To Wield My Pen, and My Shovel

If healing is attempting to achieve (or reestablish) balance, then a writer's life is an ideal proving ground.  Because a fanatical writer would adopt a hunched posture, a bleary set of eyes, atrophied leg muscles, a deathly pallor, diminished social skills, a flat derriere, never leaving her desk.  The work of writing happens sitting down.  But the raw material of writing comes from bodily contact with the world.  I once read a wonderful biography of Georgia O'Keefe by Roxanne Robinson.  A journal entry or letter excerpt of O'Keefe's when she was young and just committing herself to her art impacted me greatly.  She wrote that at a certain point, she asked herself, with every choice she made (whether to go to a party or outing or engage in an activity) whether it would enhance or detract from her art.  If it detracted, she'd refuse it.  As a grad student, I tried that on for awhile.  But I realized quickly that a whole human being is more than an artist (or scientist, or farm laborer, or activist, or whatever our passion or vocation).  I still find the idea of it romantic.  In the abstract, it would be nice to be one of those single-minded artists believing so much in the importance of their work (and with a wife to deflect all input from the world so the great works can get written), that they live by O'Keefe's principles.  (We should build monuments to those (mostly) women, without whom, so much literature and artwork would never have been born).  But since breast cancer, my writing, healing and spiritual impulses have woven themselves more tightly together; I can't separate them.  Hence the prayer poems I've been writing, and hence this blog, and meditation, and walking, and observing the world, all of it feeding into the words that appear on a page or in a blog post.    

My love, Craig, accuses me of being an extremist and I admit he's right.  My current anti-cancer diet is evidence: no meat, no dairy, no sugar, no alcohol, no wheat.  But the holidays, and a social life in general, challenges such rigidities.  So when Don and Douglas invite us to dinner and make meatloaf, I eat it.  And when the Winters invite us to a traditional Swedish Christmas Eve dinner, I load my plate with sauerkraut, homemade potato and meat sausages, Swedish meatballs, and after, chocolate cake.  I share a macadamia nut martini with Craig, or a cosmo with my friend Ralph, who has Hep-C and also shouldn't drink.  I don't tell friends who invite me for dinner of my private cancer phobias around food.  My oncologist, Dr. S., once looked at me with dismay, I dare say sorrow, and asked, "So that means you don't treat yourself to an ice cream cone?"  I'm lucky, because I love healthy food, vegetables, fruit, salmon, rice, tofu, miso, brick-like bread, gritty crackers.  But I'm less obsessed about reading every study that suggests this or that food is good or bad in terms of cancer recurrence.  So this morning's poem reflects the balancing act, the life of the mind at play with the life of the body.  As I write these words, my love clears the ground for a flower garden outside my window with that big orange tractor that appears in the poem.  I have the opposite of Hemingway's dutiful wife: my man calls me to come outside and plant beets.  For his distracting and healing influence, I am grateful. (I am also grateful to poet Mary Ruefle's essay "Madness Rack and Honey" which also provided inspiration for this poem).

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12.27.2012 Prayer

Distracted by laundry on the line, the physics of wind, which defines

whether a t-shirt wraps itself into a cocoon or flaps like an injured

bird or dangles. By him watering the eggplants. Distracted by his orange

tractor parked outside my window. By remembrance of snows past.

By a hand of bananas, half-green on the lanai. Distracted by the door

opening and him asking (not caring) where to plant fennel, where

to move the hotly inedible pepper tree. This is a prayer

for the war(p) between

a world lived on the page, unseen, in the mind, and another, of trade wind,

o-bar, pick-ax, bleach. And memory, singing in the choir loft, Our Lady

of Mr. Carmel, Lucille at the organ, the opening mouths and chords to Let

there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me constructing a poem of leaves

and debris, leaving the draft to cool, to load the dehydrator with bananas

and holes in the ground with cassava and pigeon pea. To wield my shovel.

 

A Long Walk Through Rugged Terrain

For Christmas, my love made a booklet of the last year’s blog posts, and presented it to me.  The last entry in the booklet showed me in a hoarfrost meadow in Alaska, marking the two-year anniversary of my final radiation treatment.  So now I’m on the other side of those two years, and the other side of my winter transition to Hawaii, out of the hoarfrost and into the salt spray of a wild, windy, rocky coast.  And we are on the other side of the Mayan calendar’s end, the Solstice, winter holidays, preparing for the new year.  What does it mean?  A page in my calendar is titled “unexpected blessings,” and another speaks of “changes we may anticipate and those which may take us by surprise.”   

December this year was a month of shattering and sorrow on this earth, of storms and violence and loss.  Right now blizzards are bearing down on humans and animals and birds in the Midwest, pushing eastward.  Trees are crashing down.  Some people’s time on earth, ends abruptly, unexpectedly.  It’s been a month, too, of prayers and the painful, brutal first steps toward healing which always come, the days after the funeral, which don’t feel anything like relief.  Looking back at the last two years, I see that healing is like that.  It sounds nice, soft on the tongue, but in reality it’s lonely and harsh.  A healed tree displays its old wound.  It’s gnarled.  We gnarl our way out of grief, too.  

I talked to my cousin today.  In the last few years, she’s lost her only sibling, a brother, of a sudden heart attack, and her mother, of pancreatic cancer; she died in October. My cousin, a social worker, has taken care of others her whole adult life.  She never had kids, but helped raise her brother’s kids, who lived in the same house as she and her mother. She says she feels the love of her extended family.  But there is a process only she can go through and know, the process of coming to terms with being, as an old gospel song says, an “orphan girl” on this earth. There is no comfort anyone can offer for that.  The healing path is private, a long walk through rugged terrain, picking up along the way truths, like stones, which fill your backpack.  You emerge sun-and-wind-burnt, sinewy, weathered, stronger surely for all you’ve carried, maybe more self-contained.

Since December, I’ve begun a new daily writing practice, a series of prayer-poems.  In Alaska, in mid-winter, sunrise takes at least two hours.  The sun doesn’t crest the mountains across Kachemak Bay until after 10 am.  It’s the ideal time to write.  At first, I thought of those poems as separate from this blog, but today, I’m reminded to question holding back.  This is where I am now, and these prayer poems have something do with healing.  And they are an exploration of the thing we call “praying,” what it means to me.  And they represent the stones I gather in my backpack.  So I will begin to post them here.  The older I get, the more so many things seems beyond my control.  But I don’t wish to throw up my hands in despair, or become passive or indifferent.  Sometimes, the only gesture left to is prayer.  And to me, the poems that matter in my life are forms of prayer.  It’s what I do with my worries now.  And writing, poetry or prose, for me is the way I know to answer the question I started this post with:  “What does it mean?”

This is the first in the series:

11.28.2012 Prayer

Morning stacks up in parallels – inlet,

a flat-topped mountain, cloud-strips,

a black

line

of sand.  Light arrives in bands

at 9, hues like faint scent marks.  But this is still the hour

before I want there to be, before any prayer,

any please, gods:  just a mountain dusted in pale

blue talcum (as in light as powder).  That’s all.

That’s enough.          

Before any if, the wishful, before the arrival

of need or dread:  the letter, the word, even you,

away now

these many weeks (due on the noon plane),

and I, in solitude, this hour just prior,

(day as yet without

prognosis, anniversary of no one),

watch hues elide into blue

of a shadow I remember

pooled at the base of a tree

in deep winter, north of here,

memory I peel

off moonlit boreal snow and carefully

glue to this incipient

sky, line by line.

Lay it down like a wing-track.

Until a soul can’t hold 

any longer, and cracks, crying its tiny please,

between as-yet black branches

(the way bird song bursts, a prayer) don’t let anything

begin or be just yet.  Please day,

(as-yet black)

don’t arrive for me.

Anniversary: After Two Healing Years, Two Kinds of Joy

On December 1, the two-year anniversary of my last radiation zap, I waited for my love to get off the plane in Homer.  Through the door walked Rosanna, who’d flown in from Anchorage, where she goes every week for her radiation treatments. The elation I felt for her being almost done (one week to go), at her telling me that she is suffering no ill effects, was intense, a body rush.  We hugged each other hard and rocked back and forth.  Sympathetic joy, it’s called.  When you experience another’s joy as your own.  

There is another kind of joy, one you get to experience alone.  That afternoon, after dropping Craig off at his office, I drove with my dog Gris-Gris to Beluga Lake for my first skate-ski of the winter.  There isn’t enough snow on the ground yet for skiing anywhere else.  Skiing’s fine by me, but in this case, skis were just a means to get to the other end of the lake faster.  It’s about a mile across the ice to a wild marshland inaccessible at any other time of year.  Weeks of cold dry weather have sublimated the snow covering the grasses, transforming it into a quilt of hoar frost.  Mounds of bowed-down grass are thick with a velour of crystals, some an inch or two long.  I left my skis at the end of the lake and Gris-Gris and I followed narrow ice channels through the marsh.  I was hoping to see the white owl again, the one that flew up from the ice last weekend, or one of the great gray owls my friends saw last winter, or a lynx or coyote out hunting the snowshoe hares whose tracks are everywhere on the ice.  I angled toward the nearby trees, found myself surrounded not by creatures, but by crystals. I was swishing knee deep in ice-bearded grass, millions and millions of miniature crystal ferns glinting in the low sunlight of midwinter.  I just wanted to lie down in it.  So I did, eating handfuls of hoarfrost off the collapsed grass around my face. It is fragile, collapses at the touch of a tongue, at a breath.  I ate it, and I let it cool my aching lower back, injured from last weekend’s ice-skating and too much sitting on a hard kitchen chair and working at the computer.  I looked at the sparkles of the grasses’ second skin.  I lay in a cradle/grave of hoar frost.  I stared up at the blue, blue sky. I swear I could see the sky streaming by in a river of molecules.  Let this earth become a heaven, writes Cyrus Cassells, “Down from the Houses of Magic.”  Sometimes you find that it is, that prayer is answered.  Heaven on earth, a house of magic, in the midst of everything chaotic, frightening, uncertain.  I don’t know if I can call it joy.  It is peace.  It is enough.  All concepts of forgiveness, guilt or fear vanish, dying into life in a meadow of hoar frost.

Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream

In the dream, my windows were open.  It was fall. 

In fall, songbirds quiet since July sing again, before they fly south.  It's a strange phenomenon.  Midsummer, the forest falls silent.  The bustle of territory-defending and nest-building and mate-luring-and-attending is done.  Birds are too busy raising their young to sing.  But in fall, just as in April, I hear their tentative, raspy songs again, as though their voices are hoarse from disuse.

In my dream, their voices were not hoarse.  Their songs were flute-like, rippling, tumbling, swirling through the dying leaves.  Their songs moved like whirling winds.  In my dream I tore out the door, desperate to hear this music I'd missed, this music so ephemeral, crazed to be surrounded by it before it was too late.  I ran down a long green lawn, my arms in the the air, and the birds were already leaving, winging south above me, one after another, swift bodies arrowing away, and I cried up to them, waving, "goodbye, goodbye," not caring if anyone saw me.  People across the street stood on their porch watching, but I didn't care.  My heart was busting out of me, all that mattered was reaching up toward those birds, loving them.  And then I saw the bear.  In my dream, the brown bear was there suddenly on the lawn, and she was close, coming right for me, and just as suddenly there was my car in between us in the middle of the lawn, and I dove over its roof, to get to the driver's side door, the door closest to the bear.  I had to get into that car, but I knew I wouldn't make it.  In all my dreams, I can't outrun whatever it is that is chasing me.  My arms and legs fill with sand, and I can't make them work anymore.  But I got the car door open, tumbled into the driver's seat, but before I could shut the door the brown bear was upon me, my arm in her mouth, her teeth clamped on my flesh, pressing.  And that's when I woke up.

It struck me that this is exactly the conundrum of the person who's had breast cancer.  How to live with the bear lurking always behind the hedge?  The bear can appear at any moment.  Do you run headlong toward life, toward beauty, toward all that you love anyway?  Is it worth the risk?  Is it worth the loss?  Or do you live your life listening to the bird song from the safety of your house, hearing it only through the open window?  Do you follow your madly beating heart?  Do you chase the alive creatures?  Or let the fear of dying paralyze you?  Or maybe there is yet another interpretation.  Could be it's the brown bear and not the birds you are running headlong and recklessly toward?

My friend Erin, who writes a blog called "Being Poetry," posted this poem this morning, by Jack Gilbert.  I place it side-by-side with my dream, on that pile of salvaged things I wrote of yesterday (goshawk, pillar, grosbeak), the things I've saved from the ruined landscape of my day, that place where creation begins out of destruction.  If this life is one big dream.  Then I say, hello departing songbirds.  Hello pounding heart.  Hello poetry.  Hello goshawk.  Hello brown bear with my arm in your mouth.  Teach me how to live here.  Yes, my eyes are open.

A Brief for the Defense
by Jack Gilbert 
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

From Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005)

Shattered Light

There are so many ways to be shattered in life.  Breast cancer is only one.  A hurricane is another.  Having a neighbor's distraught teenager in crisis take up residence in your house and life for a weekend is yet another.  It's just a matter of scale.  Watching yourself fall into the same hole again is a shattering.  Thin ice and you break through and all day you try to clamber out, find solid ground.  There are so many ways to be in over your head.  Yesterday, the sky reflected this shattering.  It was a backdrop and a mirror, and it shattered and shattered and reformed and morphed all day long.  At one point, pillars of light formed over one part of Kachemak Bay, while cloud shapes slid across another part, like fat drops of water elongating on a piece of glass, pushing against surface tension.  And to the west, a gold blast of light throbbed against the horizon.  It was like looking at light in ruins, light blasted apart.  The pillars held up nothing.  The cloud shapes refused to moor themselves.  The gold blast hurt the eyes.  A fogbank left the upper parts of mountains disembodied, detached from earth. None of it made sense, held together, told a sensible story.

This morning I woke up and couldn't help but think of my own life as that kind of ruins.  Stay with me here.  I don't mean to sound dramatic or negative.  Because that shattered sky was the kind of beautiful that confounds.  It was light like I'd never seen it before.  The sky put into form something never before revealed on earth about the nature of light.  Isn't it true that the nature of light and life is the same?  They are made to be shattered and reformed.  Every day, even.  When I look back at breast cancer, it's clear to me that it shattered the structure I'd built for my life.  And in many ways, I rebuilt those shattered structures, so that much of the outer trappings look pretty much the same:  I teach the same classes as before, I live in the same house, I run and do yoga, in winter I go to Hawaii, my yearly round holds the same shape except for the every six-months pilgrimage back to Cape Cod and Boston.  But that is somewhat of an illusion.  Really, those are teetering structures constructed of cardboard.  I reconstructed what I had before to the best of my abilities.  But there is more.  There's also the work of creating, building something new.  Inside me, in that shattered landscape, I see myself wandering around, not knowing where to begin.  I am still finding my way, even with my writing, around this shattered place.  A person begins by picking up one piece of wreckage, moving it from there to there.  Deciding if it stays or goes in the trash heap.  In Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Terry Tempest Williams faces the ocean and prays to receive one word to answer to the confusion following the shattering after the twin towers fell.  This is what she writes:

"How to pick up the pieces?
What to do with these pieces?

I was desperate to retrieve the poetry I had lost."

Standing on a rocky point in Maine, looking east toward the horizon at dusk, I faced the ocean.  Give me one wild word.  It was all I asked of the sea."

This morning, in my notebook, I took a walk, and then decided to start a pile of words, to retrieve them from the shattered landscape of this particular day:

goshawk
pillar
grosbeaks

The shattered sky reflected a world, a wholeness, that we can't see.  It was a rune.  It was a beautiful ruin of pillars and blasted light.  A goshawk landed in a tree at dusk last night, and even its wings reflected the blue light of evening.  Two olive feathered grosbeaks landed on top of the mountain ash this morning, stabbing at the frozen bitter berries.  From this shattered world, from the ash heap, these are the pieces I saved.  This is where I begin. 

      

Going With God and Chocolate

After my appointment with Dr. S., the oncologist, my sister Mara and I walked the narrow streets off Charles, off the Boston Common, and in that moment I wanted to live my whole life right there, I didn't want to be anywhere else, I didn't want any other day.  I wanted it all, and I had it.  Do you know what I mean?  I was the empress of ice cream, of chocolate, the empress of a beach of sea glass and exotic shells.  I said to Mara, what if we lived in a little apartment above the Starbucks or down the alley in one of those old brownstones?  October's clear air in my lungs and on my face, the sharp-angled light on the brick facades, our bodies weaving between all the walkers in boots and sweaters, I wanted it all, I had it all.  A small wad of bills in my wallet, and I wanted to spend it, waste the currency, the dirty greenish paper, imprudently, without caution, without hesitation.  Spend it all now, every ounce of happiness, of relief, save nothing for later.  I wanted to wander the aisles of the 1950's-era narrow-hipped, chock-a-block hardware store, examining the Dutch Boy cleansers, the Murphy's oil soap, the over-my-head shelves of paints, the walls of tools.  I wanted to buy gifts for everyone I knew in the trendy hipster gift shop, each object displayed on its own small boxy shelf, each over-priced object with its own story to tell, and I wanted to hear it.  Each object a joy, a delight, a puzzlement, sitting there, unbought on its perch.  I recall suddenly a line from an Elizabeth Bishop poem called "North Haven."  It's about the death of her deeply sad poet-friend Robert Lowell.  "Fun" -- it always seemed to leave you at a loss . . . )."  Not me.  Not that day.  Fun materialized:  the Tin-Tin playing cards, the Weirdopedia, the yellow cloth bananagram pouches, the balsa-wood airplanes.  We walked on brick sidewalks past shop after shop like that.  Closet-sized pizzerias, a French patisserie, a long narrow dry-cleaners with the proprietors leaning on the counter, the rows of plastic-covered suit jackets and sherbert-colored dresses as painterly backdrop to their dark hair.  The laundromat empty, the machines still and black-eyed.  A below-ground floor level shoe repair, dusty and ancient.  A store selling only fancy writing papers.  And I wanted it all.  And I had it all, because it was there, and I was there, with my sister.  I was there.  Look, gelato.  Look, pastries.  Let's go into the chocolate shop.  We stood staring into the glass case, commiserating, as though our choices were critical:  the salted caramel, the creme de menthe, the ginger green tea dark, the dark with lemon center, the honeycomb crunch.  Walking on toward the commons, we reached into the crinkly plastic bag, nibbled, stopped to close our eyes, let the sweets melt on our tongues, described their flavors to one another, passed the diminishing squares back and forth.  Was it real, the sensation of bland buttery creaminess giving way miraculously to the barest hint of ice-green?  Was the salted caramel really the best thing I've ever tasted in my life?  Everything on those streets in high-res, even now.  Everything autumn-lit, super-saturated.  Things of this world,  I love you so, my mad-dash hell-bent heart said, and I said, watch this Mara, and ran down the sidewalk and kicked my heels to one side, to the other, and she laughed.  But I meant it.

There is no guaranteed cure for breast cancer, they say, but perhaps there is something better, even if it lasts just an hour.  There is no cure for death, no cure for our failing, ailing mortal bodies and selves, there is only this:  the immediacy, the things of this world, the wasteful, terrible beauty, the gorgeous triviality, the dirt and grit, the danger, the wanting and wanting more of it.  The knowing what's at stake.  The knowing what there is to lose and leave.  And loving it all anyway.  I don't know why this appointment with Dr. S. spilled me onto the Boston streets high and reckless and dumbfounded by luck.  It wasn't that much different than any other appointment, except that at the end of that hour, he said,  "You're the picture of health.  All I can say is go with God ... or whomever it is you believe in."  I threw my arms around him.  And I went.  And I believed in everything, including my only once-in-a-lifetime alive self.

You Know the Drill

By this time, you understand the language under the language.   By this time you know the drill.

The drill is this:  You hit the sheets early the night before, knowing it may take an hour or more to actually fall asleep.  You lie in bed with those familiar chitterings and flutterings in your stomach, as though a flock of redpolls were trapped inside your ribcage.  You call Craig, snap at him because he’s preoccupied with harvesting lettuce from the garden.  When he asks you what you want from him, you tell him you support, and he obliges.  You take a homeopathic remedy to put you to sleep. 

You wake and shower and dress in layers and pack snacks in an insulated bag and pack your computer and papers to grade in a backpack for the inevitable waiting room waits, you fill a to-go mug with tea, a bottle with water.  You worry about the time.  Will you beat the Boston traffic?  Is two and a half hours enough?  Your sister drives, first dropping the kids off at school, first driving in the opposite direction from Boston.  Taking frequent swigs of water, you listen to her kids argue in the backseat, you feel impatient with their petty spats about who said this, who said that, who hit whom in the head with a backpack.  You get mad when Sam sasses you, you say, “You’re not the one going to the cancer doctor, my friend!” 

It’s a different day in that it’s sunny, cool and breezy.  It always seems to be raining and gray when you go to Boston for these appointments, isn’t that part of the drill?  But not today.  Near  Boston you slide effortlessly into the carpool lane.  You listen to your sister talk, you wrap your head around her troubles, you fail to be preoccupied with what’s ahead for you, with anxiety.  You take in the intense redness and maroonness and orangeness of the trees.  This lack of anxiety is also not part of the drill.  Until you pull into the parking garage.  You’re talking to Craig on the cell, and he says, “Oh yeah, the old parking garage, I remember that,” and you say,  “Too bad I don’t have a joint to smoke this time.”  Remembering how you crouched beside the car tire to smoke a doobie after a chemo infusion, to stave off the nausea, which always began about halfway back to the Cape.

You ride the elevator up from the parking garage, you walk across the lobby where a woman isn’t playing a harp, thank God.  Because something about that harp’s celestial chords recalled for you angelic orders, haloes, white-gold light, and in a hospital, being treated for cancer, or even two years after, angelic orders at heaven’s gate are not where you want to be thrust.  You want to be here, at street level, listening to the latest pop or hip-hop music or better yet, outside on the street, with the living, with the well, under the trees, in the crowds moving down Brookline Avenue.  But today there are no harps, just the second elevator ride, your sister pushing the button for floor number nine, oncology.

It’s crowded today.  You wait in line to check in.  You find a seat, you scan the room, and your sister points out that everyone seems happy, everyone’s wearing bright colors.  Did someone find a cure for cancer?  But you feel the eyes of others on you, checking you out.  You know the drill because you do it too, scrutinize each person who walks in the door, wonder about their story, their diagnosis, their fears and hopes.  You watch as the phlebotomists come in and out of the lab to check the basket for the next blood draw.  You wait to hear your name, hope it will be the Columbian one, not the younger one, the one you called “the milker” for the way she pumped the blood out of your finger every week during Taxol treatments.  But it is the milker.  She sits you down, and she’s fast and efficient, no milking, just a needle in the vein.  Two tubes of maroon, and you’re up and out and down the elevator to radiology.

So here’s where knowing the language, the drill, really matters.  You change into the johnny in the tiny cubicle, you leave your shirt and bra in the locker, you sit down in the waiting room with your arms wrapped around your chest and prepare to wait.  You check your email.  You check out the other waiting, nervous women, you flip through the magazines, rip out an article about freezing fresh herbs from Organic Gardener.  Hear your name called after only five minutes.  You walk in, she tells you to take off your johnny, she tells that since the fibroadenoma in your left breast didn’t change in a year and a half, she’ll just be doing two regular views.  You let her arrange you and your breast on the machine, you breathe when she tells you to, your hold still when she tells you to, you relax when she tells you to, you try to read her face when as she’s staring at her screen.  Go back and wait, she says, and the doctor will call you.  You wait again.  Why is everyone getting called except you?  Every woman who’s called gets the desired sentence:  “The doctor’s ready for you now, go and change your clothes.”  You understand the language under the language.  How this means “Your mammogram is normal, you can change into street clothes, you can leave, you are safe.”  No more views, no ultrasounds, no fear.

You wait your turn.  You remember a U-Tube video your friend showed you, of an elaborate prank some French people played.  With heavy equipment, they dug big hole dug in the middle of a running/biking/walking path.  They filled the hole with water, then carefully covered the water’s surface with leaves.  A hidden camera capture people chatting, walking, then suddenly plunged into water over their heads.  You remember that feeling as you wait.  What is coming for you?

“Ms. Saulitis?”

“Yes?”  You look up.  The portly technician holds a clipboard.  “The doctor’s ready for you with your results.  Go ahead and get changed.  Then come through this door, take a right.”

You hurry back to the locker, grab your small bundle of clothes, put on your bra, button your shirt.  You meet Mara, follow the signs back, the technician directs you into an examining room, you sit, and a few seconds later, a white-haired Dr. Groff with a friendly face more like that of a grocery store bagger than a doctor puts out his hand.  He doesn’t even sit down.  “Your mammogram is normal.”  He leans over the desk to sign a piece of paper.  You look at your sister, and both of you smile, melting smiles, ice cream smiles, golden retriever goofball smiles.

For you, now, this is technically just a routine mammogram, once a year, like anyone else.  But you hope you never receive those words in a routine way.  Because it’s as if you get to relive the terrible moment two and a half years ago when you stepped on what you thought was solid ground and fell through into deep water and found yourself flailing.  It’s as if you get your wish, at last.  It’s as if they’d said, “”It’s benign.  You’re fine, you’re okay, you can go home.”  And know it’s an illusion.  You can’t change the past.  But for those seconds of smiling so hard you want to grab your sister and jump up and down, you pretend.  It never happened.  It never will again.