Now You See the Sky

by Catharine H. Murray

  “Dtaw,” I said to wake my husband from his slumber, “I’ve been doing this for three hours straight every ten minutes. I can’t stand it anymore. You’ve got to take over. I’ve got to take care of myself.” He grumbled something about my attitude and I said, “What? What was that? Did you have something to say to me?” No reply. I crawled to the other side of him and finally dozed a little.

  A few minutes later I heard Chan asking for me.

  “She’s right here,” Dtaw was reassuring him.

  “I want Mama!”

  “I’m right here, honey, I just need a little sleep, Daddy can take care of you.”

  “Paw! I feel like there’s someone with a knife and they’re cutting me open and blood is everywhere!” he told his father, his voice panicky. “It hurts. It hurts.”

  I crawled back over Tahn to be with Chan.

  “Ugh. I hate this feeling! It feels like my hands are being cut off and they’re bleeding, and my eyes are being cut and they’re bleeding. Ugh!” he continued in a panicky terrified voice. “There was my voice, faint, that was my spirit.”

  I marveled, I didn’t even know he knew the word faint. He seemed to be reliving the operation again and talking about his spirit leaving his body.

  “Ouch, it hurts! It hurts!” He was trying to raise his head off the pillow (which he hadn’t done by himself for days) to point his face toward his chest. “I want to kiss it! I want to kiss it!” he cried desperately.

  “Here, I’ll kiss it for you, honey,” and I did, leaning my face down to kiss the scar above his left nipple where the line had emerged.

  “I’m dying! I’m dying while they’re putting in my line!”

  I kept reassuring him that he was very much alive and lying in bed with us. After a few minutes, he fell asleep.

  Chan slept well that night, and did not ask for any morphine the next day. When he slept badly the next night, waking up groaning more than every hour, Dtaw and I agreed to give him morphine.

  “No, no, not yet. It’s not pain. It’s definitely not pain,” Chan said. “It’s just, I don’t know, a yucky feeling.”

  We followed his lead and did not give him the medicine. He slept well. I thought about how I’d heard that what we perceive as pain is largely fear. Perhaps by releasing that experience of total anesthesia and surgery, a layer of fear was removed, and so his pain was lessened. Perhaps.

  Staying

  Watching my child suffer might have been hard, but what threatened to drive me mad was the roller-coaster of my mind reacting to the day-to-day changes in his pain and moods. My thoughts swung wildly between hope that he might get well and near panic that he might not. To live with this mind of mine, I fell back on the practice I had begun when I first got to know Dtaw and first learned about Buddhism. Aiming to keep my mind on the tasks at hand had become a practice for me by the time Chan got sick. I had practiced far less than I would have liked, but even so, this value was a strong part of my belief system.

  The large tree stump that beckoned me to sit still and admire the valley that first day we saw this piece of land had long since been chopped down for firewood. In the place where it once stood, the grassy outcropping had been overgrown with slender trees and winding vines.

  One morning, Dtaw led me down from the cabin to where the village men had helped him build the fence for the horses so that they could walk untethered over the ground. We turned left at the pasture, away from the waiting horses and into the dense growth that now almost hid the path to the cliff’s edge. I was amazed when a few feet into the tangle of limbs and leaves, I saw the ground cleared, and a large wooden platform where the earth fell away. Dtaw led me up onto the square floor of planks nailed tight to the supporting logs below and walked me to the center of it. He turned me toward him, putting his hands on my hips and smiling the smile that melted my heart even then when his hair had become peppered with gray and the flesh around his eyes swollen with fatigue. Those eyes still sparkled with pleasure, as he said, “For you.” I looked around at the square of symmetry beneath our feet, a patch of order in the wild around us, and felt the pleasure of his generous gift. With the help of the village men, he had built this floor above the paths of snakes and stinging bugs. He wanted me to have a place where I could sit and calm my mind each morning before I began the work of caring for Chan. As I had done years before when he showed me the cabin, I could only smile and thank him, wishing words were not so inadequate.

  I had been snatching spare moments to sit cross-legged on the porch or the bench behind the house or hidden in the dark kitchen to try to let the tired mess of my mind settle into calm whenever I could, but now I had a place to go, to escape, for a little while, the children’s constant clamor for attention and Chan’s struggle. Here I could sit and let my gaze rest on the valley floor miles below or the misty horizon as the sun climbed over it and try to practice what I believed to be the path through and out of suffering.

  Now, each morning, I went to this place, my sacred spot, the place that first drew us here, and I settled my body into the position that had become natural to me, sitting bottom to floor, legs crossed, feet resting on thighs. As I began to listen with all my senses, I felt the breezes play over my skin, heard the whine of insects around me, and sensed the light of the morning filtering into my body. I began to slow down enough to watch my thoughts arise and pass away. I reminded myself of the futility of thinking of the future and of the past. I told myself there is no reality but now. And I tried to bring all of my attention to only the immediate experience of my breathing body. I sat long enough to explore the effort of staying still, working with the habit of effort, trying to ease back on the trying. Doing the work of doing nothing. I sat long enough to let my breath calm my body and counteract the effects of the daily accumulation of fear in my mind.

  When I was ready to end my sitting, I always turned to a metta, loving kindness, practice. I knew that I needed to cultivate as much self-compassion as I could in those precious moments of quiet before I returned to the exhausting work of mothering. I focused my attention on my heart, feeling its energy warm and strengthen as I silently, with each inhalation, repeated the words that had surprised me when I learned them at the first meditation retreat I sat at a decade earlier: May I be well. And after a while, May I be happy. And finally, May I be at peace. And then, as I felt the glowing energy in my heart generated by these words, I gathered it up to share. Gazing out over the valley, it was easy to imagine all beings to the east of me as I wished them wellness, happiness, and peace. Addressing each point of the compass, then ahead, beside, behind, and beneath me, I imagined the slithering, crawling, running, flying creatures of the earth. And I could imagine the people, busy in the villages below or in the cities and towns beyond the mountains, across the continents and oceans, as I wished them all well. As I thought of so many people in so many different nations and places of peace and war, quiet and turmoil, I was reminded that I was not alone in my suffering; that, in fact, this struggle I was engaged in was ordinary, that people all over the world were like me, wanting only well-being and happiness, becoming frustrated by what stood in their way of that.

  With this knowledge that I was part of the community of humanity and that I must not waste my time with imagined future scenes of what might happen to Chan, that I must only put my mind fully on the present, I was able to return to the roller-coaster of our fight. And I would rise from my seat, uncramping and stretching my legs, thank the earth for holding me gently, and climb back up the hill to our life.

  Quiet

  Chan lay quietly in the sunny hammock, a sleeping bag slung over the pole overhead to block the sunlight from his face. I had tried to reduce the swelling in his wrist by tying one end of my good black silk scarf around his wrist and the other end over the pole above. The valley below dipped a bowl of green from the blue sky.

  “Mama, I can’t bend my fingers into a fist. Is that okay?” he asked me, desperate.

  I assured him h
e would be able to make a fist again as soon as the swelling went down. Dtaw pressed hot herbal compresses onto his foot and lulled him with soothing words.

  * * *

  The next morning when Chan woke up, he wanted to get dressed and go to the kitchen. He sat alert, watching me and the other children cook. He wanted to go eat at the table outside. And when the children all went to join Dtaw in the Land Rover for a trip up the mountain, he wanted to go too. As we left, he said to me, “This is kind of fun, going somewhere all together.”

  Unbelievable. He said something was fun.

  On the way down, he laid his head against Dtaw’s leg and asked to nap. After we got home, he stayed asleep in the front of the parked Land Rover long enough for me and Dtaw to fight and hug and cry and then for me to cook a forbidden fried egg and eat it quickly before he awoke. When he did, I took him down to the hammock, squirted Betadine in his ears and slathered calendula on his nose scab, and we settled down with Harry Potter, a good distraction.

  Chan was more subdued and docile in those few days, no more screaming and blaming me. I was relieved over this, but felt guilty because of my relief. When he was angry and loud and screaming, I could see him strong and fighting. When he was quiet and withdrawn, I worried, afraid it was evidence of more and more cancer cells in his brain. It was so hard to know if I should fight for him, reach for him, or let him rest quietly. And then I quickly saw the answer: he would have plenty of time to rest when he died.

  It was hard for me to let him fight so much. I desperately wanted to give up, play the passive, miserable, martyred mother of a cancer patient, but I knew that wouldn’t have been fair to Chan. The only way was to let him fight for his right to live, no matter how hard it became for me to stay hopeful. When I wanted to give up, I would trudge up the path to the top of the hill where I could cry into the phone with Maggie. She would tell me gently, “Not yet, not yet. Chan still wants to fight.” And I could go back in for a few more rounds.

  I’d never liked the medical world’s war jargon for cancer. Battling cancer. The war against cancer. The white cell soldiers. All this was offensive to me until I became the mother of a boy with cancer, and then very little else seemed to fit, not so much for what was going on in Chan’s body, but for what was going on with me. Each day I felt I had to rise and ready myself as a warrior. I had to steel myself for another day of staying hopeful and cheerful. It was a battle because I was never allowed to give up. Like a soldier, no matter how hard things got, I had to keep going and summon something from a well of maturity I didn’t know I had. I had to learn to act with honor and bravery, no matter how I felt, in order to rise day after day to fight for Chan.

  * * *

  Chan and I spent the morning at Mei Tong’s after biking with Cody to school. When I picked him up to carry him to the bike so we could ride home, he winced and cried out in pain. I begged him to say what it was I was hurting, so I could try to fix it. I started crying, “I can’t stand to hurt you. I hate to see you hurt.”

  He immediately stopped. As I strapped him into the bike seat, tears still streaming down my face, he almost smiled at me. He kept saying, “Actually, it doesn’t really hurt.”

  “Does this hurt?” I asked with each piece of clothing I tied around his legs to keep them from banging against the seat.

  “No. Nothing hurts,” he replied without grimacing, without seeming to cover anything up. It was as if he had switched to a part of his brain where he did not need to struggle with the pain. As we biked up the hill, me getting off when it became too steep so I could push the bike, he was quiet but not withdrawn. Suddenly he said, “It’s good to have a mom who knows how to cry because then her kids learn how to cry.”

  I felt gratification swell around my heart, but I fished for more: “And that’s good?”

  “Yeah, because then the kids can get all their feelings out. And it’s good to have kids when you’re young, because then you can get a lot of crying done early and then have a lot of fun.” He continued in this contented, reflective mood all the way home.

  I took advantage of his mood to do some thinking out loud. “You know what I think would work well for me, honey?”

  “What?”

  “Well, I’m thinking that when you want a cry, if you could say to me, Mom, how about giving me some attention? that would help me a lot.

  He was agreeable and we went over the angles and advantages. As I pushed the bike along the sunny, dusty road, weaving around rocks and gullies, we talked about how this would make me a better listener, and he brought up the fact that I could also go and have more cries and do more writing too.

  “Like this, Mom, like pretend I said, Mom, can I have some attention? and you could say, Well, how about if I go and write for a half . . . a half . . .” He struggled to come up with the right way to say the time in English. “An hour and a half first, and you could play with Cody if you want, just remind me, and then you could write and then come back and play with me and Jew and Cody, right?”

  “Exactly!”

  He pondered this more. “But sometimes I don’t always have to ask, like if I really need to cry, I just cry, right? Because it’s always good to cry, right?”

  “Oh, absolutely, if you’re really right in there, ready to cry, just go ahead, I’m just thinking of those times when you would be okay if you didn’t.”

  I climbed back on the bike to ride over the curve hugging the edge of the last hill before the steep one that led to our house.

  “Chan, when I listen to your sadness and pain and hopelessness all the time, and never see anything else, I get scared that you’re not going to get well, which I know is stupid, because you’re just showing feelings, but when I was little I was not allowed to do that much, so now I’m a little dense on this subject.”

  He nodded his understanding. As we rode and talked, he was so rational and cheerful and intelligent. I thought, Well, I guess he is going to get well after all. What ridiculous logic.

  When we finally got to the long steep road, barely discernible among the rocks and tufts of grass, he was quiet. “Cheering, please,” I requested as I stood up on the pedals and set my mind and body to the task.

  “Go, Mom! You can do it, Mom. Remember your power. Remember all the good things you eat that give you energy,” Chan called out without hesitation. “Remember all the good things you’ve done. You can do it.” His words helped me to press down hard again and again, with each stroke of the pedals. I felt my muscles strain and overwork, but I didn’t give up. “Feel the energy. Draw the energy up from the earth. Up your legs and down your legs. Up and down. Up and down. More energy. You can do it, Mom!”

  Sweat soaked my hair under the helmet. My hands gripped the handlebars tight. The strain felt like it would be too much, but I kept pushing, one downward thrust at a time.

  I couldn’t believe it. We’d made it. All the way up that long steep road over loose, dry dirt and dead grass.

  “Honey, we did it! I never could have done that without your cheering. Did you know you are an amazing cheerer. If you cheer like that for yourself, you’ll be over your cancer in no time!”

  Dap

  Days later, a voice came echoing over the valley from the far ridge. At first we thought it wasn’t for us, then Dtaw could make out Cam’s words across the distance: “Come see Dap! The rope got tangled around his neck!” My stomach lurched as Dtaw walked up to the house to get his machete and muttered over Cam’s inability to take care of horses. I imagined the huge animal dangling over some edge by the rough rope caught around its neck. The horrible thought haunted me for hours. It felt like too much; I had enough fear of immediate death around me. I couldn’t take any more.

  The first thing Chan said was, “Don’t blame me for buying the horses; I’d help care for them if I could.”

  Hours later Dtaw came back. As usual, he didn’t offer information till pressed.

  “No, he wasn’t dead, but he’d been stuck in the rope all night, and in
the morning Cam found him lying down. He lay down all morning, but by the time I got there, he was standing.”

  Later, when I saw Cam, he was more eager to share details, perhaps to relieve some of his guilt. “I found him belly up, his legs up in the air. I splashed water on him, and rubbed lemongrass under his nose to revive him. He woke, but didn’t stand until the afternoon. This evening he was able to walk back here with the other horses.”

  Earlier that afternoon, when we had gone out walking, I told Cody what had happened. “The moral of the story is that one shouldn’t own horses if one doesn’t have time to care for them,” I said, trying to relieve my own guilt. I hadn’t realized Cam was keeping them on the steep hillside he tilled daily. If I had seen the situation, I would have known the danger, but I wonder if I would have held out against Cam’s and Dtaw’s never mind attitudes. In Thai, there is a phrase that most visitors learn before any other: mai pen rai. It means no problem, never mind, there’s nothing to worry about, relax. It’s the phrase used for you’re welcome and every other situation when the foreigner feels worry and anxiety, and the local smiles and reminds him or her that everything will be okay. Don’t worry so much. So many times I heard that response to my worries that I learned to question any worries and concerns I had. Were they legitimate or was it my American habit of overthinking, of seeing the worst-case scenario, of trying to control the future? I was worried all along about owning horses when we knew nothing about it, about entrusting them to someone who had only raised water buffaloes and pigs and chickens and ducks. But I gave up fighting with Dtaw about this before I even started because I knew what he would say: mai pen rai.