in your shoes
They call it a cancerversary. If you know me, you know how I feel about that word.
Still.
My body needed a voice a year ago, and my life has become a poem in this long, flash in the pan year since my nurse-practitioner wept as she told me I had stage four cancer.
This date weighs on me, like the rocks Virginia Woolf lined her pockets with--it's heavy, inscribed in this internal calendar I keep close to my heart, the dates fluttering in the air like moths around a
light--the mapping of my prognosis onto the calendar (on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to Tarceva for 13 months; on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to the second line treatment for 9 months. (My life starts to feel like a play. The list of characters: the nurse-practitioner, the oncologist, and then later in the play, the rabbi, the yoga teacher, the social worker, the stricken cancer patients, God)). I know that 22 months doesn't mean everything, or even, anything but the number shadows my days so that today is twelve months since I heard lung cancer and one month until thirteen.
I read a book about a lesbian who gets cancer and is cured called Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home, which I didn't love, which just goes to show you that like doesn't always attract like, although the title is wonderful, but there was one moment that resonated. The woman's friends come to visit her, bearing casseroles and love, and she realizes they don't know they are going to die. That sounds a little elitist, like look at us deep people over here who get mortality, but I know what she means. When people tell me they don't know what they would do if they were in my shoes, I often think, I mean, you kind of are, you know, in my shoes. I think it also stains me a bit as a friend, like having divorced parents in the sixties--it's not really her fault, but that cancer thing makes it a little less fun hanging around Brown.
One thing my loving friends like to tell me is that I just need to stay well long enough for them to cure cancer. No pressure.
There is so much going on in the lung cancer research world that sometimes even medical people will say their own version of this sentence, something like, at some point in the future lung cancer will be more like a chronic disease than a death sentence.
A death sentence. What an astonishing phrase. We have death sentence as in capital punishment. Another death sentence is may God have mercy upon your soul, which is what some judges say when pronouncing a sentence of death upon a person found guilty of a crime we deem worthy of a death sentence. During the 17th century, the judges in Salem did not believe that stating "may God have mercy upon your soul" had meaning unless the accused person had confessed to the crime in open court. The judges could not convince the aged and pious Rebecca Nurse, accused of witchcraft, to confess. "You do not know my heart," she said, she was "...as clear as the child unborn."
I'm so tired these last days, and it's exhausting to think that I must do the magical, mysterious work of staying well enough for a cure. It makes me think of fairy tales, of the vainglorious miller's daughter, shut away in a tower room filled with straw and a spinning wheel. In the oldest version of the story, if she does not spin the straw into gold by morning, the king will cut off her head. When she has given up all hope, an imp-like creature appears in the room and spins the straw into gold in exchange for first her necklace, then her ring, and finally for her firstborn child.
A year ago, I wandered through the aisles of a Whole Foods store, filling my cart with beautifully packaged boxes of crackers and jars of jam, creamy cheeses and aged salami. I was weeping into the phone, telling my sister I had lung cancer. My family was going to converge on the house to turn the sentence over, examining it for weaknesses, crevices, some part of the word to crawl up into and fall asleep, perchance to wake. And remember this? (This is how stories become lore) A woman stopped to tell me she too had been stricken with cancer, a really rare cancer (I was too much of a greenhorn to recognize I was already being schooled in the way people with cancer evaluate one another, the types, the stages, the treatments, the survivors and the cured, the bike races and ten mile runs, and the ribbons upon ribbons), and she had been given a death sentence too, and then she had been cured. And this was long enough ago that she was confident enough about her NED status (that's no evidence of disease, I've heard) to tell me, a stranger, near the gallons of milk. And I wondered if I would get to roam the aisles of Whole Foods in a decade and console weeping women with my story of luck and fortune and overhearing the name Rumplestiltskin in the woods and getting to keep my life and my newborn child alike, or, if I would think of her in 22 months and think, boy lady, were you wrong.
I'm pretty sure the real story lies somewhere in between the dire and the fantastic. But I'm trying to remain grounded in today, in gratitude for the next breath, so I'm going to steer away from prognosis and back to the anniversary.
It's traditional to give paper for the first anniversary, so I'm going to give you the idea of a paper crane, or orizuru. The paper crane represents the red-crowned crane of Japan; its wings are said to carry souls up to paradise. A thousand orizuru strung together is called a senbazuru, or "thousand cranes." In Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, a children's book that is used for peace education programs in elementary schools, it is said that a thousand cranes need to be made in order for a wish to come true.
I'll make a deal with you. If you will fold ten or so cranes for me this summer, and ideally, send them to me, or drop me a line and a photo, won't you, then I'll wish for god's mercy, for clear hearts and true love and long lives for the lot of us.
Still.
My body needed a voice a year ago, and my life has become a poem in this long, flash in the pan year since my nurse-practitioner wept as she told me I had stage four cancer.
This date weighs on me, like the rocks Virginia Woolf lined her pockets with--it's heavy, inscribed in this internal calendar I keep close to my heart, the dates fluttering in the air like moths around a
light--the mapping of my prognosis onto the calendar (on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to Tarceva for 13 months; on average, my oncologist said, patients respond to the second line treatment for 9 months. (My life starts to feel like a play. The list of characters: the nurse-practitioner, the oncologist, and then later in the play, the rabbi, the yoga teacher, the social worker, the stricken cancer patients, God)). I know that 22 months doesn't mean everything, or even, anything but the number shadows my days so that today is twelve months since I heard lung cancer and one month until thirteen.
I read a book about a lesbian who gets cancer and is cured called Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home, which I didn't love, which just goes to show you that like doesn't always attract like, although the title is wonderful, but there was one moment that resonated. The woman's friends come to visit her, bearing casseroles and love, and she realizes they don't know they are going to die. That sounds a little elitist, like look at us deep people over here who get mortality, but I know what she means. When people tell me they don't know what they would do if they were in my shoes, I often think, I mean, you kind of are, you know, in my shoes. I think it also stains me a bit as a friend, like having divorced parents in the sixties--it's not really her fault, but that cancer thing makes it a little less fun hanging around Brown.
One thing my loving friends like to tell me is that I just need to stay well long enough for them to cure cancer. No pressure.
There is so much going on in the lung cancer research world that sometimes even medical people will say their own version of this sentence, something like, at some point in the future lung cancer will be more like a chronic disease than a death sentence.
A death sentence. What an astonishing phrase. We have death sentence as in capital punishment. Another death sentence is may God have mercy upon your soul, which is what some judges say when pronouncing a sentence of death upon a person found guilty of a crime we deem worthy of a death sentence. During the 17th century, the judges in Salem did not believe that stating "may God have mercy upon your soul" had meaning unless the accused person had confessed to the crime in open court. The judges could not convince the aged and pious Rebecca Nurse, accused of witchcraft, to confess. "You do not know my heart," she said, she was "...as clear as the child unborn."
I'm so tired these last days, and it's exhausting to think that I must do the magical, mysterious work of staying well enough for a cure. It makes me think of fairy tales, of the vainglorious miller's daughter, shut away in a tower room filled with straw and a spinning wheel. In the oldest version of the story, if she does not spin the straw into gold by morning, the king will cut off her head. When she has given up all hope, an imp-like creature appears in the room and spins the straw into gold in exchange for first her necklace, then her ring, and finally for her firstborn child.
A year ago, I wandered through the aisles of a Whole Foods store, filling my cart with beautifully packaged boxes of crackers and jars of jam, creamy cheeses and aged salami. I was weeping into the phone, telling my sister I had lung cancer. My family was going to converge on the house to turn the sentence over, examining it for weaknesses, crevices, some part of the word to crawl up into and fall asleep, perchance to wake. And remember this? (This is how stories become lore) A woman stopped to tell me she too had been stricken with cancer, a really rare cancer (I was too much of a greenhorn to recognize I was already being schooled in the way people with cancer evaluate one another, the types, the stages, the treatments, the survivors and the cured, the bike races and ten mile runs, and the ribbons upon ribbons), and she had been given a death sentence too, and then she had been cured. And this was long enough ago that she was confident enough about her NED status (that's no evidence of disease, I've heard) to tell me, a stranger, near the gallons of milk. And I wondered if I would get to roam the aisles of Whole Foods in a decade and console weeping women with my story of luck and fortune and overhearing the name Rumplestiltskin in the woods and getting to keep my life and my newborn child alike, or, if I would think of her in 22 months and think, boy lady, were you wrong.
I'm pretty sure the real story lies somewhere in between the dire and the fantastic. But I'm trying to remain grounded in today, in gratitude for the next breath, so I'm going to steer away from prognosis and back to the anniversary.
It's traditional to give paper for the first anniversary, so I'm going to give you the idea of a paper crane, or orizuru. The paper crane represents the red-crowned crane of Japan; its wings are said to carry souls up to paradise. A thousand orizuru strung together is called a senbazuru, or "thousand cranes." In Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, a children's book that is used for peace education programs in elementary schools, it is said that a thousand cranes need to be made in order for a wish to come true.
I'll make a deal with you. If you will fold ten or so cranes for me this summer, and ideally, send them to me, or drop me a line and a photo, won't you, then I'll wish for god's mercy, for clear hearts and true love and long lives for the lot of us.
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