The year cancer blew up my town

I emerged today from underneath the dark mushroom cap of my depression and fear for one reason: to vote for Elizabeth Warren. Even if I go tomorrow, I figured, I'd have done my part to put the future in good hands.

It had been more than 2 days inside my house, not going outside even for a short walk, even though the weather is starting to change a little toward spring. It did not seem to matter, to my darkening mind.

I am no stranger to dealing with depression and anxiety. I know way more than I wish I did about coping and about skills and how to try to avoid circling the dark hole. But here's where I was. My thinking: last year, cancer came to my town. Cancer ambushed, clobbered, bushwhack and detonated in my town. I was left alive, though trembling in my doc martens. My father was not as lucky. And we don't know that it's done with us.

And I know all the tricks of distraction, I take the maintenance drug, I take the anti-depressants and anti-anxieties, I go to the support groups. I dig into my hobbies, trying to master laminated dough (spoiler alert: these things take time), trying to learn calligraphy. I try to take comfort in nature and cycles of things and how the universe must surely crave balance. For every ebb, there is flow. A zig for every zag.

It's all I can do and I do it, but there are still times when longing and jealousy and righteous fury have their day. It's inevitable. There are days when grief reigns supreme. I guess this is part of the process, too, but I hope I find a way soon, a way to live a kind of "normal" life without pretending the spectre of recurrence isn't constantly hovering.

How do you go about your life again, how do you go back to living peacefully in your town? This feeling is common enough among former cancer patients, I know. And I'm still convinced there is something more than fear to learn from all of this. I'm just not sure how to begin again.

In favor of detachment

now that i know more about death -- coming close to my own, watching my father's -- now that today we drive my mother home to what was their house, but is now simply hers, now that the absence stretches before us like a useless trinket, now that i know that no matter how healthy i feel, however ordinary or normal, i will always be one doctor's visit away from a terminal diagnosis, now. now what?

now it seems the only reasonable response is detachment. yes, i have heard the arguments for jumping back into life with more gusto than ever, now that one knows how short life really is. it is one response. another is detachment. maybe if i'm lucky it'll be detachment in the Buddhist sense of the word" "Detachment as release from desire and consequently from suffering..." as our good friend wikipedia describes it. If I'm lucky. 
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what is detachment in the other sense of the word, i wonder? again, wikipedia

• Emotional detachment, in psychology, refers to "inability to connect" or "mental assertiveness"

• Detachment (philosophy), the state of lacking material desire

• Detachment (military), a military unit which has left its parent unit altogether

ah, that last one is all too poignant. it sounds like i'm wallowing -- am i? i think maybe, i'm tired of being so sensitive. that which may have made me a decent writer no longer serves me in the real world. maybe if there's something to learn from the last year, it's to step back, to raise up some invisible shield that keeps me from feeling so much and so deeply. it's not resignation, it's self-preservation, right? right now, it honestly feels like the only reasonable response. x

Snow moon

The stupid sky refuses to heal itself. all day every day the grey, rain, freezing, sleet, snow, and combinations thereof. i mean, it is february in new england. i get it.

but now he's gone and the weather feels more like it's mocking us.

now the hospital bed sits empty in a living room waiting to be retrieved from hospice. my mom doesn't want to go back to the house while it's still there. along with the wheelchair, commode, urinal, the refrigerator drawer with morphine syringes. we went back once, some hours after, because we needed his social security number for the death certificate. in the bedroom, i looked down and saw his slippers. gutteral crying. is that a thing?

he died (i can't say 'passed' or 'passed away' or 'crossed over' or any other polite term designed to mask the reality of what happened). half the reason death is so difficult is because we go all our lives avoiding talking about it, and when we do, we couch it behind soft language and then when it happens--as it will happen to us all--the calamity of it is that much harder to bear. i'm calling it what is: he died. he is dead. there was death, there is death.

he died at 2 am and so we didn't sleep, we tried. we spent the day at the funeral home making arrangements. and then making difficult phone calls. and then in my case, staring into space.

but this: on my drive home from my sister's house that evening, february 8th, still less than 24 hours into this new absence: the snow moon. the full february moon on a clear night. i watched it all the way home. i took comfort. i begged it to be a sign of something, though i've no idea what. it was the tiniest consolation.

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Wolf month

A few years ago, I became obsessed with the month of January because it seemed that so many bad things happen in January. Of course, bad things can happen in any month, but I thought it particularly sinister for some reason. In reading, I learned that the Saxon word for January is Wulf-monath, or Wolf Month. That felt right to me. I ended up writing this poem:

WOLF MONTH

They will say that cancer spared the husband, only

to come back for the wife. They will say cells replicate

like this all the time, it is January, when wolves come

starving to the village. Their hunger makes them bolder.

It’s not when but how they will take you: in sleep?

Hope you are that lucky. They are more ravenous

than their future widows, pacing the salty lips of our streets.

Upside-down blackbirds, unharbored wind.

I'll just say, this past January has felt more like Wolf Month than any other.

Last Friday, a hospital bed was delivered to my parents' house. It was the next step for him. His mobility was limited for a long time before the cancer due to neuropathy. Limited, but he could still go to the grocery store or out to dinner. First he was using a cane. Then a walker. Then wheelchair. And now this.

The bed needs to be in the living room because my parents' tiny, 1960's ranch house bedroom is too small, the hallway too narrow to negotiate.

When it arrived, we angled it toward the television. We put flowered sheets on the mattress in a futile attempt to disguise the seriousness. I spent a long time alone in the living room staring at it, trying to process its meaning. Mostly I felt numb.

**
Over on my side of things, the maintenance drug I'm taking has some side effects- abdominal cramps and stomach trouble- that are eerily similar to the cramps and stomach trouble I had last year, just before I was diagnosed. It messes with my head, especially since I'm coming up on my 6-month cancer check next week.

I asked one of my doctors to check my blood work because I was so freaked out. It all looks okay from that perspective, which is a relief. These side effects are apparently very common ones (yes I called the drug company and asked), and most likely they will subside over time, but OMG. A lot to carry.