they are, but we are as incapable of stopping them as Spartacus was of freeing the Roman slaves or as Palestine Action is of freeing the Palestinians. In the end, all who try, suffer the same fate as Spartacus and Palestine Action. They get quashed one way or another.

While injustice has always incited some – as Spartacus – to express their anger violently (which Palestine Action did not, by the way), others direct it at themselves, in the form of depression, which is, in essence, self-harm.

Most of us, however, just carry on the day to day business of staying alive and allowing business to proceed as usual.

You will put to me that there is a distinction between disease and “politics”. Indeed. But the two have a common denominator: They both kill and the net result for those who survive is LOSS.

The loss to most of us who live with this planet is unfathomable.

I grew up loving the swallows who returned to us every spring. No more. There are still swallows somewhere, I believe, but not where I live. I am surely not the only one who notices their absence.

I suspect that most of us are worried and (or) sad, some more, some less. Increasingly, though, people are getting angry.

There is so much to be angry about, where to start?

  • The 1% is running the show (the Mont Pelerin Society, the Bilderberg lot, the Davos and Trilateral Commission lot, the G7 …): Their field of expertise is exploitation at which they excel, using instruments, such as:
    • Our political class – basically all parties (new parties are soon bribed or otherwise discombobulated) – which are tasked with following agendas set for them.
    • State and corporate media whose task it should be to inform us, but which are instructed to withhold information and skew what little information they impart in order to keep us in the dark.

The problem about anger is that when you don’t know what is going on, you don’t know where to address it. When so much effort is being devoted to keeping us in the dark, we can do no more than knock our heads against walls. There is certainly no dearth of walls. Even in Gaza, they still have walls.

I have therefore decided to follow the example of the friends I described in my opening paragraph. At least for now. I have decided to love my dying partner, the planet, with all the tenderness I can muster.

Day by day, I love it more and more, knowing that it is just a matter of time before it or I must die. And this week I have been downright happy: Every day, there has been some rain. And every day, there has been some sunshine. The birds – those who are still around – have been singing, leaves are green, and there are even some insects around. I sit out in the evenings just listening, taking in the scents of life.

It is true, there were more birds last year. But those who still survive from year to year are infinitely dear to me.