After I was diagnosed with the same type of skin cancer that killed my father, I had to alter my relationship with the sun

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Claire Cameron’s novels include The Bear and The Last Neanderthal.

I remember the last words my dad spoke to me.

I was nine years old when I was called to his bedroom. He lay propped on a pillow. I crawled onto the bed to lie beside him, careful not to jostle. He wore the large glasses of a bookish man. They often slipped down his nose, but by then he was so thin they barely stayed on. When he looked at me, I was surprised to see tears in his eyes.

“I’m going to die,” he said.

I didn’t react. Instead, I stared at the ceiling and noticed a crack in the plaster. I was too young to know what to say. Should I cry?

His cancer started as melanoma, the deadliest skin cancer, and then it spread. I remember an operation, a large bite with metal staples like teeth that ran up his side. I remember chemotherapy, a kind of nuclear event that wasted his body. In life, he stood 6 feet and 5 inches tall. By the end, he touched down close to a hundred pounds.

My dad, Angus, was much more than cancer. He grew up in Truro, N.S., read a row of encyclopedias from A to Z, played pick-up baseball and left the Maritimes to study at Oxford University. He had a rolling sense of humour, loved opera and quietly pined for a two-seater sports car, the kind his legs were too long to fold into. He became a professor at the University of Toronto and founded The Dictionary of Old English.

He was a loving husband, brother and father who told me bedtime stories. The story I loved the most was his rendition of Beowulf, one of the oldest written examples of Old English dated near the 11th century. Beowulf fights three monsters, each more terrifying than the one who came before: Grendel, his wicked mother and a night-flying dragon. My dad’s retelling had everything: shining swords, brave acts, fierce battles and gold cups.

He explained that in Old English, kennings were a compound description that replaced a noun. Whale-road, for example, meant ocean. I understood the magic in kennings. Two words are not like each other, but when put together they can shift your perspective.

A bracelet is an arm-serpent. Fire is wind’s brother. The chest is the thought-land.

Soon after our conversation, my dad started slipping. He became less lucid and needed more sedation. His day-count fell short. He died on May 27, 1983. He was 42 years old.

Grief can overwhelm and my young body shut down. I went numb.

Healing, when it came, took on the shape of an adventure. I discovered a love sharp enough to pierce my armour in the form of travelling by canoe. I spent my days exposed to the elements – blistering sun, downpours and surprise hail storms. I swatted mosquitoes, dragged boats through swamps, ran rapids and portaged between the lakes on winding trails. I paddled for miles, a tangled braid hanging down my back. A warm sleeping bag, a full stomach and dry feet – these were the greatest luxuries. Loss became a thing I could weather. With the bow of my canoe pointed to the wind, I cut through.

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I headed west toward the mountains and started climbing. I hiked through the high desert scrub to a glacier on Mount Hood in Oregon, tied my harness onto a rope, walked backward off the glittering ice, and over the lip of a crevasse. About 30 feet down, in the belly of the glacier, I found a place more spectacular than any cathedral. The slick of ice was carved and twisted. It turned bright turquoise and dove into black. I realized, as I hung on the rope, that the glacier was alive around me, groaning, gurgling and cracking. The ice was ancient and the span of human life seemed inconsequential in comparison. Grief doesn’t just go; it changes shape and grows. Mine found its scale.

A man named Dave chipped out a spot on the glacier with his ice axe. He sat down beside me. I gave him one of my chocolate chip cookies. We married and started collecting things: a sofa, shoes that needed polishing, two cats, two kids and three sad-looking plants. Time passed. A few years ago, we found ourselves in a motel in New Brunswick on a family road trip. After a long drive and a dip in the swimming pool, the room resembled a crime scene strewn with two wet boys, open suitcases, bathing suits and hamburger wrappers. A teddy bear, named Tunafish by my younger son, sat in the middle of the mess looking grumpy. I was about to take a hard-won shower when I turned to look in the mirror. There was a black spot on the back of my shoulder.

Soon, I was diagnosed with three instances of melanoma, the same kind of cancer as my dad. He was 42 years old when he died. I was 45.

I had an operation. There were 34 stitches in my back after the surgeon cut in three places. The skin on my shoulder was pulled together tight enough to pucker. He took a smaller slice from my throat, a spot that we caught in the process of changing. The bandages were soaked through. Dave helped me remove them.

Battle-sweat, a kenning for blood.

The cancer hadn’t spread, as far as we knew, but a blood test identified a genetic mutation. My CDKN2A gene is faulty, which means a protein that acts as a tumour suppressor fails to activate. In our first meeting, my dermatologist picked up on my tendency to Google and asked if I knew about the survival rates for people with melanoma. I had them memorized and liked the odds, at my stage more than 95 per cent of people were still alive after five years. He shook his head. “None of those statistics apply to you.”

My condition is rare. The studies are few. I found a research paper with a small sample size: It shows that by the age of 50, only 38 per cent of people with my mutation are cancer-free. After that age, a graph shows how we start falling down what looks to me like a staircase of death. These numbers may, or may not, bear out in me, but I’ve had about 10 biopsies since my first operation. Two years in, I found melanoma in my eye.

In a meeting with my surgeon, while discussing the mutation, I told him about my outdoor adventures. Like many people with cancer, I wondered if I had done something to bring it on. He thought that the time I’ve spent outdoors, canoeing on lakes, travelling across glaciers and climbing in deserts didn’t help. But given the location of the melanoma, it was more likely that genetics would dictate the course of my disease.

There was one thing I could do, however, that might influence my fate. “For you,” the surgeon said, “the ideal exposure to UV light is none.” Even on a cloudy day or in a northern climate, the UV radiation in sunlight can damage DNA. The mutation meant that I lacked natural protection. I asked the surgeon how, short of becoming nocturnal, I could avoid UV light? “It’s impossible,” he said. “But you have to aim in that direction.”

My terror mixed with a glimpse of early death. Old feelings came surging back, but this time the life I grieved was mine. I had learned to cope with difficult things in a certain way. My ability to weather the elements in the wilderness, a kind of travel that by its nature includes sun exposure, had helped me find strength, courage and perspective. The way I’d learned to heal was one thing I could no longer safely do.

I started recovering physically from the operation, but I had trouble accepting my new reality. Finding a balance between no UV exposure and living a good life felt impossible. I consulted many doctors who listened patiently and agreed it was difficult.

I searched for edges. UV rays are strongest in the middle of the day, in spring and summer, and near the equator. Some tight-weave fabrics offer good protection. I installed a UV monitor on my phone. I convinced Dave to go with me on a short canoe trip. I had to try moving closer to the shape my life held before.

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We pushed off from a dock on Lake Opeongo in Algonquin Park. It was October, a time of year with lower UV light, and we left later in the afternoon, but the sun glinted off the lake as we paddled. The canoe was aluminum, shiny. Dave turned to watch the reflection of the water dapple on the underside of my chin. “It’s like being on a mirror,” he said.

In the early evening, we set up camp on an island. Granite rocks climbed gracefully out of the freshwater. Trees ran along the ridges, their leaves bursting with golds, reds, oranges. As the sun lowered toward the water, the slanted light caught me directly in the eye. If I wanted to fight something, to do battle, there was my opponent. I was no match. The sun, the most powerful force on our planet, had already secured a victory.

Sleep-of-the-sword, a kenning for a death. It holds the idea of surrender.

We drove home with the idea of a long canoe trip in the rear-view mirror. We talked about hiking instead, but I was in the grip of dread. My dad’s death, the worst thing I could imagine, might be mine. And if I lay down my sword in Algonquin Park, if I didn’t want to fight, that left me with two other responses: freeze or flight.

I started running. Soon I realized that it gave me more control over UV exposure. I couldn’t avoid it altogether, but I could lessen it. In conversation with my dermatologist, I developed a set of rules, or constraints, to manage risk.

Running alone in the dark wasn’t an especially attractive option, but the UV count started going way down about two hours before sunset. I would always wear a hat, sunscreen and long sleeves. I bought sunglasses so oversized that they looked like a disguise. When the sun started sliding down the side of the sky, I took off.

Now I run most evenings. Sunscreen drips into my eyes as I follow alongside the edge of Lake Ontario. I’ve lived in Toronto for more than 15 years since moving back. I grew up here, but when I was young, we thought of the lake as a place for industrial tailings. Now there’s a better understanding of the importance of the lake to the city’s health. The shift in civic thinking is something I’ve internalized.

I leave the house two hours before sunset. During the darkest days in the winter, I go for my run as early as 2:41 p.m. In the spring in Toronto, the day grows longer by about a minute every day. Around the summer solstice, I wait until the shadows touch 7:03 p.m. before I leave the house.

“I don’t believe in ageing,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.”

I’m aware of the slightest changes in the light. The water looks and behaves in a new way every time I’m out. I don’t think of it as going for a run, more like I go to see what the lake is saying on any given day. Sometimes I swear I can feel it breathing beside me. The water can be quiet and sly, like it’s hiding something. On other days, the lake is frantic, the headwinds furious. I follow along with its moods. There’s so much beauty in a constant state of discovery.

In the winter, I run straight into the driving snow. It’s as miserable as being high up on a mountain pass and every bit as spectacular. The winds on the shores of Lake Ontario are no less biting. With red cheeks, frozen eyelashes and stiff fingers, I feel incredibly alive. By the time I struggle home, I’m sure I’ve been to the end of the Earth and back.

One day earlier this month, it was too hot and humid. I came home dripping, exhausted and announced I quit. The next day, I woke up and heard the call of the lake. I’ll keep going.

Before I started running, I thought I had to leave the city to find this kind of conversation. I had a firm idea that the wilderness was a separate thing. The two, the city and the wild, were not like each other. Now, I no longer believe it. Once I allowed them to come together, it shifted my perspective. I see the city and the wilderness as inextricably bound together. One lives inside the other. I first found it in the lake, but now I see it everywhere.

The wild is constantly growing and changing. It is ancient and will be here long after I’m gone. I can’t control where or how it goes. It’s under the carpet, in the alley behind my house, in the lake, inside a glacier and on an island in Algonquin. But it’s also much closer. It lives in my cells. To some, those cells might have a mutation. To me, they are cells inherited from my dad. I have cancer. It’s wild inside me.

For many years, I remembered the last words my dad spoke to me in a certain way. I heard them as I did when I was nine years old. The experience of having cancer has allowed those words to grow. I understand them from a different perspective. It’s a point of view that, given my age, might be much closer to my dad’s.

If I have to tell my sons that I’m dying, it will take incredible courage. And if I’m brave enough to express my fear, if I can be vulnerable and honest, the conversation might come with a sense of release. My boys are still young, but they have a loving family. I see their strength. I trust them. Life can be hard and they will find ways to weather it.

When Beowulf turns to face his final fight with the dragon, he knows he will die. In Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation, he says, “I’ll let go then, of all my holdings, my throne, my carefully guarded bones.” It’s acceptance that gives Beowulf the strength to be brave.

That’s how I want to live. That’s how I’ll go.

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