Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The Swan is How I Know That I am Alive


The swan is a white blur far out in the pond.  I don’t have my glasses on,  so my friend must confirm that it’s a swan, not a clot of whipped cream mysteriously dropped from the blue sky onto the pond’s surface.   It’s morning, and we are sitting on a wool blanket drinking tea brewed in a cast iron pot.  This is Cape Cod, and this is the second pond of my morning.  This is the moment, the present tense.  The moment is a swan.

~

And this is the future, two days later, sitting in the oncologist’s office, in my jeans and a hospital johnny,  my arms crossed to keep the johnny closed,  my sister in a chair against the opposite wall,  working on her laptop.  As always, Dr. S., as he walks through the door, looks for a split second almost startled, then pleased to see us.  I want to hug him but can’t right now, because if I open my arms, my johnny will open too.  And that would be awkward.  Because suddenly, the spartan, sterile examination room sort of melts around us, and we’re momentarily in another place and situation.  Dr. S. sits down and asks me how I am.  Not as a doctor, but as though he were just a friend.  As though he’s invited us to his house for a visit, and we’re sitting in the living room catching up.  For a moment, we’re just people.  Even though he wears a white doctor coat and there’s a stethoscope dangling from his neck and I’m in this cotton garment of the sick, we’re just talking about life.   All the time we were waiting, anxiety built inside of me.  We waited for almost an hour to see “the Shnip,” as Mara affectionately refers to him.  We always wait a long time here.  But rather than annoy me, I accept it.  Because this is what the Shnip does.  He treats you like you’re the only patient he has.  Or like you’ve dropped in for a visit at the end of his busy day, and he can finally relax and chat for awhile.  I wonder if he’s begun practicing meditation, like his wife.  He’s that present.

~

The swan is coming into focus now.  I want to write “she,” but my friend corrects me.  It is probably a male, his mate tucked into some sedge and cattail indentation in the pond’s shore, sitting on a clutch of eggs.  He patrols the shore always, she says,  describing an all-day all-out battling with danger and potential danger he wages with the lake.  Like the pair of Canada geese we just watched waddle onto the sand several hundred yards away, the pair he is at this moment bee-lining toward.  He is no decorative swan, spinning slow circles, preening, hoping someone takes his picture.  He means business.  His focus is impressive.  His path is direct.  He is intent.

~

Earlier this morning, after I dropped my sister off at work, I drove to Nickerson State Park.  It was unplanned, like this visit with my friend at the swan-pond.  It was spontaneous.  The morning was pure spring, mild, the trees flushed various shades of baby-green and speaking in their spring voices, the voices of newly arriving migrant birds.  On the radio, I heard that people had been spotting indigo buntings, even one rare black-throated sparrow who normally lives in the desert southwest.  I was going to go to the coffee shop to do some computer work, but I cranked the wheel over at the entrance to Nickerson Park, thinking I’d walk around Cliff Pond, to breathe the morning air, maybe write in my journal.  Cliff Pond was my refuge during chemo.  But something pulled me to another trail, a shorter trail around Little Cliff Pond.  In my eight months on the Cape, I never walked that trail.  I was the only person in the parking lot between the two ponds.  I walked the trail,  pushing through a thicket of birdsong.  I found a sandy spot in the woods at the pond’s edge, sat down, and pulled out my journal.  “Time here now on Cape Cod is stacked many layers deep, the moment dense with past time, with memories of when I lived here during treatment.”  It’s disconcerting.  Driving the car down Rte 6A was like swimming through a kelp bed.  So maybe that’s why I walked a new trail, to break out of that viscous sensation of memories knocking around against the present.

~

 I tell the Shnip it really took a full year, like everyone said, after treatment ended, to feel somewhat “myself” again.  “Me and my shadow,” I say,  the new shadow that now hovers at the edge of my sight, cancer and its uncertainties.  He tells me that the shadow will grow paler with time.  I believe him not because he’s worked with countless breast cancer patients over the years, but because his wife is a two-time survivor of breast cancer.  He knows about the shadow.  And I take to the image of a pale shadow.  One day, perhaps, it will become a negative of itself, a ghost print, and when I look into it, what will I see?  What will it show me?

~

The swan is not aiming toward those geese after all.  He is aiming his prominent orange beak, its black nobs, the curve of his forehead, his black eyes, his wings, which my friend observes are never relaxed on his back,  toward us, the two of us on the blanket, with the pot of tea.  I think of a scene in the novel The Snow Child, when the girl Faina battles a swan.   A swan, as graceful and placid as it appears, is a strong, fierce bird.  Its beating wings could break our shins.  We stand, we back away.  The swan does not swerve until he’s almost grounded himself  in the shallows at our feet.  Then he turns, eyes us, pushes back off the sand and begins to forage.  We sit back on the blanket.  This is the moment, the acute moment of the swan acknowledging us, eye to eye. “I see you, I know you are there, I am aware.”   It is how I know that I am alive.

~

An Alaskan friend emailed me this morning of his struggles to not dwell too much in thoughts of mortality.  A survivor of  one kind of cancer many years ago, recently, he’s had surgeries for melanomas.  He’s an athlete, a mountaineer.  He described to me crashing his bike the other day, blood on his smashed helmet, walking his unscathed bike and self 8 miles back to town.  “And I didn’t think about it once,” he said.  Meaning cancer.  It is how he knows he is alive. 

~

The Shnip asks me about Craig, and I tell him it has not been easy on our relationship, cancer and its aftermath, and that only now am I accepting that Craig and I took two separate but parallel journeys.   And everyone, I say, focuses on the cancer patient, and expects partners to be rocks of support.  The Shnip says yes, that is the way it is, there are even support groups for partners for that reason.  And I tell him we are different, that for Craig, the numbers are his rock of Gibraltar.  He is a scientist, I say.  And he goes back again and again to one scene.  When we sat in Dr. S's office that first time, two years ago, Mara, Craig and listening to the NP rattle off my treatment plan.  “We don’t usually provide numbers unless s someone balks at treatment,” she said, but she gave them to us nonetheless,  the way that each kind of treatment halved the chance of recurrence.  And as I sat there, the words and percentages streaming past my ears like twigs in a big, breaking-up northern river, as I sat there ignoring the twigs,  fixating instead on the enormous slabs of ice roiling past, Craig looked like a man who’d just lost everything.  He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees,  face in his big hands.  He looked despairing, but he was doing multiplication and addition in his head.  Chances of recurrence.  Months of treatment.  To those prognostic numbers he’s returned again and again, lobbing them at my fears.  The little sticks bounce off the ice chunks in my head.  “For me,” I tell the Shnip, “The numbers are no Rock of Gibraltar.”

~

 Now the swan tips up its snow-white tail.  It appears to do a headstand, holding the pose for long minutes as it searches the sandy bottom for food.  My friend and I talk, drink tea, the swan feeding within a stone’s throw.  We are suddenly no threat, and I wonder, were we ever?  “I think,” I tell my friend, “some animals are just more social, some more solitary, than others.”  I wonder if the swan is lonely.  I wonder if it feels more secure in the company of other creatures like us.  Why is it feeding right here?  When there’s a whole pond available.  I will never know these things.  And they are not the point.  The swan is the point.  The point of this moment.  Its gleaming black eye.  There are no icebergs here, in this moment.  There is no fear.  No future, no past.

~

In my journal, at Little Cliff Pond, an hour before the visit with my friend at her pond, an hour before the swan, I wrote, “I want to squeeze as much life out of life as I can.  This morning, I am aware, maybe through the birds, and through the distant background hum, a low, human mechanized roar of cars, of the intensity of life, the burning of both candle-ends.  I want to squeeze every drop of life out of life and I want it to squeeze every drop out of me and leave me spent.”

~

“What is your rock?” Dr. S. asks me.  Is this the kind of question an oncologist asks?  Or a friend?

“Writing is my rock,” I say.  “Writing my blog.”

“But isn’t that painful sometimes?” he asks.  “It must be intense, to put those fears down, to go into them, to explore them that way?  Isn’t it harder?”

“No,” I say.  “It’s much harder when I don’t write.  The runaway thoughts in my head are a much worse kind of pain.”

~

The swan is moving gradually away from us now.  While feeding, the wings relax along the torso, but the black feet move separately to balance the tail tipped up as it feeds deeper and deeper.   Now the swan rights himself,  and the wings again assume what appears a position of tension, of defense.   Yet now I see that they also make a basket, a cradle, of the swan’s back, in which cygnets will ride.   The swan swims now for the place where we saw Canada geese earlier.   My friend and I talk about the wild, about the bird songs, about the nature of nature, which is not peaceful, but incessant, focused, intent on survival, on life.  Birds, birds, and the strange birds we are, too, continuously falling off our bikes so we know that we are alive.  Bird hearts beating impossibly fast.

~

We talk a long time, and then it’s time for the Shnip to turn into the doctor again.   “Well, let’s take a look at you,” he says.  I sit on the table, and he presses his fingertips into my neck, my sternum.  “Breathe,”he says, the stethoscope cold on my back.”  I lie down and he taps his fingers on my abdomen, runs them quickly over the numbness of the scar, presses up into my armpits.  “Okay, you can sit up.  You’re the picture of health.  Go ahead and get dressed.”

~

The swan is not a picture of grace or beauty.  The swan is flesh and blood, feathers and beak – real.  The swan is now.  My friend and I gather up the tea pot and cups.  We leave the blanket where it is.  We say goodbye.

In my journal, at Little Cliff Pond, I wrote “Here, the pond asks nothing of me.  It doesn’t even care if I look at it or just sit here staring at my page.  The breeze touches the side of my face and moves on.  The birds territorialize,  a scratchy, whistley, buzzy, chucking, chattering  din, the business and industry of their brief spans of time on earth.  Like me, they live like there is no tomorrow, filled with urgency.  Like me, they are alive only right now.  They’re not peaceful.  Their calls in the forest aren’t sweet music.  Their music is incidental.  They sing work songs, love songs, fight songs.  But still, despite all of this urgency of the earth all around,  and the urgency inside me, I can finally breathe here, alone in the woods, on the pond’s edge.  I can let the incessant ripples of memory and future flow past my ears, like the ripples on the pond itself, heading across the pond, glancing off this beach, on their way to someplace else.  Like the swan, they recognize no edge or ending.  They move forever forward into the next moment.

~  

This is my moment.  It is 1:30 am on my 49th birthday.  I am in bed listening to the rain.  The swan sleeps.   We dream each other.  I am writing these words:  the ice has gone out of the pond.  For this moment, the ice has gone out of my life.      


Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Small Animal in an Elderberry Thicket Ponders Love After Breast Cancer


Last night I finished the novel The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey.  The book is a deeper story disguised as an Alaskan take on an old Russian fairy tale.   At the heart of that fairy tale – at the heart of many fairy tales –  is darkness, is longing and loneliness, desire, disappointment, letting be and letting go.  So of course The Snow Child is more than magical and dream-like.  It is very real.  It’s about loving something desperately but not being able to own it, fix it in time or place, rein it in.  It’s about overcoming your own deepest cravings and wounds to see and accept another person, place, or animal as it is.  It’s about loving something wild and untamed, and having to adjust your manner of loving – all you’ve been taught about what and how it’s supposed to be – adjust it to the true nature of the beloved thing.  It’s about letting yourself actually see the beloved thing, beyond your own projections.  Mary Oliver, in a poem, asks the reader to just “let the small animal of your body love what it loves.” The small wild thing, the animal of the body, isn’t always a rational creature, and it isn’t always pretty or polite or well-behaved.  It’s difficult enough to know and then focus on that small animal’s meanderings, its desires and impulses and instincts, much less ask others to honor them too.  But that’s what love does, doesn’t it?

When your love gets cancer, get ready.  The small wild animal, stuffed, buried, contained, muffled, suppressed, awakens.   No, you didn’t sign up for this insurrection of the body, did you?  You didn’t sign up for this particular train ride.  Even when your love, the day she was diagnosed, asked you directly, “So are you ready to get on this train with me?” and you said,  “Yes,” how could you understand?  You didn’t know the train was heading down this particular narrow cut through a dense forest, jumping the track your life was on and careening down another.  You didn’t anticipate that when the treatment was over, she wouldn’t want to jump off that train and trudge back in the opposite direction, searching for the one you started on together when you first hooked up.  That when you finally found that old train, finally hauled yourself into a boxcar, she wouldn’t follow.  And now you see her there, waving from a boxcar on another train, swaying down a parallel track, but you can’t make out her words.  They don’t make sense.  They don’t sound like the language you used to speak together.  And she can’t seem to understand your words either.

Two years after cancer, on the home front, nothing is the same, and everything is the same.  I still get mad when he forgets to bring cloth bags to the grocery store and comes home with plastic.  He still gets mad when I drive too fast on our dirt road.  I still get mad when he chainsaws down the elderberry bushes in the orchard to let in more light for the raspberry patch.  He still gets mad when I buy more books than I can read in a year, more books than I can afford.  But I don’t know the terrain of his inner life, exactly.  I don’t know what happened to him during the year of breast cancer, what path those months carved into him, and where that path led.  It’s a private place.  There’s that song, “Stand By Me,” and when I hear it, I think of Craig and my sister, my mod squad, and all of our trips to Boston, to the hospital, and all of the shit we faced together.  But the truth is, cancer doesn’t happen to one person with everyone rallying around, standing by.  And it doesn’t happen to “a family.”  We each take our own trip with it, alone.  I write my way through.  That is not Craig’s way.  I talk about my “healing process,” a lame phrase, a euphemism for the way I flail through the elderberry thickets, lost, following the small animal of my body, which is sometimes frantic, sometimes exuberant, and sometimes afraid.  Craig says he can’t go there with me, into that thicket.  By god, he wants to clear it out with a chainsaw, let the light in.  And I think I’ve got the map and key, but it doesn’t fit into his door, it doesn’t show the way to his wilderness.  His way is equally a mystery, equally a place, and a path and a language, and someone walking alone through a landscape only he can see.   Does this sound lonely?  Sometimes it is.  But maybe it should be.       

Breast cancer changes something about the small animal of the body.  Not the obvious things.  Not so much the animal itself, but one’s access to it.  In my case, it leapt out of its woodpile like the red squirrel in our shed, and chattered at me, and it hasn’t stopped. This is what I love.  This is what I want.  The best times are when the big gawky human of my body and the small animal are one, as in the other morning, when I walked down the road from my house.  The puddles had frozen in the night, the air was cold against my face, but birdsong flamed here and there, deep and near, in the forest.  The sky was pale and flat as old tin, not yet bright.  And this all-out, desperate, obsessive, consuming love for the earth, the wild dead grass, the freezing air, the frenzied push-of-the-world birds arriving year after year, their rough songs, the broken branches, the moose-chewed alders and willows, the rabbit-stripped spruce trees, the scruffy rabbits themselves, mangy and tousled and fleet, half-brown, half-dishwater, the ground without its snow clothes, which behind our house resembles the matted, damp coat of a moose, like we are walking around on the enormous body of a moose that is sleeping (thank god), and I wondered, how could I ever let it go?  And this desperate voice inside me said, “I want to stay right here forever, this is my heaven.”   There are two forces at play in this moment: my intense fear of cancer coming back, of dying, and my equally intense desire to be alive. The flip side of fear, for me, is joy with a knife in it.  I cannot stay here, in my heaven.  I will love it anyway.  

And maybe that’s what The Snow Child touched in me.  The main characters, an old man and woman in the Alaskan wilderness in the 1920’s, have lost a baby.  They’ve grieved it in mutual isolation, in completely separate ways.  And then a child appears out of the snow, but she’s not theirs.  They have to learn another way to love.  They teach me how to love something with the fierceness of a bear, knowing it is not mine.  It is beyond me, apart from me, wild unto itself.  I can’t keep it, lure it, seduce it, tame it, even know it completely, or be known by it, without killing the essence, without dousing the flame.  I will love it anyway.