goldenrod and the 4H stone
I was talking about compassion with my friend, Alison earlier tonight in the little window in her life between the moment she puts her young children down to sleep and the moment she herself falls into bed, exhausted. When I say talking, I mean texting. Alison and I are in one giant, years long texting conversation that never breaks off. I kid you not. I am sure if we subpoenaed the records from Verizon (it's not that we committed any crimes--I just can't shake the former litigation associate tendency to think of everything in terms of discovery, and if you don't know what I mean by that, you're lucky), you would find a kind of epistolary novel about two dear friends ruminating over just everything--through divorces and marriages and child birth and job losses and toilet training and kids off to college and then finally, last year, my cancer--our text messages are witty and exhausted and loving and cranky--like the two of us together.
I love texting, I'll freely admit it. I came to it late in life, so I haven't seen much of the awful side of texting. But not so late that I'm like my dad, who uses text messages almost only to communicate dry, directional types of information. We are sitting on the lefthand side of the auditorium, he texts me. I woke up crying from another dream about having cancer, I text Alison. Tell me more, sweetheart, she texts back.
Anyhow, I heard Dr. Deborah Morosini talking today on a podcast--Dr. Morosini is Dana Reeve's older sister--you know, Dana Reeves, who was married to Christopher Reeves, yes, who played Superman, then fell off his horse and became a quadriplegic, and then right after he died, she found out she had lung cancer, and she died about a year late-- anyhow, her sister was already a doctor when she died and has since become an advocate for lung cancer--anyhow, Dr. Morosini was sharing that when her sister was diagnosed with lung cancer, people would ask her if she was a smoker. Which, as you have heard me mention perhaps once or twice before, is almost always what people ask within three of hearing me say I have cancer. Within three is another one of those things from document review--say you were doing an electronic search of say, the emails of the president and you wanted to see all the places in the emails where the word "stormy" appeared within three words of the word "bribe"--you might program the computer to find all the instances where "stormy" w/3 "bribe": just as an example. Anyhow, it's not really within three words of cancer for me, but it is within three sentences.
Oh, this bald head? I have lung cancer. Oh, that's awful. I'm sorry. [insert pause] Did you smoke?
What. the. actual. fuck. to quote June from The Handmaid's Tale (and can I keep watching it? It hurts so much, and why can I not just decide to stop watching? The episode which took place in the abandoned Boston Globe building is haunting me still. Haunting. And I have plenty to haunt me already (see lung cancer).
But what is that question? I know some of it is self-protection. There but for the grace of a pack a day go I. I do this with obituaries, or I used to, anyhow--you know, skim the obit for the age of the person: "ooh, 98, that's old. Oh no, 50, that's me--let's see why that's not me. Oh yes, donations to the American Lung Association--must have been a smoker." So I'm safe. Exculpatory obituary reading.
But some of the impetus behind asking that question is actually a lack of compassion--like hey, you assumed the risk.
I sit in that little group of dying people every two weeks and we have it all. We have people still smoking who have breast cancer. We have people still drinking with brain cancer. We have people who need to lose weight, and people who heartbreakingly need to gain weight. I would guess we had a drug addict in there, but I have no idea how we would know, we're all so hopped up on methadone and morphine.
And if there was ever a group who deserved compassion, it is my little band of weary fellow travelers.
Did you know that lung cancer is by far the leading cause of cancer deaths among both men and women? More people die of lung cancer than of colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined each year. Ten to fifteen percent of the people diagnosed with lung cancer are non-smokers. But my God, all of these lovely fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers dying of tumor burden, or infections, or complications of the metastatic disease like a stroke, or a pulmonary hemorrhage. We don't like all those words and I really don't like them because they are so far away from my fantasy version of death, which goes something like this: 98-year-old Kyle and 106-year-old Tracy were found lying next to each other, as if asleep still, in the sun-filled bedroom on the first floor of their palatial home in Provincetown, where they had lived for the last thirty years, after Tracy sold her first best seller which allowed them to retire early. The breeze was soft, and the music of Sufjan Stevens was still playing on Alexa.
I know I'm not headed anywhere fast tonight out here on the blog. But I hadn't remembered that Dana Reeves died of lung cancer and I feel sad about her death tonight. I wonder what happened to the Reeves children--I know I could go google it and find out, but I feel like giving them their privacy tonight. Back in the mid 2000s when first Christopher Reeve and then Dana Reeve died too early, there was nothing much doctors could do for someone like Dana. There is lots more to do for metastatic lung cancer now, and lots more on the horizon (see blog writer's continued existence--the proof is in the pudding).
But for all the people who are going to die from all the cancers before they (the magical they--my beloved fleet of genius MIT grads working right now in Cambridge, surrounded by Thai take out, with the Celtics on in the background) figure out how to cure cancer, let's be compassionate. Maybe I smoked, maybe I drank, maybe I ate too many chips (is that a thing?), maybe I worked too hard and slept too little, maybe I exercised too erratically in my life (can it be that this same body currently crying out to me to go to bed once ran a marathon?)--but we all deserve the utmost of compassion, dignified questions and gentle kindnesses. I am guilty as the next of telling myself stories about the dying and the dead which were meant to comfort me, when the person who really needed comforting was standing right in front of me.
Sleep well, all of you wonderful loves. If you need me, I'm right here for now. On the lefthand side of the screen. Goodnight, Dad, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EzeW5KoPUI
I love texting, I'll freely admit it. I came to it late in life, so I haven't seen much of the awful side of texting. But not so late that I'm like my dad, who uses text messages almost only to communicate dry, directional types of information. We are sitting on the lefthand side of the auditorium, he texts me. I woke up crying from another dream about having cancer, I text Alison. Tell me more, sweetheart, she texts back.
Anyhow, I heard Dr. Deborah Morosini talking today on a podcast--Dr. Morosini is Dana Reeve's older sister--you know, Dana Reeves, who was married to Christopher Reeves, yes, who played Superman, then fell off his horse and became a quadriplegic, and then right after he died, she found out she had lung cancer, and she died about a year late-- anyhow, her sister was already a doctor when she died and has since become an advocate for lung cancer--anyhow, Dr. Morosini was sharing that when her sister was diagnosed with lung cancer, people would ask her if she was a smoker. Which, as you have heard me mention perhaps once or twice before, is almost always what people ask within three of hearing me say I have cancer. Within three is another one of those things from document review--say you were doing an electronic search of say, the emails of the president and you wanted to see all the places in the emails where the word "stormy" appeared within three words of the word "bribe"--you might program the computer to find all the instances where "stormy" w/3 "bribe": just as an example. Anyhow, it's not really within three words of cancer for me, but it is within three sentences.
Oh, this bald head? I have lung cancer. Oh, that's awful. I'm sorry. [insert pause] Did you smoke?
What. the. actual. fuck. to quote June from The Handmaid's Tale (and can I keep watching it? It hurts so much, and why can I not just decide to stop watching? The episode which took place in the abandoned Boston Globe building is haunting me still. Haunting. And I have plenty to haunt me already (see lung cancer).
But what is that question? I know some of it is self-protection. There but for the grace of a pack a day go I. I do this with obituaries, or I used to, anyhow--you know, skim the obit for the age of the person: "ooh, 98, that's old. Oh no, 50, that's me--let's see why that's not me. Oh yes, donations to the American Lung Association--must have been a smoker." So I'm safe. Exculpatory obituary reading.
But some of the impetus behind asking that question is actually a lack of compassion--like hey, you assumed the risk.
I sit in that little group of dying people every two weeks and we have it all. We have people still smoking who have breast cancer. We have people still drinking with brain cancer. We have people who need to lose weight, and people who heartbreakingly need to gain weight. I would guess we had a drug addict in there, but I have no idea how we would know, we're all so hopped up on methadone and morphine.
And if there was ever a group who deserved compassion, it is my little band of weary fellow travelers.
Did you know that lung cancer is by far the leading cause of cancer deaths among both men and women? More people die of lung cancer than of colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined each year. Ten to fifteen percent of the people diagnosed with lung cancer are non-smokers. But my God, all of these lovely fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers dying of tumor burden, or infections, or complications of the metastatic disease like a stroke, or a pulmonary hemorrhage. We don't like all those words and I really don't like them because they are so far away from my fantasy version of death, which goes something like this: 98-year-old Kyle and 106-year-old Tracy were found lying next to each other, as if asleep still, in the sun-filled bedroom on the first floor of their palatial home in Provincetown, where they had lived for the last thirty years, after Tracy sold her first best seller which allowed them to retire early. The breeze was soft, and the music of Sufjan Stevens was still playing on Alexa.
I know I'm not headed anywhere fast tonight out here on the blog. But I hadn't remembered that Dana Reeves died of lung cancer and I feel sad about her death tonight. I wonder what happened to the Reeves children--I know I could go google it and find out, but I feel like giving them their privacy tonight. Back in the mid 2000s when first Christopher Reeve and then Dana Reeve died too early, there was nothing much doctors could do for someone like Dana. There is lots more to do for metastatic lung cancer now, and lots more on the horizon (see blog writer's continued existence--the proof is in the pudding).
But for all the people who are going to die from all the cancers before they (the magical they--my beloved fleet of genius MIT grads working right now in Cambridge, surrounded by Thai take out, with the Celtics on in the background) figure out how to cure cancer, let's be compassionate. Maybe I smoked, maybe I drank, maybe I ate too many chips (is that a thing?), maybe I worked too hard and slept too little, maybe I exercised too erratically in my life (can it be that this same body currently crying out to me to go to bed once ran a marathon?)--but we all deserve the utmost of compassion, dignified questions and gentle kindnesses. I am guilty as the next of telling myself stories about the dying and the dead which were meant to comfort me, when the person who really needed comforting was standing right in front of me.
Sleep well, all of you wonderful loves. If you need me, I'm right here for now. On the lefthand side of the screen. Goodnight, Dad, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EzeW5KoPUI
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