cancer journey | pull up a chair

so, some months ago now, in the days not long after my first follow-up lung scan (they come at six-month intervals) when i was marinating, once again, in the new measure of time that comes when they’ve peered under your ribs and found something not welcome there, i started to think of how this close watch-keeping snaps me into an attention that echoes an ancient spiritual practice. i started to think of how taking my life in abbreviated brackets of time, six months per dose, compels me to pay attention to the nth power, to relish each and every bead of time, from the quotidian to the ones that break you out in goosebumps.

so i did what i do: i sat down to start typing. i peeled back my shy parts, and let the raw truth come tumbling onto the page (aka screen). i try to put things in words because maybe just maybe there’s someone out there looking for someone who knows how it feels, how scary it is, and how maybe just maybe there’s a way to turn that fear into fuel: to be more alive than before the word cancer came barging into our lives. that i found it, and find it, a spiritual tether, to live my life in what i think of as scan time, well, maybe it was worth saying aloud.

so america magazine, the journalistic home base of the american jesuits, an order of priestly folk known for their piercing intellects and forward-thinking ways (although when my sweet husband once asked a priest friend of ours if he was a jesuit, the friend — a diocesan priest, who grew up in his father’s south side chicago tavern — shot right back with “no, i’m a real priest,” which tells you how jesuits are regarded in some corners), decided to print my little essay in their june issue, and unbeknownst to me it showed up online last night.

i’m a bit shy about social media these days, but the chair is a place i think of as safe, the closest virtual approximation to the old maple table scattered with mugs and spoons and the crumbs from someone’s lemon-blueberry bread. so, i’m leaving it here. with big thanks to america magazine, and an even bigger prayer that that one someone (someone living in her or his own scan time) just might find it, and welcome the company…

Living on Scan Time: My life after a cancer diagnosis
Barbara Mahany
May 16, 2024

Ever since the murky hour when, through an ethereal fog, I made out the silhouette of my surgeon beside the bed where I lay tethered to tubes, ever since I heard him utter the words, “Turns out it was cancer; I was really surprised,” and I pressed my hand to where half my lung used to be, I have been living in Scan Time.

Scan Time is time reordered, narrowed, heightened. Scan Time is time abbreviated, shrunken to digestible, perceptible segments. It comes in the immediate wake of finding out you have cancer—in my case, lung cancer. Now that my tumor and a good chunk of lung have been removed, watchkeeping—scans every three to six months, for at least five years—is my first line of defense against its return.

Appointments are made a half year out; the date on the calendar becomes your benchmark, the point as far in the distance as you will let yourself see. The screens in the waiting rooms at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center flash with a digital message: Scanxiety? We understand that waiting for scans can be hard. Call our social work team now. Everyone grasps that whatever the future is, it hinges on what they find when the all-seeing machine—a Goliathan O-ring that swallows you whole—peers deep inside your body.

You are told not to move once you climb onto the hard plastic bed that makes me think sarcophagus, especially as it glides eerily into the shadowed encasement. And then comes this contender for the world’s most redundant instruction: “Hold your breath,” the disembodied words piped in from what seems an otherworldly station.

In lieu of breathing, you pray mightily that no new ghostly suspicions emerge. And then you wait. And wait.

Should the all-clear be granted, you are etch-a-sketched back to a clean slate.

Scan Time: the lease on your life, meted out in six-month installments.

Turns out, it’s something of a blessing, one that sharpens the focus on the miracle of each moment, peels away the anesthetization to time that, for most of us, is default mode. We live, most of us, thinking ours is a timeline that extends into the far-off far off. And that dulls the noticing of each never-again day.

But when you’re told you’ve got cancer, when you feel the iron weight of that sentence fall with a thunk on your every breath, the bracketed finiteness of time—of life itself—now doled out in measures of half a year per dose, it amplifies everything. Each pulsebeat of living is magnified, glorified. It’s time distilled to its most sacred concentration.

And it draws out a knowing that’s deep and profound, one that’s not too dissimilar to an ancient spiritual practice that understands the holiness in contemplating our death. Or, in my case, contemplating the reduction of time, the days I count on my half-year watch. At first glance, that might sound morbid. But it’s emphatically the opposite.

Memento mori is the age-old practice of remembering that you will die. It’s an ancient philosophical thread, a spiritual practice woven across time and traditions (be they moral or religious traditions) from early Stoicism to medieval Christianity, from ancient Judaism to the central teachings of Buddhism.

St. Benedict of Nursia, in his sixth-century book of precepts known simply as the Rule, exhorted his monks to “keep death daily” before their eyes. It’s an awareness that winds its way through most world religions, although barely so in the West, where we do all we can to push away any whiff of dying or death.

To understand that our days are not infinite, not a bottomless pour, spilling one after another so dizzyingly that we are numb to each dawn’s awakening, is to tight-squeeze our focus on how precious this time of ours is. Pope Francis, in his apostolic exhortation “Laudate Deum,” posed three critical questions: “What is the meaning of my life? What is the meaning of my time on this earth? And what is the ultimate meaning of all my work and effort?”

Those questions take on an inescapable edge when held up in six-month increments. We’re a simpler people than we sometimes pretend. We’re keener at grasping hard truths when they’re pressed up against us. Cancer presses hard truths. Scan Time sharpens focus, propels us deep into seizing the day. Seizing each blessed day.

Once upon a time, I was a nurse who took care of kids with all sorts of cancers. Back in the days before scanners were part of every oncologist’s medical tool kit, I remember more than anything how those kids somehow eclipsed the cancer in their lives. They shoved it out of the viewfinder, didn’t let it intrude on however many days were counted in their too-short lives. Theirs was an innate genius—not a day dithered away—that echoes across the decades.

I remember how kids with an amputated leg and a hospital-issued pair of crutches clocked how swiftly they could race down the hall, without crashing into medicine carts—or their nurses. Or how, as soon as the retching from chemo ended, they’d order up midnight pizzas and hunker down in the supply closet for a tête-à-tête with their IV poles and their bald co-conspirators. Or how, one Halloween, one of my favorites, a 12-year-old with a tumor lodged in her spine that left her paralyzed from the waist down, didn’t let that stop her from slopping papier-mâché all over her bedsheets, as she crafted me a green, tempera-painted pumpkin head and crowned me her Irish Pumpkin Queen.

Those children made time count. And they didn’t need scans to prompt it. All these years later, I draw on their wisdom, though I lean on the scanner—a machine that might see what is inside me but not what lies down the road.

Scan Time, I’ve realized, propels me to live sacramentally, to hold time to the light, to behold its shimmering brilliance, the facets of my life I consider most indispensably sacred. And to enfold myself in each anointed hour..

I might be mesmerized by a butterfly. Might sit down to pen that long-overdue confession. Might devote my perishable days to those few souls I cannot bear to leave behind, revel in the litany of whimsies we’ve long promised we’d get to, indulge with abandon. Or maybe I’ll travel to pockets of the world where my heart and my hands—and my long-expired nursing license—might be put to good use.

Scan Time is palliative, too; it offers something of a balm. Where the arithmetic of five-year-survival rates sets me to trembling as I weigh cold, hard probabilities, I’m washed in some iteration of calm when I set my sights on half a year at a time. Like a mountain climber trekking past mile marker after mile marker, I keep my eyes on the immediate path and don’t try to peek around circuitous, unseeable bends.

Yet underpinning each round is the knowing this might be the last, the one with expiration. One of these rounds, you suppose, the call won’t be so freeing. And time then will shift again. Day after day the distilling comes, until each last minute holds all that you love, all that desperately matters.

(reprinted exactly as it appears on the pages of the june 2024 issue of america: the jesuit review of faith and culture)

for the record, my latest scan looked clean. and, in the spirit of seizing the days, we’re off to rome in just a few days. the four of us, G-d willing. we have four valid passports among us, and after having to leave one of us behind last year when a passport was found wanting, (not in accord with the french rule that your passport must be valid for 90 days after leaving the country, and our firstborn’s was a mere few days short) this adventure in world travel is one big giant hallelujah.

what are the forces in your life that propel you to seize each and every day? and or any other thoughts that might be burbling about in your beautiful minds….

29 Comments

April 19, 2024

solitary vigil

there are days we mark in silence, days best kept in solitude, in the quiet deep down places where only we can trace the contours of the shadow, the weight of how they’ve changed us, cleared the lens through which we see.

they’re the days that have left their mark on us, indelibly. the days in our lifetime that will forever inscribe the demarcation, time divided starkly––before and ever after.

one by one, or one alone, they’re the days, the dates, the hours that constitute our subterrain, the strata by which our soul is shaped and stretched and textured. it’s the timeline that draws us into depths, to keener understanding of what it means to be alive. or our life, anyway.

it might be a death or disfigurement. it might be birth, or betrothal. a beginning or an end. most often, both at once. to close one chapter is, by definition, to open the next. and while some of those days are duly announced, and bracketed with anything from helium balloons to holding our breath, it might be the weightier ones––the ones whose mark is most unexpungable––best kept in solitary vigil.

it is in the profound spaciousness of unspoken thoughts that we find the room to grope for consequence, that we fumble toward those few faint stirrings that draw us closer and closer to what becomes our truth. we can’t really find our way without the grace of our aloneness, the room where knowing comes. in the beginning and the end, we tread the thin-bare thread of life with but our God to take us by the hand. or so i believe.

and here’s a truth: by the time we’ve hobbled through a few decades (or less or more, depending on our lot), we all accumulate those days. the days whose dates we don’t forget. the day we met our one true love. the long night of our first miscarriage. the house fire that chased us out. the last look into someone’s eyes. the first time the doctor put breath to the word cancer, and quickly added how surprised he was they’d found it deep inside us.

we keep those days in cloak of silence because we are sifting still through all the ways they’ve reconfigured who we know ourselves to be, and how we move through time.

yesterday was one such day for me. one year since i awoke on a gurney, my surgeon by my side. i shudder now to remember it, though at the time i didn’t shudder at all. i was brave that day. it hadn’t sunk in so deeply yet. ever since, and all year long, i’ve had glimpses both of bravery and brokenness. i’ve cried buckets and, then, i’ve set my shoulders firm; i’ve faced the worst of my fears with unflinching questions, endless hours reading, and airplane rides to doctors i wish i’d never needed to know. i’ve slowly, slowly, tried to imagine adding numbers to my years.

april 18 is a date i’ve uttered umpteen times in the last year. date of surgery: date of diagnosis. date of new beginning. date of counting time with deeper intention and attention.

maybe the date will dim, as i move on from it. as 2024 fades to 2025 and . . . (and hallelujah for the 4 that now sits firmly where the 3 began.) a year ago today was the first time i saw my life measured in the span best known as five-year-survival rate, the chance you’ll be around five years hence. believe you me, it’s a bracing thing to count forward and hope and pray you cross the line to––bing! bing! bing! your magic number is….––04.18.28. the date now yours with odds attached.

i’m going for broke here, and placing bets. but that’s only because at this very moment what swells in me is hope. quick as the clouds scuttle across an april sky, i might flinch, get scared, and pull my money from the table.

my point is simply to say that there are days that define who we are, and we keep those days in silent vigil, wrap those days in certain grace. and we pray to God we come out the other side, with lessons learned and underscored, as we reach and reach toward that one repeating prayer: dear Holy Gracious God, let me make of this one most sacred day every iota of blessing that is mine––and yours––to give.

some mornings are so much clumsier than others; this is a clumsy one, but my vow to try–even when i mostly miss–is one i take to heart. to write raw is its own peculiar dare. but here’s the why: because every fleeting while you just might catch a dust mote of life as you know it. and thus i will keep swatting at the passing motes, in hopes of putting words to those ineffable pieces of the puzzle. because we are all bumbling along together here, and in good company we find light and air.

as you look back across the plane of your life, are there days you’ve not forgotten, days you note alone and without mention, because you know how lastingly they’ve marked you? and that’s a questions whose answer you needn’t give voice to here. but just a prompt.

24 Comments

September 22, 2023

turn, turn, turn . . .

“Ecclesiastes was onto something,” i wrote, as i dove into a meditation on the notch-by-notch turning of the dial, the dance between heaven and earth that is the shifting of season, as one fugue surrenders to another and another, over and over and over again.

and here we are again, at another cusp. the autumnal equinox. tonight (or, rather, tomorrow morning in the wee wee hours) at 10 minutes to 2 here in the heartland, central time zone.

in my musing on seasons, in the pages of that latest little book of mine, the book of nature, i prattled on a bit longer. . .

“Each season, in four quarter turns, brings forth its own headlines. There’s the yin and yang of spring, the season of exodus and resurrection, of equal parts heartbreak and magic. ‘The fizz and the roar of the land coming back to life again,’ is how Robert Macfarlane brilliantly captured the vernal animations. There’s summer with its invitation for indolence, for taking it slow, savoring, all but licking your plate of its succulence. And autumn, the season that changes its tense, is letting-go time, the beginning of burrowing in, when the shadow grows longer and sunlight goes amber, when half the globe is stripping to its essence, revealing its unadorned spines. Then there’s winter, the stillest of all, when deep-down stirrings are all but invisible, and we learn to keep faith. Sometimes I think God couldn’t decide which channel was best, so the heavens kept jabbing the clicker.

“It’s a wonder reel that never ends, yet never truly repeats—a koan for the ages.

“I often contemplate the geometries of time, how the year is not an inescapable circle, a shape that would get us nowhere, but rather it’s a spiral, and from one winter to the next we’re never the same, always ascending, closer to the holiness we were meant to be—or so that’s the hope and the plan, anyway. Maybe that’s why God keeps this seasonal show on autoplay: maybe God knows how dense we are in the figuring-it-out department, how some of the lessons we need to review. Over and over and over again. Most especially at the fraying hems of the seasons when the doubt begins to creep in, the fear that we’ll never be loosed from whatever it is that tangles and knots us, and God needs to show us those few immutable threads: Resurrection comes. Quiet must follow exuberance. So too dormancy. Surrender to earth’s holy rhythms, the very ones that pull the tides and the flocks, paint the woods, star- stitch the night sky. Expect heartbreak. Await healing. Start all over again.

“’The seasons are our scripture text,’ writes Celtic spiritualist Christine Valters Paintner. ‘This earth we are riding keeps trying to tell us something with its continuous scripture of leaves,’ echoes William Stafford, a poet and pacifist who referred to himself as ‘one of the quiet of the land.’ To the ancient Celts, the unfolding of the seasons read as ‘gospel without haste.’ And Walt Whitman, America’s latter-day Homer, put something of a military spin to it when he wrote that ‘nature marches in procession, in sections, like the corps of an army.'”

i prattle on a few pages more. but i’m already thinking anew about seasons. life, when we’re paying attention, comes in all sorts of seasons. some, clocked by the sun. some, by the tumults and percolations from deep down in our hearts and our souls.

the season of my soul that i’ve been dwelling in all these past months is one that opened in mystery, back when every day was bringing another scan, another long wait, another doctor’s uncertainty. then, when the surgeon finally extracted the answer, “it’s cancer,” i landed in shock and bewilderment. and ever since i’ve been encountering an underworld, a sometimes murky, sometimes brilliantly glistening world potholed with reams of unanswered questions and populated by fellow travelers who nearly always, uncannily, know just what to say and just what i’m thinking. it’s those fellow travelers who have thrown me life rope after life rope. just when i begin to feel the walls closing in, one of them pings me with hope. or pure simple kindness. or laugh-out-loud irreverence (eileen N i am looking at you!).

one thing i know, which i am going to be thinking about for a long time to come (and trying desperately to put into words), is how love truly is a magnetic force field all its own. i can be teetering at the edge of some quicksand-y bog, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, kindness will come. and kindness, love’s gentle sister, can shatter the darkness to shards. kindness makes you not all alone. kindness holds your hand and squeezes it so tightly it won’t let you dangle. or drop. or run out of air.

just this week, a brilliant brilliant poet friend of mine sent me a note. and it might have been one of the wisest, kindest, gentlest things i’ve read in a long time. he wrote:

“You have spent a lifetime thinking and feeling deeply. In my experience of living like that, I’ve found that pains are more painful and joys more joyful. I think it also means that you are better able to face the sort of scary stuff you’re now facing. I hope that your lifetime of thinking and feeling deeply gives you the strength to deal with this face-to-face…whatever ‘this’ ends up being.”

and so, my prayer as i look to my first post-surgical scan in the weeks just ahead, is that i begin to move now into a season where the edges aren’t so raw, and the fears aren’t quite so suffocating. there is love all around, and i know it will save me. no matter what comes.

tell a story of a kindness that saved you.

the apple slices above, already doused in caramel-y bath, are my sweet line cook’s first attempt at pie baking. his slicing alone impressed the heck out of me. just a month into the job at one of chicago’s finest eateries and the kid is picking up tricks. and pie recipes too. pretty sweet living at our house.

may this autumn, season of awe, of turning in and deepening, enrobe you in the brilliance you reach toward….

and a big giant thank you to each and all of you who have lavished me with kindnesses and love in this long season now turning…

p.s. i’m writing this from a hotel in ohio where tonight, squeaky squawky voice and all, i am getting up to a podium and giving a keynote address on the blessed book of nature…

6 Comments

August 18, 2023

they call it grounding for a reason . . .

mistletoe (now studied for its tumor-shrinking capacities) fights “convulsion fits, the apoplexy, palsy, and vertigo.” (elizabeth blackwell, 1737)

there’ve been days of late when i feel dizzy, dizzy with a lightheadedness that comes from being afraid, from not knowing, from wondering if i’m standing on a very thin edge, and worrying about what might swallow me.

dizzy from trying to figure things out on my own, because doctors don’t always tell you all you need to know. so you piece it together the smartest ways you know.

on those dizzying days, the days that come because it seems my cancer is more complicated than i was first told, i all but plant myself –– ground myself –– in this holy earth. i listen for the cardinal’s aubade at the hour of first light, as the inky molecules of night dissolve into the tissue-paper pink of dawn. i pluck flowers with whimsy and abandon, and tuck them willy-nilly into wee tiny bottles that line my sink and my windowsill, and make me dizzy with short breaths of joy. i stare into the depths of the starry night. i all but beg all the heavens and earth to enfold me.

if creation is holy, and i believe it is, if holy God is the spark that animates the whisperings of the cottonwood’s quaking and the duet of the butterfly couplet, and i believe that God is, then this holy earth is here for more than just astonishment and wonder.

this holy earth is here for healing.

for healing what’s broken inside. deep inside. and broken in ways where you barely recognize the pieces, and can’t quite find the way to piece them together.

holy earth has offered its healing since the beginning. the very beginning.

sometimes, it’s straight-up medicinal. the foxglove, a magnificent stalk dangling with deep-throated bells, is the font for digitalis, the cure for a galloping heart. coneflower is where we pluck echinacea, the compound that chases away a cold. even morphine, the pain killer to which i’m allergic, comes to us from the fields of poppies that sway in the mountains of turkey and burma. and it was madagascar periwinkle, described as a “carefree annual,” that gave its leaves to heal the kids with leukemia i cared for so long ago. (how gobsmacking miraculous is each of these earth-given cures?)

sometimes, it heals in ways that infuse without compound or molecule. sometimes, pharmacology is not in the equation. but the healing is as certain, as deep, as true, as that from any pill or tonic i’ve ever swallowed or slurped from a spoon.

i was drawn back to the groundedness that comes from this earth, to the veritable apothecary of cures upon which we dwell –– both the medicinal and the ethereal (the ones that most often infuse me) –– when i stumbled upon a poem-slash-essay in orion magazine the other day. it was titled “11 interventions in the 10 days of your dying,” and, one by one, it ticks through the litany of earth’s holy graces that saved its writer as she watched her husband die. it ends in this coda:

XI.
Katydids

I have kissed you goodbye, made the calls, packed our things. I step out into a hot summer midnight to the paeans of katydids ringing the trees. The only conceivable response is to set down our bags and bow.
trebbe johnson

i read that its author, a blessed woman named trebbe johnson, is a writer, wilderness leader, and founder of a global community that goes by the name “radical joy for hard times,” a community that describes itself as “devoted to finding and making beauty in wounded places.” sign me up, say i!

because poking around is my default mode, i poked around long enough to peek into trebbe’s newest book, fierce consciousness: surviving the sorrows of earth and self, a book i’m ordering up from my friends at the library. here’s one paragraph that just might pull me out of the cold, dark well where i’ve been splashing about:

so joy is what i’m seizing. joy with its amazing, even if only momentary, loft. startling joy. joy that comes up and grabs you at the heart, and taps on your chest long enough for you to notice. joy is the thing that carries us forward when our feet might feel stuck in the muck.

joy comes in so many colors, and sounds, and serendipities. joy comes when someone breaks into a particular smile, and zings straight to your heart. joy comes when i sit here typing (another source of deep grounding i’ve noticed) and a word or three pop out in a particular order, one i’d not realized would happen, nor even imagined.

joy, to me, is when an old friend i love as dearly as life calls me out of the blue, and out of the decades. just after i’ve walked in the door from a harrowing too many hours in the ultrasound chamber. joy is the sound of his voice when he tells me something he was reading felt like “a theological poem from the heart of God.” joy is remembering how deeply i loved him, my dear friend the priest who’s as joy-filled and funny and holy as just about anyone i’ve ever known.

and joy, nearly every day, is what pours from the throat of the cardinal, and the wing of the butterfly whirling. and the way the sunlight darts and illuminates.

and joy, strung like beads on a string, just might save us. no matter the darkness.

what radical joy is saving you these summery days?

p.s. i should probably listen to the old roman, seneca, who has this to say about groundless fears:

“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

and i should probably pay heed to his follow-up advice:

“What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.

“Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.”

and here’s his kicker, quoting epicurus, an old greek philosopher:

“The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.”

we should heed the ancients, is the moral here…

p.s.s. dearest chairs, i want to be sure you know that there is no need to worry about me. i am finding my way, and have chosen to be truly honest with you in the wake of my medical mystery tour (though sparing any medical details, as this is not the place for that). i don’t intend to write too often on the subject, but when it interlaces with whatever leaps out from my emotional landscape for a chosen pondering, i won’t skirt around it, and i will always write true. so when i write of being afraid, it’s because that is how this is, this thing that has boggled me and thrown me into territory i never would choose to enter. there are days that leave me gasping for breath and hope. and there are days where i can be utterly swept into joy upon joy. mostly, it’s just that this is all new, and uncharted. and i didn’t see it coming. i have always taken life and its emotional obstacles head-on. my knees might buckle, but my spine stays strong. and the only way i know is the truth way. we are all humans who find ourselves afraid. and i’m not afraid to say so. because in our vulnerabilities, we discover our strengths. especially when there are glorious hands to hold all along the way….

26 Comments

June 16, 2023

maybe acres of flowerpots would help. . .

in which i tell the truth and let on that this is a bumpy road right in here…

my summer companion, a fellow named tedd, leapt into the passenger seat, as he is wont to do these days. he loves nothing more than wending his way through the city, curiosity propelling the route. we stopped along the way, biscuits with cheddar and honey, fuel for the road. he took notes of places he’d want to come back to, the romanian sausage shop, the honeybear pancake house where the windows were bursting with clouds of silk flowers.

we were headed to a chicago institution, a garden shop that’s sprawled across city blocks. a garden shop that upholstered my very first garden, long long ago. we were looking, allegedly, for a fountain whose splash would punctuate the summer sounds, whose soothing whoosh might lull us into that fugue state that comes when you plop in a chair and listen to all that the world has to offer.

i love my companion more than life, and i love our urban adventures. but truth is, there was yet another uninvited passenger in the old red wagon, and its name was fear. i am inhabited of late by runaway fears, and worries, that this cancer has let loose and is running amok in odd parts of me. it’s too scary to say aloud to the people i love, so i mostly hold it inside. except for here, where words tapped out on keys have always been my one certain release valve.

it seems that two months after the day i first heard the words “it was cancer,” i’ve been caught in what’s likely an inevitable gulch. it’s a lot to absorb. it’s a lot to have half your lung up and cut out, sent off to pathology, where science-y folk slice it apart and mark it with names, stamp it with numbers that scare and confuse you. even the oncologist the other day said as much, though i think her words were something along the lines of “it rocks your world, especially when it’s right there in your chest.”

i was listening to a podcast the other day, a podcast for people with cancer (i still gulp when i write phrases like that, realizing i’m now among them, the people with cancer), and they talked knowingly about “the middle-of-the-night questions,” the ones that basically all circle back to “am i going to die?” there is solace, much solace, in knowing how universally some of this hits us. we are all human beings, a motley collection of bones and flesh, of freckles and smiles that wrinkle our faces in particular ways. we all hope big, though my big is different from yours. and we’ve all suffered hurts we’ll never forget, even if we’ve pushed them off to the side. and a lot of us get scared. the thing about cancer –– or any one of the other life-altering diagnoses –– is that it strips away so very much of the pretense. it’s brass tacks, and un-glittered questions. it’s a swift dunk in the truth-telling end of the pool, where you dispense with roundabout thoughts and spit out the unedited ones. the ones you might not bring up in the produce aisle, sifting through the bunches of carrots, or reaching for the ripest avocado.

once you have cancer, and find out the one or two others in your life who are on the same road, it’s like you’re ushered in to a particular locker room, where everyone walks around with the same flimsy towels, and no questions are barred. where you can say out loud those things that keep you awake in the night. and, somehow, putting breath to the words, seeing the knowing in the eyes of the one to whom you are talking, reminds you, over and over, how very much we all want to cling to this life we have built, this life filled with people we love, and dreams we still hold.

i’m thinking i’m struggling because all of this is so new, and it still feels like it came out of the blue. and it knocked the breath right out of me. i keep thinking that once i get one of those scans under my belt, the ones that will come every six months, i might settle in to the notion that maybe the cancer is gone. or at least settled back to its indolent state, my couch potato of a cancer, as the doctors proclaimed it (after all, it had been lolligagging down at the bottom of my lung for eight long years before anyone realized what trouble it was).

i realize i can’t call my doctor every time there’s an odd sensation — say, like the lump i feel in my armpit — or maybe i should just get a diagnostician on retainer, one who wouldn’t hold it against me for all of my worries.

somehow or other i am going to find my way to the other side of this rather dark cloud.

i intend to get on my knees. with trowel at my side. and a big jug of pellets, the ones that give plant roots a boost. while i’m down there i intend to dig deep into my very own soul, open up a portal to the God who animates the whole of me, and the whole of this earth.

deep in the night i spend plenty of time asking “those” questions. but i also spend just as much time lying in silence, holy silence, channeling the God in whose palm i am trying to rest, aching to rest.

i tend to find God when i’m out in the garden, or lying in the impossible dark. i tend to find God, too, when i tell the whole truth, and the balm comes — Holy Balm comes — to settle deep in the cracks.

how do you find your way to the other side, when the dark clouds come, or the wall of fear feels too high to scale?

i did find a couple poems i was going to leave here today, but i will save them for another day. and simply close with this blessed thought from rabbi abraham joshua heschel, one of my great, great sages…

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.
Abraham Joshua Heschel

p.s. a delightfully joyful thing did happen this week when, lo and behold, i discovered that none other than richard rohr, the great modern-day mystic, had quoted from The Book of Nature in his daily meditation for tuesday. and i’m getting back in the saddle this weekend, for a nature walk with an oak park synagogue, a two-hour radio show with a pittsburgh priest i’ve come to love, and a trek to milwaukee tuesday night for a conversation with the journal sentinel’s book critic, jim higgins, at the boswell book company, an east side literary institution.

p.s.s. happy blessed father’s day to the brilliant fathers who sometimes gather here…

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Category: cancer journey

May 17, 2024

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