pull up a chair

you start to wonder. which is another name for worry. for most of the last five months, i’ve worked at pushing it off to the edge of the frame. to keep it out of my focus. but october is coming. and with it, the next scan. the next clear-eyed peek into my insides, into my lungs, to see if anything’s lurking that oughtn’t be. 

i’ve mused about the saintly side of scan time. how it’s akin to memento mori, the ancient and holy practice of remembering our death so that we maximally live our one swift shot at this astonishing life. 

but the other side of scan time is the deeply human side. the wake-me-up-in-the-night, the try-not-to-worry-that-the-pain-in-my-ribs-is-anything-scary side. 

i feel it rumbling around the edges. the what-ifs i bat down as if a pesky mosquito that won’t leave me alone. i try not to tumble down the shadowy mole hole of imagining a call to my boys, letting them know i need another round of surgery. i try to quash the dialogue that runs through my head, my doctor’s voice telling me there’s something in the scan that looks worrisome, that needs more poking around. i try not to let cancer be the ice to my spine. 

i try not to cry.

but sometimes i get scared.

i am, always, bumpily, raggedly, very much human.

i’m still new to the tidal ebb and flow of scan time. and the scan now rising on the horizon’s edge is only my third since surgery, since they took out a chunk of my lung, since they found an uncommon cancer that sometimes decides to shuffle around in the lungs, settle in where it wasn’t before. what i’m finding here in the precinct of scan time is that when i near the one-month-to-go mark, the palpable fear comes. 

maybe each round i’ll get a little bit less wobbly (though, having lived with myself and my keen imagination for all of these years now, i tend to doubt that). maybe i won’t be tempted to imagine the worst. 

but the flip side, the smarter side, even now, even at the less-than-three-weeks-to-go mark, is that the hovering worry makes me sink deeper and deeper into the now. “today is a day when i don’t know anything’s wrong yet,” i sometimes hear myself saying. i suppose there are healthier ways to frame the day (for instance, omitting the “yet”), but once the doctor stamps the C word onto your chart, once it follows you pretty much wherever you go, it gets decidedly hard to unshackle yourself from being afraid.

remember, i’m bumpily, raggedly, very much human.

which is why a necessary ingredient on this bumpy, pock-riddled road is to enlist a battalion of comrades. some are fellow travelers i know up close and personal. a few are glorious souls i only know through their words, words they beam to me as if telepathic lifelines to put oomph where i’m lacking. 

whether they’re friends whose numbers i could find in my phone, or soulmates by circumstance, they’re all someones who know by heart how it is to live in the penumbra of cancer. what i find utterly indispensible about each and every one of them is that they put words to the rumblings i’d otherwise keep under lock and key. 

and when you hear the worst of your worries, the very words you’ve not yet dared to utter aloud, come out of a mouth that’s not yours, there comes an incomparable sigh, a sheer and certain relief to find you are hardly alone. and deep in communion, even if it’s a union to which you wish you didn’t belong.

one of my incomparable comrades is suleika jaouad, the best-selling author of between two kingdoms: a memoir of a life interrupted, the new york times writer of the “life interrupted” column, and every week in my inbox, the author of “the isolation journals,” her unfolding and intimate chronicle of her rare leukemia and relapse and bone marrow transplant. she’s one of the ones whose wisdom and courage i lean on. she infuses me. and, often, she steadies me. 

just the other day, after a weeks-long silence that signaled something amiss, suleika, who indeed has suffered yet another relapse and is back to chemotherapy, mused about radical acceptance.

she wrote:

That’s not to say I don’t feel fear—of course, I do. But strangely, the anticipation of pain can be far scarier than just being in it, actually confronting it. After my first transplant, in the years when I was cancer-free, I felt hijacked by the prospect of a recurrence and afraid that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. When it actually happened, I faced it. Knowing that, I have been trying to practice a kind of radical acceptance of whatever comes up, responding with whatever the situation calls for.

Take last weekend, for example. On Saturday, I had to go in for my last infusion of my second round of chemo. The side effects compound day-to-day, and afterward I felt awful, and I knew I’d be spending the day in bed. It had been a rainy morning, but on my way home, the sky began to clear, and I beheld a spectacular rainbow. For a moment, I glimpsed a sense of wonder. When I got to my room, I said to myself, “If I have to be in bed all day, so be it. What can I do to make this a little less miserable?” I took some anti-nausea meds and got a big glass of water. I put on my favorite face oil, wrapped myself a heating pad, gathered my pups around me, and queued up some favorite old movies to watch. Did I still feel awful? Yes. But instead of fighting it, or lamenting all of the things I wouldn’t be able to accomplish that day, I accepted it. And it turned out that staying in bed all day felt almost luxurious.

she speaks such truth. and then she somehow wraps it in what feels like a velvet blanket, somehow makes even a day in the sickbed sound a bit like a day at the spa. no wonder suleika is someone whose hand i would reach for on the darkest and scariest of days.

even though she wouldn’t know me if i bumped into her in the revolving door of sloan-kettering (a hospital entrance both of us have spun through) i wrote her right away to thank her for planting seeds of courage that some day might be my ballast. and i seized on her phrase, “radical acceptance,” to try to put it to practice. to not let my fears escape from the barnyard. to not be hijacked by fear, but to stare it square on, and to remind myself that time and again in my fair little life, i’ve steadied my knees and my spine in the fulcrum of whatever would have been my worst fear. i’ve always been braver than i’d ever imagined. i think we all are.

another one of my unparalleled big-hearted compatriot warriors who speaks to my deepest-down soul is the spoken-word poet and queer activist andrea gibson, diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2021 and a recurrence last spring. i can’t count the times she’s sprung me to tears. tears of recognition. of stripped-naked truths. of beauty so rare and so fine i sometimes imagine she dwells with celestial beings. 

here’s a line from one of her poems that stiffened my spine and reminded me to steady my ways:

My worst fear come true. But stay with me y’all-
because my story is one about happiness
being easier to find once we finally realize
we do not have forever to find it. 

we do not have forever to find it…

i play their words over and over, as if a broken record, hoping and hoping that with each spin of needle to groove, i might finally inscribe their wisdom, their wonder, their truth, onto my heart. or at least find a strong steady hand to hold while i aim there….

what steadies you when you’re afraid?