the legend of Len Bias.

Three times a day, I slip two wafers of methadone onto my tongue and chase them down with cool water. I was exhausted several days ago, and twice in a twenty-four hour period, missed the time to take the methadone and woke up from deep sleeping to real pain. Which was a good lesson because methadone is a great pain medication and had lulled me into believing I might not need the methadone because I wasn't in pain. I understand the looniness of the logic, but the fact that I am taking methadone (and this would be so if you subbed in any other similarly situated drug) prevents me from driving, which has made my life circumscribed in a beautiful, often vexing manner. So if I didn't somehow need methadone anymore, wouldn't that be grand?

My life takes place, with some exceptions, in three places. My home, which I love. MGH. And the cranberry bog down the street from my home--which is almost unspeakably beautiful. I am feeling stronger, and have been able to walk in the bog almost every day of late, which allows me to bear witness to changes on a small scale. Avery and her boyfriend, Rajdeep, were home last weekend, and we walked around the bog and suddenly there, flat and startled against the gray rocks, was a dead Canadian goose. It looked as though it had simply plummeted from the sky, like Icarus. We knew that the next time we came, it would be gone, pulled away and ravaged by other animals. Perhaps a bobcat. Or maybe it wouldn't happen like that at all. Maybe someone would come and gently remove the goose, and place it in the flatbed of their truck and take it home to bury it. We don't know. When Avery was a child, she couldn't bear to see dead animals alone in the road. She would come home and get a shovel, and scrape up the dead squirrel and bury it by the side of the house. She would intone a child's prayer for it, telling the animal she was sure it had been special and unique in some way. She would tell the animal she knew its family would mourn its death. It was gorgeous and awful, and I took down all the little burial markers when we sold that house for fear someone would think of that Stephen King novel, Pet Cemetery. I feel like I have told you this story before. Perhaps I have and I don't remember because I take methadone three times a day.

When I tell people I am taking methadone, often they will say, but wait, isn't that the drug people take when they are being treated for opioid addiction (this is usually phrased something like--isn't that for people who do heroin?). And I say yes, but it is also a pain medication. I did some reading about methadone, and learned about a report the FDA issued in 2006 titled "Methadone Use for Pain Control May Result in Death and Life-Threatening Changes in Breathing and Heart Beat." Which I am also afraid is one of the results of having lung cancer. The study lists a huge number of adverse effects of methadone which includes diarrhea or constipation, flushing, sweating, heat intolerance, sleep problems, memory loss, loss of appetite and weight gain, decreased libido and, under withdrawal symptoms, spontaneous orgasm (about which the very contemplation leaves me speechless and certain I can never come back to work). So far, I am not experiencing any of the myriad of horrors, but I do find people seem a bit chagrined that I am merrily taking a medication they associate with the opioid crisis in America (there, that sounded like CNN, didn't it?).

People are also a bit chagrined that I have lung cancer and I didn't smoke. I think there are a fair number of people out there who are a bit judgy about all my fellow lung cancer travelers who did smoke. It's like that scene from the movie "Airplane," where the journalist on a news show called "Counterpoint" says of the passengers on the plane (which is now flying out of control threatening to crash): "They bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let them crash." There is something confusing and unseemly about having lung cancer and never smoking.

Which I really never did. Not a cigarette, not marijuana. My dear, dear aunt Rose (which makes her sound like an old woman who smells of lavender and carries Starlite mints in her handbag--think instead of the cool girl who lived in a single in your dorm and wrote for the college paper and wore great tattered jeans, and dated the smart and handsome boys--who never went to calculus class but knew everything there was to know about words, and politics and the world) was visiting last week, and we stumbled onto remembering Len Bias, who was the reason I never tried cocaine. (Look him up, if you don't remember because you were a baby at the time, or, gulp, just a twinkle in your mother's eye).

So it's funny now, to be in a world of methadone and medical marijuana. A dear, dear world, which is understood as long, tiring, delicious walks to the bog, countless hours talking with my mother, and my sister, and the steady group of friends who trek out to visit me and sink into the deep couches to talk, or hold my hand on the front porch, or sit in the kitchen as I start to cook again, to the long, dark nights where Kyle is my caretaker and best friend and sometimes we watch Stranger Things and sometimes we cry at the strangeness of the situation at hand--a world where my older children pile out of their decrepit Volvos, and I can hear them talking late at night in the kitchen as I rest upstairs--their laughter carrying up through the window in the living room, the clink of glasses, a time when I read, story after story to the five year olds, and moved after novel to myself (right now I am reading Manhattan Beach) and where I write story after story to all of you. I don't mind at all, it turns out, not to be in Paris or Israel or Telluride. I would love to go, but I'm so incredibly grateful for the map unfurling as it is now.

It's a bit of a myth that old maps used to have the legend 'Here Be Dragons' inscribed over unknown territories. In fact, only one globe has such a legend. It's named the Hunt-Lenox Globe, and was built in 1510. You can see it at the New York Public Library, if your world allows you to go that far, and it is tiny, and made of copper, and contains that warning along the coast of Asia. I haven't worried much about dragons, but I have worried much about time and symptoms and death. Lately though, the days and the nights have been calm, the walks have grown longer, and the laughter deeper. Winter is coming, and I'll lose the bog at some point to ice and snow I can't traverse with my brittle bones. But I feel sure I'll see it in the spring, with the green leaves unfurling, and the warm rains, and the purple crocuses.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it's the methadone.