Mercy Now

12 April, 10:30 am

Beginning the descent into Boston.  I’ve slept fitfully, a nap here or there.  I’ve been reading that book, The Wild Braid, Stanley Kunitz’s reflections on gardening, nature, poetry, life.  The end of one poem, “The Testing Tree,” goes like this;

  

In a murderous time

            the heart breaks and breaks

                        and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go

            through dark and deeper dark

                        and not to turn.

I am looking for the trail.

            Where is my testing tree?

                        Give me back my stones!

I think of my own trail, around Cliff Pond, on Cape Cod, which I circumambulated so many times last summer and fall, a round to walk off the fog of chemicals at work in my body.  And my testing tree, the sprawling beech at the end of another trail in the woods behind my sister’s house.  Partway down a slope to the swamp and a cold spring, it spread multiple trunks toward the sky. I’d wrap my arms around that trunk, gray like an elephant leg, and Piper the dog would jump up and place his paws beside me, wondering what I was doing.  And my stones.  I carried a small cloth bag of them away from the Cape when I left in December.  At my goodbye circle gathering, each friend gave me a stone and a slip of paper with some words, a poem or a prayer, and I carried them to Hawaii and back up to Alaska and now that bag is on an altar in my writing room.  People ask why I’m going back to the Cape for so long, when my doctor visits are over in one week.  It’s for the tree, the trail, the circle, and the stones, the dog, the family, the cottage, the trails, the bay.  We just broke through the clouds and I can see the earth below.

12 April, 1:30 pm, Testing Tree

1n the waiting room of radiology with all of the other scared women, clad in our light blue cotton johnnies, women with two breasts, or one.  We wait while the radiologist checks images, wait to be released from purgatory.  At least there’s no blaring TV.  Just terrible, outdated “women’s” magazines, including one called Lucky.  Which is ironic, as that’s exactly the case here:  some of us will be lucky today, some of us unlucky.  Some will walk out of here back into the life they left outside the door, some will walk out of here into an altered life, like I did last year.  No one in Lucky magazine looks like any of us, though. 

Mrs. Malcomb, a 50-something short blonde finally gets called.  Earlier she told a group of us that she was scared waiting such a long time.“Mrs. Malcomb, you can get dressed and then go back and see the radiologist.”  She walks to the changing area.  I send a prayer chasing after her.  But then I realize: “You can get dressed” is code for “You’re out of here.”  Once you see the radiologist, you leave by a separate door.  Goodbye Mrs. Malcomb.  Good luck to you. 

Two women in the waiting room need ultrasounds.  One looks like she might be hip when not in her johnny, with layered dirty blonde hair and rectangular glasses.  But whatever she is outside this room has vanished.  The hospital Johnny is the great equalizer, stripping us of masks.  We’re all, from the waist up, primarily flesh and bone creatures.  And it feels like we’re imprisoned, awaiting sentencing or release.  The look of fear in the eyes of the woman across from me, one of those waiting for her ultrasound – her pale skin and wide eyes, the cell phone pressed to her ear, the way she glances around at everyone else,  meets my eye – locks me into sisterhood with her.  We sit here and reassure one another, sometimes with just a look.  One lean, dark-haired woman in a pixie haircut like mine realizes she’s hungry, didn’t anticipate the long wait, and Mara offers to go downstairs and buy her some food.  But her husband is outside the door, and she tells us her name – Nora, in case they call her – and leaves to get a power bar from him. 

Mara asks the older woman in street clothes sitting next to us, who speaks Portugese to her johnny- clad friend (who is exceedingly thin, bird-boned, like me, one-breasted), if they call everyone back for their results, not just “if there’s something bad.”  The woman reassures us, yes, they call everyone back.  It’s nothing to worry about, if they do an ultrasound, they just want a better look.  The other women who needs an ultrasound looks over at us, and I think she feels better, hearing that, whether it’s true or not.  Her face opens momentarily. 

We’re like people randomly thrown together on a small plane on a stormy flight, or in an earthquake shelter.  We’re not strangers.  Nora gets called to put on her clothes and go to the back office.  When she comes out of the dressing room, she strides, already gone from us, already part of another, brighter world.  The yoke of worry’s off her slim shoulders.  I can see her wings unfolding.

Then I’m called into the mammogram room.

I’m back after less than five minutes.  Two views of my left breast.  I found the rough, brisk treatment reassuring, with its air of the routine, the rote, the breast just a pound of flesh to mold and press into place, my shoulder something to push down away from my ear.  Right before I stepped up to the machine, I thought I might cry, but the no nonsense orders:  put your shoulder down, put your arm up here, doused the emotion.  I came back out and picked up my computer, began writing.  Erma and Rosa now are welcomed into the rooms with their humming machines and dim lights.

The Portuguese woman in street clothes has a hot flash, waves a magazine at it.  “Eight years,” she says, sighing.  Then she and her bird-thin friend get called back, return.  Now something isn’t good.  The one-breasted one comes out of the ultrasound room upset.  She gestures with her hands, violently, in front of her chest.  She keeps glancing down at her remaining breast.  She shakes her head no; she looks more angry than scared or sad.  I nudge Mara, who’s working on her computer next to me.  She understands Spanish, but not Portuguese.  I type:  Something bad?  The look she gives me says something not good.  There are no tears with those two.  Just intense conversation.  My heart drops several inches and leaves an empty spot at the center of my chest for that tiny woman with her arms crossed over her chest.  And then the two of them burst out into laughing that sounds more like hyenas crying.  And there’s something incredibly strong in that.  How the blows come out of nowhere, on some random day, and we just take them, reel for awhile, and go on. 

Another friend, at exactly the same time, is having a mammogram.  A ten year survivor of breast cancer, she found a lump in her other breast.  She too is at this moment waiting, in fear even more acute than mine.  She will need a biopsy.  I send a prayer like a smoke ring, but first, I take some deep breaths, to clean the anxiety out of the smoke, so it’s a clear ring drifting off to find her.  I imagine her looking up from paging through her O or Woman’s Day magazine and catching it on her forefinger.  I call up the smoke ring prayer “Mercy Now.”  There’s a song by that name, by Mary Gauthier. 

Yeah, we all could use a little mercy now.

I know we don’t deserve it

but we need it anyhow.

We hang in the balance,

dangle between hell and hallowed ground.

Every single one of us could use some mercy now.

Writing helps in this limbo between hell and hallowed ground.  The anxiety flows out of my fingertips; the faster I type, the faster it flows.  The waiting is terrible.  When I stop typing, I feel like an intertidal creature exposed by the tide on a hot sunny day, slowly drying out, the salt on my skin itching.  I hear the sound of water licking back up the beach, but it doesn’t rise fast enough.   I wait to hear the sound of my name called.

A woman comes out with a clipboard to check the names on our wristbands against the names on her sheet, and says she’s trying to memorize us.  But she comes out and does it again and again.

One of the women who had an ultrasound, the hip-looking one, gets called back, then comes out smiling, practically flouncing.  After she gets dressed, she returns to the waiting room to get her bag, glances around with that relieved face, as though the other face she wore, the scared, vulnerable one, has been peeled back like an onion’s brown, dry outer skin.  She stops and locks eyes with me, asks if she knows me.  She tells me I look familiar.  “I’m not sure,” I say, because I do feel know her, maybe a part of her that many of her loved ones have never seen.  But the look on her face now:  we’re strangers again. There she goes, back into the land of the lucky, with one more smiling backward glance, and it washes over us like a blessing.  You go, girl. 

3:18  It’s now past time for my appointment to see my oncologist.  Now the waiting room takes on the atmosphere of a torture chamber.  I was called back, not asked to get dressed.  In another room, the same efficient technician mashed my breast even more radically, trying to squeeze out the “thing” the radiologist wanted another look at.  “Don’t worry,” she says.  “It’s probably nothing.” On the picture she hangs on a lighted screen, the “thing”  or “no thing” is a diffuse white blob, like a smashed moth on a windshield. 

And after that, I was called back again.  And told that the radiologist wants to do an ultra-sound.  The technician tried to reassure me, “The radiologist is very thorough; it’s probably nothing.”  But I’m seriously scared now.  All the confident, healthy woman energy I carried into this place pools around my feet and runs away.  I shrink into my johnny, cross my arms across my chest.  This is not how I imagined the day going. I tell Mara, and then I start typing again because my heart’s racing.  All the poise and confidence I entered with is gone, like my new jeans and flowered shirt balled up in the changing room.  The woman with the clipboard who can’t for the life of her remember any of our names, comes out again to check our wrist bands and offers to call the oncologist’s office, to tell them what’s happening, that I’ll be late.  Again we wait.  Then I’m called, and Mara gets up with me and we walk to the back door. 

A short, dark-haired Latina woman named Helena, maybe 50 years old, leads me into the ultrasound room.  As soon as I see the examining table under the dim lighting, I start losing all semblance of control.  I turn to hook my jacket on the back of the door and I don’t let go of the corduroy and burst into tears.  What comes out of me is a spontaneous cry.  “I can’t face this again.  I don’t want to do this again.”  Mara puts her hands on my shoulders and just as before, I do turn and face the room, the machine, the letting go.  Miles away, my friend, the breast cancer survivor who found the lump, also does it again, faces what she believes she can’t.  She too lies down on an ultrasound table.  Mara and Helena calm me down, and then I lie face-up on the table and bare my breast.  I cover my face with one arm and cry as the jellied wand slides along.  Then I try to read Mara’s face (she watching the screen) but she’s at such an angle I can’t tell what she’s thinking.  “There it is,” Helena says in her calm voice, her slight accent.  “It’d definitely fibro-adenoma.  That’s a bit like cyst with thicker shell, and it’s never cancerous,” she says.  “See?”  I crane my neck back to look at the screen, at the small, dark lens shaped like an eye amid the whitish and grayish strands that are the fatty and glandular tissue of my healthy breast.  Hello eye, I think, Eye into which I do not want to look.  Eye like the black oval in the middle of my friend Jo’s otherwise colorful paintings depicting what she says is the black holy void, the creative generative center of life within us all.  The void from which we come and into which we go.  Hello eye.

Hours later, I am lying on my back in shivasana after a yoga class in North Boston.  We rushed here in a taxi, leaving the empty 9^th oncology floor (we were the last patients, and Dr. Schnipper, my beloved oncologist, spent an hour with us, past the closing of the office) in a rush. 

Having looked again into that black eye, that void, creator, destroyer, I sense, in my whole body and spirit, as I lie on the wooden floor, that this reprieve, this “all clear” is the very gift of life itself.  It’s been handed to me.  Like never before, I know I’ve been offered a rare treasure.  And it’s temporary.  How long I can keep it, I don’t know.  In my mind’s own eye, I reach out my hands and take the gift, and there’s something inside me that wants to say:  “I promise to take good care of this.  I promise not to forget what this is.”   

April 14, Westin Hotel, Boston, rain outside

Mara reads the morning prayer from The Book of Awakening.  It describes the yoga mudra known as “profound bow,” where by you kneel on the floor, and  “bringing your head to your chest while extending your arms up and out behind you, you can practice placing your head beneath your heart.  And from this humbling position, you can’t help but tire, and so, you must put your arms down.” 

I realize that this is what we all did in that waiting room, yesterday.  In those hospital johnnies, we bowed down to everything we couldn’t control.  We all bowed to that void.  Some of us got reprieves.  Some of us got to put on our street clothes.  Some of us walk further into the fearful unknowns.  I send out my smoke ring prayer to each one.  I get down on the hotel room floor and bend into a profound bow to the void. The words to the song plays again in my head:  Every single one of us can use a little mercy now.


And here is a link to the song:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6EWitBW_F4    

 

 

Citizen of the Garden of Earthly Delights

Craig and I are sitting in the living room.  He’s reading a magazine, Gris-Gris is attending to his paws, and I’m sitting in the rocker I’ve had for 15 years.  Beside me on a table draped with a cloth my grandmother embroidered, my tea cup sits on a carved wooden box my father bought at some yard sale.  I’m drinking licorice mint tea.  It’s 8 pm, and light pours in across my shoulders, pools on my lap.  It stays light past 10 pm now.  The spruce forests are full of varied thrushes.  Moose, escaping the still-deep snow up high, kneel on people’s lawns to graze on new grass shoots.  You can see the brown hairs coming in amid the white on the backs of snowshoe hares.  Every day, the snow patches shrink, the brown earth gains ground.  And the galloping light keeps us up later and later. 

 And tomorrow I leave.  I fly to Minneapolis, then on to Boston, on an all-night flight.  My sister will meet me at the airport, and off to the hospital we’ll go, that old familiar route along the Charles River, the circling of the hospital parking garage.  I’ve probably taken that drive, ridden that elevator to the 9^th floor, and talked to my oncologist once a night in my head for a week now. 

 Despite that, as the day gets closer, oddly, I get calmer.  Cancer occupies my thoughts less.  It’s a strange calm, like I’m standing on a rope bridge in the sun, over a rapids in a river.  I take a read of my body, and it tells me everything’s okay.  Just a half hour ago, I finished planting seeds for vegetable and flower starts.  When I return, there will be leggy stems and leaves leaning toward the sun.  I’m grateful for these tasks that keep me from looking down at the rushing water, that keep me focused on my hands smoothing soil over seeds.  But sometimes cancer comes at me unexpectedly, from the outside.

 I still encounter people I haven’t seen when I’m out and about, and they jar me out of the present I’m in and throw me back into Cancerland.  Yesterday it was a woman in Homer’s Jeans.  At first she looked right at my face and didn’t recognize me.  Then she did a double take.  She told me she’d been lighting candles for me.  And she asked me the inevitable:  “So is everything okay now?”  I’ve heard variations of that question innumerable times, all accompanied by a look of concern, fear and just a pinch of pity mixed together.  The question shrinks me into myself.  I understand it’s coming form a caring place.  But it’s loaded nonetheless, and difficult to answer.  It lies at the bottom of a tall stack of unasked and unanswerable questions like the thin sheet under several blankets on a Siberian bed.  Unasked questions like:  “Did they cure your cancer?”  It’s a heavy topic for two women holding armfuls of jeans and shirts, hands rattling hangers.

 There are two pieces of literature under my computer, and each one provides a valid answer to the question.  They lie on my lap, under my computer (the dog now asleep at my feet).  One is a book, The Wild Braid:  A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden by Stanley Kunitz.  The other is the March 25^th issue of Science magazine, devoted to the 40th anniversary of the declared “war on cancer.”  This juxtaposition pretty much sums it up, the rope bridge (poet preparing for another season in the garden) and the raging river (fear of/obsession with/identity tied to/ cancer).  It sums up two possible answers to the variation on the question some other acquaintance asked the other day:  “Are you in remission?”  Answer 1: see the current state of breast cancer pathology and treatment as summarized in current issue of Science.  Answer 2:  I am planting seeds into six-packs for my garden.  The magazine lays out the research strides and dead ends and disappointments.  It describes what’s been learned about cancer’s nasty, downright evil personality, which defies as much as it succumbs.  There are myriad cancers, but they all share commonalities, a wiley-ness, a craftiness, a meanness, a stupidity, a fanatical drive, the ability to mutate, to travel, to colonize, to morph, to evade, to resurrect, to transform, like some monster in the scariest horror flick ever made, the un-killable Talky Tina doll.  Perhaps I should carry multiple issues of the magazine, hand them out.  If you read the articles about cancer, it’s clear how impossible it is to answer, how useless to try.  “Chances are,” I might say.  Or “As far as anyone can tell.”  Or “I sure as hell hope so!”  How do I answer?  Maybe this is the way: Today I feel great, healthy, hungry, energetic; yesterday I ran 4 miles and shared a meal with a group of friends, hosted a house-guest, wrote, took a walk, conversed, ate dessert.  How about you?

That’s where the gardening book comes in.  On the cover is a photograph of Stanley Kunitz, a famous poet who lived to be 100.  He’s bent over examining something in between the rosemary bush and the ferns in his garden.  He’s clutching a bamboo cane in his right hand.  Perhaps he’s watching a garter snake (he wrote a poem about that).  He’s wearing a blue and black plaid chamois shirt and tan corduroys like Craig’s.  His left hand is brown, the skin shiny and tight, with prominent veins and long slender fingers, like a piano player’s.  He’s beautiful. 

 Before cancer, I went through my midlife crisis phase, a couple years where I stared too long in the mirror searching for wrinkles or new gray hairs.  I panicked right before hitting my mid-40’s at the probability that in a few years, I might look ridiculous in low-rise jeans.  I went through menopause early and suddenly.  It was a shock.  After my breast cancer diagnosis, riding my bike down Lower Road on the Cape to and from my sister’s garden, I frequently saw older people out walking, retired men with golden retrievers, or gray-haired, trim women in sun hats and walking sneakers, or couples, hand in hand.  I looked at them with longing.  Suddenly, growing old seemed a most desirable process.  Imagining myself in loose slacks instead of jeans, in short gray hair, in spectacles instead of glasses, was a kind of prayer.

Planting seeds is a similar kind of prayer.  This summer’s will be the fourth garden I’ve had some part in tending since last March.  I planted all our start seeds last spring in Homer.  I helped my sister grow a garden on Cape Cod.  Most days, even during the worst of chemo, I biked or walked or drove to that plot and pulled weeds or stood watching a murder of crows harassing a red-tailed hawk as I watered the tomato plants at the center of the garden’s spiral bed.  In Hawaii, I planted corn and tomatoes and cucumbers.  Early in the morning or late at night, before it got too hot, I watered, tinkered, weeded, harvested.  And now, full circle, I plant seeds the day before I fly back east.  That brings me back to Stanley Kunitz, who wrote a poem I love called “The Round.”

I’m going to let Stanley Kunitz have the last word tonight.  It’s finally dark, and the nearly half moon is now the source of the light landing on my shoulder (It’s 10:10 pm).  As I live each day, the poetry/garden answer to the “How are you doing now” question is more and more appealing and natural.  (But I still need to figure out how to deal next time it happens in the grocery store, the library, a concert, in a restaurant.  I would like to be the one who gets to choose whether cancer – damned Agatha – gets invited into the conversation or not.  I need a script, a good one-liner.  “My cancer’s gone at the moment.  How about your bunions?”)

Here is “The Round” by Stanley Kunitz

Light splashed this morning

on the shell-pink anemones

swaying on their tall stems;

down blue-spiked veronica

light flowed in rivulets

over the humps of the honeybees;

this morning I saw light kiss

the silk of the roses

in their second flowering,

my late bloomers

flushed with their brandy.

A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the door of my house,

so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,

so I am sitting in semi-dark

hunched over my desk

with nothing for a view

to tempt me

but a bloated compost heap,

steamy old stinkpile,

under my window;

and I pick my notebook up

and I start to read aloud

the still-wet words I scribbled

on the blotted page:

“Light splashed . . .”

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow

when a new life begins for me,

as it does each day,

as it does each day.              

Planting seeds, running back and forth to the greenhouse, walking on a dirt road with a friend, nothing else exists.  Take it down to a single instant, a  single moment, a single breath, and life cancels out death, a bird song  trumps cancer.  Yes it’s true I’m sometimes a scared woman standing on a rope bridge looking down at wild, rushing water, a scared woman lying in bed at night trying to breathe past cancerous imaginings.  But right now, I’m a writer sitting in a rocker while the dishwasher churns and the woodstove ticks as it cools.  And an hour ago, I was a gardener planting seeds.  And yesterday? 

Q:  Is everything okay now?  

A:  Light splashed this morning on the mountains across the bay, on the mud on the road, on the hare gnawing a branch in my friend's yard, on the waffles on my plate, on the tea in my cup, and these evening, it spilled into my lap. I can scarcely wait till tomorrow.

On Being Porous

I sat to write late this afternoon, thinking I’d recount what happened a year ago today, April 8.  I started to type out the story, how in the early morning, I stood in the shower in my sister’s house.  It was Thursday; she was going to work.  Unexpectedly she knocked on the shower door and asked if she could open it.  “Sure,” I said.  When she did, I saw that she was crying.  “What’s wrong?”

“I did something.  I’m afraid you’ll be upset.  I knew that today they’d probably call about the biopsy, and I’m working, and I didn’t want you to be alone, so I called In-med and asked them not to call you today, to wait until tomorrow, when I’ll be home.  But I realized that it was wrong.  So now you know.  So you can decide.  If you want to know today, you can call them.”

I wasn’t upset.  I knew she’d done me a favor.  I’d been waiting all week for that call, and the rush of adrenaline every time my cell phone rang was wearing me out.  The night before, I’d called the pathology lab, and a young-sounding guy told me he was at that moment working on my biopsy.  He’d fax the results to the pathologist that night.  He was so matter-of-fact about it, as though we were talking about a car part.  I pictured him in a white coat, lank brown hair in his eyes, leaning over a microscope, I-pod headphones draped around his neck, the phone pressed to his ear, a pizza delivery on the way.  Just another night on the job.

I sat in my writing room, at my little antique desk and started to write about the rest of the morning, my calling In-Med (the pathologist was busy ruining someone else’s day), then waiting for a return call. 

And I realized I didn’t want to do write about it.  The journal from last spring, open on my desk.  I closed it.  I put it back on the shelf with all the others. 

All day today I’ve carried with me the awareness of the anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis.  All this last week, I’ve counted down the days leading up to today, living suspended between present and past.  But now that it’s here, I turn my back on last year.  I look out the window at broken clouds, a few pale blue patches, bare trees  Instead of reading my journal, I open The Way It Is, by William Stafford, and I read his poem  “You Reading This, Be Ready.”

My friend Wendy showed this poem to me earlier today.  I drove up to her house in the spruce forest after yoga.  We sat in front of the fire in her woodstove, drank tea, ate fruit, fig bars and Vietnamese ginger cookies and talked about poetry.  She told me that a woman I knew years ago, a fellow poet, her close friend, had committed suicide.  She was “porous,” Wendy said, and I thought it an accurate description.

Allowing yourself to be porous is risky in this world, where the body betrays you, and people sometimes do, and accidents happen, and lovers leave, and the furnace breaks, and tsunamis hit, and politicians fail, and a brother driving a motorcycle five miles an hour falls and breaks his neck, and a mother visits her child in prison and never recovers from the sight of him in handcuffs and a yellow jump suit.  Yellow knocks her to her knees.  How do you stay porous to all of this, porous and hopeful and writing poetry? 

A breast cancer diagnosis didn’t knock me to my knees last year.  It washed over me, the pathologist’s words on the phone.  Then I went upstairs, lay down, and pulled a blanket over my head.  The poet I quote below, William Stafford, wrote another one that ends with the line "The darkness around us is deep."  And that hour, it was deep.  But then that tireless tug of life, that mindless will, rousted me from bed.  I think of it like the old dog that wants his walk no matter that his owner’s father just died.  The kids want their supper.  The plants their water.  I got up, washed my face, and drove to pick Mara and Jon’s kids up from school.  Then I sat with my mother while she ate dinner.  The blessed tedium of an ordinary day, mundane errands, tasks, hunger, thirst.  None of it stopped.  I let the old dog drag me along until my feet moved of their own accord.  And then other things found me:  poems, a pond, birds, music.

At the close of this day I pray to remain porous to the pain and beauty, to the acute crisis of every moment of being alive.  And for the strength to hold equally the sorrow and joy.

Here’s that poem by William Stafford, and my own attempts at answers to its questions:

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shiny floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

(I want to remember the snowshoe hare Wendy and I watched from her writing cabin window, with a white body and a strip of brown down its back.  I want to remember the copy of our dead friend’s poem, the one Wendy handed to me as we sat by the fire.  How I read the poem and we sat in silence, how the silence said everything necessary.  How the silence was the answering poem.)

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect you carry

wherever you go right now?  Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

(Yes, I want to write my way always to some better thoughts, not satisfied with the ones I have right now, in this dark room, Craig asleep beside me.  I want meaning, but I know life is sometimes just that tired old dog who can’t tell me why someone porous and full of poetry ended her life, and why I fight for mine).

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day.  This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

(All that I want from this day, that I will keep for life:  the voices of my step-daughter and her fiancé coming through the door downstairs, carrying a blueberry crisp, and before that, Craig playing his guitar, and before that, my annoyance at Craig calling up to me  “Where is the olive oil?  Where is the soy sauce?  Where is the salad dressing?  And my gritted teeth and my muttered “God damn it,” and my love for all of it).

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

(No one can give me anything greater than now.  Soup made of halibut and cauliflower from our freezer, and carrots from the bucket of sawdust on the porch. And blueberry crisp with strawberry ice cream.  And talking about Eve and Eivin’s wedding. And my dead friend’s poem on the refrigerator.  And the whale-shaped stone another friend brought me the day after my surgery which now sits on my desk).

Perhaps it’s right to live two days in parallel, one in sickness and one in health.  Life on earth is nothing but paradox.  The porous woman who took her own life wrote a poem I hang on my fridge to teach me about hope, and to teach me about pain, about everything I'll never understand. What can anyone give that’s greater than that?  It’s as though she’s here in this room right now, starting again, turning around to begin.   I keep her poem for life.  

 

Picnic Under the Cherry Blossoms

5-6 April

Yesterday morning, winter again.  The night before, three or four inches of fresh snow sleeved every branch, mounded up on the porch railings.  I spotted a hare gnawing on the crab apple.  White, just a few brown specks.  It knows:  four more inches of snow expected tonight.  In the newly snow-swaled back garden and yard:  no hoof or paw or foot print, nothing flocked the white field but clumps of fallen snow.  I watched it happen:  snow clods descended in the forest like dropped mitts, leaving pocks to mark their landing:  here I am and here I went.  No wind.  The snow dropped out of the trees of its own accord.  It was pretty up there, like bridal lace.  But even snow has to let go.

And I’m letting go, making a shift.  It’s no accident I’m updating the blog every other day now.  Something inside me stirs, like thumbs of crocus in my rock garden, under all those layers of dead leaf-litter.  Stirs and takes flight like that flock of Lapland longspurs, spring migrants, that my friend Lisa and I saw on our walk on the Homer Spit this morning.  They foraged on the beach logs, black gravel and brown grass beside the mudflats, and scattered whenever we came up beside them.  The wind reddened our faces.  We wore winter coats and hats and scarves, but still something stirred, despite the cold, and despite my impending trip to Boston for a six-month follow-up mammogram, blood work, and visit with my oncologist and breast surgeon.  Less than a week away.

I think it’s hope.  You know, Emily Dickinson’s “thing with feathers.”  And the thing with petals and buds.  It’s scary, but at the same time, exhilarating, like it must have been for that moth from my last blog, who burst out of a bag to find itself in an utterly new landscape.  It survived its dislocation from Hawaii, closed up in a plastic bag with a bunch of dried fruit, stuffed into a duffel, man-handled into the belly of a jet, unpacked.  (By the way, that moth followed me all evening, that first night.  It landed on my arm when I was reading in bed.  Later, brushing my teeth, it landed on the mirror.  Sleek, silvery-winged, lean).  It’s scary to burst.  A little sign on my wall says “The shell must break before the bird can fly.”

This afternoon, Craig and I walked over to the Bunnell Street Gallery to see the newest show, a paired exhibit of painter Lisa Shih and sculptor Cynthia Morelli called “Passages.”  In her statement Shih wrote:  “Thankfully, many of the detours turned out to be the real substance of my life.”  Something like that view of the detour is perhaps one reason for the stirring, the hope inside me.  I recently got to questioning the way the cancer experience was becoming the center of my life.  Was I stuck? 

 

Now I sense what at first seemed to be a detour is the road I’m on.  And it’s not Cancerland, it’s not Cancer Road.  Cancer was simply a crossroads.  Did you ever take one of those detours that led you through so many side-streets and turns, you wondered if you’d ever make it back to where you were meant to go?  And it turned you completely around?  I remember finding my way out of such a labyrinth in Boston once, shunted off a main drag into a maze of one-way streets lined with trees and brownstones.  Of course, the detour signs dumped me eventually back onto the thoroughfare, and that’s where the analogy falls apart.  This detour in my life, that stirring inside tells me, is the real substance of my life.  It’s not a static place, not a stopping point, but migration.  At the end of her artist’s statement Shih wrote:  “Yesterday into today, the cusp of tomorrow.”  Like a bulb, like a flock stopping by Kachemak Bay on its way north, like coastal Alaska in between winter and spring, I’m on the cusp.  The detour is the cusp.

Cythia Morelli’s clay sculptures were organic in form, color, and texture, like things unearthed, accented with dark rocks or beach grass.  They reminded me of the strange rounded clay forms that emerge from the eroding bluffs west of Homer to spill onto the beach.  Some resembled cast off shells of invertebrates, the tough kind that live on rocky shorelines: inside-out chitons or barnacles.  On three pedestals, many dozen tiny hand-built clay vessels – egg-sized, like candle bowls that once were set to drift, empty now – were scattered like the memory of a flock of birds.  This piece was titled “Crossing the River of Death – A Prayer for Japan.”  There were little strips of paper beside it the vessels, and a pen, for viewers to write their prayers.  Above it hung a ceramic “pocket,” the repository for those prayers. 

 

As I wrote, I remembered the NPR radio piece I heard yesterday and how it had disturbed me.  In Japanese parks, signs have been posted by the government, scolding those who’d picnic under the flowering cherry trees, as is customary at this time.  “You should mourn the dead,” the signs admonished.  But what could be more real and honoring than to picnic under those blossoms, petals falling on your shoulders, ants crawling on your bread, death in life and life in death intermingled, feasting at the same table.  Ironically, cherry blossoms – extremely beautiful, quickly dying – symbolize transience, mono no aware, the Japanese concept of sensitivity to impermanence.  Here are just a couple poems of Basho, reflecting that dual nature of the cherry blossom:

Very brief:

Gleam of blossoms in the treetops

On a moonlit night.

And this:

Temple bells die out.

The fragrant blossoms remain.

A perfect evening!

And yet another:

The leafless cherry,

Old as a toothless woman,

Blooms in flowers,

Mindful of its youth.

Maybe that stirring inside me is part of my own internal picnic under the flowering cherries, as I live in a state of blossoming hope and at the same time anxiety over my upcoming medical visits, my anticipation of the elevator ride to oncology floor.  After I get off the elevator at the landing next to the “cancer shop,” I’ll turn right and walk down the sunlit corridor lined with large black-and-white photographs of people who’ve walked that same road before.  In the photos, they are not cancer patients.  They are not mourners.  They are whole human beings, picnickers, as it were.  They were photographed surrounded by family, often outdoors, or in their homes, in the midst of life.  But in their eyes you see something like the reflection of the blossoming cherry trees.  A knowing.  A stirring.  A hope.  A fear.

Before entering the waiting room, I’ll stop as always to look inside a plexi-glass box on top of a pedestal in the corner near a window.  Inside the box is a nest woven by birds from a woman’s hair.  A hand-calligraphied note describes how it fell from her head in the shower, a couple weeks into chemo, how she wept.  Her husband collected the hair from the shower drain, scattered it in the garden, and later they found the nest.  And now it’s there for all of us, a weaving together of hope and loss, of life and death.  That nest, and those faces in the photographs, the life in them, despite cancer, the stirring and worry and hope in their eyes, will give me the courage I need to push open that glass door, to take my place among those waiting with such hope and sadness and fear in their eyes.  The fear is there because everyone in that room, above all, loves life, as broken as it is, so very much.              

Birth of a Moth

3-4 April

Yesterday was a stormy one in Homer, the sky a gritty, dingy gray, the northeast wind bustling through the birch forest.  In the boxing match between winter and spring, it was a draw, both raining and snowing, the ground half-white, half-brown, the branches bare brooms sweeping the sky in a distracted way.  Today, I walked outside and smelled spring for the first time, and it’s been sprinkling off and on all day.  I haven’t seen a snowshoe hare lately.  Their coats are the best indicator of the season, changing from white to brown in mimicry of the ground.   

One year ago today spring was unequivocal.  I sat in the grass on the commons of Worchester College, in Massachusetts.  I’d driven there with my sister and family the night before, for my nephew Sam’s “Destination Imagination” competition.  The campus was abloom with flowering trees and parents and kids.  Plastic tape marked the “off limits” areas of the campus grounds, which were the places I most wanted to be, on some shaded slope, under a tree, hiding out with my journal.  Instead I sat on a bench at the edge of a green commons, amid the hubbub of children’s games on the grassy lawn, strolling parents, picnics, balls flying by my head or rolling past my feet.  It was sunny, hot, an early spring, what might have passed for a summer day in Alaska.  There was plenty of distraction from the week looming ahead of me, with its biopsy, mammogram, ultrasound, and MRI, but like this month’s winter-spring sparring, the present and the future duked it out in my head.  In my journal I wrote:

I’m finally putting a pen to this page.  Something inside me – maybe fear—resists making my thoughts or feelings visible, as ink on a page.  I’ve been the receiver of pure emotion.  Thought doesn’t help.  I don’t want to make my fear concrete.  It’s like stepping out of an old skin and not quite understanding the new one.  Maybe underneath everything there’s a kind of faith.  I’ve stepped out of the door of my ordinary live, the life in which I try on different outfits and never find the right one, the life in which I worry about being 46, worry about any number of trivial things.  Next week I’ll cry, one way or the other.  There’s a kind of surrender.  All my efforts at control are useless.  There’s just this unknown:  what my life is supposed to be, what life is, even desire.  All that anxiety about wanting this or that particular thing, needing to have things my way:  its gone.

Reading that, it strikes me that I’m still sitting on that bench.  Her questions are my questions today, one year later.  Like her, I’m still stepping out of an old skin, still uncertain as to how the new one will fit, feel, or look.  And it’s challenging to live this way, staying present with today, but also acutely aware of the past, the last year running like another river under my life.  Recently, Craig and I made a pact to only talk about cancer at set times; otherwise, it colors everything.  And maybe that’s the issue right there:  it changes everything.  But it shouldn’t color everything.  I shouldn’t see and hear and experience each moment through its lens.  I want to see the disappearing snow, the emerging brown ground, the first green shoots pushing dirt up from my start trays; I want to hear every buzzing varied thrush (the first spring bird in coastal Alaska), hear the winter wren that’s taken up residence by the old chicken coop; I want to eat soup with Craig and Two Sisters bakery and listen to him talk, every word; I want to smell snow or softening ground, as they are, right here, right now, unfiltered through the experience of cancer.  But my skin is new, so everything is sharper, more distinct, clarified. 

It’s both literal and metaphoric, this shedding of skin.  As I heal from the allergic reaction of the weekend, layers of skin peel off my face.  Just as they did during chemo.  The Sugpiaq Native people of Cook Inlet, the body of water outside Homer, have old stories about humans zipping off their skins and emerging as killer whales.  Killer whales swim into coves, zip off their animal skins and walk barefoot up the beach.  In those days, the Sugpiaq say, humans and animals spoke the same language.  When I listen with my new ears, perhaps I can hear some whisper of that language, which speaks in sound, in color, in the sensation of cold and damp on my face. 

During chemotherapy, as I described in an earlier blog, I invented visualizations involving killer whales.  They transfused me with their red and white blood cells.  I also called upon the spirits of certain humans.

I look to my left.  I’m finally sitting and writing in my little office upstairs, and not at the kitchen table.  On my bookshelf, beside my desk, is a photograph of my friend Celia Hunter, who died in 2001, at the age of 82.  Digging through a box the other day, I also found the program from her memorial service.  In that photo she wears a necklace with a caribou pendant.  When I’m afraid of airplanes, I close my eyes and call upon Celia (she was a pilot), and imagine her flying under the jetliner or prop plane I’m on, her arms outstretched like wings.  She flies the plane carrying it on her back.  During chemotherapy, or during acupuncture sessions, hers was the face I visualized.  She stood always at my feet, her hands massaging them, her blue eyes locked with mine as the IV needle entered the vein on my hand and the chemical began to flow, or as the thin needles did their work.  Her eyes were a mixture of kindly and intense, those see-right-through-you-but-love-you eyes, blue as a lake at break-up, framed in her round face by thick, dark brows and two braids the color of white birch bark.  Her eyes could be ironic, scornful, concerned, delighted, interested, but there was always a glint in then, a play of light, the mark an imp, a mischief-maker, a wit.  She’s my grandmother in that ancient sense, and each visit to her house – the log home she shared with her friend Ginny Wood, a nest-in-the-woods, smelling of freshly baked bread, wood smoke, old books, mildew, and root cellar – was an encounter with “the arch-druid.”  But don't get me wrong.  She was no "sage," above the fray, despite her 82 years and her wisdom.  I knew her.  She struggled.  She worked constantly to grow and evolve.  She shed layer upon layer of skin until at last she shed the very last one, and soul-naked, she put on her coat and her boots and she lay down on the small rug on her bedroom floor, placed her prayer-hand under her cheek, and she died.

On this first morning of spring (it sure smells that way outside my door), in this fragile new skin, from this new face, I send my prayer:

Celia, fly me to the threshold of a new year, a new life.

************

That was to be the end of my post.  But it's not.  This may seem very strange, unreal even (remember the Church of Synchronous Happenstance!), but after writing that line, I paused to open a bag of dried starfruit Craig brought back from Hawaii, and a small brown moth burst out of the bag and fluttered up to the window.  Go figure.  Celia, thanks.

The Burning Remembering

31 March

One year ago today.  It was late, and she was tired.  She’d picked me up earlier that day in Boston at the airport.  She’d just finished typing up her medical charts.  I’d been sitting beside her watching the news, and now it was past midnight, but I asked her if she’d feel a lump I’d discovered in my breast. 

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” she asked. 

“I didn’t think it was anything.  And I just thought I’d wait until I was here, so you could check.” 

“Okay,” she said.  “I’m sure it’s nothing.  You’re 46.  You’re menopausal.  You have lumpy breasts!  But I’ll take a look.” 

I unhooked my bra, lifted my shirt, lay down on the couch, and she “took a look” by copping a feel, pressing her fingers into my flesh, spiraling around and around my breast, working inward, and then she stopped. 

“Is this what you mean?” she asked.  She moved her fingers along a thickening. 

“I think so,” I said.  “Don’t press so hard, it kind of aches.  What do you think?” 

I felt a little throbbing then, like a heart beat beneath my solar plexus, like some tiny mouse trying to scratch its way out, the first hint of fear. 

“Well, it’s weird.  It’s not what I thought it was going to be.  It kind of feels like a ledge.” 

If it was a ledge, then we were both falling from it, but we didn’t know yet.  Or at least I didn’t.  It turns out my ledge had unsettled her, and as I pulled my shirt back down, she fired off an e-mail to her boss, Cormac, the head of her medical practice. 

“I think you should see a breast specialist,” she said, typing.  “I’m going to ask Cormac if he knows anyone.  It’s probably a fibro-adenoma.  It’s not uncommon.  It’s probably nothing.”

But of course it was something, though it took us days to know what.  That night, as I climbed two flights of stairs to sleep in the attic room, I was both climbing and falling at the same time.  I don’t remember being aware of the sensation.  I’d put myself in my sister’s hands.  .I fell asleep to damp spring air and the sound of peepers. 

I was not sitting here, a year ago, watching another phenomenon in which opposites occur simultaneously:  my mountain, both brightly lit and draped in clouds.  I wasn’t watching the rain, the first rain of spring, falling at the same time as the sun brightens the ice-white water to the south.  I wasn’t glancing to my left to see an unfinished Scrabble game left mid-play.  Did I dream that night, falling that way?  The ledge that had been my life receding, the unknown ground below rushing to meet me.

It’s been days since I’ve written in this blog.  Perhaps it’s true my body remembers as well as my brain.   For three days, what began as a “radiation recall” on my chest has moved up to my face.  The recall was triggered by contact with a plant.  A few days ago, one warm afternoon, I decided to hang laundry out on our line, which extends from our front deck to a tree, by way of a pulley system.  There on the corner of the deck, draped over the railing, as it always is, dead and dry, was the remains of the hops vine, a perennial that grows up each summer to cover part of the southeast wall of our house, then dies back each fall.  At some point each year, I clear the old growth away.  The brown, crumbling leaves were making a mess on the wet laundry, so before hanging the clothes, I ripped at the plant, pushed, pulled, shoved, yanked, then swept the detritus off the deck.  That night, a little red patch on my arm, like cat scratches.  Funny, I thought, we don’t have cats.  The next morning, the bright red alarm of the same rash I got from radiation burning up my chest to my neck.  That’s when I put the dates together.  My body’s remembering, I told myself.  But as the reaction moved beyond recall, to a full-blown systemic allergy, I realized it was two things at once, the way everything since cancer seems to be:  it was biology and it was metaphor.  It was memory and physiology.  It was something to get through and something to work through.  It was climbing and falling.

April 1

I have no record of this day last year except one memory.  It exemplifies how my sister and I, and her family, and far away in Alaska, Craig, coped with the days of waiting:  by living, and often, by laughing.  My nephews and niece and I started April 1 by sneaking into Mara and Jon’s bedroom and switching the contents of their underwear drawers. 

Cormac e-mailed back with the name of a breast surgeon on the Cape, and we made an appointment for April 2, a Friday.  I had 24 hours to live a day as if breast cancer was nowhere on the horizon.  Mara’s high-energy kids helped with that.  After school, the boys and I spied on the neighbors, jotted “clues” in a notebook.  The story got dark pretty fast.  We found a depression in the ground:  a mass grave.  We found an old ax in a woodpile.  Cigarette butts:  a sure sign of evil-doers.  In my mind, I considered my own set of clues:  the ache in my breast that had started in December, that I’d attributed to vigorous yoga; the lump I’d felt one January morning; the swelling on my breast a month later.  The denial, denial, denial.

An allergic reaction is acute, like fear.  Like fear, it comes in waves; a couple times a day something triggers a new histamine release, and the chemical floods the body.  I place ice-cold clothes on my red face to stop the itching and pain, but there’s nothing to stop the intense adrenaline rush that rises, and then the tears.  I call my sister, and she reminds me that these are normal physiological reactions.  There are reasons.  My encounter with the hop vine was just bad luck.  Craig tries to joke, and I shoot arrows in his direction from my puffed-up eyes.  It’s okay if I call myself “moon pie face,” but not okay if he says I look like an Irish drunk with my red hair and fat face.  I also look like someone who’s been crying for days.  And the medical explanations do help, but at the same time I believe my body is talking.  It’s telling its own story, in its own language, and there’s no translation.  It’s its own narrator.  This story I’m recounting isn’t my body’s story.  It’s some kind of approximation.  Luck, good or bad, is mine.  My body lives in a realm beyond luck.  It has its own strange story to tell, and I have mine.

April 2

Spring and winter are wrestling.  The last two days it’s snowed, but it doesn’t stick to anything, and old snow continues to erode.  I opened a computer file this morning to read my grad student’s final thesis manuscript, which was due yesterday.  I hadn’t seen the whole memoir in awhile, and was surprised to find this epigraph at the manuscript’s beginning:

“The remembering burns.

Send word to the jasmine

to bring its tiny whiteness.”

–Federico Garcia Lorca

There’s no jasmine here, but the larger whiteness of an orchid blooming in the kitchen.  Cream-colored butterfly blooms with maroon splotches.  It’s a cooling antidote to the remembering, like the wet washcloth stiff from the freezer I place against my burning face.  The remembering:  a year ago today, I lay on an examining table while a short, brown-haired 30-something breast surgeon kneaded my right breast for far too long.  I think she expected it to be just another routine visit, reassuring a nervous 40-something patient with a lumpy breast.  Mara stood near the door watching Dr. Sachs’ face.  She said later that she saw it change, from brisk and efficient and confident to surprised then dismayed.  I just wanted her to stop the massaging.  To me, her face got younger by the minute.  By the time I sat up, I wanted to see her high school diploma.

“I don’t like the way this feels,” she said.  Mara asked if she had an ultra-sound machine, to rule out a cyst or fibro-adenoma.  She told us to come back in an hour.  When Dr. Sachs left the room, Mara and I wrapped ourselves tight around each other.

“We’re going to get through this.  It still could be a cyst,” she said.  I wiped my face and we walked out through the waiting room and into the sun.  The world of normal.  Where people rushed around from errand to errand, obeying traffic lights.  Where the atmosphere was very bright.  We drove to the Toyota dealership, so Mara could get something checked on her car.   While she talked to the mechanic, I sat in the “waiting area,” which was furnished with recliners, like business class on a jumbo-jet, all facing a large flat-screen TV, broadcasting what seemed to me an inordinate number of ads related to cancer.  I flipped through a People magazine.  The people on the pages might as well have been Martians.  The people in the chairs around me, too, looked foreign, citizens of the land of normal.  I was a stranger, suddenly yanked out of their world and thrown off a train in another country, where the language was ugly:  fibro-adenoma, benign cyst, vascular ultra-sound, surgeon, lump.  It was the limbo between the lands of normal and cancer.

An hour later, I was again lying on my back.  This time, the terrible fluorescent light of the examining room was replaced by dimness, the green glow of a screen on which the inside of my breast was projected, white, gray and block splotches, unreadable to me as Braille.  Mara stood beside me staring at that screen.  She knew the language.  The technician stared at the screen too, and slid a wand across the jelly-coated surface of my breast.  I felt strangely relaxed in that room, as though it was all happening underwater, or in a dream.  Dr. Sachs came in to push the wand around some more, and that’s when they first used the word “mass.”  It measured about 1.5 cm, she said, and I watched my sister’s face morph from emotion to emotion:  worry to relief to happiness.  “Eva,” she said, tightening her grip on my hand.   “Even if it is cancer, it’s small.  It’s totally treatable.  It’s a save.”  Dr. Sachs agreed.

“The next step’s a diagnostic ultra-sound, mammogram and a biopsy,” she said.

I read their faces and heard their words but I didn’t know exactly what they were saying or feeling.  Someone had turned on the lights in the room, but I was still underwater, like a killer whale in a tank.  Mara, Dr. Sachs, the technician, seemed to be speaking to me from behind thick glass.  When everyone left, I leaned into Mara’s arms.  She stood very straight.  I felt her backbone.  I felt every muscle, her lean arms tight around me.  She was solid, and I was not.  In that watery world, I’d lost all my bones.  “It’s going to be all right,” she kept repeating, until my bones reformed and I could walk out of that place.

“The remembering burns.”

And I’m choosing to believe that it cleanses and purifies.  When this allergy flares, I feel like my face is on fire.  Even the tears seem to burn my skin.  Yesterday, my friend Jo put her cool hands on each side of my burning face.  Today, my sister talked me through my panic, as she did so many times in the last year.   But no one, in the end, can stop my fall.  No one can reconcile the climbing and falling that’s me coming back to life.  No one can tell me the story that makes sense of it all, a story of burning and falling and climbing and swimming, a story of losing my bones and finding them again.  In the end, no one can write this story but me.  This story can’t be found in my medical chart.  This story is the only thing that matters.  This story is the only thing that’s real.