Dance with the Reaper

I was sitting with a couple of friends the other day, talking about I don’t know what, when one said about the other, “Well, she doesn’t believe in global warming.”

I gave my friend, let’s call her My Skeptical Friend, the hairy eyeball. She squirmed, but all I said was, “So you think you know more than the combined membership of National Academy of Sciences?”

Then my other friend, let’s call her My Tactful Friend, changed the subject. This is Texas, after all. In one way, it’s become a riff, a joke with us. “Well, you don’t believe in global warming,” I tease My Skeptical Friend, and sometimes she retorts, “Well, sometimes your clothes don’t match, and you are rude, and you go to the grocery store with bad hair and no makeup, so ppptht.” Actually, being a Texan, she never says anything like that, but she thinks it, and I can see the little cartoon bubble above her head saying so, and it also says, “But I love you anyway.”

Her cartoon bubble also says this: “I’m not very good at science, and I don’t understand what people are talking about when they analyze the chemistry of greenhouse gasses, but I understand that people I trust think that global warming is a conspiracy of fanatic left-wingers, tree-huggers and bug-huggers who want us all to stop bathing and stop wearing deodorant and start wearing Birkenstocks.”

My own cartoon bubble, on the other hand, says this: “I wish the National Academy of Sciences had a spokesperson who looked and sounded and dressed like Sara Palin so that people like my friend could understand more clearly what the stakes really are in this debate.”

I’m no scientist either, and if I were, there is no way I’d be in the National Academy of Sciences. I don’t have what it takes  — but I have friends and colleagues who do, and that is how I am different from My Skeptical Friend. My scientist friends tell me they’re worried, and so I turn off my lights and set the thermostat of our house at 85 degrees, and I think about my own carbon footprint when I choose not to buy fruit imported from Chile, or cheap useless crap imported from China.

I don’t believe that manmade pollution is causing the earth to heat up because I did the research myself, or even because I read the studies — I did, but I didn’t understand them well enough to hold my end of a point-by-point debate. I believe in global warming because people I trust tell me it’s real, that we’re heating up our world, and we’d better stop trashing our atmosphere or else it’s just gonna get hotter.

And it’s not just global warming. I believe in evolution because I know geologists who do, and because I believe that the people who work for the Museum of Natural History in New York knew what they were talking about when they put together that fantastic exhibition, because I trust the institution. I believe in social justice in South America because I know people who are from there, and people who have worked in the Peace Corps there. I believe that central Africa is an intractable mess because people from Africa have told me it is, and they have told me, repeatedly, that the solution to it has to come from within Africa. I believe that Northern Africa is a hotbed and a powder keg because the news told me so, and I saw the pictures, but more, I trust the people who run the news stations, except for Fox News.

We can only educate ourselves so far, and I am growing to realize the extent to which everything I believe is based on faith, in individuals and in institutions. I believe that most conservatives are good people. I believe that most Tea Party members really do have the best interests of our nation at heart. I believe that most liberals really do think they are smarter than other people, and I believe in many cases that we are, but I also believe that being smart and well educated is not enough.

I believe that the answer is humility.

I’m going to try to make the cartoon bubble above my head say this, “I might disagree with you, but I could be wrong, and I am sure I could learn from what you have to say, so please speak, and I will listen.” It’s a lesson I’ve learned from my friend who doesn’t believe in global warming.

Last month, I wrote an essay about explaining war to my kids using as an example the newly established Republic of South Sudan and why I care about it. The piece was picked up by the Dallas Morning News Opinion Blog (yay) but I’m still wondering”

Why does this affect me so deeply?

I’m just finished a second reading of King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hothchild’s amazing history of the Belgian invasion of the Congo river basin and subsequent enslavement of the people who lived there. According to the book, under Belgian rule, the Congolese population was halved in a matter of decades and the reign of terror unleashed by the colonizers is still wreaking havoc.

I had read the book once before, when it first came out in the early years of my marriage; I read it as a history book. I found it fascinating, but I didn’t have the same visceral reaction as I did with my second reading. The first time I read about this atrocity, my (selfish) reaction was one of “How horrible of the Europeans!” This time around, my reaction can be condensed into “How horrible for the Congolese!”

I re-read books all the time. It’s not unusual for me to find new ways of reading a piece of literature, or history, or philosophy, or a cookbook the second, third, or twentieth reading. But I don’t even recognize the person who read that book a decade ago. It’s as if I’m a whole new me.

I am.

Not a whole new me; more like a less-than-whole new me.

I don’t know whether it’s maturity, aka getting older, or having had children, or having had cancer, but the new less-whole me is a whole lot less detached than I used to be.

“You can’t imagine it unless you’ve been there.”

Those words are a line from Watership Down, Richard Adam’s midcentury novel about rabbits, and about freedom and totalitarianism, to describe the what it was like in Efrafa, a rabbit warren run like an Eastern-Bloc gestapo state. The words sing through my mind’s ear like a refrain at the most inopportune times: when a well-wisher gushes at me, “I can imagine what you’ve been through,” citing her own experience with early-stage breast cancer, or her mother’s, or her grandmother’s. The words whisper in my year when I think about a mother who has lost a child: my neighbor,  my friend’s friend, my own friend. The words remind me to be sensitive when I ask my friend whose son is sitting in a federal prison cell, reminding me to ask, but not to pry. They shriek to a fevered pitch as I drive by a homeless person sleeping on a cardboard box in a shaded corner of the street. I know that there are some experiences that must be endured to be understood. Other people’s pain has moved from being an unknown unknown” to become a known one.

I know I cannot feel it.

But I can acknowledge it, because I have felt my own.

I get it.

I’m not one of those horribly earnest people who thinks that pain is good. I hate pain. At the first sign of a headache, I head straight for the bottle of aspirin, and if it doesn’t work, I have a medicine cabinet full of every kind of painkiller you can imagine. It’s the silver lining of cancer, and, for all those people who immediately go to the bad place and assume I have a painkiller dependency, I don’t; most of my narcotics are past their expiration date, and 95% of the reason I still have them is because I don’t know what to do with them. The other five percent is that I might have a really bad headache some day.

Pain lowers your immune response. It makes you cranky. It makes your body release stress hormones, including an adrenal hormone called cortisol that stresses your heart and makes stink and makes you fat. My friend, whose grandmother is fading into Alzheimer’s, told me about a study in which the researchers targeted untreated pain as a possible cause of dementia. My friend is one of those people who don’t vaccinate their children, so I am inclined to take anything she says about  modern medicine with a cup of salt, but she also wise in many ways that don’t involve vaccination, and it certainly makes sense to me that pain would be a factor in anyone’s cognitive dysfunction.

Pain is bad.

Or is it?

I think of John McCain, who endured torture as  a PoW in Viet Nam and now stands as a staunch opponent of torture methods practiced by the United States. His experiences lend him more than gravitas or credibility. His experiences shape his compassion, I believe, even though we don’t know what kind of man he would have become had he not been imprisoned and tortured by the North Vietnamese.

I think of my friend Monica, whose priceless gift to me during my illness was her empathy. Monica hadn’t had cancer herself. Her mother hadn’t had it, nor her father. Yet she completely, totally, and utterly “got it,” because she had been through her own private hell, the hell of infertility.  No one else in my circle of friends understood the horror of your own body’s betrayal, but she did, and her friendship helped create a bridge for me out of my own hell.

I think the medievals got it. Suffering begets compassion. Not in everyone responds this way, surely. For some people, suffering twists the psyche, and for others, it deepens it. We’re not cookie cutter images of each other, but as different as we are from one another, no one seeks out pain. Instead, in our culture, we seek an escape from it. We dull the pain of childbirth through a variety of drugs and procedures. We numb the pain of dental work, of setting broken bones, even a headache, backache, stomach ache, psyche-ache has a remedy, one that really works to block the pain lest we suffer. And that’s not a bad thing, not at all, but I can’t shake away the feeling that we’ve lost something precious.

I got a message a couple of days ago from my friend Debbie: “I’m going to be in Dallas tomorrow. What are the chances of our getting together?”

“Duh. 100% of course,” I wrote back. I cleared my calendar. I haven’t seen Debbie since tenth grade, but some things never change and friendship is one of them. I sent a note to Chris, “My friend Debbie is spending the night.”

“Who??”

“My best friend from middle school, Debbie. You know, I’ve told you about her, from that swank private school I went to. You’ll like her. She’s really beautiful.”

Chris wrote, “Who?? I can’t keep track of all of your friends. What’s she like? What’s her story?”

“Well, she’s awesome, of course. She’s a nurse in Florida, I think she works with old people. She’s hilarious. She just got married, in Connecticut, to a woman who’s a neuropsych professor, I think.”

“Are any of your friends straight?”

I did a quick tally from facebook. 30/500 that I know of, or fewer than 10% of my friends are gay and out of the closet. “Yeah, most of them.”

Chris came home early(ish) from work, another of our friends drove down from Plano, and we all hung out rehashing old memories until way too late. Mean people are still mean, my friend reported from our 25th high school reunion ( I skipped it), and, surprisingly, none of those mean people, to her at least, seemed happy. Sometimes, smug is good. And our school really was that crazy — we see that now in hindsight.

This morning, my friend and I tooled around Dallas in her little BMW Z4, with the top down. In a scene straight out of Glee, she was blasting songs from The Book of Mormon, when she exclaimed, “OMG you HAVE to hear this song,” poked her iphone a couple of times, and put on this little ditty:

All I wanted was to go back in time and tell my twelve-year-old self that in 30 years, Debbie and I would be driving down down Lover’s Lane in Dallas, Texas in her two-seater convertible, still singing along to songs on the radio. Somewhere, somehow, I think I got the message.

Chris just killed a 12-inch snake in our yard. It looked like a baby water moccasin, with a white mouth. I could have kept it to be sure, but EW.

Tell me again that Texas is a great state to live in. And I thought the giant spiders in New Hampshire and Tokyo were bad.

I’m very upset about this. Why did it have to be snakes.

It’s good to be home. I did NOT melt in the Texas heat — I simply escaped, and I didn’t think it would be wise to say, “Hey y’all, I’m OUT OF TOWN.”

In the meantime, I had a checkup at the doctor and am pleased to add another official six months to my cancer freedom. My next checkup is sometime in February.

I went to the woods to find myself, which I would have been able to do had I not brought my children with me. My parents have a place in the backwoods of easternmost East Tennessee, and we all went camping for a couple of weeks.

I’ve always admired people who have been able to write meaningful prose about their time in the wilderness. As me, I collected some wood and stomped on it to break it up into burnable bits. Then I burned it, and found that I was out of wood, so I went and collected some more wood.

I also sat on a rock and looked around me at the leaves and the trees, at the rocks, and the curve of the earth. I looked up some, at the bits of the sky peeking through the canopy. I looked down at the ground, at the bugs, and the layer of leaves. I kicked it aside with my boot to see how long it takes the fallen leaves to turn into soil. Not long.

I did some cooking in a cast iron skillet over the open fire, and I listened for rain.

My son, whom I am going to start calling by his middle name, Nicholas to protect his identity, dug holes in the ground. He found two large stones, which we brought home with us, as well as what looks to me like a very old and primitive axe or scraper — it has a sharp curved blade along one side. I’m going to take a picture of it and send it to an archaeologist friend to look at when I unpack my car. Nicholas also discovered that he, too, could collect sticks and burn them.

My daughter, whose middle name is Catherine, read. The next time we go camping, I’m packing a box of books for her, hard ones like War and Peace, or Watership Down, or else I’m getting her a kindle. There’s something wrong with that last idea… Catherine never quite cottoned up to the fire, but she did, eventually, overcome her fear of dung beetles.

“What did you learn this summer,” I asked her? “I learned to poop in a hole in the ground!” she said.

School starts in two days. I’m already practicing keeping a straight face.

I went camping in the easternmost part of East Tennessee from the end of July until today.

My son found what looks like a super-ancient stone tool. I’m going to look into identifying it.

Camping is wonderful, and it’s good to be home.

Chris and I were talking last night. I should say, I was talking, and he was folding laundry. I hate to fold. It hurts my back and somehow I break all of my nails and the skin on my hands gets all chapped, so when I get behind on the laundry, as I often do, Chris does the folding. It’s one of the many things I love about him.

“All I really want,” I said, “Is to live a simple life.”

Chris didn’t say a word, but he never does. Instead, he just looked at me.

I backpedaled.

“I’m not saying I want to life in such a way that I don’t have nice things. I like all the things that make life pleasant. I just want to have a life that’s less . . . complicated.

“I just don’t want to feel I have to make things fancy . . .

“You’re right,” I said.  “I should just shut up. You know if by some miracle my life became uncomplicated, I would get bored and find ways to make things interesting.”

Chris handed me a pile of folded laundry to put away. “Mmh hmm,” he said.

I was reminded of an earlier conversation I had with him, one in which he actually spoke. We were talking, among other things, about the way we make friends as a couple. Typically, I make friends with people first, because it’s easier for me since (1) I am not an actuary and (2) I don’t have a job, so I have the opportunity to meet a lot more people. Initially, I’m the one that everyone likes and Chris is like Teller. But then, once people get to know us, they realize that Chris is much cooler than I am.

This has happened repeatedly, everywhere we have moved, every time we’ve had to make new friends.

In New York, Chris would up developing a friendship with “my” fabulous friend Deb. I had had to work one Saturday morning and Chris and Deb were, I dunno, palling around doing Fabulous Things. I came home and found an empty apartment (this was before everyone had a cell phone). I asked Gene, our doorman, “Have you seen Chris?”

“No” said Gene.

“But he’s supposed to meet me! We’re going out! And he’s not here!”

“Haven’t seen him,” said Gene.

“But you must have! He’s been hanging out with our friend Deb, you know, the fabulous one. The one who looks like a model! How could you miss them?”

“OH!” said Gene. “They went out a couple of hours ago. They’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”

Chris told our doorman later it was nice to know that Gene had his back. I never did figure out a way to tell Deb the story.

In Tokyo, I made a wonderful friend in our apartment building, someone who remains at the top of my “favorite people” list, during a time when the pool of potential friends shrunk from “People whom I like, and who like me,” to “People whom I like, and who like me, and who have babies about the same age as my baby, and who share the same approach to baby-raising as me, and who live in the American/European expatriate community in Tokyo, and who understand that my particular baby is a difficult baby and they aren’t going to judge me, and they will understand that sometimes, I’m not at my best, and forgive me for it, even if we haven’t already been friends for years.” I’m still not sure whether I see pregnancy and baby-rearing as a dress rehearsal for the experience of being a cancer patient, or whether God gave me early motherhood so that, once cancer came along, I could say, “Pshaw, this is nothing.” If anything, being a cancer patient is easier than being a new mother, or being a pregnant mother of a toddler, because when you have cancer, no one expects you to have your shit together.

My friend Laura did not expect me to have my shit together. She made it a point of telling me all the ways it was okay that my shit was patently not together, and then we could move forward and develop a friendship. One of the things I love about Laura was that she genuinely liked my beautiful but very, very cranky baby, and she never, not even once, intimated that my beautiful baby’s legendary crankiness was in any way due to my deficits as a mother.

Georgia, my superbly cranky baby, looked exactly like her father. She did the second she was born, and she still does. It’s one of the things I love the most about her.

Laura noticed it the first time she saw Chris. It was in the lobby of our building in Tokyo’s Roppongi district. Laura was coming home from the grocery store and Chris was coming home from work when she stopped him.

“You must be Georgia’s father,” she exclaimed in her very French way. “You know, Elizabeth is right. Georgia does look exactly like you.”

Chris stared at Laura for a full five seconds.

He drew himself up.

“I have teeth, (pause) and hair!” he snarled and stalked off to the elevator. Laura, she told me later, stood still in shock and got on the next elevator. She replayed the conversation a couple of times. Then it dawned on her, and she did not stop laughing for ten minutes.

“You know,” I said to Chris. “I know you’re much cooler than I am. If you want me to, I will write and print out a certificate that says as much, sign it, date it, and frame it for you to put up in your office.” I said this on the heels of my having done something we were both extremely happy about. Chris had said, “I don’t have to be proud of you. You’re proud enough of yourself for the both of us.”

“A certificate of coolness,” said Chris. “Interesting.”

“I really will, you know. I can make it funny. But I know you’re cooler than me, and always will be.”

“Nah,” said Chris. “You care much more about that kind of stuff than I do.”

Exactly.

I do this thing with housework.

Well, I do several things with housework. I procrastinate it. I rush through it. I delegate it. But somehow, it all gets done, and the process I use is a process I call triage.

I tackle the worst messes first. That’s why it took exactly one year for Chris and me to finally “finish” moving into our bedroom. I’ve learned, at least in housework, that good enough is just that: good enough.

It’s emotionally healthy, and it’s a good example for my children: to teach them to evaluate everything they have to do, and choose the most important task and do it first.

I show it by the example of doing housework together, and I show it by the example of prioritizing my own jobs and talking about what I’m doing, being a parent, and what I’m not doing: anything else. It’s also good for them to know where they stand in the order of things: important.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with them this summer, playing, doing housework together, and not writing. It reminds me why I didn’t even try to get anything done outside of full-time parenting until my younger child started all-day school.

I’mma go watch my son play. This is a short and pointless post, but it indicates a long and purposeful life.

I never used to decide who I wanted to be friends with. I was, as they say, “Friends with everyone,” and when I spent time with someone, it was because it just happened, or because I am lucky in my friends in that they tolerate me and my lack-of-reaching-out habits.

I do have the very most wonderful friends, and they all know that when I go off the radar it’s not personal, it’s just that: I go off the radar. Not my kids’ radar, unfortunately — see my earlier post, but most of the time, I’m impossible to pin down. It’s not something I like about myself. In fact, it’s something I dislike about myself, and I work hard on changing, and I am doing better, which begs the question, “How bad can it be?”

Over the past year something new has crept in.

I’m becoming intolerant.

Not intolerant of foibles and quirks, but there is a certain disconnect, a certain uncomfortableness I’m experiencing and it’s getting in the way of my laissez-faire approach to friendship.

It’s like this.

I just don’t think I can be friends anymore with people who smoke, people who whine, and people who judge.

In the case of the judgers, it’s a no brainer. I get the axe because I am judged and found sorely lacking.

The smoking is more complicated.  It’s not about second hand smoke or poor choices, because no one smokes around me, and poor choices just means better conversation, or at least more interesting conversation. It’s that when I am around people who smoke, I feel like the parable of the beggar starving to death beneath the table of the glutton. Only not, because there’s a connection in the story that I don’t have in my relationship with my friends. Your smelling like cigarettes does not affect me, except that it makes me not like to be around you. You have this huge gift that is called Life Without Cancer and you’re trashing it. It’s hard enough for me to follow up with my friendships with people whose company I enjoy.

In the case of people for whom whining and complaining to me about stuff that is part of everyday life is a fine use of my time, it’s even more straight up. “STFU,” I say. I might lose friends, but what I gain far outweighs the loss.

This post makes me sound bitchier than I am. I can count on two fingers (guess which ones) the “friend breakups” I have had in my life. The richness of my friendships is, in many ways, a testament to the qualities I bring to the table, highest among them a tolerance of just about anything. But that is changing. In some ways, it’s another thing cancer has robbed from me, but in others, it’s part of what “they” call the gift of cancer. I usually write off that idea, of cancer as a gift, as sentimental nonsense that people invent because they’re uncomfortable with the reality of it all, but this one is a significant change for me, and I think it might be for the better.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll become a better friend to the people with whom I choose to pursue friendships as a result.