During this whole big horrible thing (BHT) there have been many family occasions I could not attend, didn't feel well enough to attend, or didn't want to attend for fear of being seen as "the cancer relative." But after months of missing so many (3 cousins' kids are getting married this year), I decided I should try to get to one, a bridal shower. Unlike many of the others, this occasion was local. So I said I would go. I put on a cute regular dress, because now my snail's-pace-healing incision has finally gotten to the point where i can put something around my waist without pain (it's really been the summer of the t-shirt dress until now), pulled on my stripy cancer hat (which is really my husband's old bouldering cap, the only cap I will wear even in the 100-degree heat because every other cap in the world makes me cry), and grabbed my litre-sized water bottle, because it was only a couple of days post-chemo, and I needed to stay hydrated, plus take a steroid pill at 2. Then I waited to be picked up my cousin.
It was hot inside the house of the hostess. It was not her fault. The air conditioning was on but not working well due to the number of people or due to the a/c unit, or due to me refusal to wear any cap other than a knit acrylic one. So I was pre-tty sweaty.
Everyone was nice, as people will be at these things, but also nice-polite, in that distancing way, because cancer. is. awkward. It is a bald reminder of mortality to everyone it encounters. And while people know it's not contagious in any real way, they also do not want to get too close, because death.
I know this nice-polite, one-step-back way of being, because I used to be nice in this way, before I traveled to the other side. It is weird, let me tell you. Death, the subject of it, is so taboo and so feared in our culture, that I couldn't be angry with people for taking the one step back. And yet. The nice-politeness had a very ungracious way of leaving me feeling even more isolated. CANCER RELATIVE ALERT.
It's no one's fault, I guess. But when I'm at home when in the hideously comfortable recliner trying to figure out my next life move, staving off the thought that even I don't know how long I'm going to actually have a life, yeah---well you can imagine, that's pretty lonely stuff. So, venturing out and being around people should, in theory, feel better than that.
It does, a little. There is a sense people admire you for being actually going out in public in a ridiculously summer-inappropriate medium-weight acrylic knit hat when you probably don't feel awesome, when you know that you will be The Cancer Relative. (Note to self to use that phrase in a poem because I can also write it as, The cancer, relative.)
But it's the nature of the beast, isn't it -- to feel isolated almost everywhere except for the doctors' offices and the infusion centers and the hospitals? Living with cancer means inhabiting an entirely different country.
Yes, a country you never wanted a passport to. My cancer blog is on caringbridge.org. Not flowery, no pink, not a journey, not a gift. Because I, too, write to make sense of things. Thanks for this. . .and hope you are, these many months later, keeping on.
ReplyDeleteYes, a country you never wanted a passport to. My cancer blog is on caringbridge.org. Not flowery, no pink, not a journey, not a gift. Because I, too, write to make sense of things. Thanks for this. . .and hope you are, these many months later, keeping on.
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