Opium Papa

In the chair next to me with a vitamin C drip in his arm sat John from Macedonia. 78, looking good for his age, but worn out by cancer and surgeries.

He was telling me about growing up in a small town in the mountains, about life after the war, about moving to Australia.
He said they grew a lot of cannabis in Macedonia, and used the female plants for medicine, ropes, more.
There were also opium poppies everywhere, and he told me how to tap them. He said they used them for medicine.
When he was a little kid he'd play with a big bud of opium, throwing it against walls, and his grandfather would wallop him.

His wife died of cancer a few years ago and it wrecked him. She was only 68. He really loved her. Still holding hands in public kinda love. He'd internalised all the pain, keeping it from family, not wanting them to see him weak, sad or sick - and I chastised him for that. Told him I talk to so many men in their 30s and up who are ruined by stuffing all their feelings inside in a toxic little ball.

And all that internalising equalled belatedly finding out his immune system was collapsing, liver failing, and pancreatic cancer blooming.
He doesn't want chemo. He watched it eat away the last of his love's life. Hence vitamin C infusions. Rebuilding the immune system. Getting quality of life back - much more important to him now than quantity.

He said when he moved to Australia in 1954, he had heard that black people eat white people's babies.
He's a smart guy, so he didn't take it at face value, but was still wary.
His first occasion of seeing an Aborigine was one being thrown out of a pub by 4 white men.
"I thought - oh, the black people attack the whites - and here I see, it's the other way around!"