No one suspects the Days to be Gods.
That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.
Rainer Maria Rilke
My scans came back clean last week, so the way the math works for me is that I now feel like I have six months to live, at the least. Because even if my scans come back unclean in three months, at the end of the summer, and even if the cancer mutates in a way which resists available treatment options, it would likely take at least another three months for us to figure all that out, for the cancer to have dominion over my body, which is its goal. And so if I am honest about this, and I am trying so hard to look as much of this in the eye as I can, this means I have at least three more months of the relative good health I have right now, with the strength to walk to the bog with the dog several times a day, the ability to wander the sculpture gardens in Lincoln, as I did last week with Cameron, to accompany the kindergarten class on a field trip to Clark Farm, where we inspected the new chickens with their unexpected plumages of feathers and their tentative forays out into the bright sunshine of a late New England spring day.
I may have many many more months to live. I may die in an auto accident tomorrow, and if I do, you may talk at my funeral about all the kale and turmeric and goji berries I ate to stave off cancer and say how ironic.
Rilke also says something along the lines of many signs indicate that the future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. Philosophers and poets alike love that line, but I read future as cancer and it strikes me to the core. The cancer was there first, the tumor taking flight before I had even noticed, the sinewy mets winging their way to my bones. The cancer began to transform me long before cancer happened. I was just late to its arrival.
I'm thinking about Rilke and sadness because it is slowly dawning on me that I am living in the richest of ways these days, these days framed by incurable cancer. Getting cancer has been the singularly most transformative event of my life, aside from my birth into this world, and presumably my own death. And I will live the rest of my days, whether 120 or 1200, in the shadow of the valley of death. And for much of that time, it seems, I will live a life of profound joy: I shall not waste a moment.
Ira Byock talks beautifully--a complaint could be lodged against the very notion--of dying well. "When the human dimension of dying is nurtured, for many the transition from life can become as profound, intimate, and precious as the miracle of birth."
I'm not the first to say that giving birth, becoming new parents, is a developmental chapter for many of us. I don't think there is any way to prepare oneself for the incredible exhaustion of the first six months of your life with your first child. No matter whether we grew up the oldest in a family of twelve, if we earned the Girl Scout badge for childcare and babysat our way through the Friday and Saturday nights of junior high, or we embarked on a nine-month reading tour of all the books one read about newborns and toddlers during whatever decade you happen to be birthing in, it is still a shock. We are simply allowed to go home with these tiny humans with whom we are falling in love but who are intensely dissatisfied and without a single resource of their own. It will literally be years until they tumble into bed when they are tired and go to sleep--seemingly the simplest of actions. Years of nursing and late night bottles and inconsolable weeping and wet diapers, and then wet pajamas and sheets, and the pitiful nightmares, and the lengths we will go to in order to just get them to sleep and stay asleep, us tip-toeing backwards out of rooms, purchasing machines that make white noise and crazy swaddling sleepers. And that's just sleep.
There are these times in the lengths of years we are adults that are deep, turning points for some, times of incredible learning and change for us. Yes, those exquisite first days as a new parent, but I also think of marriage, and for some, divorce. I think of deciding upon a vocation. Of losing one's job. I think of adultery, of addiction, of children leaving for college, I think of the deaths of our parents. This diagnosis of incurable cancer has forced me to skip chapters, skim others. My book is out of order, and I find myself at the end without having had a chance to savor much of the middle and final third. I retired, early, in one day last summer. I have the aches and pains of an old woman now. I nap after long walks, I go up to bed long before the party is over.
Dying well, Byock writes about the possibilities in this time for real growth and change and love. Rather than thinking of dying as the medical occurrences that happen on the way to death, could we imagine dying as the inevitable, final stage of our becoming human?
Let's dispense with a few of your complaints before you formally lodge them.
What is all this talk of death, you might say? The scans came back clean. And yes, I hear you. The truth is, I have never been so freed up for life as I am now, paradoxically and precisely because of cancer. (Yay cancer, my support group dutifully intones). And there is nothing I want more than to stay. When I think of my children having their own children, even the sadness of allowing the very thought of not being present for that fills my throat with tears. When I look at my twins, so proud to be six years old, I think: but they need me, when the truth is I want to be there as they become the people they are going to become. Having born witness to my older children becoming such lovely, loving grownups makes the wanting only keener to bear witness to the transformation of the twins. I would like nothing more than to be a companion to my parents as they age and, in good time, die themselves. I am in love with Kyle and the trust that underscores our journey now was hard-fought for and won. And I was meant to outlive her. I am supposed to be the caretaker. To the extent living is a function of desire, I am all in and for the long run. And yet. Every three months I lie down on a tray and machines pull secrets from my body that must be shared.
And yes, I suspect that actual dying is no picnic. I'm afraid of the end of this journey, when the cancer mutates, and my sweet oncologist has no more tricks up his sleeve, or his tricks require sacrifice of things that allow me to have what I call good days--the ability to talk with my people, the ones I made and the ones who made me, and the ones I have chosen and who chose me, ideally the ability to be outside to see the living landscape [I have fallen in love with the dusty road to the bog. If you have ever had occasion to visit the bog as the evening falls, you will have seen the persistent quality of the day's light as darkness approaches. The backlit sky, the orange tendrils of the sun, the way the small purple flowers deepen in the dusk, as the night sounds swell. The sound of the owl across the expanse of the bog can break your heart with its beauty, and you know the geese are rustling their goslings to safety and sleep. We don't have any street lights at all on the dusty road to the bog from my house, so if I stay too long, I must wend my way back by flashlight, which brings me back to my years as a camp counselor, picking my way through the dark woods to the cabin where my sleeping campers lay, having stolen a few hours off with the other counselors, maybe swimming in the dark lake, hoping the water snakes were off elsewhere, or maybe I sat with my arms around my knees, as the sweet smell of marijuana drifted through the campfire. Someone was always playing Neil Young. ] Emerson said, "No one suspects the days to be Gods."
I have not forgotten how much I dislike the hospital, and I am certain to spend several more weeks of my life, if I am lucky it will be weeks, not months, in the hospital, which is as far from the grandeur and loveliness of the peepers and the swallows and the herons and the rollicking dogs leading their owners around by their noses. I think Ira Byock imagines I get to go home after my last hospital stint, die well in the company of loved ones, with the scent of lilacs on high, and having resolved any last hurts, lingering feuds, and perhaps having convinced several of you to commit to my children and my Kyle for the long run, since I won't be there to shield them from the world should it get stormy. It turns out, I'm here to tell you, that having one thing go wrong doesn't shield you from the next, so none of them will just get away with having lost their mother to cancer as their only tragedy. They're going to need your love.
Rilke writes that we should not forget ancient myths of dragons and princesses, he posits that perhaps "everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Life has not forgotten you, he says, "it will not let you fall."
I know that I will not fall, but I no longer know what that means. I feel a presence walking with me, near me now, and it is death.
Now, I live with bated breath. Rilke said,"Being here is so much." When I think now of the wasted time, of the arguments allowed to billow up into disasters, of the days unspooling without my listening for God. Everyday I am able to pray now, and that is because of this curious frame around my life. Sometimes people say to me, I can see how that might be from your perspective. Or, I might do the same if I were in your shoes. You are in my shoes, my loved ones. Hold tight to the people you love, listen closely to the hoot of the owl across your darkened fields. Have courage. Be brave.
Rainer Maria Rilke
My scans came back clean last week, so the way the math works for me is that I now feel like I have six months to live, at the least. Because even if my scans come back unclean in three months, at the end of the summer, and even if the cancer mutates in a way which resists available treatment options, it would likely take at least another three months for us to figure all that out, for the cancer to have dominion over my body, which is its goal. And so if I am honest about this, and I am trying so hard to look as much of this in the eye as I can, this means I have at least three more months of the relative good health I have right now, with the strength to walk to the bog with the dog several times a day, the ability to wander the sculpture gardens in Lincoln, as I did last week with Cameron, to accompany the kindergarten class on a field trip to Clark Farm, where we inspected the new chickens with their unexpected plumages of feathers and their tentative forays out into the bright sunshine of a late New England spring day.
I may have many many more months to live. I may die in an auto accident tomorrow, and if I do, you may talk at my funeral about all the kale and turmeric and goji berries I ate to stave off cancer and say how ironic.
Rilke also says something along the lines of many signs indicate that the future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. Philosophers and poets alike love that line, but I read future as cancer and it strikes me to the core. The cancer was there first, the tumor taking flight before I had even noticed, the sinewy mets winging their way to my bones. The cancer began to transform me long before cancer happened. I was just late to its arrival.
I'm thinking about Rilke and sadness because it is slowly dawning on me that I am living in the richest of ways these days, these days framed by incurable cancer. Getting cancer has been the singularly most transformative event of my life, aside from my birth into this world, and presumably my own death. And I will live the rest of my days, whether 120 or 1200, in the shadow of the valley of death. And for much of that time, it seems, I will live a life of profound joy: I shall not waste a moment.
Ira Byock talks beautifully--a complaint could be lodged against the very notion--of dying well. "When the human dimension of dying is nurtured, for many the transition from life can become as profound, intimate, and precious as the miracle of birth."
I'm not the first to say that giving birth, becoming new parents, is a developmental chapter for many of us. I don't think there is any way to prepare oneself for the incredible exhaustion of the first six months of your life with your first child. No matter whether we grew up the oldest in a family of twelve, if we earned the Girl Scout badge for childcare and babysat our way through the Friday and Saturday nights of junior high, or we embarked on a nine-month reading tour of all the books one read about newborns and toddlers during whatever decade you happen to be birthing in, it is still a shock. We are simply allowed to go home with these tiny humans with whom we are falling in love but who are intensely dissatisfied and without a single resource of their own. It will literally be years until they tumble into bed when they are tired and go to sleep--seemingly the simplest of actions. Years of nursing and late night bottles and inconsolable weeping and wet diapers, and then wet pajamas and sheets, and the pitiful nightmares, and the lengths we will go to in order to just get them to sleep and stay asleep, us tip-toeing backwards out of rooms, purchasing machines that make white noise and crazy swaddling sleepers. And that's just sleep.
There are these times in the lengths of years we are adults that are deep, turning points for some, times of incredible learning and change for us. Yes, those exquisite first days as a new parent, but I also think of marriage, and for some, divorce. I think of deciding upon a vocation. Of losing one's job. I think of adultery, of addiction, of children leaving for college, I think of the deaths of our parents. This diagnosis of incurable cancer has forced me to skip chapters, skim others. My book is out of order, and I find myself at the end without having had a chance to savor much of the middle and final third. I retired, early, in one day last summer. I have the aches and pains of an old woman now. I nap after long walks, I go up to bed long before the party is over.
Dying well, Byock writes about the possibilities in this time for real growth and change and love. Rather than thinking of dying as the medical occurrences that happen on the way to death, could we imagine dying as the inevitable, final stage of our becoming human?
Let's dispense with a few of your complaints before you formally lodge them.
What is all this talk of death, you might say? The scans came back clean. And yes, I hear you. The truth is, I have never been so freed up for life as I am now, paradoxically and precisely because of cancer. (Yay cancer, my support group dutifully intones). And there is nothing I want more than to stay. When I think of my children having their own children, even the sadness of allowing the very thought of not being present for that fills my throat with tears. When I look at my twins, so proud to be six years old, I think: but they need me, when the truth is I want to be there as they become the people they are going to become. Having born witness to my older children becoming such lovely, loving grownups makes the wanting only keener to bear witness to the transformation of the twins. I would like nothing more than to be a companion to my parents as they age and, in good time, die themselves. I am in love with Kyle and the trust that underscores our journey now was hard-fought for and won. And I was meant to outlive her. I am supposed to be the caretaker. To the extent living is a function of desire, I am all in and for the long run. And yet. Every three months I lie down on a tray and machines pull secrets from my body that must be shared.
And yes, I suspect that actual dying is no picnic. I'm afraid of the end of this journey, when the cancer mutates, and my sweet oncologist has no more tricks up his sleeve, or his tricks require sacrifice of things that allow me to have what I call good days--the ability to talk with my people, the ones I made and the ones who made me, and the ones I have chosen and who chose me, ideally the ability to be outside to see the living landscape [I have fallen in love with the dusty road to the bog. If you have ever had occasion to visit the bog as the evening falls, you will have seen the persistent quality of the day's light as darkness approaches. The backlit sky, the orange tendrils of the sun, the way the small purple flowers deepen in the dusk, as the night sounds swell. The sound of the owl across the expanse of the bog can break your heart with its beauty, and you know the geese are rustling their goslings to safety and sleep. We don't have any street lights at all on the dusty road to the bog from my house, so if I stay too long, I must wend my way back by flashlight, which brings me back to my years as a camp counselor, picking my way through the dark woods to the cabin where my sleeping campers lay, having stolen a few hours off with the other counselors, maybe swimming in the dark lake, hoping the water snakes were off elsewhere, or maybe I sat with my arms around my knees, as the sweet smell of marijuana drifted through the campfire. Someone was always playing Neil Young. ] Emerson said, "No one suspects the days to be Gods."
I have not forgotten how much I dislike the hospital, and I am certain to spend several more weeks of my life, if I am lucky it will be weeks, not months, in the hospital, which is as far from the grandeur and loveliness of the peepers and the swallows and the herons and the rollicking dogs leading their owners around by their noses. I think Ira Byock imagines I get to go home after my last hospital stint, die well in the company of loved ones, with the scent of lilacs on high, and having resolved any last hurts, lingering feuds, and perhaps having convinced several of you to commit to my children and my Kyle for the long run, since I won't be there to shield them from the world should it get stormy. It turns out, I'm here to tell you, that having one thing go wrong doesn't shield you from the next, so none of them will just get away with having lost their mother to cancer as their only tragedy. They're going to need your love.
Rilke writes that we should not forget ancient myths of dragons and princesses, he posits that perhaps "everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Life has not forgotten you, he says, "it will not let you fall."
I know that I will not fall, but I no longer know what that means. I feel a presence walking with me, near me now, and it is death.
Now, I live with bated breath. Rilke said,"Being here is so much." When I think now of the wasted time, of the arguments allowed to billow up into disasters, of the days unspooling without my listening for God. Everyday I am able to pray now, and that is because of this curious frame around my life. Sometimes people say to me, I can see how that might be from your perspective. Or, I might do the same if I were in your shoes. You are in my shoes, my loved ones. Hold tight to the people you love, listen closely to the hoot of the owl across your darkened fields. Have courage. Be brave.
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