The thief of time dies. Wilko Johnson RIP

In 2013, Wilco Johnson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They told him that it was terminal. They gave him 10 months to live. Pancreatic cancer is one of those cancers that is particularly fatal. Patrick Swayze died from it. My good friend Lenore Herb died from it. In her case, she had been self medicating with marijuana and a hit water water bottle, until the pain was so unbearable, she heeded advice to go to the emergency. They discovered stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She asked the doctors what was the plan to fight this. They told her to consider her spiritual options.

When Wilko was told the same advice, he refused the chemo, and he went on a Final tour. His impending death revived his creative energies. He recorded a “final” album, “Going Back Home,” with Roger Daltrey of The Who.

Later that year, the doctors decided it wasn’t as bad a cancer as they had first believed, so they operated on him, removing a 7 pound tumour.

“I suddenly found myself in a position where nothing matters anymore,” he told the Associated Press in 2013. “I’m a miserable so-and-so normally ... I’d be worrying about the taxman or all the things that we worry about that get in the way of the real things. And suddenly it doesn’t matter. All of that doesn’t matter.

Besides the heroism of his attitude to refuse to die and go on the road for a final hurrah, the thing I loved about Wilko was his response after that Final tour ended. There he was, alive. He was supposed to be dead. All the doctors said he would be dead. But there he was.

“You walk down the street and you feel intensely alive. You’re `Oh, look at that leaf!′ You’re looking around and you think, `I’m alive. Ain’t it amazing?’”

The cancer was supposedly gone. But his depression returned. Wilko, who had suffered from depression, had lost the depression during that 10 month period in which he thought was his final days.

“ I knew I was really getting better from the cancer when I started getting depressed again,” he said.

He was alive. His response to this reprieve? I clearly remember reading that his response was, “ Now what?”.

And so he kept busy, never stopping, never allowing himself to be consumed by the depression he lived with every day. According to The Guardian, “In 2015, Johnson made a film, The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson, focusing on his unexpected survival. In 2016 he published the memoir Don’t You Leave Me Here, and in 2018 he released the solo album Blow Your Mind. He was still performing regularly with his band up until September this year.”

Today his time ran out, as it always does. Our lives are finite. Our spirit can be infinite. However, sooner or later, our body wears out. It is interesting that the depression returned after he got over the operation to remove the tumour.

Depression is like that. Silent, mysterious, depression waits for it’s time to kill the sun. When you have depression, you never really lose it. You manage it. You take antidepressants. You might try to wean yourself off them, but after taking them for some time, your brain chemistry changes. Escape seems futile. Your life becomes all about managing. This has been my experience anyway. Others may have different experiences.

Today, time finally caught up with Wilko Johnson. His memory and music lives on.