At what point did I stop thinking and saying, “I have cancer,” and start to say, “I had cancer”? I feel as though I am still between the two, in a zone of uncertainty because at any time I could slide back from the second state into the first, my cancer having recurred. But if I measure the reality of cancer by how indifferent I was last year to things that interest the majority of people, by my remoteness from world events of that time, and measure the unreality of cancer by the anger those events provoke in me again, by the mostly futile preoccupations I engage in anew, and the stretch of future that I have granted myself by buying a five-year warranty on a dishwasher, for example, then I can say, “I had cancer.”
This month’s hike took us along the banks of the Chattahoochee River. It was a gorgeous morning so everyone and their brother appeared to have had the same idea, which meant that the parking lot was full and there were too many other dogs on the trail for Tosca’s comfort. We managed a meandering loop, anyway. 4/12 down, a third of the year behind us, and 8 more to go. Checking these off of the calendar is certainly a welcome alternative to radiation treatments; I heartily recommend it to anyone in recovery from, perhaps, anything at all.
This month’s hike with Tosca & friends was to Arabia Mountain, a huge granite outcropping pocked with craters southeast of the city. It feels a little like visiting the surface of the moon. Or Mars. But signs of spring were everywhere. That’s actually one of the things I love most about this new ritual–taking a hike near the end of each month allows me to witness the slow creep of the seasons in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise. The sounds, smells, and temperatures have shifted subtly with each excursion, much like the vegetation. And Tosca’s warming a bit to new company alongside these new environments (emphasis on “a bit”). When I become impatient with her, I remind myself that certain things take time. Revisiting my last post re: remission is a perfect example of this. I expected my reaction to the news to be instantaneous, but I’m finding that it’s actually sinking in quite slowly. It’s as though a profound weight, which I’ve become so accustomed to carrying that I hardly notice it any more, is being gradually lifted from my shoulders. Each day, I feel a little lighter, and it’s the loveliest thing.
Yesterday I received news that my annual CT scan was clear, and it settled in the strangest way. I felt relief, of course, but not the utter elation I’d expected. I say this because it wasn’t your typical scan; if clear, it would be likely be my last. And lo, it was! Yet I felt… so many different things. Which suggests that perhaps few emotions or experiences in life are unalloyed, though some have come close. Anticlimactic as the news was (sadly, medical test results aren’t sent with confetti effect), I still found myself wishing there was someone I could meet for a spontaneous drink to celebrate, but I didn’t know who that person would be at 2:45pm on a Monday. So, at a loss despite this seismic gain, I drove to pick up my daughter in the very same car in which I drove to pick her up after receiving my diagnosis five years ago with an uncannily similar sense of bewilderment. Wow, I thought to myself, I’m still here; I’m in remission; I’ve been cancer-free for 5 years. 5 years! It feels like a thousand lifetimes have transpired since my diagnosis in 2018–-so many awful and unexpected things have happened on both a global and personal scale that I’ve struggled to account for much of any of it. But I could no more account for the grace or good fortune that’s befallen me throughout my life, either. Account. That’s kind of funny. To whom? For whom? I suppose mostly for myself and maybe my daughter, in the event that she becomes curious about all of this when she’s older. I write these things down because then they live on the page, outside of me, and not solely inside, which can be overwhelming. And I share them here on the off chance that they might help someone else going through something similar, just as the few blogs I found my way to in the wake of my diagnosis helped me. To paraphrase James Baldwin, you feel alone in your suffering, and then you read. Or write. Or lean on others (those who helped me get here are countless and range from strangers to closest kin; I offer my gratitude to each and every one of them ❤️ ). Or walk the dog you once wondered if you’d live long enough to be able to have. Cheers to that.
Our family’s big ticket Christmas gift this year was a new puppy, though I guess that’s a little redundant (are there old puppies?). We brought her home from the breeder’s farm in KY yesterday. How we found our way to this particular dog, from these particular folks, is a story unto itself, I suppose. My daughter—now nine—has long been obsessed with animals and has always wanted a dog. Both my husband and I grew up with them, but we already have a beloved elderly cat as well as an unfenced yard, so we’ve been hesitant to add a puppy to the mix. But sometimes it’s just time, and a confluence of concrete and ineffable factors makes this apparent. Like loss, for example. Just so much loss taking on so many different shapes over the past few years that welcoming something new into our lives felt strangely imperative. Not as a substitute for those losses, but a tonic to them, perhaps. And while I wanted to adopt a rescue from a shelter, my daughter became fixated on the relatively rare breed my husband grew up with: English Shepherds. They’re next to impossible to find, with breeders in far flung corners of the country and waitlists for unpredictably timed litters, but our daughter managed to find one within a six hour drive, the only puppy left from last spring’s brood. Cowgirl was, if not the runt of the litter, then certainly overshadowed by her siblings, all of whom got scooped up quickly. Sweet tempered and skittish, she hadn’t shown much promise working the cows, so her owners put her up for adoption at 10 months. We said we’d take her, not exactly sight unseen (they sent a recent photo), but close. It felt like quite the leap of faith, driving all that way for an unknown quantity, but I needed to take this leap more than I’ve needed anything in a while (my daughter, of course, carried nothing but absolute conviction in her heart). Dear reader, it was rewarded.
…that sometimes, they were happy. There is so much to miss re: life before quarantine that finding oneself feeling good, while in it, can come as a shock. Yesterday, for example, was the official start of my daughter’s summer and it was, well, lovely. The hours–even minutes–passed at a leisurely pace, even more so than a usual Saturday. There were no forgotten online assignments to track down; no flooded inboxes; no Brain Pop, Splash Learn, Freckle, or other inane platforms to remember and toggle between. The heat had arrived, along with the mosquitoes, but both belong here and we went outside, anyway. Meals also punctuated the day in such a welcome, ritualistic way that I took notice. Perhaps because it was exactly one year ago now that I finished radiation and found myself floundering without them. Everything I consumed then was liquid, meager, awful to taste, and painful to swallow. The fact that I can enjoy all foods again is something to celebrate, so I am by noting it here. I hope I don’t forget how I felt last night while preparing dinner–how happy and at ease, despite everything–because such moments are rare, for me and for so many others suffering, each in their own way, at this time. My daughter thundered around the living room in her gymnastics unitard, dead fucking serious about the improvised routine she was performing for no one, while my husband folded laundry to a delightfully random playlist of his choosing–Curtis Mayfield, Procol Harum, the Beatles–and I thought, yes. This is it. This is everything.
Even the simplest tasks are performed under a pervasive general strain on all of one’s faculties during this bizarre, sad, and maddening time.
I am well enough, and my daughter is well enough, to undertake such simple, ostensibly heartening tasks.
Somehow, we have an abundance of construction paper, but a dearth of the other kind (see below).
I remain a perfectionist when it comes to many things, even under the shadow of a pandemic that, it would seem, might provide a welcome opportunity not to be SO. DAMN. ANAL.
My daughter and I have creative differences.
Our ability to reconcile these differences and complete the friggin’ rainbow has become an internalized metaphor for–and imagined predictor of–my own ability to get to the other side of this day, week, month, etc. in one piece.
As of right now, the rainbow remains… in progress. Will (try to) report back.
This is the album that got me through yesterday, courtesy of my dad’s old record collection. You would think that, having survived a year of something akin to self-quarantining during my recent cancer treatment, I’d be primed for this new normal. I’m not. A curious corollary of acute illness is the myopic focus it induces (something I wrote about in a previous post), but the current COVID-19 crisis has resulted in pain and anxiety that feel much more diffuse. I’ve wanted to write here again in an attempt to manage it, but finding the time, space, and energy has proven difficult while working and parenting from home. Here’s hoping that might change.
The other day a student asked me, why the insane demand for toilet paper in the midst of this coronavirus outbreak? My reply: It’s symbolic, of course.
A year out from my cancer diagnosis and a month out from my last scan, I still find myself trying to reconcile how I thought I would be feeling now with how I am. The following is excerpted from a journal I keep more or less sporadically:
The depression I was feeling a week or so ago now appears to have morphed into anxiety. It hits me when I arrive at work in the mornings–really, whenever I leave my daughter and husband. […] The news I follow (both local and national) every day is no help. I’m anxious about the rise of white supremacy, coronavirus, fires in Australia, the fact that the common flu killed an otherwise healthy thirty-five-year-old man… If I list them all here, will my worries go away?
I guess it’s part of post-cancer existence, this knowing in one’s bones–no longer just one’s head–that life is both fleeting and finite. Like those coins in the Borges story, this knowledge is so heavy induces a kind of paralysis; I don’t want to go anywhere, do anything, take risks. Which is not where I was a few months into my recovery after treatment. Then, I felt uninhibited and impulsive, like I wanted to grab life by the horns and wrestle it to the ground, or ride it over a cliff. I contemplated things like dyeing my hair (which I did), and getting a tattoo (which I didn’t). I felt hungry for new experiences, for higher frequencies of feeling that now terrify me. Who was that person, born again and almost feral at forty? It’s decidedly not who I am this morning.
I share this because I thought perhaps readers in a similar boat could relate.
Well, then 