rainy July, to date

Through a glass darkly--the phrase comes from the Apostle Paul, who explains that we cannot see, except obscurely, that when we look, it is only through a clouded version of what is real.  When we die, perhaps, we will see clearly.  Maybe Paul is sure about that.  

Someone I love was talking today about the young, the babies and the children, and how much closer they are to the mystery of what came before we took our first breath and began the process of forgetting.  Or, to put it another way, of looking back through a glass darkly. The poet Joy Harjo talks about her experiences with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who remember her from other lives.  We knew each other before, they tell her.  

It was a long winter in many ways, followed by a spring filled with loss.  I don't know when to say the loss started, actually--it has been loud this whole year.  We have lost too many people from my metastatic cancer group.  When someone died last month, I was irrationally angry at the sameness of the ending of all these stories.  She died.  Of course.  She was human.  But human with stage four cancer, so she died with her children still children, her marriage intact and forward-flowing, her work deep and with meaning for her.  And she was preceded in death by someone who had cheated death her whole life--surviving polio, surviving a terrible plane crash.  She too was in love; she was also an artist who blew glass--she blew glass, someone observed, not afraid in the least of the ferocious heat.  She died, too.  And now, one of us, in hospice, remarks she feels she has the scarlet A on her because she knows we are all looking at her, thinking, you're next.

It's a joyful burden to bear witness to this much loss.  To allow yourself to draw close to those who are leaving.

It's also been a time of deep, deep family connection.  I have seen so much of my children and my parents in the last seasons.  We all went to the cape at the end of May--I had just been released from the hospital after one of several stays, and was driven to the house we rented.  Magical--everyone seemed to know exactly what to do, when to make a meal, when to take a nap, when to eat ice cream, when to gather up the youngest and take them to see whales.  I slept and sat, curled up on chairs with blankets at the ocean, by the pool, in the living room while cousins put together 1000-piece puzzle after puzzle.  I felt like I could die after this week at the cape--seeing so clearly, not darkly, the ways in which my children are woven together, how they will carry one another through my death to the other side, where Passovers and Thanksgivings, babies and marriages, new homes, new jobs, Christmas and Hanukkah lights await.  I could see myself in all of them and it felt like the beginning of a goodbye.

My cancer has progressed and I'm done with infusion chemotherapy for now.  I am taking two targeted drugs to try to stop the growth of cancer now.  My pain is very well controlled by the pain meds I'm on.  I'm very, very tired.  

My therapist has been deeply instructive or intuitive as I am trying to reframe how I think about my days.  No longer in terms of capitalism.  You laugh, but really.  It's strange not to be productive in those ways--I'm not earning a penny.  I'm not making anything: not a Powerpoint, not a novel, not a new drug for cancer, like the one I am now on, which was just approved by the FDA last February.  Think of the work of those who invented that drug which I now humbly take, two pills, twice a day. I ask myself: am I supposed to be reading this much?  I finished a ten-book Norwegian detective series.  I read all the books on the NY Times Best Books list.  Is it okay to think of my days in terms of what calls me--a long walk, a meditation, a deep nap, a loaf of bread, a meal with my children, a phone call just to hear the sound of my child's voice, the feel of my dog's coat as he presses against me when he senses I am anxious, hot coffee with my mother, a piece of pie with my father, a series of sarcastic texts with my sister, an obscure joke with my brother, the stolen conversations Kyle and I have at night when I wake up, watering the flowers my daughter planted, exclaiming at the new puppy--does this add up to a life?

It seems it does, and it's one I want to stay in as long as I can.

The summer is extraordinarily rainy here.  We see the effects of the fires out West in the red sun, and the smoky air rising off the trees.  Still, here it's lush and green.  The wildlife creeps closer to the house--we have seen bobcats, turkeys, coyotes, owls, herons, deer, rabbits.  We have a large snake that lurks under the above-ground pool we installed to get through last summer's pandemic.  Kyle can hardly bear that snake and she called around to see if there is anything to be done about it, and there isn't, except co-existence.  The bikers are back too.  They aren't wildlife, but they travel in packs and spread out over the narrow roads of Carlisle and Concord, enforcing the speed limit, and crowding the counter at Fern's: ordering sandwiches and thirstily drinking Gatorade, their heads tipped back and their expensive bike shirts shining in the sun.

I've made strawberry rhubarb pie, and a pasta salad with snap peas and halved cherry tomatoes and angel hair and a sesame dressing, and homemade bagels, and hardly any soup, and lots of overnight oats in the jam jars, and so many grilled burgers and hotdogs. We had five extra nine-year old boys over the other night and they swam happily in that same above-ground pool, oblivious to the life of the snake underneath, and then ate grilled burgers and watermelon--the dinner of children in the summer--and then ate huge quantities of popcorn while they watched the new Space-Jam.  Absolute chortles of laughter at certain points in the movie, so no need to be cynical about Warner Brothers or LeBron James, I suppose.  Or save that for another day.

I wrote a quick thank-you note to my oncologist, two nurse practitioners, and my palliative care doc the other day, thanking them for these four years.  It's been four years now, and as I have joked before, I'm like one of those fancy gallons of organic milk, with a due date that is unrelated to how long the milk is really drinkable.  My due date, or the projected length of the rest of my life which the oncologist reluctantly supplied four years ago, is long past.  But here I sit, on my back porch, with the ceiling fan turning, and the trees rustling, and the sounds of the bikers talking as they ride past, writing to you. 

I am knitting a sweater right now--creamy ivory and a super simple pattern so I can mostly just knit while I talk on Zoom, or meet my therapist, or listen to a podcast.  A college friend's mother taught me to knit when I was 19--crushingly young and so sure of myself and my pending life as a grown-up (when really I was writing a series of five-page papers and eating rice and beans from the vegetarian section of the dining hall).  I'm no longer in touch with that college friend--he has gone his own ways--but I still exchange messages occasionally with his mother on Facebook, and of course, I think of her when I knit.  It's like polishing the silver, or making bread.  You start with tarnish, or flour, or yarn, and then time passes and you have brilliant silver candlesticks, or a loaf of country sourdough, or a sweater.  

I have spent a lot of time with people in their twenties of late, because many of the people I made are people in their twenties.  It's such a privilege to be with people who are seeing the world and resisting it or embracing it or insistent upon changing it.  I can make a meal or have a spare bedroom or an extra car or some words to the wise and I can thusly draw them in.  But they don't stay for long--they have jobs and houses and apartments and dogs and fish and trails to walk.  I spend even more time with nine-year old boys.  They are all about the meals and the bedrooms and the talking and don't have anywhere else to be, aside from the pool and the baseball field.  But you can see the way they are already figuring out how to leave.