I read the email three times in a row, hoping each time that this time, the words will be different.
Then I think, No you don’t, cancer. Take me; I’m a jackass anyway. But you can’t have Debbie. The person who, all those youthful Valentine’s Days that I didn’t have a valentine, not only always sent me one but signed it from Jan Brady’s imaginary boyfriend, George Glass. The person who responded to my diagnosis by making me a FUCK CANCER shirt. No.
I pick up the phone and hit the star marked “favorites.” Debbie’s husband, Mike, answers. I recognize the shell shock in his voice the moment he says, “Hi.”
“I got the email. How’s it going?” I ask, stupidly, helplessly.
“We’re coping,” he says. “It’s not like we can do anything else. Here, let me get my wife.”
He puts Debbie on the phone. The first thing she says is “I think I’m going to need my shirt back.”
Welcome to the club, Debbie. One in three women will develop some form of cancer in their lives. Yet somehow this was a uniform I never imagined you’d have to wear.
She fills me in on more of the details of her situation, and how what she thought was a minor surgery for cysts escalated into a diagnosis and a fast track for surgery and chemo. She is shocked and pissed. Her arrival in this new place, like mine, has been abrupt and confusing. “We’re all kind of stunned,” she says. “I don’t want to be Cancer Lady. I don’t want to be the bald woman everybody feels bad for. This is not the plan. I’m supposed to get old.”
I wish I could promise her it will all be okay. People do that—they confidently tell you it’ll all be all right, and that’s just bullshit. When we lived in Brooklyn, I had a friend named Anna. Anna was gorgeous and smart, as were her husband and two kids. She got breast cancer in her early 30s. She was already fit and healthy before the cancer, but after it, she went all in. She eliminated sugar, white flour, alcohol, and meat. She meditated and took supplements and juiced. The family left the city and moved upstate to the country for the fresh air and slower pace. Four years later, Anna died anyway. Because the inconvenient truth is that cancer sometimes just doesn’t care how virtuous you are or how much you have to live for. Cancer is a dick like that.
So I don’t feed Debbie useless lies. Instead I say, “I can’t speak for the doctors, but here’s what I can tell you. About a third of the people you know will step up and do great stuff for you because that’s who they are and they would do it for anyone in trouble. A third of them will never get it together and cannot deal, and that’s just how it is. The rest will do whatever they can, and they’ll do it just because they love you, Debbie. We’re the ones who love you. We love your guys too.”
“It’ll be okay,” she says reassuringly. “You and I—we got married together, we had our babies together, and we’re going to die together. When we’re 90.” Sounds like a plan.
The next day I go on Etsy and start plugging in words based solely on their history of amusing Debbie. It doesn’t take too long to land on a subtle, organic cotton T-shirt emblazoned with a curlicue triangle and, in bold letters, the word MERKIN. I think that will do nicely.
It’s an unseasonably warm evening one week later. My friend Stacey and I are perched at the bar at the Amsterdam Ale House, paying marginal attention to the ESPN blaring from the television. I’m wearing my new go-to uniform of loose, flowing clothing and a tightly tied scarf that conceals layers of gauze. “I know what you’re thinking,” I say as Stacey sizes me up. “Why is she out on a Friday night, and where are her eight identically dressed children?”
Stacey teaches yoga at my local studio, and like me, she’s a theater nerd and mom. We have something else in common now too—cancer. Last year, she was diagnosed with the “good kind” of thyroid cancer. A small scar from her surgery sits near the hollow of her throat, like a pendant without a chain.
“You look great,” she tells me. I get this a lot lately. Once I hit 40, I started assuming “You look great” came with a silent “for your age” at the end. Now I think there’s an implied “for your cancer.” Yet for one who’s skated by on an incredibly lazy personal maintenance plan her entire life, I do look great. I’ve been eating right, sleeping great, and doing all the limited physical activity I can. Aside from the Pucci scarf covering the open, oozing sore where the malignant cancer was and the two tiny, probably unrelated little nodules on my lung that turned up on the CT scan I had a few weeks ago, I’m in the best shape of my life.
“You look great too. Your scar’s faded so much since I first met you,” I observe.
“Yeah, but I don’t ever want it to go away completely,” she says. “I want to remember, every time I look in the mirror. It reminds me what I survived.” I’m still too newly brokenhearted over my head to agree with her, but I try to hope the scars will someday provide character. The bald spot? I’ll tell people I got it in Desert Storm. The red rectangle on my thigh? Secret Russian mob tattoo. That clean little notch in my neck? Knife fight in Juárez.
It’s becoming clear lately that I’m not the only scarred one around here. It’s just that some wounds are more visible than others. The kids have begun to rechannel their anxiety about my illness into some straight-up surly, uncooperative behavior toward their still feeble mom. They leave a devastating trail of socks and squeezy yogurt wrappers everywhere, and I fully doubt they would bathe or wear shoes without elaborate and vaguely threatening reminders. Part of it is simply their ages—you don’t get to be ten and six without routinely acting like hotel room–trashing rock stars, whacked out on Capri Sun. There is, I suppose, something encouragingly indomitable about the human spirit to be found in the solipsism of a child. She will only give so much of a crap about your oozing wounds or fear of mortality, and then she will expect you to provide her a peanut butter sandwich, no crust, and a glass of milk—and damned if taking care of her doesn’t take you out of your own terrified, self-absorbed head.
Another part of this, though, is surely cancer-related acting out. This is Lucy’s last year of elementary school, and thanks to New York’s brutally ruthless and competitive public school system, we are already hip deep in a fall filled with the blood sport of tests and tours at middle schools all over the city. The kid would have been stressed enough without Cancer Mom to deal with. Throw in that monkey wrench, and she’s been bumming out on the inconveniences my disease and recuperation have imposed on her and Bea. I’ve tried to be a trouper, but I still haven’t been able to be the slumber party–hosting, bake sale–dominating champ of school years past. Subsequently, Lucy has been expertly playing the tween angst card, as only a daughter of a working, recovering-from-illness woman can.
This morning, I’m in the bedroom sorting through a mountain of laundry searching for two even vaguely matching socks when Lucy looks at the pile with angry disdain. “You’re always going off somewhere and leaving us,” she gripes.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “I haven’t taken a trip since I did that reading in San Francisco, and that was almost two years ago.”
“You’re going to Costa Rica, aren’t you?” she replies. So that’s what this is about.
I wasn’t much for sun and sand and jungle even before the melanoma thing. But when Jill and Michele sent out an email to a circle of friends back in April—long before my cancer diagnosis, well before I first felt that little bump on my head—to go in on a house and spend a ladies-only Thanksgiving week in a small Costa Rican surfing town, I decided before I’d finished reading it that I had to make it happen.
I knew the idea of gallivanting off to Central America for that most American and family-centric of holidays would raise a few eyebrows. I also knew, screw it; I don’t get a lot of invitations to drink margaritas with a bunch of lesbians in Costa Rica. Jeff had been encouraging—exotic opportunities don’t often come along, so if one person gets a chance to travel, the other always steps up to make it happen. What I couldn’t have predicted was how the trip would come at an optimum moment for my
firstborn to do some serious guilt-tripping.
“You’re always gone,” she repeats. “You were gone a long time for your surgery.” I was gone one night.
I look at her, steaming there with resentment, and feel the urge to launch into another of our regular “No I’m not/Yes you are” standoffs. “Did you brush your teeth and comb your hair?” I instead reply, as I regard her tangled mass of snarls. We have exactly one minute to get out the door if we’re not going to be late for school, though you wouldn’t know it from the defiantly indifferent attitude of my progeny.
“No,” she answers, like it’s a wild idea. “You didn’t tell me to.”
“We do this every day. You know how to get ready for school.”
“You’re my mommy, you’re supposed to tell me what to do,” she snaps back.
“You’re in the fifth grade and you’re supposed to know what to do,” I snarl, exasperated. “So brush your teeth and comb your hair.” She stalks off, furious, and does the angriest bit of grooming I have ever witnessed.
As Lucy, Bea, and I walk in awkward silence to school, it dawns on me. This is not about Costa Rica, or tooth brushing, for that matter. I had surgery. I was zonked out recuperating for weeks. I couldn’t even promise my children that I’d get better. I was gone. I frightened Lucy that I might get even more gone. She’s not trying to make my life hard. She’s finishing elementary school and leaving her friends in June. She just wants her mom to stick around to be the one to nag her. Because she’s the kid and I’m her mom and that’s important to her right now. Ohhhhh. I cannot imagine how scary it was for her when I got sick, and she—the responsible, mature, dutiful daughter, all of ten years old—felt the weight of all that.
“Listen, I didn’t get it before but I do now,” I say. “I hear you when you say you need my help. I’m here to take care of you, okay? I’m always Mom and I will always take care of you. I don’t want to fight.”
“Me neither,” she says.
“Were you worried,” I ask, “when I was sick?”
“Duh, Mom,” Lucy answers. “I was afraid you were going to die.”
I kiss both my little girls goodbye. Although I’m sure I’m giving my daughters plenty of material for their future shrinks every day, I’m still around to screw them up. Go ahead and piss me off, kids. Tell me I drive you crazy and that I’m so mean. You have no idea how important it is to me that you’re just the little girls with the crazy-making mean mom. Because it’s a whole lot better than being the ones with the dead mom.
CHAPTER 7
Christmas Is Over
Thanksgiving 2010
Even the main street of Mal País is not paved. It’s basically the only street—a bumpy strip dotted with hostels, surf shops, and casual restaurants where patrons sip Imperial beer and fruit smoothies and stray dogs lazily assert their right-of-way by parking in our path.
The heavy humidity that’s been diligently frizzing what’s left of my hair since we landed had not abated in the least when we walked into the house. In fact, it had seemed damper inside, with a mildewed aroma permeating the air. Aside from the native moistness, however, the place is stunning: high ceilings, full kitchen, tranquil swimming pool and patio, and big rooms with hammocks on their private decks. Jill, Michele, and I had dropped off our bags when we got in, and then, famished, walked down the road to the first friendly-looking joint we could find while the rest of our friends trickled in back at the house.
We are eating lunch at an open-air establishment with a dirt floor and rustic roof to keep out the rain. I am having the casado—the house meal—a plate of chicken, rice, and beans. It’s cheap and simple and so delicious I could weep. “Everything here is so fresh,” Jill says. “The last time I was here I felt like I’d gone through detox by the time we left.” I see my plan for the week unfolding before me already. No painkillers or weird CT scan dyes running through my veins. None of NYC’s abundance of grime and noise and hassle. Just the chance to feel cleaner and clearer and lighter of heart.
“Have you talked to Debbie?” I ask Jill. Her surgery was just two days ago, and considerably more invasive than mine. Her cancer was staged at 2c, and she’s starting chemo in January.
“I have,” she says. “She’s wiped out but she sounds good. She just wants to be well enough to enjoy Thanksgiving.”
I’m still getting the hang of my post-melanoma identity, and of being the person who travels with a small supply of Silvadene and a dorky purple headscarf, of being the yogi who’s not going to attempt a headstand. I’m also determined, however, this new person is never going to put off another damn thing—like going for sunrise walks by the Pacific or spending time with friends I love. During the heat of the day, while my friends are happily surfing and sunbathing, I prefer to feel the spray of the ocean and watch monkeys leap around the trees from the safety of a shady yoga class on a pergola right out on the beach. The teacher is an impossibly beautiful French woman with a hypnotically lilting accent. I am immediately hooked.
Despite my best efforts at being 100 percent half-assed, there is something new about my practice here that moves me. The awareness that being in a different place brings. The incessant chatter inside my head quieted down a few notches. The worrying that I’m doing something wrong gone, replaced with a sense of pliancy and suppleness. Just soft inhalations and exhalations, my breathing so much smoother and easier than my usual tense, shallow respiration. I stretch forward, unwinding my too often too tight limbs toward each other. I sink deeply and wrap my hands around my feet, and hands and feet delight in meeting each other.
“How was the class?” Jill asks as I languidly stroll in to the house after my session.
“Good,” I reply. “Nothing too strenuous. Lots of stretching. No funny business.”
“Ah,” she says, “tourist yoga.”
“Exactly,” I say, as I crack open an Imperial. I may not be on the fast track to enlightenment with my remedial hatha and beer plan, but it’s my vacation-based spiritual path and I’ll drink my way down it if I want to.
From then on, the days work out brilliantly. Yoga. Watermelon margarita that tastes like summer crossed with tequila and burying myself in a book at the bar, followed by deep tissue massage. I stroll over to the cabana, undress, and slip under a vibrant pareu. The ocean breeze blowing in is soft and salty. If I opened my eyes, I could see the sunlight streaming in. I choose instead to close them and let the masseuse knead me until I’m limp. She smooths lavender-scented potions into my calves; she slides her hands down my back and the curve of my spine. I roll lazily over and she places a hand softly over my heart. Although I know now that my body can be a vicious bitch, I am still proud of what it can also be. It can grow a baby. It can do a backbend. It can entwine with a lover. It’s regenerating a scalp right now. Even starfish and earthworms would be impressed.
Each day of the week, I dutifully apply sunscreen, a process that is extensive and needs to be repeated constantly. Each day I do it more lovingly, relearning the terrain of my body with each application. I am so pissed at it for turning my own cells against me, but I’m impressed at how responsive it is. I want to be friends with my flesh from here on in: the paleness, the moles, the laugh lines, the calluses on my feet, the allergic reactions to shellfish, the blushes at inopportune situations, and then—the kicker—the way it tried to kill me. My body is not the enemy. It is a force to be reckoned with. Of all the things I can give thanks for this faraway Thanksgiving, this year, I’m going to start with that.
December 25, 2010
Jeff’s folks have come over to exchange Christmas gifts and share a humble dinner of roast chicken and gingerbread. It’s a quiet, restful day, especially because a third of the assembly has been dealing with cancer recently. Dad is sitting by the tree, smiling. He’s lost a few pounds this time around on the chemo, but it looks good on him. He is now fully immersed in his regimen. He goes in on Mondays for treatment and then back on Tuesdays for a refill, one week on and one w
eek off. In the off weeks he can still get around and rehearse with the church choir. In the on weeks he’s wiped out. The girls know he cannot play with them as much, but they’re patient with him. Next month he and Mom are going to Florida, and they’re both eager for the break.
“The tree is beautiful,” Dad observes to me as we sit amid the detritus of the morning’s unwrapping frenzy. “Don’t you find that everything seems more beautiful now? I’m so emotional. We went to Alvin Ailey a few nights ago and I cried the whole performance.” He gives a chuckle, embarrassed by his candor.
I nod in assent. “How’s the treatment going?” I ask. “You look great.” I cannot help adding a silent “for your cancer” in my head.
“I feel good,” he says. “I hope it’s working. I just don’t like it when the doctor starts talking to me about ‘my’ cancer. I don’t want to call it that. It’s not me. I just want it out of there.”
Dad is fundamentally combative and rarely takes well to disagreement, so I am unsurprised by his adversarial approach. Though I know I’m risking putting myself on the receiving end of his eternal eagerness for a debate, I nonetheless must beg to differ. “Well, my cancer is my cancer,” I say. “It’s my body, it’s my cells. I feel like I have to be peaceful toward it. I don’t want to rile it up. Does that sound crazy?”
“We all find our own way,” he answers gently.
Later, as he and Mom pile on their coats and gather up their presents, Dad gazes around the living room wistfully. “I guess Christmas is really over,” he sighs. A wave of sadness engulfs us all. Jeff and I flick a glance toward each other, and I know what we’re both thinking. Dad is already missing this Christmas because he’s wondering if he will see the next one. Sickness has a way of forcing you to confront mortality in ways you never imagined. It’s not just “Oh, la di dah, I wonder if I have soul.” It’s “What if my last birthday was my last birthday?” It’s “What if there are no more Christmases?” I watch Dad take one more look back toward us as he and Mom get in the elevator with their presents. He will never walk through our door again.
A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles Page 7
