April | 2023 | pull up a chair

April 28, 2023

some words are hard to say. . .

i don’t think i will ever forget the first time i heard the word cancer spoken in a sentence in which i was the unspoken subject. i was groggy from anesthesia, but there was my surgeon, leaning against the curtain in the recovery room. he was dressed in street clothes, his backpack slung over his shoulder, headed home to dinner, i imagined, with his little brood up here in the leafy suburbs, where we happen to both share the same zip code. i heard him say “it was cancer,” and i heard him say he was so surprised. i don’t think i heard much after that. and for all the days since i’ve been trying on that word.

it’s a word that’s hard to say. it’s a word that’s hard to slip your lips around. especially when it belongs to you. and when the cancer in question is the one that was settled quite inconspicuously in your very own lung. i’ve thought a lot about the eight years since they first saw it there. no one thought it was cancer. they thought maybe it was a scar, from a pneumonia i’d once had. or an old broken rib. nothing to worry about. all those years. all those christmases and birthday candles blown. all those graduations and droppings off at college, and at law school. all those late late nights when a million worries kept me up, but never that one. never ever a worry that i had cancer in my lungs.

until december, when someone once again saw it by accident and decided we should not ignore it anymore. i owe that someone every year of the rest of my life. and while the next weeks of january into march were a wild, wild ride, it took till april 18 to finally figure out what it was, to finally figure out that the suspicious “neoplastic process” was in fact just that: neoplastic is another word for cancer.

and it’s gone now. they cut it out. all of it, we hope. my surgeon called the other day and in the cheeriest voice i might ever have heard, he said “congratulations;” said “it’s as good a report as we could hope for, knowing it was cancer.”

i am writing the word here, because words are how i make sense of life. i have always found my way with words. words on paper most of all. words on paper even more than words in air. words on paper are the tracings across the topography of my life. i find my way stringing one word to another, groping along from one to another till the sentence ends. and right now i am in a thicket that makes very little sense. for a few days there, i could not for the life of me tell which way was north, and which was south. i was all turned around, and upside down. i wept and wept some more.

but slowly, slowly, i am feeling my way. and i am feeling very brave. braver than i ever would have guessed. i would have guessed i’d crumble. but maybe all my crumbling is only in my imaginings. maybe, over the years, when i’ve played out my potpourri of disaster scenarios, i’ve been getting the crumbling out of the way, so that when the real thing came along i was practiced, i was ready to step boldly, bravely, even valiantly up to the plate.

part of being brave is learning to say those two words, strung together: lung + cancer. lung cancer. i am now part of an unwelcome sisterhood; i’m among the ones to whom those words now belong, and whose lives are shaped and re-shaped thereafter and ever after. and i am linking arms emphatically with the ones who know these hauntings and these hollows. i am, so help me God, intending with every ounce of will and fierce determination to be among the ones who say aloud that we’ve had lung cancer and we are here to prove you can live beyond it. you can live with it shrinking––day by day, month by month––into the distant distance.

i am still going to dance at my firstborn’s wedding, and my secondborn’s too (or whatever is the life event for which cakes will be ordered and flowers strung). i am going to sashay through my garden, the wise old woman who communes with birds and bumblebees and baby ferns. i will some day tell stories that include the chapter of the time they made the words lung and cancer a part of my vernacular. how never in a million years did i think those words would find their way into my narrative. but here they are. and who knows where they’ll take me, though i’ve a hunch it will be a heady, heady heart-swelling somewhere. i’m not one to leave life’s sheddings by the wayside, unstudied, unplumbed for all their wisdoms and epiphanies.

these might be the two hardest words i’ve ever said. but i am going to say them till they shrink in size, in wallop. i am going to say them till they’re stripped of high-voltage burn capacity.

we all have words that are hard to say, words we don’t think will ever be ours. words we don’t want to be ours: widow, widower, survivor, victim, divorcee, depressed, anxious, anorexic (the word that used to be my hardest one to say), amputee, diabetic, dyslexic, broken-hearted. maybe the point is to take on those words, slip our arms through their sleeves, make them a part of who we are, but not the whole of who we are. to be not afraid, nor defined solely by their simple syllables. but to allow them to deepen who we are, to add contour and dimension, to layer on the empathies. to shape our particular view of how we see the world. and where we find our place within it.

i don’t intend to turn this into a place where we contemplate cancer. not at all. but right now, it’s the woodsy thicket in which i am trying to find my way. if i—someone who never smoked a single cigarette, someone who never lived with anyone who smoked—can bring the words out into the open then maybe, just maybe, it won’t be such a surprise to the next someone who finds herself stymied by a spot on her lung that cannot be explained. i will be the first one to wave my hand in the air, and say, please don’t wait. don’t hesitate. bite the bullet and let them have at it. find out if it’s cancer or not. don’t dawdle. cuz dawdling does not buy time.

only courage buys time. stare it down, this cancer. let it know who’s in charge. let it know that you’ve no intention of letting it steal a day of your most precious life.

i have always known that life is fragile precious. i’ve known that since long before the day my papa died, and i somehow kept on breathing after he was gone. i’ve known it over and over and over again. i’ve known it on the day i got married, when walking down the aisle was something i never really knew i’d know. i’ve known it when i birthed each of my two boys, one whose birth almost felt as if it was about to slip away, but i was determined, and i was not going to lose the answer to the million prayers i’d prayed. i knew it, too, the night i miscarried my baby baby girl, a night as real to me as the ones that ended with babies cradled in my arms.

i’ve lived so many days i’d never thought i’d see.

and i am going to live even more. and i am going to say aloud that i once had cancer in my lung, but they cut it out, and now it’s gone. and i am going to tell the story of what it’s like to live emphatically after the doctor in the recovery room tells you he was so surprised. so so surprised to find out that it was, in fact, cancer idling in my lung.

cancer i hope and pray is gone. completely, totally, forever gone.

the two little bits i found this week seem fitting for a day of telling hard truths. first, musician Nick Cave’s advice to a 13-year-old:

“Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.

“Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world.”

and next up, annie dillard on why we read and write at all….

“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?”

– Annie Dillard

and, this, maybe more than anything. . .

a friend who will be a lifeline sent me this late last night, and i breathed it in through my tears. we can do hard things. humans have done hard things since the beginning of time.

a little note: i am not going to share any medical details here, only the rumblings of my heart. please know that i have a team of angels on my side, medically.

what hard things have you done? and what lightened the load?

29 Comments

April 21, 2023

waiting. . .

waiting is the word of the week. word of the year, in fact––so far, anyway. i’m on the other side of surgery––and have the tic-tac-toe board crisscrossing my side to prove it. they got out what they needed to get out (i hope), though it was more than we’d been betting on. so now i’m waiting.

waiting is a quilt of many textures. sometimes it washes over me, with a calm that takes the sting away. sometimes i feel my heart kick into higher, faster gear. i try hard to turn off the nozzle that lets the worries out. but even my secondborn tells me i do too much of that. and he’s only been keeping watch for twenty-one of my years (and he is 300 miles away right now, so he’s out of range for any current worries; job one for me is to project calm to the one with the very, very giant heart). it’ll take two weeks for the blessed souls in the pathology lab to do what all they do to lay out the specifics of this little dervish that somehow found its way to the bottom of my lung. and that gives me time to sink slowly into the bath of this new reality.

waiting gives the human species time to settle in, to realize you’ve taken more steps into the unknown than you’d ever imagined you would. and you’re calmer––and maybe braver––than you’d ever ever imagined you could be (most of the time anyway). of all the worries i’ve worried over the years, i never added lungs to the list.

just the other week, i read a lovely line from a 96-year-old, a woman who knew she was on the last pages of her life, and so she scribbled out her truths for her children, her grandchildren, and her many greats. when asked what might be the most important thing she’d realized as she rounded the final bend, she simply said: “i wish i hadn’t spent so many hours worrying, cuz most of those worries never came to be.”

mostly, what waiting does is make me savor every minute. stepping out into the balmy springtime air. tucking my nose into the soon-to-be blossoms. listening to the owls hoot at 5:15 a.m. marveling at the miracles of modern medicine that can do so very very much, and for the most part do it so very lovingly. (i fell in love with my nurses, emily who stayed all night with me, and clare who worked by day. the care with which they changed dressings, filled syringes, listened to my questions, they made me so so proud that i was once one of them. and they made me realize how very much even their most basic medical tasks translate into a language that feels like love. i was a stranger to them when i was rolled into my cubicle of a room, but by shift’s end i was sad to see them leave. if you’re a nurse, believe me when i tell you you’re a living saint. to make the scared and fragile and confused feel safe and tended to is a sacred act, is sacramental, in that it lifts even the most perfunctory of duties into the closest thing i know to benediction.)

a few of things i marveled at this week, while idling in my wait station: my friend the nurse practitioner who, when she found out how much it hurt to try to lie down in bed, ordered up a giant wedge pillow that made last night a whole lot less bumpy. having two of my three boys right by my bedside all week long. one of ’em had me laughing (sidesplittingly is not such an apt description here, though it might have stretched some stitches) within hours of getting to my little room. (i was on the heart transplant floor, and, believe you me, i did not miss for a minute how blessed i was to be there only for a chunk taken out of my little lung.)

yet another surround-sound marvel in this week one of the two-week wait: the promise of springtime, that life bursts forth year after year after year. we live in an eternal spiral, and i am on for the holy blessed sumptuous ride. stepping into the still soft air, watching the goldfinch nibble at the thistle seed, rejoicing as the daffodils tossed off their snowy caps to rise and shine again, golden periscopes of spring. it felt to me like the arms of God were wrapping round me in the form of this gentle greening world.

in book world, one fine thing happened: there is a lovely lovely journal, the EcoTheo Review––a quarterly put out by a collective of poets (mostly), writers, and artists who plumb the depths of wonder and beauty in this world, and who claim as their mission, to “celebrate wonder, enliven conversations, and inspire commitments to ecology, spirituality, and art.” and they published a conversation we’d had a few weeks back about The Book of Nature, which you can read here. the editor who spent hours in our exchange of thoughts, Esteban Rodriguez is his name, is himself a poet, and one of the kindest, gentlest souls i’ve been blessed to come to know. it more than more than made up for the half dozen book events that got wiped off the calendar.

while i wait in these days ahead (and try so hard not to worry!), i’m going to be on watch, to soak up and see every blessed wonder and beauty in this holy world. i don’t want to miss a drop. i am following the instruction of richard rohr, the modern-day mystic, who asked:

Where is this God being revealed? Not in the safe world, but at the edge, at the bottom, among those where we don’t want to find God, where we don’t look for God, where we don’t expect God.

i’m going to look for God in every nook and cranny along this waiting way. because i’m fairly certain God comes in a thousand thousand forms: in the gentle touch of the nurse who poked my arm, in the bouquet dropped on my front stoop, in the tub of soup that now takes up a shelf in the fridge, in the box that’s on its way from zingerman’s deli in ann arbor, and in every last note and gentle text that simply says, “you got this, and i am here beside you.”

God comes most certainly in the hours when our waiting gives God more than plenty time to tap us on the heart, the soul, the noggin. i’m on watch while i wait…

where did you find God this week, or whatever is the name you give to the all-embracing goodness that i call the holy Author of it all?

18 Comments

April 14, 2023

a need for butterfly wings. . .

beloved chairs,

i’ve thought long and hard about what i was going to write here today, and i’ve decided to lower my voice to a whisper and let you all in on what’s stirring in my heart. after all, even if this table is more cyber than maple, and even if the chairs we pull up are virtual, it’s all very real, and utterly fulsome to me: the love and the kindness and the tenderness, and all the shared wisdoms and laughters and tears, as deep and human––and often divine––as they could possibly be.

and what sort of hearts would we be if we didn’t share some especially tender threads every once in a while? so here’s what i want to tell you, though i really truly don’t want anyone worrying: i’m having a little surgery next week. a little something is stirring in one of my lungs and they need to take it out. there, now you know. i’ve been in something of a medical mystery tour these past many weeks, some of them bumpier than others, and all of them pointing toward the date i now have with a wonderful surgeon who has a habit of making me laugh out loud.

the timing, of course, is something of a bummer. not in any marketing plan in publishing land is there a clause that suggests the author duck out for a while to have scalpels taken to her chest. so i’ve had to cancel a swath of bookish adventures for the next few weeks. or, “postpone” them, as sweet blair keeps correcting me. and since brand new books have only so wide a window for birthings, i feel a bit as if i’ve slammed the sash on my very own thumb.

but maybe you can help keep the flutter in my butterfly wings. maybe for the next few weeks, while i get the wobble out of my knees, i can imagine you afluttering for me. any simple thing: maybe a few words on that ol’ amazon reader review (my publisher keeps reminding me); maybe ask your local librarian if they’ve a copy on their shelves; maybe you simply send me a picture of a page you’ve found yourself reading. (i melt every time anyone does that.) or, maybe, whatever stirs you.

i promise you i need not one other anything. i am abundantly wrapped in the tenderest care by my beloved, blessed dear hearts and souls. my blair has been nothing short of a saint. and one of my boys will be here all week. and the other has sworn not to give it a worry. (an emphatic answer to this mama’s prayer; more than anything i did not want that kid to give it one shred of a worry.)

because i’m a quirky iteration of shy, and because i’m mostly allergic to SocialMediaLand, i am not saying a word about this out in the public sphere (i don’t think of the chair as anything close to public; it all feels very sacred and safe here to me), as i don’t want it to prompt any worries or wild-eyed questions. (trust me, the things people ask!!!) i’ve kept it all exceedingly quiet because i can’t bear the thought of worrying the ones i love (or anyone else) and, until i had more than an inkling of what was going on, i didn’t want to utter a word.

so know only this: that little fluttering, however you flutter, is more than aplenty; it will keep me afloat and awaft, and soon as i can, i’ll pick up the winging all on my own. xoxox, and thank you.

love, bam

p.s. i think by now you’ve figured out that i love to respond to your comments whenever you leave one at the table, but i might not be able to check the chair too much in the week ahead. and i want to apologize in advance.

and speaking of the public square, how’s this for the perfect antidote?

Remedy for Social Overexposure

by Sandra Cisneros

Seek a pirul tree and sit
beneath immediately.
Remove from
ears and tongue,
words.
Fast from same.

Soak in a tub of seclusion.
Rinse face with wind.
In extreme cases, douse
oneself with sky. Then,
swab gently with clouds.

Dress in clean, pressed pajamas.
Preferably white.

Hold close to the heart,
chihuahuas. Kiss and
be kissed by same.

Consume a cool glass of night.
Read poetry that inspires poetry.
Write until temperament
returns to calm.

Place moonlight in a bowl.
Sleep beside and
dream of white flowers.

or this one stanza from celtic mystic christine valters paintner’s poem, “origins,” especially the first stanza, about peering into a robin’s throat, an image i envision again and again every time i see the robins plucking for a worm in my newly-verdant grasses…

Origins

If I could peer far enough down
a robin’s pulsing throat, would I see
notes piled there waiting to be flung
into freshness of morning?

If I close my eyes and burrow
my face into peony’s petals,
would I discover the source
of its scent, a sacred offering?

Can I plunge inside
and find a lifetime of words
spooled tightly inside my heart
ready for a tug?

If I dig beneath the bedrock
will I find love there,
solid like iron or does it flow like magma
filling in all of the empty spaces?

–christine valters paintner

and i’ll sashay off into the sunset with this psalm from dorianne laux…

Psalm

by Dorianne Laux

Lord, there are creatures in the understory,
snails with whorled backs and silver boots,
trails beetles weave in grass, black rivers
of ants, unbound ladybugs opening their wings,

spotted veils and flame, untamed choirs

of banjo-colored crickets and stained-glass cicadas.
Lord, how shall we count the snakes and frogs
and moths? How shall we love the hidden
and small? Mushrooms beneath leaves

constructing their death domes in silence,

their silken gills and mycelial threads, cap scales
and patches, their warts and pores. And the buried
bulbs that will bloom in spring, pregnant with flower
and leaf, sing Prepare for My Radiance, Prepare

for the Pageantry of My Inevitable Surprise.

These are the queendoms, the spines and horns,
the clustered hearts beating beneath our feet. Lord
though the earth is locked in irons of ice and snow
there are angels in the undergrowth, praise them.

“how shall we love the hidden and small?” that’s a question to ponder in the blessed, blessed unfurling days ahead….

p.s.s happy blessed birthday to my beloved ella bella beautiful, who is turning 14 today, her goldenest birthday. xoxox

34 Comments

April 7, 2023

into the depths and the darkness…

i hadn’t set out to burrow into the darknesses of history this week. but i’ve been traversing trails darker and darker, as i’ve turned the pages of jewish history, a history i entered into on sunday when i listened to a priest tell a story of holy week. drawing from the work of early christian scholars, the priest i was listening to closely laid into a tight and stark timeline an account of holy week, one i’d never quite followed so closely, one which even more poignantly drew me into the jesus for whom judaism held the holiest code.

one curiosity led to another, and notes were exchanged between the priest and i, and books were requested from the library. while i awaited the books, i wandered upstairs to the bookcase where my husband keeps his collection of jewish-themed books, from the big book of jewish humor to the wisdom of the Talmud, from chaim potok to martin buber. that’s where i found the big fat doorstopper of my people: the story of the jews, the majestic 522-page historical tome written by abba eban, the late great israeli statesmen and scholar of hebrew and arabic languages (he was fluent in 10 languages).

i pulled the book from the shelf, and started to read, and soon i was typing line after line of notes as i turned the pages of eban’s telling of jewish history, from the drama of abraham through the rise of christianity, and on through the crusades of the middle ages, through the founding of israel, straight through to the state of the middle east when eban’s book was published in 1968.

these are but some of the notes i typed, ones especially relevant to this holy week:

Jesus meticulously kept Jewish law, made pilgrimage to Jerusalem on Passover, ate unleavened bread, uttered blessing when he drank wine. “He was a Jew in word and deed.” Articulated ideas of the masses. Sermon on the Mount: “I have not come to destroy Law but to fulfill it.”

with each page’s turning it felt apt to be tracing more and more deeply the story of the jews in this particularly blessed week where our house is filled with the rhythms, once again, of passover and passion week. after spending each saturday of the year studying torah, portion by portion with a collection of inquiring minds at our synagogue, it seemed as if eban was giving me a glimpse of the whole jigsaw puzzle i’d been studying piece by piece.

but the longer i read, the darker it grew. in the name of one holy God, we have persecuted, and burned at the stake. we’ve thrown the holiest texts of the jews onto the pyres of history. we’ve forced them into ghettoes, ordered them to stay in their homes with shutters drawn on easter sunday. ordered them to wear badges, so identifying themselves as followers of the One Holy God. we’ve told centuries and centuries of stories making them out to be the ones who crucified jesus. who betrayed him in the garden, who led him before pontius pilate, mocked him and crowned him with thorns. those stories, lost in translation, lacking full context, miss plenty of points. those stories have been turned into stones to torture the jews.

i weep at the decimations of history, at the evil and the distortion that drives the worst of humanity. at the fact that we wage such wars under the flag of God, and of church. how dare we.

i’m 239 pages in; i’ve just read through the crusades, and the development of the ghetto in medieval europe, where “jewry was sealed off by a bolted gate.” today, i’ll put down eban, and i’ll pick up the way of the cross, by caryll houselander, the anglican mystic and artist, who curiously worked as a counselor of war-traumatized children, the war in question being the one where hitler sought to exterminate (what a detestable verb) the entire jewish population, a hatred that never seems to die.

i will read, as i always do, each station along the way of the cross, to the mount where jesus was nailed to a cross and left to die between two criminals, one who sought forgiveness and one who scoffed.

i will weep as i turn those pages, just as i’ve wept through the pages of my people.

i will ask, louder and louder, how might we have been so very wrong? and how have we dared demonize a holy people, a chosen people, a people whose truth jesus so ardently tried to tell? jesus’s holiest command, “love as you would be loved,” is in fact the jews’ central command, found in leviticus, and taught by the great hillel to be the greatest of all.

a marvelous story, in fact, is told of hillel, the gentle sage, who once was confronted by someone who wanted him to teach the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot, and to which hillel is said to have replied something along the lines of “what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. that is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this—go and study it!”

what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.

love as you would be loved.

Father, forgive us for all of our sins, for which there are so, so many.

who taught you to love as you would be loved? and how did you see that played out in the fine grain of your life?

because friday is the day we pull up a chair, i’ve written on 17 good fridays now, and each year i seem to find a new way in. here are a few others:

way of sorrows

jesuit girl with jewish soul

into the depths

silence on the day that darkens

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Month: April, 2023