cancer country
Have I shared my small fantastical idea that there is a parallel universe so close it sometimes feels like I could just take a step to the left and be back on that path, or open my eyes quickly in the morning and catch a glimpse of the other world, the world from before last summer, a universe where I hum merrily on my way, and I don't have cancer, and Hillary Clinton is president, and we don't have to ever realize that it is much worse than we imagined, over here where I have stage four cancer and Donald Trump is president. I feel so close to that Tracy--I can picture her waking up wearily at 4:30 in the morning to answer emails and make pancakes and adjust her black dress and slide into the old, black Honda to steal through the quiet, dark woods of Carlisle and Concord until suddenly she joined Route 2 and was on her way, into Boston, into her office, where she sat in her office and talked, really, for a living. Oh sure, there were PowerPoints and bullet pointed memorandum, but mostly there was talk.
At any rate, it might just be that I haven't been an inhabitant of cancer country long enough and so my memory of my well self is still real enough to be actively mourned, in a way where I literally reach out and try to grab hold of the past which still seems so close as to be the truth where this life with cancer is the illusion, or, and this feels more truthful, it may be that there really are these parallel universes and my life, another life, uninterrupted by cancer, spins on out there, on a channel I can't find anymore, but which occasionally comes through to me, patchy, like a short-wave radio.
That's a sort of terrifying thought isn't it though.
I suppose I want to take hold of all of it and shake it, like a blanket at the foot of the bed, shake it out straight and full, so that Trump and cancer and all of that falls away. I could make the bed tidily, brush off my hands on my jeans, and be on my way.
I know you remember how important Narnia was to me and to so many of us, I imagine, especially those of us who sought company and comfort from books, at times instead of people, at times because of people. The idea that in your present day you might be an ordinary schoolchild, marking time until the war ended in an old country home in England (even that, sounding marvelous) and suddenly you could be thrown back into a world where you were a beautiful queen ruling over a magical country filled with good fauns and evil snow queens, giants dragging their stone hammers through the forest where even the trees could talk. This feeling I have now, of being in the wrong place, of being trapped in cancer while my regular me is hiding, just out of sight, makes me feel the same pins and needles I sometimes felt as a child, wishing so hard, in my dark bedroom, to wake up in Narnia.
One time I drove Zachary to this ferry in Vermont that you can take across part of Lake Champlain rather than driving further down the highway to get across on a bridge. Zach was getting on the ferry and a friend was going to meet him on the other side to take him to his job at a wilderness camp. I was supposed to leave him there and just turn the car around and drive home from this ferry.
When we pulled up, however, the ferry wasn't there yet and suddenly I felt fretful, reluctant to leave Zach. Zach is incredibly sensible and normally I wouldn't think of telling Zach about this kind of maudlin onset of panic, this feeling of don't leave me, Zach, how do I let you just get on this ferry and float away for a matter of months? And then my imagination spun a story around Zach--what if he was leaving home to go out and earn money--perhaps whale hunting, maybe surveying for gold, something nineteenth century or early twentieth century. And I did share that story with Zach, and he played along with it, joking about saving money and sending it back home so his sisters would have enough money to get married--we mixed metaphors and history, and we laughed. But there was something about that ferry, taking my son away from me, out into the world, where, as we all know, disaster always has us in her sights, that makes me still able to crawl right back into that feeling of panic about my son and what was going to come next.
My scans come every three months. Oh and last week I took a headfirst tumble down half a flight of stairs. It all seemed fine and semi-hilarious (I damaged the wall of all things, so almost every day now, while we are waiting for that handyman to come, one of the twins points out the wall and wants to revisit the crazy moment when the fact of my lack of grace was made manifest, setting me apart, again, from my athletic, gravity-gifted sons and from Kyle, who never saw a tossed ball, vegetable or baby she didn't handily catch. A day or two later, the pain from the fall really set in and although we knew I had just fallen, we knew it, the pain in my lower back was scary because remember, this is cancer country and I have cancer in some of the nodes of my spine and Donald Trump is president and has the bitter gall to suggest the solution to the murder of our children in our schools is to arm the teachers, bless them and the stunning ways we do not reward certain jobs which sit precisely at the intersection of home and self and the world, like teaching. The long and short of it is that I ended up having my three month scans a week early to ensure that it wasn't the cancer growing as it will one day, that the pain I was feeling was from the tumble down the stairs, not from a tumor pressing on my spine.
And the scans looked good, they said.
And just like that, I renewed my chance at this life for another three months. Can you imagine the other way the news could have gone? Of course I can, I practice hearing that all the time. Instead of sitting at the cape, as I am right now, in the borrowed house of a dear friend, listening to Alexa stream classical music, I would be thinking through probabilities of death on the second line of treatment which awaits me, feeling the ridiculous guilt I feel at leaving my family, feeling fury at my fears. Oh this is a strange way to live.
You know, I still don't like having an IV put in. And I compensate for that by being exceptionally friendly to the people who are putting the IV in--oh, they must think, what a nice lady. She's so pleasant, and how kind she was to ask about my weekend and to laugh at my jokes about needles. But I can't complain anymore about IVs--it's just such small stuff. An IV is the gateway to so much of my treatment, and eventually, will be the way in for the more traditional chemotherapy, which patiently waits for me when my cancer cells multiply. You see what I mean? I can't complain about IVs because then when would the complaining stop? So instead I do this weird thing and make lots of small talk and try really hard to inquire about the nurse's nail polish or clever funny button or the awards affixed to her name tag, as if my job is to make the nurse comfortable inflicting the small doses of pain that come with an IV.
No one wants to come to this country, and we tell ourselves stories about why we aren't there if we aren't. Some of those stories are chokingly hard to hear from the other side of the fence--self-congratulatory stories of miles run and logged or an early adherence to a diet based in lean protein and superfoods. I used to tell myself a story about how old the people in our family got, mixed with my really strong immune system that usually spared me the common colds and strep throats that made their ways around the office halls--this story about what a great old person I would be because I tried to stay in touch with the new--the new songs on the radio, reading voraciously so I knew enough to usually get the SNL references--and I was never shocked by children's behavior. What a great grandmother I would be. Each new decade of aging and I would tell my mom, I used to think seventy was old, but now, seventy seems young, and so on.
Now that I am sick, I think less about how old people are and more about whether they are sick or well.
I still wake, from nightmares where I realize I have cancer again and again, from nights where I am made restless by pain, nights where I am restless because I can't breathe right I'm so afraid to leave this world and the people I love so desperately at those moments.
Sometimes I wake, though, and I'm at am kind of peace with it all--on those mornings I wake feeling like I was just given a glimpse of what is to come, or perhaps I'm seeing what is happening, in my parallel universe, where I continue on in my merry way, healthy and absolutely blessedly ignorant of all things cancer. A world where the fact that I have the EGFR mutation doesn't save me from already being dead from lung cancer.
I can't remember when I found out that C.S. Lewis was a Christian, and that the Chronicles of Narnia contained Christian imagery in a way that was easily digestible, or so the line went, by children. I missed all that, of course, on my first several times through the books. My father first read them to me, and he never said and here is Aslan, dying for Edmund's sin, so that Narnia can be returned to its paradisaical nature. But once revealed, I felt incredibly protective of my books. I knew I was supposed to think of myself as Jewish, and, as makes complete sense to me now, of Judaism as always under threat or in danger thereof, which somehow made me loving the Narnia Chronicles, suspect. I grew up thinking something vague and elitist about Christianity, as if believing in Heaven, and even worse, in the resurrection of Christ was anti-intellectual. If I adored the story of Aslan--and I did--which was now revealed to be the story of Christ and his sacrifices, what did that mean about my Judaism? What did it mean about me as an intellectual? How could one believe in something as fantastical as Jesus and heaven and angels and Santa Claus? I was a Jew who lived for the moment when Aslan awakens on the table. Suspicious.
I have never been able to put away thoughts of Narnia, although I no longer feel I am betraying my history. Years later, listening to the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar, I wept to the lyrics: My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Christ whispers alone on the cross, in the dark heart of the play and the story. Aslan, alone on the stone table, his body broken, the small girls Lucy and Susan chilled and afraid in the nearby bushes, tiptoeing out to see the tiny field mice, tearing away the ropes that bound the lion's body to the stone. In cancer country, the idea of being forsaken by God, and the fervent hope that there is a morning after, are heartbreakingly familiar.
It is not that I am a bad Jew, although you have all heard my stories of making my way through adulthood and parenting equipped only and always with stories, but never with the right ritual, or the proper prayer.
It's that at heart I'm a reader--as you all are, or why would you be whiling away your Saturday with me here?
We tell each other stories to live, said Joan Didion, and I would be nothing without them now. It's the story that gives me hope that there is another turn of the screw here for me, a time to be the queen, not just the child seeking shelter from the war, a time to ask the question about being lost, abandoned, and more time to hear the answer, the call back home to a sheltering sky.
Here's to three more month of stories.
At any rate, it might just be that I haven't been an inhabitant of cancer country long enough and so my memory of my well self is still real enough to be actively mourned, in a way where I literally reach out and try to grab hold of the past which still seems so close as to be the truth where this life with cancer is the illusion, or, and this feels more truthful, it may be that there really are these parallel universes and my life, another life, uninterrupted by cancer, spins on out there, on a channel I can't find anymore, but which occasionally comes through to me, patchy, like a short-wave radio.
That's a sort of terrifying thought isn't it though.
I suppose I want to take hold of all of it and shake it, like a blanket at the foot of the bed, shake it out straight and full, so that Trump and cancer and all of that falls away. I could make the bed tidily, brush off my hands on my jeans, and be on my way.
I know you remember how important Narnia was to me and to so many of us, I imagine, especially those of us who sought company and comfort from books, at times instead of people, at times because of people. The idea that in your present day you might be an ordinary schoolchild, marking time until the war ended in an old country home in England (even that, sounding marvelous) and suddenly you could be thrown back into a world where you were a beautiful queen ruling over a magical country filled with good fauns and evil snow queens, giants dragging their stone hammers through the forest where even the trees could talk. This feeling I have now, of being in the wrong place, of being trapped in cancer while my regular me is hiding, just out of sight, makes me feel the same pins and needles I sometimes felt as a child, wishing so hard, in my dark bedroom, to wake up in Narnia.
One time I drove Zachary to this ferry in Vermont that you can take across part of Lake Champlain rather than driving further down the highway to get across on a bridge. Zach was getting on the ferry and a friend was going to meet him on the other side to take him to his job at a wilderness camp. I was supposed to leave him there and just turn the car around and drive home from this ferry.
When we pulled up, however, the ferry wasn't there yet and suddenly I felt fretful, reluctant to leave Zach. Zach is incredibly sensible and normally I wouldn't think of telling Zach about this kind of maudlin onset of panic, this feeling of don't leave me, Zach, how do I let you just get on this ferry and float away for a matter of months? And then my imagination spun a story around Zach--what if he was leaving home to go out and earn money--perhaps whale hunting, maybe surveying for gold, something nineteenth century or early twentieth century. And I did share that story with Zach, and he played along with it, joking about saving money and sending it back home so his sisters would have enough money to get married--we mixed metaphors and history, and we laughed. But there was something about that ferry, taking my son away from me, out into the world, where, as we all know, disaster always has us in her sights, that makes me still able to crawl right back into that feeling of panic about my son and what was going to come next.
My scans come every three months. Oh and last week I took a headfirst tumble down half a flight of stairs. It all seemed fine and semi-hilarious (I damaged the wall of all things, so almost every day now, while we are waiting for that handyman to come, one of the twins points out the wall and wants to revisit the crazy moment when the fact of my lack of grace was made manifest, setting me apart, again, from my athletic, gravity-gifted sons and from Kyle, who never saw a tossed ball, vegetable or baby she didn't handily catch. A day or two later, the pain from the fall really set in and although we knew I had just fallen, we knew it, the pain in my lower back was scary because remember, this is cancer country and I have cancer in some of the nodes of my spine and Donald Trump is president and has the bitter gall to suggest the solution to the murder of our children in our schools is to arm the teachers, bless them and the stunning ways we do not reward certain jobs which sit precisely at the intersection of home and self and the world, like teaching. The long and short of it is that I ended up having my three month scans a week early to ensure that it wasn't the cancer growing as it will one day, that the pain I was feeling was from the tumble down the stairs, not from a tumor pressing on my spine.
And the scans looked good, they said.
And just like that, I renewed my chance at this life for another three months. Can you imagine the other way the news could have gone? Of course I can, I practice hearing that all the time. Instead of sitting at the cape, as I am right now, in the borrowed house of a dear friend, listening to Alexa stream classical music, I would be thinking through probabilities of death on the second line of treatment which awaits me, feeling the ridiculous guilt I feel at leaving my family, feeling fury at my fears. Oh this is a strange way to live.
You know, I still don't like having an IV put in. And I compensate for that by being exceptionally friendly to the people who are putting the IV in--oh, they must think, what a nice lady. She's so pleasant, and how kind she was to ask about my weekend and to laugh at my jokes about needles. But I can't complain anymore about IVs--it's just such small stuff. An IV is the gateway to so much of my treatment, and eventually, will be the way in for the more traditional chemotherapy, which patiently waits for me when my cancer cells multiply. You see what I mean? I can't complain about IVs because then when would the complaining stop? So instead I do this weird thing and make lots of small talk and try really hard to inquire about the nurse's nail polish or clever funny button or the awards affixed to her name tag, as if my job is to make the nurse comfortable inflicting the small doses of pain that come with an IV.
No one wants to come to this country, and we tell ourselves stories about why we aren't there if we aren't. Some of those stories are chokingly hard to hear from the other side of the fence--self-congratulatory stories of miles run and logged or an early adherence to a diet based in lean protein and superfoods. I used to tell myself a story about how old the people in our family got, mixed with my really strong immune system that usually spared me the common colds and strep throats that made their ways around the office halls--this story about what a great old person I would be because I tried to stay in touch with the new--the new songs on the radio, reading voraciously so I knew enough to usually get the SNL references--and I was never shocked by children's behavior. What a great grandmother I would be. Each new decade of aging and I would tell my mom, I used to think seventy was old, but now, seventy seems young, and so on.
Now that I am sick, I think less about how old people are and more about whether they are sick or well.
I still wake, from nightmares where I realize I have cancer again and again, from nights where I am made restless by pain, nights where I am restless because I can't breathe right I'm so afraid to leave this world and the people I love so desperately at those moments.
Sometimes I wake, though, and I'm at am kind of peace with it all--on those mornings I wake feeling like I was just given a glimpse of what is to come, or perhaps I'm seeing what is happening, in my parallel universe, where I continue on in my merry way, healthy and absolutely blessedly ignorant of all things cancer. A world where the fact that I have the EGFR mutation doesn't save me from already being dead from lung cancer.
I can't remember when I found out that C.S. Lewis was a Christian, and that the Chronicles of Narnia contained Christian imagery in a way that was easily digestible, or so the line went, by children. I missed all that, of course, on my first several times through the books. My father first read them to me, and he never said and here is Aslan, dying for Edmund's sin, so that Narnia can be returned to its paradisaical nature. But once revealed, I felt incredibly protective of my books. I knew I was supposed to think of myself as Jewish, and, as makes complete sense to me now, of Judaism as always under threat or in danger thereof, which somehow made me loving the Narnia Chronicles, suspect. I grew up thinking something vague and elitist about Christianity, as if believing in Heaven, and even worse, in the resurrection of Christ was anti-intellectual. If I adored the story of Aslan--and I did--which was now revealed to be the story of Christ and his sacrifices, what did that mean about my Judaism? What did it mean about me as an intellectual? How could one believe in something as fantastical as Jesus and heaven and angels and Santa Claus? I was a Jew who lived for the moment when Aslan awakens on the table. Suspicious.
I have never been able to put away thoughts of Narnia, although I no longer feel I am betraying my history. Years later, listening to the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar, I wept to the lyrics: My God, why hast thou forsaken me? Christ whispers alone on the cross, in the dark heart of the play and the story. Aslan, alone on the stone table, his body broken, the small girls Lucy and Susan chilled and afraid in the nearby bushes, tiptoeing out to see the tiny field mice, tearing away the ropes that bound the lion's body to the stone. In cancer country, the idea of being forsaken by God, and the fervent hope that there is a morning after, are heartbreakingly familiar.
It is not that I am a bad Jew, although you have all heard my stories of making my way through adulthood and parenting equipped only and always with stories, but never with the right ritual, or the proper prayer.
It's that at heart I'm a reader--as you all are, or why would you be whiling away your Saturday with me here?
We tell each other stories to live, said Joan Didion, and I would be nothing without them now. It's the story that gives me hope that there is another turn of the screw here for me, a time to be the queen, not just the child seeking shelter from the war, a time to ask the question about being lost, abandoned, and more time to hear the answer, the call back home to a sheltering sky.
Here's to three more month of stories.
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