April flowers bring May showers

Hello friends.  It's been a moment.  I opened up computer today to turn back to writing and discovered this unpublished blog I wrote in April.  I'm going to sent it out and work on a new one--I'm in Provincetown with the twins and Sebby, and its our last day, so I'm certain to be interrupted by the need to get to Herring Cove at high tide, but I'm hoping to begin writing again and anew.

 Psalm 91:10 is translated variously.

There shall no evil befall you. Nor will any plague come nigh thy dwelling.

There shall no evil befall thee.  Neither shall any plague come nigh thy tent.

Harm, of course, does come to all of our tents.  Sometimes, the harm comes from without, sometimes from within.  The Bible knows this: it is full of harms, of infertility and adultery, of war and disease, of hunger and of jealousy, of vengeance and of sacrifice. Kate Bowler taught me about the prosperity gospel: "its bold central claim that God will give you your heart's desires: money in the bank, a healthy body, a thriving family, and boundless happiness." Faith containing earthly rewards.  

Harm coming to your tent, or put differently, God preventing harm from coming to your tent is the precursor to the prosperity promised in that evangelical gospel.  

Most people, I think, most people are not truly pining away for overwhelming wealth.  We might daydream about winning the lottery, about Gamestop's stocks streaming sky-high (see Zach), about indoor NBA-sized basketball courts (see Elijah) or a fleet of Teslas (see Asher).  But what we really wish we could exchange for faith is protection from harm.  We want lives without cancer, we want marriages that last, we want teenagers that come home from the party, we want the fevers of our children to break. And that's just here in suburbia.  We want full bellies, strong roofs, freedom to walk in our communities, communities.  

Most people, I think--can get caught up in a kind of ritual of blame, sometimes directed at yourself, sometimes at others.  What did I do to get stage four cancer? Did I weigh too much? Not eat the right foods? Unwittingly expose myself to radon? Or more malignant.  What did I do in this life to other people, to God, that left me exposed? Did I not pray enough, or truthfully? Did I harm other people? Did I not make amends? Are my regrets visible in my diagnosis? 

And then there's the chorus.  I can see it in your eyes, which aren't smiling above your smile. You must have done something to deserve this, and I must find out what it is that differentiates me from you so that I can sleep without fear. Are you running enough miles, eating enough leafy greens, praying with enough certainty, living within the guardrails of normalcy? Will this prevent cancer from entering your body?  T-shirts say: All it takes to get lung cancer is a set of lungs.  But who really believes that among the unafflicted? Do you secretly imagine no harm will come to your tent if you live life according to certain rules, however superstitious, religious, capitalistic?

I might sound a little angry today.  I'm very lonely, as this winter winds down in these last bitter days of March.  I continue to be surprised by what I have lost since I turned the page to cancer.  When I imagine myself in that doctor's office, hearing I have stage four cancer, asking four out of how many, my heart aches for my innocence.  I had no ability to imagine all that I would lose in the next five years: the structure of my days, my hard-won career, financial stability, relationships I thought would not falter.  I didn't know anything about cancer, or pain, or drugs, or hospitals, or what palliative care was, or how important ongoing research would be to my longevity. I'm full of knowledge now, but I wish I knew nothing.

I'm the same friendly writer that suggests cinnamon rolls, Mary Oliver poetry, and a long walk with a Goldendoodle as balms for what ails you.  I'm the same woman who has seen my community of loved ones show up in my hours of greatest need--when I am skating on the thinnest ice, when my people show up with a hand to the slipping elbow, righting me so I can continue:  that is the moment of responsibility towards which all of our promises of love and family and friendship are tilted. My people who don't see me as my illness, or see me as if I'm playing a role in a movie about cancer, where there are miracle cures, or gorgeous Julia Roberts step-mothers, or deaths shimmering with the appearance of angels.  I do adore Mary Oliver's poetry for the prayer to simply pay attention to the world, to observe with empathy, to be our own soft animal rather than good.  

When I walk at the bog these last shivering days of March, I see the land is on the verge.  A purple-veined crocus has appeared.  The green buds of leaves are aching to unfurl.  Did you know baby beavers swim within the first twenty-four hours of birth?--the slap of their mother's tails will warn off my dog, hopelessly devoted to swimming too near. 

What if God is good, but not safe someone asked on a podcast the other day. Your worst fears do come true: you lose your job, you lose your house, you lose your spouse, you lose your child, the tumor is malignant, the cancer has spread, someone is calling from inside the house.  For so many of us, our worst fears have already come true, and for those of you who imagine you are still on the side of safety? Some of you learn to look at us on the side of harm, not with fear but as the fear, as the cancer, as the missing child, as death.  And then you stay away.  It's commonplace to talk about losing friends during cancer--there are studies out there, data, truisms.  When I heard I had lung cancer, I thought about how long I might live, I thought about not seeing my children grow up, I thought about not seeing grandchildren, but I didn't think I might lose some of the people with whom I was closest. The harm comes from inside your tent, the harm comes from outside your tent.

The truth is none of us know exactly what we will do when things get hard. We don't know how we will respond to traumatic events. As an act of self-preservation, some people need to stay as far away from death and disease as they can.  Distance from the thing that scares you feels like safety.  Sometimes grief looks like anger looks like fear looks like disappearance.  

The truth is none of us know exactly what to do or say. We are programmed to believe in progress and prosperity.  What if all the carrot juice, and miles logged on Strava, and hot yoga, and carefully curated organic vegetables and grass-fed cow milk, and the studied right approaches to parenting, to sex, to marriage, to career all still end you up in the same place of trauma and unforgiving fate? 

Ugh. I make myself want to avoid myself when I feel like shaking the world to say that harm, tragedy, illness are not linked to character, decisions made, actions taken.  It just is, as they say, what it is.

The truth is I don't know how to be in the world any better than anyone else.  Of course not, you say, and no one expects that of you.  But I do.  I want to know how to navigate the days and months so they become years.  I don't want to waste time, and yet I do.  

Sometimes it's hard to untwine grief and anger. 

There's a Twitter account for someone whose handle is Anticipatory Widow.  Her husband has what she calls terminal cancer. What does it mean to define yourself in terms of a tragic future? Is that what I'm doing right now? I am certain she is not contributing to her husband's early demise by grieving now because I don't believe that being positive is the trick to cancer.  Nor do I believe that being negative hastens your time of death.  But I do feel queasy when I lose my time to anger.  When I lose my time to anticipatory grief.

After all, a student found a swastika in the school bathroom this week.  After all, Ukraine is on fire.  After all, the planet itself is consumed in anticipatory grief.

And yet, April Fool's day was its usual hoot.  I found two fake ice cubes with plastic bugs floating in my seltzer water tonight.  Elijah told me LaMelo Ball joined the Celtics.  

Yesterday I walked Sebby with a friend and her dog--we went to the bog and the dogs joyfully swam.  

I'm reading a book called The Anomaly, and it's curious and I'm amazed by how I come to care for character after character with just four or six pages to set each of their stages.  

I'm on a cherry-pie baking tear.

After all.

When Cameron was born, I was convinced he was crying the first night because I was not swaddling him correctly, and after the third time the exhausted nurse came into my room to show me how again, I knew the problem was not the swaddle but me.  

When Zachary was born, I paced the married students housing courtyard through the night, watching the mathematician graduate student studying at his desk.  Was he discovering the formula or creating it?

When Avery was born, the United States invaded Haiti while I was in pitocin-induced labor, and I watched CNN for hours and became a surface-level expert on voodoo. 

When Zoe was born, the summer Olympics were on and Reebok had an ad showing different women excelling at different sports and the voiceover said something like, right now in America a girl is being born.  And I wept and held her and said, here she is, here she is.

When Asher was born, a team of doctors whisked him away and told me to hold on before I was instructed to push Elijah out into the world, fifteen minutes later. 

Elijah now calls Asher "big brother."

I contain all my ages, all of these births, and my anticipated death.

As Mary Oliver wrote, "It's not the weight you carry/ but how you carry it--books, bricks, grief."

You can't put the weight down, but you can carry it with laughter. You can stop to admire the tiny baby snake that scurried down the bog path.  You can even allow others to carry you, you and your weight, for a moment or two. You can remember unrequited love like the ragged tunes my grandmother would whistle under her breath as she stood at the sink--an untitled requiem for time passing.  You can pray to God as an answer to these questions.