Anniversaries & other afflictions

Last Friday the 13th, before everyday life as we all know it backflipped and landed on the ground, breaking every last bone in its body, I sat down and wrote this post -- it was my one-year anniversary of being diagnosed with cancer.

Which is not insignificant. But then, my own Big C story was usurped by this new one. The personal usurped by the global. And here we all are, in the proverbial trenches.

Make no mistake: I'm as scared as you are. Maybe a little bit more, since my maintenance drug leaves me slightly less able to fight off infections. But as for life turning completely upside down, as for having to stay inside and away from most people, and figure out things to do all day --- in these things, I have some experience.

I don't mean to diminish it. It's a science fiction B movie come to life. It's affecting all of us, all over the world, at the same time. It's huge. But maybe the global Big C, while intensely weird and scary in and of itself, feels to me like just one more thing to soldier through.


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 3/13/2020

Today, as you may already know, is Friday the 13th. Where I live the sky is a kind of colorless wash of barely-grey and white. It's damp. The ground is wet. And oh yeah, the entire country, most of the world, in fact, is panic-buying hand sanitizer and bottled water, and hunkering down in their houses to avoid contracting covid-19, aka the coronavirus. Strange times.

But today for me is also something else. It was one year ago today, March 13th (close enough to the ides of March) that I was diagnosed with advanced-stage ovarian cancer.

Just so you know, I did not really have symptoms. It was nothing more than some mild cramps, very much like period cramps, that weren't going away after a month or so. I had seen my OB-GYN doc just the month before, mentioned it to her and she felt around and couldn't feel anything unusual. But since they didn't go away, I called her and she suggested getting an ultrasound, "just to be on the safe side." Well.

Today is the anniversary of the day I went for said ultrasound, the day I got the call back to come into her office as soon as possible, the day I heard the "cancer" words. Many former and current cancer patients remember this day so succinctly because it is the day our entire world as we knew it completely changed. We were thrown with great force into the other side, the side of sick people longing not to be sick, the kind of sick that is many people's worst nightmare. I know it had been mine long before it actually happened to me.

And then, that new life is suddenly before you, huge in all it requires: you must make life-changing decisions as quickly as you can, about doctors, surgeons, treatments. you must read all you can (but not too much) on what the process is, what the chances are. you must try to mentally prepare yourself (tho I think this is never possible) for the enormous, frightening path ahead of you: there will be chemotherapy, there will be a big surgery, there will be more chemo. and then....

But you really can't think of the "and then..." Well, I couldn't, anyway. I just had to go day by day and fear by fear, march as well as I could onto the next thing I had to do, and the next.

I do not wish this on anyone, and right now there are dozens of people in our government I could imagine wishing it on, but still, I do not wish this on anyone. I hope with all my heart that you who are reading this, are not nodding your heading in knowing agreement with what I'm writing. May you never.

So today marks one year from that day. To be honest, it marks the beginning of what was the absolute shittiest year of my life so far. And I have other shitty years, dealing with mental health issues, suicides of friends. But. Two months after my initial treatment was finished, my 84-year-old father was diagnosed with lymphoma. And a little than 3 months after that, he was dead. So this past year wins. March 13, 2019 to March 13, 2020. Year of staring death straight on, whatever that means.

And now, forward March, haha. But really. I am trying in my way to declare, no, to demand a kinder spring. Tomorrow, March 14th, 2020 I will wake up and bake a pie (it is Pi Day after all) and I will visit my mother and do some work and swallow my maintenance drug and try to write. I will keep going.

Next year I hope to update you on how March 14th, 2020 to March 14th, 2021 was just the best, the happiest year ever. Or that it was a super-quiet, low-key, drama-less year. I would take that as well (just in case the universe can hear me).

Dogs go on with their doggy life

On the last day I remember my dad being coherent, I told him the story of how when I was very young, and he was taking a nap, I would climb on his bed and put my ear to his heart to hear it beating, and to try in my young way, to make my heartbeat match the rhythm. i reasoned that if i could do this, he and i would live exactly the same amount of time, so we would never have to live without each other. 

He said, "that is so sweet," as if it were a story that didn't involve him, as if he were not connected to it, as if he were hearing it told about someone else. 

I think that is how he was, though, placing himself a few steps back from the rest of a family that was trying to be part oh his life, a few steps back from the rest of the world. He didn't, or couldn't, see himself as a real participant or important member, and thinking of him now, that is the fact that undoes me.

The last thing i asked him before I left that day was if he remembered dancing with me at my wedding. 

"I do," he said. 

I kept pushing, "that was a nice time, right? that's a good memory?" 

He nodded. But he was somewhere else entirely, beginning to slip into the unconscious days that would follow. 

When you grieve the loss of a parent, you are (I am) in some cases grieving the parent you wanted him to be, the parent that could not--due to undiagnosed depression--be present with you most of the time. The parent who shrank back from the world emotionally, even though his physical body was there keeping to itself, reading newspapers and magazines while his daughters literally fought each other for his attention. 

His physical body was there. It was a commanding 6 feet tall. It lumbered up and down the stairs with a sluggish, choppy gait, because his feet had lost their natural arches from standing too many hours behind a pharmacy counter. There was no way not to notice. 

I have let a lot of time go by in this blog, before writing about him again. It has been a month since he died, and there are still images of him as a sick person that cycle on repeat in my head. So it is hard to have any perspective. If someone you love has died at home, you will know the trauma of watching. 

Slowly we unpack our newer lives. My mom goes back to their house. My sister goes back to work. I go back to figuring out my own path forward, knowing that at any moment, it could stop short or go backwards. I work on some freelance, I try to write some poems, though I am not even sure I am a poet anymore. 

I do these days think on Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts," and remember to keep going: 

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

-W.H. Auden