abiding gratitude
dear readers.
I have a new doctor on the west coast--I think of her as the love child of alternative medicine (she studied under Dr. Andrew Weil) and scorched earth medicining. She is working at my behest on everything from carefully chosen supplements (based on blood work rather than on my haphazard approach, which has been to add everything I read about with some relationship to cancer--the Chinese mushrooms, the ginger tonics, the beautifully named astragulus), to emotional healing (which involves a kind of meditation where I imagine fire flies flickering in all parts of my body--not that she told me to do that--it is just what comes up when I am very very quiet (and it must be remnants of several years in Clintonville, Ohio, as a young child, when we played outside at dusk amongst the twinkling fireflies and the diving, swooshing bats)), to a review of all of the relevant clinical trials both to make sure we aren't missing any opportunities now and for later, when the cancer mutates, so we know if there are options out there. She encourages me to be hopeful, to have strong reasons to keep on living. She encourages me to tap into my community, to be held, as they say in California, by the collective arms of my specific world.
Which is where all of you came in. I am seeing this doctor, in a kind of complementary relationship to my oncologist and his protocol (which I follow like a child follows religion, believing first and still in Western medicine) because of the generosity of so many of you. You know who you are--your contributions to my medical care at this juncture became the voice of hope for me. I feel deeply lucky to be relying on the kindnesses of my friends and my family at this crossroads. I feel held.
What I want to give you in return is a miracle. That's of course what I want. I want to live a long life, not a life cut short by cancer. I want to stand before you, an old woman, and to thank you from the bottom of my tired heart, for a life with grandchildren, for the poetry, for the many holiday seasons, for the long years with Kyle. But I wrestle with what? Can you call it hopelessness, can you really ask me to believe in miracles? Is it not simply realism to know that my cells are turning, turning, looking for the way around the medicine I am taking right now, looking for a way back to the wild growth of cancer? I don't know. I want to be the kind of person who believes in miracles. I want to be the kind of person whose life is miraculous.
And of course, when I write those words, I see what is miraculous. I am sitting in my warm study, listening to the wind howl outside. I am just days away from a house filled with my very best thing, my children. I am in love with a person who loves me back fully, which is hard won and precious. I live in a community of generous, kind, and loving people who want nothing short of a miracle for me. If that is not in and of itself miraculous and profoundly lucky, I don't know what is.
Tonight, when my house falls silent, lulled by the sound of the wind and nothing more, when the starlight slants across the cornfields and through the windows as the night falls, I will think of all of you in my imagination, your myriad faces, some content, some perpetually discontented, and I will welcome you into my mind, lit up with dancing fire flies from an Ohio childhood, and I will thank you, as if in prayer, and then slowly my mind will empty and I will sleep, and so will you, in your own homes, in your own beds, outfitted against the cold with woolen blankets, and crumpled comforters.
I have a new doctor on the west coast--I think of her as the love child of alternative medicine (she studied under Dr. Andrew Weil) and scorched earth medicining. She is working at my behest on everything from carefully chosen supplements (based on blood work rather than on my haphazard approach, which has been to add everything I read about with some relationship to cancer--the Chinese mushrooms, the ginger tonics, the beautifully named astragulus), to emotional healing (which involves a kind of meditation where I imagine fire flies flickering in all parts of my body--not that she told me to do that--it is just what comes up when I am very very quiet (and it must be remnants of several years in Clintonville, Ohio, as a young child, when we played outside at dusk amongst the twinkling fireflies and the diving, swooshing bats)), to a review of all of the relevant clinical trials both to make sure we aren't missing any opportunities now and for later, when the cancer mutates, so we know if there are options out there. She encourages me to be hopeful, to have strong reasons to keep on living. She encourages me to tap into my community, to be held, as they say in California, by the collective arms of my specific world.
Which is where all of you came in. I am seeing this doctor, in a kind of complementary relationship to my oncologist and his protocol (which I follow like a child follows religion, believing first and still in Western medicine) because of the generosity of so many of you. You know who you are--your contributions to my medical care at this juncture became the voice of hope for me. I feel deeply lucky to be relying on the kindnesses of my friends and my family at this crossroads. I feel held.
What I want to give you in return is a miracle. That's of course what I want. I want to live a long life, not a life cut short by cancer. I want to stand before you, an old woman, and to thank you from the bottom of my tired heart, for a life with grandchildren, for the poetry, for the many holiday seasons, for the long years with Kyle. But I wrestle with what? Can you call it hopelessness, can you really ask me to believe in miracles? Is it not simply realism to know that my cells are turning, turning, looking for the way around the medicine I am taking right now, looking for a way back to the wild growth of cancer? I don't know. I want to be the kind of person who believes in miracles. I want to be the kind of person whose life is miraculous.
And of course, when I write those words, I see what is miraculous. I am sitting in my warm study, listening to the wind howl outside. I am just days away from a house filled with my very best thing, my children. I am in love with a person who loves me back fully, which is hard won and precious. I live in a community of generous, kind, and loving people who want nothing short of a miracle for me. If that is not in and of itself miraculous and profoundly lucky, I don't know what is.
Tonight, when my house falls silent, lulled by the sound of the wind and nothing more, when the starlight slants across the cornfields and through the windows as the night falls, I will think of all of you in my imagination, your myriad faces, some content, some perpetually discontented, and I will welcome you into my mind, lit up with dancing fire flies from an Ohio childhood, and I will thank you, as if in prayer, and then slowly my mind will empty and I will sleep, and so will you, in your own homes, in your own beds, outfitted against the cold with woolen blankets, and crumpled comforters.
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