I shouldn't complain around you....

One less than fun thing you can do when you find yourself around people dying of cancer, or living with cancer, as Kyle likes to say, is to apologize for what you are about to say and then say it anyhow.  The sentence goes something like, I shouldn't complain around you (what with your pending mortality and constant companion of pain, you with your sudden demise of your career, and the promise of clinical trials and hospice in your near term), but and then you do. You tell me that your boss is impossible, or your spouse is annoying, or you have a summer cold you simply can't get rid of, or your mother is driving you crazy by calling you all the time. You have laundry piling up.  You have bills to pay.  You know you shouldn't complain in front of me, because I've got it so much worse, but we're such good friends, or you forgot, just for a second, that I had cancer, and the complaint was out of your mouth before you realized and so you sweep up the mess you made at the end of the sentence:  I shouldn't complain around you.

The worst thing about that is not that you shouldn't complain.  Of course you should. My pain doesn't negate your pain, and I have all of those same issues you have--my bills are piling up, and my kitchen reconstruction post-mold will just not get done, and I can't seem to keep the literal waves of yellow pollen from waltzing right in the front door and attaching to every last dish in the house, rug on the floor, pile of clean laundry.  I want to know you as much as I ever have, and I want to know your troubles. I don't want you to rank all of our mutual troubles and never share with me because I have cancer and that means your woes no longer count.

When you silence yourself, it makes me feel like this strange, absolutely unenviable person who has problems so unlike yours, so much worse, that you feel like you need to apologize for not being content all the time, because, god, look how bad it could be. That's an awful feeling.  Is it really all that bad?  Yes, your sentences tell me, yes, it is just terrible.

I mean, first off, we are really not in different boats, you and I.  We are both fully alive and doing absolutely as much as possible to live fully, as well as we can, for as long as we can. I pray every day with my whole self and life and ask to be allowed to stay, to stay and witness the boys as they grow into adults, to hold my grandchildren, to be an old lady with Kyle, to support and love my parents as they age, to live an open life increasingly marked by clarity and gratitude.  I would think you pray in a similar manner.

I am perhaps closer to death than you, but we aren't really sure, and in any case, there you will be, just a few years behind me.

When you say that you shouldn't complain in front of me because I have cancer, it makes me feel unmoored, like a stranger to you because of the cancer.  I want you to love me just as I am--isn't that the dream of love?--and when you cut yourself off because what I am experiencing is so frightening that it severs our connection, your ability to think of me as someone like you, so that your sentence dies off in apology, my heart falls. You shouldn't complain to me about what challenges you face because I am going to die of cancer and that fact negates what we used to share: a tumbleweed, rolling litany of charges against the universe for scattering our path forward with late plumbers, recalcitrant toddlers, judge-y mothers, annoyed bosses, petulant teenagers, and sulky neighbors, a text or phone or email driven opera of exhaustion, of late-stage capitalism, of me-too, of stories about the sweet-sour mash that is our life in these days because, suddenly, I win all the sorrow.

The truth is, we're sharing big helpings of sorrow, and if you're paying attention here, you know that there is more than a good measure of joy and blessing going on over here, as well. So please: you complain around me.