Review of ‘Not nothing’: Hiske Dibbets’ poignant memoir on living with terminal cancer

Halfway through Not nothing by Hiske Dibbets (55), about her life with metastatic colorectal cancer, a young doctor’s assistant asks her: ‘Do you want to be resuscitated if something goes wrong during the operation?’ Yes, replies Dibbets. The doctor’s assistant asks if she is sure. ‘Because you are terminally ill.’ As if Dibbets doesn’t know that – it makes sense that she gets pissed off: ‘What was she thinking? Didn’t she understand that for a palliative patient, time is everything? A few extra weeks might have been worth more to me than a whole year to someone else.’

A year with death on my heels reads the subtitle of the book and if it makes anything clear it is how much of a hurry someone is in Dibbets’ situation. Not to experience great and compelling things, but to simply cycle through the city, eat a sandwich with husband and child. Dibbets has spent half her life fantasizing about a different, more beautiful existence, preferably on the Italian or Greek coast. Now she wants nothing but her old, ordinary, imperfect life back.

Write what you want

It is an insight that crops up more often in the genre – a genre that Dibbets himself previously had nothing to do with. As a manuscript reviewer for a publishing house, she not only pushed Kluuns A woman comes to the doctor as worthless aside (“I had missed the biggest sales hit of the century”), other medical histories did not interest her either. The fact that she is now publishing ‘the umpteenth story about cancer’, she writes, is because ‘I didn’t really care that my story was about my illness. I distanced myself from all those dogmas I had imposed on myself in the past. I could write whatever I wanted.’

So Dibbets writes about the desperation and grief that inevitably come with the approaching end of life, about the two-track policy that many a terminally ill person will recognize (‘In the end I decided to adopt a magical realist attitude towards my illness. I would stay sober and meanwhile believing in the impossible’) and about the right to hope: even her best friend, who is a doctor, should not dare to doubt the usefulness of another cure.

Sobering up

A shaman in Druten, who burns incense and drums for Dibbets for a long time, advises her to accept her death. On the train back to Amsterdam, she wonders what the hell she is doing. The hope of a miracle couldn’t be more soberingly destroyed – in a bedroom in Druten, by someone who had promised nothing less than a healing.

In addition to death and keeping it at a distance, Dibbets writes about her life: the artistic environment in which she grew up, the quarrel with her father, the love for her husband and daughter. The blissfully happy afternoon, once, the three of them at the Hotel Gronchi in Pisa, picnicking in bed. You feel the urgency: everything must be recorded before it is too late, because ‘in the end there was only one thing worse than dying and that was never to have lived’.

Yes, another well-known insight from the genre, but rightly so that Dibbets didn’t care; the general truths Not nothing come in mercilessly through the unadorned language, hypothermic humor and careful construction of the story. That a rare encounter with a doctor who does take his time is almost a cliché, is not the author’s fault. That’s bad enough.