magical thinking

I was rereading The Year of Magical Thinking the other day in honor of the young Sara and Arsi, who wed in Philadelphia last month and who were each taken with the book, and I realized with a start that I am also engaged in magical thinking, not, of course, that my dead husband is still alive, coming back for his abandoned shoes, and life, and wife, but, that I don't really have cancer. 
It's easy to fool myself because so far I have been so lucky.  I take one single pill each day that is my targeted chemotherapy, and a dozen other pills to keep the pain and symptoms from the single pill at bay.  So this is certainly different than the life I lead before, with its occasional ibuprofen.  But not enough so that I dream in cancer.
I think I will be done with my year of magical thinking when I have accepted the cancer enough that I dream the dreams of someone with cancer.  Right now, I dream colorful, complicated dreams in which I do not have cancer and which end with a clattering crash as I wake back into the truth.  I often wake up with tears already streaming down my face. This isn't hyperbole: it's like groundhog day where I keep finding out over and over again that I have cancer and there is no cure and I'm not okay, at all.
Except that, as we all know now, life doesn't pause and wring its hands about cancer, so I tend to already be in motion, it's morning and the boys are waking up, or it's the afternoon and the dog needs to go out for a walk or the black beans need to be stirred or the bread needs to be turned out for a final rise or a conference call is set to begin, so I swiftly wipe the tears away and get back to it all.
Maybe these dreams of not having cancer are precisely the dreams someone with cancer has, but I still hew to the idea that a dream in which I have cancer will mean acceptance.

We just are back from Truro, where the views included the sweep of the bay over to the streets of Provincetown, the sleek head of a dark seal in the water, the delicious bodies of my six year old boys in the surf, exhausted tumbling into bed at night, the chilled green grapes in the paper toweling from the house, the broken shells pressed into the crumbling sand castles, the deep chocolate ice cream layered into a waffle cone, and the moon hanging over the Atlantic.  We brought ourselves into the picture, too, as we all always do on vacation, but I didn't feel the heaviness of that feeling that this was the last time until we got home.
There has to be a last time, of course, a last time that I go to the cape with my family, a last time for running my fingers through a child's hair as I sweep out the sand, a last time to make the stack of sandwiches for the beach (one with mayonnaise for her, one unspeakably with ketchup for him), a last gin and tonic with the slips of lime.  But it didn't feel like the last time this time, and if it was, I'm glad I didn't know it.  The weight of knowing could tip the whole affair over into the maudlin pretty easily.
Recognizing the last time all the time is no way to live, although I like to think that I bring more awareness of mortality to all my times now such that I no longer say things like time slipped away from me, or it hardly seems like it's been a week, or a month, or a year.

On the other hand, it hardly seems like it's been twenty-four years since Avery was born, and yet it has been, almost, and Avery leaves for California this week, so that's making me blue.
Avery's birth in 1994 coincided with the U.S. military intervention to ensure Aristide was restored to power in Haiti, a story which CNN covered as breaking news (no kidding) and so included brief journalistic sojourns into American ideas about Haiti.  Avery's birth was induced and she could hardly be bothered, so by the time my labor really got going, I was a surface-level expert on American policy towards Haiti, and, apropos of nothing with the mission at hand, Haitian vodou.
Haitian believers in voduo believe in a distant, unknowable creator, Bondye, who does not intervene in human affairs (say, for example, by miraculously curing one's cancer), but do believe in Loa, or mysteres, who serve as intermediaries between the creator and humans. Certain rituals allow the Loa to come down, and be served by humans, perhaps with gifts or dance; sometimes the Loa then grant requests. 
All of this was absolutely new to me, a young woman in her 20s, hopped up on pitocin in a hospital in Columbus, Ohio, where I labored to birth Avery. 

Avery has been observing the planet since she was born, stepped back a tiny bit from the action so she can drink it all in, decide what she thinks is right, and act accordingly.  I find her beautiful, as I do all my children, with her soulful brown eyes and the gentle kindnesses she bestows on the young and the animals.  I've been so lucky to have her near me in this first year of magical thinking, and I will love thinking of her fighting the good fight in California.  She is going to be a gardener teacher in the LA public schools, which, if you know her, is the perfect role for her.  So many of us head out, either to the big city of New York, or go west, young woman, and some of us return to our roots and some of us put down new ones.

I've always imagined a silvery, almost visible cord connecting me to all of my children, a literal line between my body and theirs, and, in contemplating her move, I'm certain of the very fact of it.

You might detect defiant weariness in my voice, friends, and I'm not going to lie.  It's harder this week than others, and certainly some of it is the ocean weary return from Truro and some of it is saying good-bye to Avery and some of it is just the exhaustion of being ill in the summer, when it would have been so lovely to feel strength, not weakness, as I turned to the crickety steep stairs that led from our rented house in Truro down to the sand and the water.
Some dear friends, including my dear sister, rode the Pan-Mass Challenge in my honor last weekend and it was magical to see my face, with my hair shorn from my head, superimposed and beaming from their cycling jerseys, and it was hard not to be the strong one, pushing my legs each mile from Sturbridge to Provincetown, and instead to be the one left behind, with the pain in my chest when I breathe too deeply.  There I go, feeling self-pity. Nothing charming in that, and I beg your forgiveness.
I do know you will say no need to apologize. Sometimes the appearance of fear and pain looks like anger.  Sometimes I feel angry about the fear and pain.  I do feel exquisitely vulnerable and miss the days when I felt strong, strong enough to swim boldly to a child in the waves, or to run up those steep beach stairs for an extra beach chair. And confident--a confidence grounded in the belief that I would continue to be one of the lucky ones, if I defined lucky in terms of longevity. 

Which I don't, if I press myself.  What could be luckier than to live in a community founded in love, as I do, every day.  And if I allow myself to be as real as possible about the ragged edges of my life, my vulnerabilities, which include pain and fear, so much more the whole story.

I'm still hoping to learn to walk the line towards magical realism, which has always been one of my favorite genres, a line that toggles between pity and grief, between joy and regret, between east coast and west coast, between humans and the Loa, between the horizon and the stars.