A thread of sadnesses

A thread of sadnesses, a crowd of sorrows, a clutch of fears. An ambush of tigers. A sloth of bears. A murder of crows. A range of mountains. A forest of trees. A flight of stairs.

And why not a clutch of fears? 

I went to see my surgeon yesterday. I think of him as mine now, because that's how my team refers to him. As in, we need to run these scans past your surgeon. When I met with him, he was much warmer to me than he was in the spring. Maybe he is starting to think of me as his patient.  He specializes in orthopedic oncology and is startlingly frank about my cancer (I think of the cancer in my body as mine, too). "That leg is full of cancer," he says, as an aside. I know that already, so it doesn't strike new fear into my heart, but it does feel a little like a soft drumbeat in my mind, where I keep my clutch of fears when they haven't wandered into my heart. 

You might remember I had surgery on my left leg last winter. I had a plate put into the left leg in order to shore up my left femur., which was filled with cancer. Femurs come in pairs, so now I am faced with a right femur filled with cancer, but also, a fracture in the socket where the femur meets the pelvis, which, upon seeing the scanned image my surgeon used to show me to prove out surgery was necessary, sent fear running through my body because the bone was so excruciatingly thin and pale that it looked like the ghost of a bone. I must have surgery to insert a rod and a nail to shore up the right femur; for however much longer I live, it must be stabilized. 

I am now carrying that image of the pale almost absence of bone--picture a circle of bone with a section almost erased, maybe just 1/6 of the circle--a clutch of fears grabbed my imagination and possibly the surgeon's too, because he wanted to schedule the surgery for just three days later. A boring story about white blood cell counts and blood thinners made the surgery impossible until next week. But I have been imagining that bone fully breaking while I changed the laundry, or while I stirred the spaghetti sauce, or when I sat down on the couch to watch Monday Night Football with Eli (which was really sneaking pages of Small Mercies, a novel by Dennis Lehane which takes place in Boston during the busing desegregation crisis of the early seventies, looking up only when Eli gets excited about a play, or gets disgruntled, loudly declaiming, "You're in the NFL, my man. They pay you the big bucks to catch that ball!").

Pollyanna would say that the good thing about having this surgery is that my team of doctors thinks I'm going to be around long enough to enjoy the newly improved leg, after recovery and physical therapy. Nobody said that but her, but I like her way of thinking.  

Autumn has arrived, with chilly nights and the windows cracked to let in the sounds of the owls hooting and, sometimes, the coyotes hunting, and the delicious cold edge of the wind that sends Asher, Elijah and me burrowing into our comforters. Roz came over last weekend. She brought apples and honey for us to share to honor the new year and to wish for sweetness in the upcoming days and nights. Her son, Justin, played in the annual Kicks for Cancer soccer game in my honor this year. Look at this beautiful photo--unbeknowst to the young, healthy bodies on the sideline, the photographer captures the thread of sadnesses. Grandpa Andrew. Uncle Reggie. Cancer is a thief. I'll say it again.

This is an annual cancer fundraiser in Concord, and I am certain that sometime in the past, I walked past the table where they were collecting money and I would have reached into my pocket to donate as I walked by, shepherding two five-year-olds from their own soccer games, pulling out a crumpled five dollar bill, almost thinking this has nothing to do with me, or murmuring, a good cause. A worthy cause.

Sometimes I think we call upon our ancestors only in moments defined by a crowd of sorrows or by a clutch of fears, almost in the way many of us pray to God. When the phone hasn't rung with the news we crave; when the phone rings at the wrong time, the dead of the night, with the news we dread. When the test results aren't back, when the ultrasound glides over your belly, when the shadow moves in the parking garage, or the card is declined with a week of groceries rung up. When we offer that silent prayer to God, please, please let him be safe. Please let me buy this food. Please let the door open downstairs and the guilty child tumble into bed. 

I often find my grandmother, unbidden, in my head at these times. I imagine her beatific and hallowed by a golden light, somehow able to influence fate, or at the least (most?), to bear it with me. I've got her all wrong, of course, in those moments, and the hubris to equate her powers with God, but that's how it works for me. In reality, she was a powerhorse of a woman, smart and sure, not beholden to anyone and in love with you and everyone you loved. She was an athlete when women weren't; she was disinterested in jewelry, make-up, clothes, furniture, cars, any markers of luxury, which was great because she had six kids and they all went to college and came home with various boyfriends and girlfriends in tow and stayed up late talking to them, drinking and smoking; she would slip a bowl of matzo ball soup to you at your place at the table, and there was always enough for you. 

I should have been invoking her all my life, like daily prayers, because although I am just like my mother, in many ways, my dream was to be my grandmother, or perhaps my dream was to be my grandmother's house--a person and place at the ready with the long hug, the hot soup, the easy conversation, and the prolific love. 

Our prayers, both prosaic and profound, ought to invoke our ancestors because we carry their traumas and their tribulations along with their found joys and moments of beauty within us, and here I mean, both the specific, Evelyn Gutfeld, and the broad, the Ashkenazi Jews, the broader--wait, do you know the famous and debunked Margaret Mead story about the broken femur? Supposedly an audience member asked Mead what the earliest sign of a civilized society was, and she answered a healed human femur. 

The theory was that wounded wild animals would be hunted down and eaten before their broken bones could heal, but a healed femur is a sign that wounded humans received help from other humans. I can only appreciate my surgeon's willingness to help not one but both of my femurs to heal, and, I suppose, not to see me limping into his office as a sign that he could easily walk off with my purse, or worse. 

In fact, Mead is on the record as pointing to great cities, elaborate division of labor and record keeping as some of the things that create civilization. Moreover, humans don't have a corner on the market when it comes to healed bones, especially when it comes to the care of young primates. And I much as I would love to think of loving kindness and healing as the foundation of civilizations, I'm not sure what to do with all the countervailing evidence (see: everything everywhere).

The femur has taken me off track. 

What I wanted to suggest was that eating cottage cheese with blueberries this morning is precisely what my grandfather ate for dessert when he was dieting. 

Saturday night I sat at the kitchen table for an hour or two talking about jobs and failure and doors opening and the nature of hierarchy with my son and his close friend. They drank wine and I drank water and we all tumbled off to bed before ten. I can remember falling asleep to the sound of my older aunts and uncles talking in the night when I was young and visiting my grandparents' house. 

I have specific memories of a sandy, square cookie my grandmother on my father's side made, wrapped in wax paper, given to us at the ocean, wind whipping our hair. I hobbled about last week, before I realized me]y femur was in such danger of snapping, making blueberry-raspberry muffins with brown sugar caps. 

My desk drawer overflows with cards and envelopes and special tape for sealing and gorgeous stamps and I look no further than my father, collector of stamps, and my grandfather, printer by trade. 

I know what my mother will say before she says it, and she possesses my words and views as well. I value intellectualism and academics; I am afraid of crowds all singing the same song. 

I am a human and I am afraid of the shadow in the garage. 

I'm not saying we are our ancestors' traumas and joys, although I suspect that is true, and I'm not saying we are puppets of our environments, although whether for or against, I suspect that is also true. 

I'm saying let's offer up small and wide prayers to our ancestors, both specifically and broadly, not just when we are in the way of crowds of sorrows or clutches of fears, but also when we are changing our children's diapers while talking about the presidential election, or pulling the sandy cookie out of the oven, or writing a thank you letter to dear Justin for playing soccer with my name on his back, or sitting up in bed at the strange sound in the night, and then, not hearing it again, reaching out for the sleeping dog at my side and falling back asleep.

I left out the thread of sadnesses. I meant thread in a thoroughly modern way, as in the chains of text messages or thousands of comments beneath an online story. I also meant it in a less modern way, like a thread that is a through line in a linen blouse, or the thread in a blanket on a loom. Thread works for me as a collective noun for our myriad sadnesses. 

I am sitting uneasily with some sadness right now. It's a fragile time in my small family right now, made manageable by my larger village of friends and found family. 

A lot of change in the house--these sixth graders are growing so fast, threatening to surpass me in height and certainly having left me in the dust long ago when it comes to what is cool. Anyone who thinks it is easier to be a child has blacked out middle school. 

And cancer continuing its assault on my body is an assault on our family as well, calling up our best and our worst selves. 

And the way we never isolate our sadness, we insist on seeing it in relation to the last time and the next time. You hurt me before and you will hurt me again. Like each sadness is part of a thread holding us together. What happens if we cut that thread and are left only in the present?

                                                                   *********

Cabin fever is a funny kind of thing to fret about. But I worry that this winter, which will cover the time of healing and rehabilitation from this next surgery, which feels to me as if it will be snowy, the kind of snow that prevents people from visiting one another, this winter where I will continue to be unable to drive and unable to walk much--for fear of fracturing another ghostly sheaf of bone--I worry this winter will include suffering from cabin fever.

I can't get comfortable with the phrase though. Cabin fever. It makes me think of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. It makes me think of the Ingalls girls waiting for Pa to get back with candy from Mankato. Cabin fever doesn't get at the kind of strangeness of being alone at home, with the bony pain of cancer knocking around your body, the clutch of fears about dying this year, the crowd of sorrows about not being at work, hiking with the dog in the snow, sitting in a coffee shop with a friend, wandering the aisles of a grocery store, even, picking out my own pale fruit. Cabin fever doesn't evoke the sweet thread of sadnesses, contemplating loss, loss, loss.  Cabin fever evokes a kind of crazed impatience.  

And I'm not asking for company, although I welcome that. And lately, I've been asking people to send me photos of where they are in the world. My sister sometimes sends me videos of what it looks like from her bicycle seat as she rides silently through Vermont. Those photos and videos are marvelous and open up my frame of reference. So I love those, too.  But I'm striving to get at a way to think about wintering over again, again with the cancer, again with the winter, again with the slow recovery from surgery--without falling into a trap of self-pity. What I need, I believe, more than anything, is to fall in love again with life this winter. To take what necessarily must be a slow walk through the cold, dark months and make of it something beautiful. Something celebratory and something alive. 

Suleika Jaouad held a 100 days of creativity event a year or so ago.  And Rebecca Makkai offers up some creative writing tips, thoughts and prompts online, along with an opportunity to participate in a book club as she reads her way through 84 books in translation. 

There are 152 days from October 1 to February 29 (yes! a leap year--it's got to mean something) and I believe I will hold myself to the task of making something every day. Every day. And I will share, if I think the something is worthy or if you ask, but I'm thinking it could be as simple as a line of a poem to a drawing that builds in time, to a cookie I made or an elaborate sandwich that could have been so-so and instead became delicious, to a collection of small stones, to a snowman (okay, given my bones, maybe a small snow-elf on the front porch).  But deliberately, something I create. 152 days from October 1 until fake spring, because we all know March is the time of unwanted blizzards (save for you skiers) and April is not the time for Easter dresses (unless climate change has something to say here), and in New England sometimes we miss spring all together. But I think I will be ready to move on in March.

There are a couple of days left in September to gather your supplies. I need to think about how I will track this for myself, especially knowing I will spend some of these nights in a hospital which can threaten to stamp out any creativity you had coming in through the doors especially if, God forbid (Evelyn forbid), you are coming in by ambulance.

I said your supplies. That wasn't a typo. I thought perhaps some of you might come along. Please tell me if you do. The bar is so low, you cannot be intimidated. Look:

Roses are red, violets are blue, pray to your grandmother, each day is new.

See? A poem. 

And we won't keep track of the days. Except I'm going to because I think it might help me from holding too tight to the thread of sadnesses. And I think I am going to make the theme of my small projects a kind of testament or prayer to and for my ancestors.

Hmm...should we borrow more from Suleika and meet once a month in a kind of salon, look at the photo of my sandwich kind of way? I might not be that technically savvy. But it would be nice to read your haikus, if anyone is interested in sharing them. I promise you have the time. Look:

New England winter:
art unravels threads to weave
new patterns in love.

A haiku! 

I think I might need some sleep before I invite you all over for a sleepover. Good night and thanks for reading, my coven (of witches)? my herd (of cows)? my pack (of wolves)? my flock (of sheep)? my journey (of giraffes)? my parliament (of owls?).

Okay--good night, my sleeping beauties.