the wood thrush

A poem for my support group for metastatic cancer, Harvard, Massachusetts, June 2018

Today as we gathered to say goodbye

we heard a wood thrush's piercing trill

separate the moment of silence we use to depart 

into before and after.

I did not hope, That is God, much,

as I was deeply contemplating

how much I loved you, 

my beloved strangers,

as we come closer to truths about dying,

and thus of course, about living,

than any end of June on the coast of Massachusetts.

My words are not veiled,

not the kinds of words one would confuse for others,

but I could not alone call for myself

the complete beauty of birdsong

in the still air between us,

but only dared to with the strength in numbers

we afford us.

Sometimes it seems to me, these days, as if no experience is true until I have written about it.  I know when it's time to write: a poem, a journal, a story, and it's more than a way of recording words against time, but a way of taking my own life out and looking at it, and living it more than once.  

In my support group today, we talked about death, a little, and that kind of talk is hard to come by.  I spend a little bit of time with this group of fellow travelers every other week, and while I don't think we truly speak unmitigatedly, I do think that being safe in a room with other people who have the bad cancer, the cancer which has already spread, the cancer that has a prognosis that is months, or perhaps years, but is incurable, allows for an honesty about dying that is hard to come by on the outside. Don't get me wrong, this group has time to spare for recalcitrant husbands and wayward children, because living doesn't pause for cancer, but we can, some times, talk about death in a full frontal way.  We are a scan or five away from hospice, some of us, and others will live and have lived for time that is measured out in years.  But it's much harder to pretend we aren't going to die, like we used to in time before cancer.

I don't say that in a self-congratulatory way, although it did sound a bit like preening, didn't it? I will apologize for that begrudgingly, because it is an elusive and terrifying practice to be honest about dying. As we have noted, of course, the terrible irony of cancer is that it is also, I can't say this in any unmitigated way, a blessing.  That felt awful to write because the word blessing threatens to erase the tremendous power of pain to eat away at our very concept of self, our very understanding of soul, perhaps, and reduce us to wracking nausea or absolute fatigue, or the very deepest of bone pain.  And I can't bear for any of that to be misunderstood.  I'm not speaking for me, really, when I name all that, because blessed methadone, I live in an exhausted way that keeps the pain really at the margins.  It's when I miss a dose and the hours unwind and I find myself weeping that I realize I've missed the time for taking the medicine and there you go, the reason why I take that medicine is now my companion while I wait it out.  I'm really speaking for one or two or four of the people in my support group whose days seems so determined by pain: it really makes you collect your breath in swiftly and hold it close to bear witness.

But many of us in that group do have the secret to life which death provides, which is in this full embrace of the world, of God, if that is how the world comes to you, of the break your heart beauty of this almost summer on the coast of the Atlantic.  I have spent more time in the company of my beloved family and my dearest friends in this one year since being diagnosed than I would have, I'm absolutely sure, in at least ten years.  Possibly more.  I am not wasting time anymore, and I have figured out, thank you cancer, how to prioritize, even if my tired body won't always let me stay up as late as I want to each night, letting the nighttime hours unspool next to my beloved Kyle, as we watch MSNBC, or read novels, or eat graham crackers in bed, or hurry to help the child stumbling to the bathroom at midnight. If I didn't have to sleep, I wouldn't--I don't want to miss a minute more.

My cousin Sara is getting married to Arsi in a couple of weeks and she has asked me to say a few words during the ceremony and for that, I honestly couldn't be more honored, because she and Arsi love language so we share that.  I've been thinking about what I might say and two stories keep looping through my mind. One is a story about taking a class on Shakespeare in college from a professor who had just fallen in love. I can't read Romeo and Juliet without picturing her almost raptured face as she lectured to us about the merits of the play.  She taught us to read Romeo's language carefully to see how Shakespeare showed us what happened to the language of the lovers as they fell in love.  Romeo's  prose became poetry.  And when Juliet died, Romeo mourned the loss of the language only he and Juliet shared.  As Arsi and Sara reminded me, from Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking--there is the story of the widower who tries to go on a date and summarizes the experience: she didn't know the songs.  It's all love, really.  I see it with my four oldest children, who grew up together in the cauldron of craziness that was our life at that time, and share a kind of comedic language, full of insider references and quick asides--it marks them as being in love.  You all know who you have language with--the kind of language that only you and your beloved share. I believe that when I die, Kyle won't have anyone else to call sweetheart in the particular way she does now, to me, full of concern.  

The other story I've had on the mind is the story of Odysseus returning to Penelope, and not just because his dog recognizes Odysessus, who has been gone for twenty years and has returned disguised as a beggar, although I do love that part of the story.  After some Greek turmoil involving suitors and sending an arrow through twelve axe-handles, Odysseus joins Penelope in their bedroom.  She hesitates, and he chastises her--after twenty years, who is this woman who refuses to recognize him? But she knows one or two things about the gods, and fears this is a trick. So she tells her handmaiden to move his bed to another room, and he explodes, and then softens, realizing her clever check.  For he built the bed with a live olive tree, and one of the four bed posts is actually still that tree, connected to the ground. The bed cannot be moved.  Penelope only knows believes the man in front of her is truly Odysseus because they are the only ones who know that secret.  This is their story.

I believe that the men and women in my support group know the songs, and this makes the experience of sitting with them surprisingly deep and softly comforting.  I think these are songs worth knowing, and I wish that they did not come at such a steep price.  It's a terrifically tired phrase to say stop and smell the roses.  Mrs, Jarrell, my seventh grade English teacher, taught me I could not use tired words to express myself.  So let me say this.  It's the very edge of summer after a long, drawn out winter, and the fields are full of butterfly weeds, gaillardias, queens of the prairie, orange tiger lilies, echinaceas, purple lupine, coreopsis, asters, hardy geraniums and daylilies.  Take your loved ones in hand, hitch up the dog, and go for a walk tonight in the cooling evening.  Tell your stories to one another with the words only you have.