ON FINDING HOPE IN ADVERSITY… With Sir Chris Hoy and Michael Rosen

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2:15Elizabeth Day:That's 15 % off at masterclass.com slash fail. Masterclass.com slash fail. When we're younger, we believe that life is going to follow a predictable path. But the truth is that difficult situations have a way of arriving without warning. And it's often in those ruptures that we discover the resilience we didn't know we had. This episode explores how hope can emerge in the toughest moments, reshaping our sense of who we are. You're going to hear from the amazing Sir Chris Hoy, who recounts receiving a stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis and then discovering that his wife was living with multiple sclerosis.

3:00Elizabeth Day:Despite this severe adversity, Chris says the experience transformed his understanding of love, of joy and of what truly matters when life's fragility is unavoidable. Then you'll hear from the beloved British children's author Michael Rosen, who very sadly lost his son aged 18. Michael talks about allowing himself to sit with that grief rather than trying to outrun it. His experience is a salutary reminder that hope doesn't erase heartbreak, but sometimes in time it can coexist with it and it can steady us as we learn to live on. First up, here's Sir Chris Hoy.

3:48Elizabeth Day:Can you tell me about love and what you've learned about love

3:52Sir Chris Hoy:through this process the terminal diagnosis or any serious health diagnosis that brings into focus your own mortality it really does help you to to strip away all the stuff that's not important and to focus on all that matters you know that's that was the reason that was the reason we chose that title for the book it's you know stepping back looking at the situation and and realizing actually it's the people in our lives that matter and the intensity of that love It just, it goes to another level when you suddenly feel like it could be, you know, it could all be ending at some point. Yeah, I think in the last year I have a whole different perspective.

4:32Sir Chris Hoy:The stuff that I used to get worried about, the stuff that I used to stress about, the small stuff, you kind of look at now and you think, what was I wasting all that time for? and most of the time the things that we worry about the things we we have you know anxious thoughts about the things that wake you up at two or three o 'clock in the morning they're not going to happen yeah writing the book it's it's helped me process it all when I started writing the book I was in a very different place to where I am now physically and mentally and and I believe that the writing process has helped me to get through that and now genuinely feel incredibly incredibly positive um the number of dark days are few and far between now and yeah i think you just kind of think i wish i could have had this perspective you know a few years ago and and but you can't look back you've got to you've got to look forward as you mentioned

5:22Elizabeth Day:there you're a year and a bit on from your diagnosis how are you feeling physically right now

5:28Sir Chris Hoy:remarkably well um i mean you look fantastic well thank you it's just it's it's a hard one because you you know I was still exercising fairly you know intensely I retired in 2013 so I was still riding my bike regularly I was still lifting weights in the gym I still had that kind of athlete's mentality of pushing myself hard when I was exercising you know I had maybe half an hour or an hour a day to squeeze some some training in if you can call it training so I would I would push myself hard in that in that time and that was just the way I did it and therefore when you started to pick up aches and aches and pains you assume it's because you're getting a bit older and it's just the body's you know way to tell you to slow down but in reality it was actually secondary cancers it was it was tumors all over my body which were had got into the bones and and so that that instinct to push through pain was was was a bad one really but now having had you know i've had chemotherapy radiotherapy various medication you know i'm not on any painkillers now but I've got no pain but feeling really good like by far the best I've felt in the last year and probably the last two years really um and and as I say mentally I've got through that initial grief and shock and and horror of a diagnosis um you know and you realize that it's it's not unique this is happening every single day around the country around the world countless families are going through exactly the same thing um so my thoughts are with them because there's no way to fast forward through it.

6:59Sir Chris Hoy:You have to basically accept it and grind your way through and it feels like it'll never get better. But yeah, I hope that the book was written to show that even when you don't believe it, you can find hope eventually. It takes time, but you've got to be disciplined with the way you approach things. You've got to choose to not engage with the negative which is impossible sometimes impossible some days but on the whole if you can keep leaning into your family into your friends the people that are there for you your loved ones then then you can you can get to a point where you can laugh again you can enjoy music you can you can have fun again and it's I couldn't even listen to music um you know it was too triggering I couldn't nothing was a relief you couldn't escape it it was just this constant thought it was the first thing you know thought about in the morning when you woke up, you dreamt about it.

7:53Sir Chris Hoy:It consumed every waking thought and sleeping thought. So to get from that stage, I'm glad to be here in the here and the now.

8:01Elizabeth Day:That book does take you very much on that journey as a reader. And I mean this as a compliment. I had to put it down several times when I was reading it because the emotions that you provoke are so overwhelming, I can't even imagine what they must have been like actually to inhabit for the person going through them. And you describe the moment you got the diagnosis and sort of squatting on the floor, just not being able to breathe because there was just this boulder of grief, it felt like. And then by the final chapter, what I love about the final chapter is that you talk about how Sarah, your wife, has started hearing you hum again.

8:41Sir Chris Hoy:that shift that imperceptible shift over the space of those few months to going from this just absolute shell to to coming back to being myself again and so stage one two and three there is hope that you can cure it stage four it's you're told this is incurable but it is treatable you know those words stick with you in the space of a sentence your world has changed you know everything that i had done in my sporting career mentally you know the tools in your toolbox to cope with pressure or to deal with difficult situations at the heart of it was the notion that this isn't life and death this is riding bikes in anti-quotified circles this is you know this is fun and if you win or lose this race nothing's going to change you know no one's going to die this is just this is just basically um a hobby and that's what you lean in what i always used used to lean into but here was a situation where it very much was life and death and then that you're kind of scrabbling around trying to find some solid ground to grab onto to think well how do i process this how do i cope with it incredibly lucky with the support i've got i mean sarah is well she's a she's a samaritan so she's a listener so she's she is an amazing listener in general but she has the skills to to kind of let you vent to let you express your your fears and not offer solutions but just be there to take it all but at the same time you're you're realizing this isn't her talking to an anonymous person on the end of a phone this is her husband that's talking to her and so she the strength that she showed during that time was was quite incredible um and yeah you know had well steve peters our psychologist from the cycling team

10:29Elizabeth Day:We'll get on to him. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

10:31Sir Chris Hoy:I mean, he was, he has and always has been, you know, since the first time I met him, has been a really important person in my life. Yeah. He was very quick to try and help me stabilize the ship.

10:43Elizabeth Day:And Sarah's support is all the more extraordinary when you consider her own diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, which you reveal in the book that she kept from you for a month because she wanted to protect you. and yet she seems to embody so much of what you're talking about that sense of being lucky

11:02Sir Chris Hoy:can you explain yeah or she had this tingling on her face and this numbness which had been there for a while and she'd been to the doctor and the gp and back and forth and she found out that she she has multiple sclerosis and she she didn't tell me about it because for that first month it was just i think her logic was there's nothing that i can do or we can do at that time um she was going to you know receive treatment and but telling me that at that stage where i was absolutely hanging on by a thread i think she thought this this you know there's it's not going to help in uh you know in in telling me the news so yeah i think it was late december or mid-december when she told me and that's the point where it felt like hang on a minute what what is going on it felt it felt nightmarish even when she told me she never had self-pity or there was no poor me or you know how how awful this is she was just like this is what's happened this is how you know i've got an appointment with the doctor for this we're going to find out treatment options her strength was what kind of kept me going at that point um and the fact that she says you know she constantly reminds me how lucky we are because we both have a disease which there is a treatment for you know you could so many other things could happen where there's nothing you can do there's nothing you can treat it with and it's going to be a very quick and you know a quick and sudden end and when you have those dips you remind yourself the here and the now you bring yourself back to the present you don't think too far ahead you don't try and predict the future you just go well right here right now when it was awful in the first few weeks and you'd wake up in the middle of night or you couldn't sleep in the middle of the night you know it was just this feeling of the kids are next door they're warm they're comfortable they're sleeping they're fine they're safe we're in a warm comfortable dry bed we're okay and i think that was it was just this feeling of kind of grab on and hold tight and it'll it'll settle you'll get through the turbulence but yeah it was uh it was a tough time but reminding yourself how lucky you are how we all you know how lucky all of us are it's not about being positive and every day jumping out of bed and saying everything's great, but just trying not to engage with the negativity and choosing, you know, not choosing that kind of mourning, complaining, worrying, just steering clear of that.

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14:53Elizabeth Day:This season, we're bringing back some old friends, a Radiotopia buddy, and for the first time ever, a Nobel laureate. That's right. We have Malala on season nine. Normal Gossip is out on all your favourite podcast platforms. Is part of the reason you don't like failing at team sport because you don't like letting people down?

15:15Michael Rosen:Yes, I think you've discovered something there. Yes. Now that you've put it that way. Yeah, I can't bear it. Yes, it's a great fear and connects with something rather terrible, which is the loss of my son. So my son, Eddie, died of meningitis. And I suppose not a day goes by when I sort of feel that I've let the family down because he was staying with me. It was just me and him in the house. And I didn't spot that he had meningitis. And he just seemed to be a bit fluey. And I didn't spot that it was meningitis. So there isn't a day that goes by when I do feel that I let him down and I let the family down.

15:55Michael Rosen:So that hurts. Yes.

15:58Elizabeth Day:Michael, I'm so sorry for that unassailable tragedy. And I read about Eddie during the course of researching this interview, and I wasn't sure whether to talk to you about him, because I don't know what kind of pain that must be to carry. and I'm so grateful to you for sharing that. Do you like talking about him? What does it feel like for you to talk about your son in this way?

16:29Michael Rosen:These days, it's absolutely fine and something of a relief because talking releases something. This is why we have psychotherapists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and so on, is because there's a sense in which when thoughts are in your head, there is a way in which they're trapped not all of them but some of them they are trapped or they feel trapped and then when you talk you let them out you release them and we've got all sorts of phrases talk it through talk it out we've got all sorts of phrases that mean that and so with eddie at the beginning i couldn't talk about it i was genuinely suffering but now i have all sorts of memories and things.

17:15Michael Rosen:And the whole family talk about him, his girlfriend, she was then, we write each other letters and talk about it. And the other day, I found my dad's poem that he wrote for the funeral that the Jamaican poet James Berry read at the funeral. And that was just amazing, because I hadn't been able to find it. All I could remember was one line from it. And I was feeling frustrated and kind of a bit, a sort of sense of deprivation. I couldn't find the poem because it had been so good in fact if just hang on one second i could reach across oh we'd love it's it's on the shelf just hang on okay there may be a little right yes i've managed to get it so it's in an envelope in which my father it's got my father's address on it and he's written on it harold's poem so here we are and it's in his handwriting and typed so here is what he wrote.

18:11Grandson Eddie, larger than life, filling the frame of the doorway in his hockey

18:17Michael Rosen:goalkeeper's gear, a giant from outer space, larger than life. Eddie in his Arsenal shirt, acres of it across his chest, stroking it with his great hands. Eddie with his first watch in the Natural History Museum, checking the time every minute in charge of the rendezvous by the dinosaur, making sure there was still some time left. Nowhere near enough time, we now know, larger than life, but not large enough.

18:53Elizabeth Day:Oh my goodness.

18:54Michael Rosen:So.

18:56Elizabeth Day:That's such a beautiful poem, And it gives such a sense of him.

19:01Michael Rosen:Absolutely. And I sent it to Eddie's girlfriend the other day because she wouldn't have known it or had it. I don't think she had a copy of it anyway. I say Eddie's girlfriend. I mean, she's gone on to lead a life, obviously, because this was a long time ago. And she wrote back straight away saying that the image of Eddie was exactly as she remembered him. Yeah. Great.

19:22Elizabeth Day:Do you believe in an afterlife of any sort?

19:25Michael Rosen:No, we are the afterlife. And I take great comfort from that. That's to say the afterlife is the memories and the physical remnants of the person who's gone, whatever remnants they are. I don't mean that in bits of their body as such. Though, of course, atomically speaking, they are there without being mystical about it. The body and what remains of it remains atomically around. The atoms and molecules are there. but the remnants in our minds of everybody who knew Eddie and then also physically you know I've got his shoes they're just on the other side of the room here believe it or not in a box and I get them out every now and then I've got all sorts of things there's a little photograph of him playing with his stepsister just up there on the bookcase I've got some Duplo people sitting on the shelf there and one of them I seem to remember me and Eddie decided was Aretha Franklin so it does actually look a little bit like Aretha Franklin.

20:24Michael Rosen:The hair, definitely. And I seem to remember we'd sit there going, you make me feel like a natural woman. It was a very funny bloke, I should say. There's also a Jewish thing. There's what's called a yurtzeit candle, which technically I should have lit every year, but I haven't. Yurtzeit means year time, literally in Yiddish. Yurtzeit, that's there. So there's all sorts of remnants and then all sorts of events as well. So for example, the guys he used to play hockey with. They have a hockey match every year in memory of Big Eddie. And they even try and encourage me to get on and hit the ball. I always miss.

20:59Michael Rosen:So there's all sorts of ways in which the afterlife is here and now.

21:06Elizabeth Day:Thank you, Michael. What a profound and helpful sentiment.

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