a new year.

I have been sorting through some old poems, and here is a fragment from a poem I wrote in 2011, when I believed I would easily live into my nineties, when the idea that I would get lung cancer was as preposterous to me as it was on the day before I got the ER dismissal sheet this summer (because my anemia had spiraled out of control and I popped over to the ER for a transfusion (and I thought I would just skip over back to work after the transfusion (a sweet thought from someone who was confused about the pace of things in the ER where, although I did need the transfusion (and desperately needed to be diagnosed with lung cancer), I was not an”emergency,” as compared to the guy who fell off a ladder at work and needed surgery or the drug addict who was overdosing (and I never would have believed that within six months I myself would be calling 911 to report my own possible overdose (see earlier blog posting (spoiler alert: I lived)))--the report that quietly told me to follow up because they had spotted a nodule in my lung. I googled ‘nodule in lung’ on the late-night drive home from the hospital--Avery driving and working so hard not to get lost because I was reading the odds the nodule was malignant instead of listening to Waze. 

Do not cleave to houses,

the admonition goes.

But how shall we not cleave to grandmothers?

When I still wait

twenty years, and a dozen black dresses later,

for my grandmother to enter this house,

my house,

and set things right.

I can’t imagine what admonition I was thinking of when I wrote don’t cleave to houses, but now that I have cancer, and all I want is more time--the deep pain of the desire for time enough to see all my children grown feels like a heavy weight tied to my heart that could drown me in relentless waves of sadness, the breath-denying ache to let me grow old with Kyle and hold ancient hands together--I can’t imagine phrasing such a thing in the negative.  How shall we not cleave to grandmothers?  Cleave to grandmothers we must.  

We have to take out our stories of the ones who have already departed, and often. We need to say, what would Evelyn think? What would she tell us to do? We need to honor her and remember that she would never tell us what to do, but to be near her, with her endless capacity for acceptance and love of all of us, despite our failings, because of our failings, we would find we already knew what to do.  I know what you are thinking: she is scared that she will be forgotten. It’s something like that, but not quite.  It’s something to do with imagining a future where Avery, or Zoe, or Kyle, or Asher looks for me, needs me, and I’m just not there.  How can I shore up their understanding of me now, so that I can be of some comfort then?

People say the holidays are hard for some people. I always imagined those people as the singular people--the people alone, whether by choice or fate. I have created a life where I am definitively surrounded by people virtually all of the time. Six children is its own life-form--it’s a noisy, lovely animal, surrounded by lots of other noisy, often lovely people.  The parade of girls and boys, now men and women, brought home to be inspected by the tribe: held up in the air, the delicate sniffing out of a sense of humor and adoration of the sibling at hand--the two prerequisites for an invitation in.  And I somehow still have two small ones, who believe in Santa and delight in crawling right up, sprawled half-naked, just out of the bath, all dewy skin and warm.  And who knows, anyhow, if the singular people are not just out there absolutely reveling in their singularity.  

But the holidays were hard for me this year because of course, cancer. In cancer world, you have to think, what if this is my last Hanukkah, my last Christmas.  I don’t wander around on any given Tuesday, thinking, what if this is my last January 2nd, but I did have a hard time staying in the present over the last few weeks.  I carved out regret for the past and freak-out anxiety for the future.  I kept it together during the days of gift-wrapping and gifts opened, of meals in warm restaurants, and stacks of pancakes and bowls of scrambled eggs in the morning. But the nights were really lonely, and the deep cold and dark days of winter have been slowly tearing into my “reasonable hope,” which is the phrase I had been throwing around lately. 

Bless Kyle. She has carried me right through these weeks. You’re not dying of cancer, she would say.  You’re living with cancer. Here sweetheart, come closer and let me hold you. Who knew, she said, again and again, what a beautiful head you have. 

Bless Avery for coming home for days on end,  and shadowing me, making it possible for me to cook for everyone by acting as my sous chef, holding me for the long hugs she should be famous for, for loving me so gently. What flowers will you want in your garden next summer, she wrote this week, sending me images of flowers so I could dream my way out of the winter.

Bless Zoe for sitting for hours with me, working side-by-side on our computers, for searching through all of our photos and making a beautiful photo album that is rich in colors and themes--I hate to call it a photo album because our family comes alive in its pages. For telling me to go take a nap. For taking the boys to the movies so I could nap. For pulling out your colored markers to ask me what my goals were for the next year, and for assuming staying alive did not need memorialization.

Bless Nancy for visiting the Rabbi with me, holding my hand while we asked him to explain the story of the child who dies before her parent, for swallowing sensibilites and coming with me to meditation class, where we sat in the dark room in the temple, focusing on just one breath, and then another.

Bless Rosie and Sara for braving snowstorms to come sit in my kitchen and make kale soup, and debate the virtues of brown sugar ratios to white sugar in chocolate chip cookie recipes (err on the side of brown), for telling the same family stories over again for new audiences.

This is the part in the Emmys when the person clutching their award wants to keep reading her carefully scripted acceptance speech but the person in charge of making the show end on time wants her to gracefully exit stage left (the music roars up, drowning the rest of my thank-yous, but you know who you are, all you late night texters, and early morning emailers, those of you who have been insistently in touch with me, refusing to let me go too far towards the dark spaces, those of you who keep opening up the shades, letting the sunlight in, clapping your hands together and saying, now, what shall we do with this one precious day we have, right now?