Late Autumn: Provincetown

The little boys and Sebby and I are staying in a tiny, perfectly renovated house on the far west end of Commercial Street in Provincetown. Sebby has been in a sustained anxiety attack since we got here--I now see how quiet his life in Carlisle is.  At home, we often go for walks and never see another person, another dog.  Here the streets are absolutely jammed with people, sometimes quite drunk, and the dogs--oh, the multitudes.  Asher said he thinks this is a good community because they like gay people and dogs are allowed everywhere.  Which is probably a perfectly great way to assess a town.  But Sebby is absolutely overwhelmed and I don't think I would bring him next time, if there is a next time.  He does love swimming at the town beach, but I cannot tell you just how bad he smells after that--kind of like a dead seagull.  And since he is glue to me in our tiny house, I must then force him into the shower, where I bathe him with the boys' all-in-one body wash and shampoo which is designed to smell "tropical."

I was nervous to come this week because I'm pretty fatigued these days and in some pain, and I was going to be the only grown-up.  

But I'm so glad my anxiety didn't win out.  I've pulled energy from somewhere when I could and we have been able to go to Herring Cove and catch crabs with my Crocs (neglected to bring a net), and we have gone out to dinner and mocked the idea of eating zucchini, and we flew down Bradford Street in a pedi-cab, and we bought fudge twice.  I've also napped and we spent yesterday entirely at the house, save for walking Sebby, because I needed to recover.  And the boys have been gracious and loving to me in every way.  I'm so grateful for eating bowls of Apple Jacks and watching Stranger Things on the couch with the boys and Sebby.  I'm so grateful for seeing my friend, Alison, who was here with her kids and some friends, with whom we shared Pirate's Booty ("suss," as my boys would say) and cherries and stories of lost and found romance.

The longer I live with cancer, the more I want to fill my days with clarity and love, and the more loathing I have for drama. There is enough drama on demand in this life--the many deaths I have witnessed in my support group, the death of a friend's child, the decisions people who are sick must make about when to push for more treatment, and when to go gently into this good night. The dying planet, the wars everywhere, the people on the street, the fear of books and science and history, the corruption.  There is so much drama for the taking without the homespun kind.  I don't have the tolerance for nonsense and confusion I once had. 

I'm watching several people very dear to me go through painful dissolutions of hard fought for relationships.  And, as many of you know, Kyle and I have separated: she has a new person in her life and I am here for it, in that cancer makes it crystal clear that the boys can only benefit from having adults who love them, who honor them.  We don't have time for more drama. 

I'm watching my dear ones let go of the idea that love and loyalty mean suffering through mistreatment or harmful behavior or repeated violations of the boundaries you set, or wish you could set.  But. We can hold the complexity of a gray situation.  We cannot become the toxicity we want to avoid: we have to become the balm.  We have to learn to live together without dismissiveness and judgment and find the path with the least drama which honors the love we had, our choices and decisions, the people we made, if we did.

Late in life, I am trying to be clearer about my own pain and my own desires.  I've spent a lot of time in my past keeping quiet to "keep the peace."  I am trying to be the peace now.  That sounds presumptuous and like a pin on a college student's backpack, but I'm quite serious.  I can't chase things I can't have.  I need to live quietly within my means and within my time, and love the people I love fiercely and without hesitation or distraction.  I can wish things were different, and I do (as you might remember, Asher's two wishes every birthday when he blows out the candles are that I don't have cancer and that Pokemon are real, not necessarily in that order), but that doesn't mean I need to try and reverse the course of things.  It doesn't mean I should spend my one wild and precious life wishing for things to have turned out differently.  Time is of the essence here.  I need to live here in the now, honoring grief and seeking joy.

Over the summer my cancer progressed.  I went through a course of radiation to rid my shoulder of cancer that was causing so much pain I had to leave that arm in my lap while driving.  That's the second time we have used radiation at that spot to control the cancer.  The cancer is spreading in my spine too, and we have already radiated there twice, so now my beloved team at MGH is monitoring the progression carefully and preparing to switch my treatment to an infusion therapy that comes with its own gift box of side effects.  Knowing that is coming is one reason we rushed off to Provincetown this week--Kyle found this very sweet little house for us, and off we sped, jamming into the summer iced tea lattes, and egg sandwiches, and a beautiful man in a white satin spangled dress, and hydrangeas in the late summer evening, and sharp shells on the beach, and a mother, covered in sun-protection clothing, standing at the edge of the water, watching the twins dive into the waves and trying to quell her fears about rip tides so as not to over-mother the moment.

We also all went to the cape at the beginning of the summer--to Mashpee, which is a very different beach town.  There, the vacation was all about the house: big enough for all the big and little kids and their respective people, with a pool and a big grill, and a wonderful dinner to celebrate my parents' sixtieth wedding anniversary.  I sat next to my sister at that dinner; later in the summer she drove me to all my radiation appointments, as is our tradition, and then she rode in her umpteenth PMC ride out to Provincetown with all the other bikers from Ropes & Gray and Fidelity and so forth. Last summer, after our week at the cape, I immediately reserved the same house for the next year, banking on science and luck to get me through to the next summer.  I am searching for the right house to book for August 2023: I want more ocean so will pick something up here in Provincetown or Truro.  I am not sure I will be there next year.  But I am sure the kids should be there, with, or without.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.  I am not sure where I heard that, but I want to pause on the idea.  One evening this week, we went to the beach at dusk, and very few people were in the water.  Eli was: blissed out, shivering.  I saw a sleek black head bobbing and it was a seal.  The mother in me thought: where there are seals, there are sharks.  There was also a very elderly man swimming parallel to the shore.  I didn't realize he was older when he was swimming.  His stroke was sure and seasoned and strong.  In the water, he was ageless.  When he came out of the water, he seemed frail.  Pale and a bit stooped, he made his way slowly back to his chair, wrapped in a towel a woman brought to him. I pointed him out to Eli. I think he must swim here all the time, I said.  All his life, I thought.  Buoyed by the darkening sea, he seemed out of time.  On the gray beach, he stepped back into time.  His swimming seemed like a prayer to me.

On my walks with Sebby, past the Coast Guard station at the part of Commercial Street where it curves even closer to the water, I have seen some leaves on the ground, brown and papery and harbingers of autumn. I plan to attend this fall and this winter, attend to boundaries, to change, to love, to truth.  My prayer is this: let my attention become devotion.  Let me devote myself to the exquisite, shining small details of what I see and what I love, the cold water dripping off of the thin, tired man, the dry cotton towel around his shoulders, the tide slowly, inexorably inching closer to where I stood, watching my son and the seal in the waves.