A friend of mine was just diagnosed with melanoma.
Finding this out makes feelings come up that, if I were a character in a movie or a novel, I would manifest to the reader, or audience, by pouring myself a stiff one, or seven, but because I am a person IRL and not a fictional character, I know better, and besides, it wouldn’t do any good.
I know it wouldn’t do any good. I haven’t gone down that road, because I have eyes and can see that it leads to no good place. There isn’t even a good place to go.
The good place to go would be for me to fly up to see her, perhaps tag along when she goes to the doctor, hold her hand, and say, “There, there, it will be okay,” except that the last thing she needs is an old college friend in her hair, and she already knows what to do and how to handle it, and besides, it might not be okay. Or it might be. But it isn’t something I can control, or even affect.
My friend, who lives in Maine, is a stay-at-home mom with small sons, no job, and one of those crappy ex-husbands. I could send a cute thing that says, “Hey I am thinking of you,” and I can think of plenty of great things to send (Peeps, anyone?) but I also know how much good it won’t do.
I find myself a blinking idiot, looking online for a present to send, and yet knowing that for all of my hopes, I can’t do anything. I hate feeling powerless, and I hate knowing that I am.
It’s iconic. The “I have cancer” look — bald.
Surprisingly, lot of people think cancer itself makes your hair fall out, and I am reminded, over and over, of that wonderful woman I went to college with who came down with alopecia areata during her freshman year. It’s horrible to lose your hair, and it’s horrible to get the pity look wherever you go.
When I lost mine it was a much smaller deal than everything else I was going through, but it still made me sad.
I said to my brother, “My hair has started to fall out,” and he replied, truthfully, “My hair has been falling out for years.”
Then came the hats.
My head was cold all the time, so I wore a ski cap most of the time, even in July and August. I had a lot to choose from, because my friends are wonderful and mailed them to me all the time, including a several hats hand-knitted with love (thanks, Mom) and with skill plus love (thanks, Laura) and a couple bought with love and good taste (thanks, Jeanne).
The very best hat was the pirate one, which I wore everywhere, and again I shall say it: Thanks, Maureen.
I wore a baseball cap sometimes, which, I was told, looked creepy, because it only highlighted my baldness, but I like to imagine the off-kilter looks I got wearing it around Dallas were because it said “NY” on it. Yeah, I like the Yankees, and I have cancer. You wanna make something of it? Do ya? Do ya?
I don’t wear hats much any more, but recently, I came across a style of hat I did not wear when I was without hair, because I did not know about it, but if I had known about about it, I would have worn it. And, if you are reading this blog because you know someone who has cancer and you are wondering what might be a good gift for them, here you are.
If only I had known.
I got an email from an old friend a few days ago. My friend does not have cancer, but she has another “bad” illness, one of the ones where the illness and treatment play a one-two punch with her mental processes, and she was asking me about my experiences with cognitive occupational therapy.
I’m upset that my friend, my brilliant friend, is having to go through this.
I would have loved to have been able to give her a step-by-step detail of my experience, but I couldn’t, because it didn’t work out for me.
I had a complete neurological and psychological workup done which established that I was indeed cognitively impaired and that I would benefit from some cognitive occupational therapy. I went once and received a handout with advice like “Put your purse in the same place every time you walk in the door so you can find it.”
I think it’s called recursion.
If I had had the ability to put my purse in the same place every time I walk in the door then I would not have needed cognitive therapy.
I never went back.
I eventually found a therapist, a doozy of a good one, with whom I was able to talk through my frustrations, and she gave me some pointers that have evidently worked out for me, because here I am, blogging about my life, and not just playing Warcraft all the time, my house is falling much closer to the tidy side of the tidy/chaotic spectrum, I’m making healthy meals for my family and myself, I have friends with whom I do stuff, I’m being a good example for my children in terms of personal grooming habits, and all of the other “fumctional” checkboxes are pretty much checked. I talked about them with my therapist.
Clean clothes. Check.
Hair brushed. Check.
House tidy. Check.
Social life. Check.
Kids taken care of. Check.
Happy. Check. Check? Wait, what?
Depression? Huh? As it turns out, the workup sheet of my cognitive and psychological evaluation had a sentence that stated “Patient should be evaluated for severe depression and is a potential suicide risk.”
Yeah.
On the one hand, depression is a deadly disease, and I’m glad that the medical profession is on the lookout for it.
On the other hand, I do not feel depressed.
I asked my therapist about that sentence. She looked at my results and thought for a few minutes.
Therapist: “The question, “How many times a day do you think about dying.” How did you answer that?
Me: “Um. Several times a day? All the time? Whatever the maximum answer is.”
Therapist: “Do you ever think about killing yourself?”
Me: “No. Hell no. I didn’t go through cancer treatment to kill myself.”
Therapist: “Well then what do you mean when you think about death.”
Me: raises eyebrow and sneers.
Therapist: demonstrates how they teach you to not say anything in therapist school.
Me: “I had bad cancer with a low probability of survival. Of course I think about dying.”
Therapist: “Do you think about how you would like to die?”
Me: “No, I think about how I would like to not die.”
Therapist: “I think when they developed that test, they didn’t envision patients with quasi-terminal diagnoses. Most people don’t think about death because they don’t have to. If you say you’re not depressed, I believe you. It doesn’t sound like you’re depressed. Don’t worry about it.”
I don’t worry about it. Much. I’m surprisingly uncomfortable with that sentence in my medical records, but it’s not like anyone is going to sell me life insurance anyway.
I have a friend who was in a terrible accident years ago.
I didn’t find out about it until recently when we got back in touch after 17 years of not being in touch (thanks facebook!). We all got together for dinner recently — thank goodness he got along with my husband — and in the course of the conversation, I heard about the crash.
Me: “You broke your back? In THREE places? AND you had a shunt in your brain to relieve swelling AND you broke half your ribs and your leg in three places?”
Friend: “It was a bad crash.”
Me: “Yeah, I bet it was one of those cases where the ambulance guys were like ‘ZOMGWTFBBQ he’s alive!!!'”
Friend: “Tactful. And yeah, they were, but I don’t remember that part. I heard about it later.”
Later on we went for a stroll down around the swanky shops near the restaurant we went to, and I chatted with my friend while Chris chatted with my friend’s beautiful wife.
Instead of talking about my friend’s near-death car accident, we chatted about my near-death cancer. It was much the same, except that my friend already knew about my cancer and his mom died of breast cancer, so he knew the drill.
Friend: “I bet you have some serious insight into the big issues of life.”
Me: “Yeah, but no one gets it and it’s not something I talk about a lot. I mean, you have to be pretty much dead to understand what I went through.”
Friend: “Um, yeah.”
Me: “Oh, OH! You were! What happened. Did you see the light and everything when you were lying there by the side of the road next to your smashed convertible?”
Friend: “It wasn’t by the side of the road. It was the day after, when I woke up in the trauma unit of the hospital. The nurses kept trying to give me morphine but I wouldn’t let them.”
Me: “With the light and everything?”
Friend: “With the light and everything. I was on the threshold, talking to Jesus, telling him I had to go back, for my kids and for my wife, that they needed me, and He kept showing me all the ways they would be okay without me, and then I said, ‘okay, Jesus, I get it, they don’t need me, they need You, and I’m just along for the ride.’ Then the nurses gave me a shot of morphine and knocked me out and I woke back up in the hospital room.”
It was a good conversation, but it was one of those conversations where I did all the asking and all the listening, and none of the talking. I heard about my friend’s near-death experience, but I did not share my own with him.
I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words at the time, probably, maybe, but if I had put it into words, it would be these words.
I never took the walk down the tunnel into the light, or if I did, it was gradual, because my descent into death wasn’t brought on by a sudden event. I was dying, and I knew it, but it was a gradual knowledge, and not the less horrible for the slowness with which the realization dawned on me. I was months if not weeks from death when they started chemotherapy: there was a metastatic lymph node wrapped around my coronary artery.
Taxol stopped my disease in its tracks. I could feel it. It was like an itch being scratched: no longer was I dying, but neither am I precisely living. I stopped just short, with one foot over the threshold.
It is like the scene from The Matrix when Trinity stops time, or escapes it. I don’t know whether I’ve slowed down, or the world has slowed down, but either way, my sense of time is all messed up. It speeds up and slows down like a kid playing with a wind-up phonograph. A good friend, who also happens to have cancer, and AIDS, described it like being in the middle a car crash, were everything slows to a snail’s pace and the smallest things zoom into sharp focus, only I feel as though the car suddenly stopped, mid-air, and I unbuckled, opened the door, dropped out of the car, and walked away. My entire life flashed before my eyes, and then stayed.
It’s still there.
It’s awfully strange.
I feel exactly like I did as a toddler, as a teenager, as a college student, as a mother of elementary-age children, and exactly as I will as an old woman, cranky at the younger generation for leaving her behind, and yet I’ve forgotten whole swaths of things I know I ought to remember, but I don’t know what they are. Weeks and years go by for me and I don’t feel the passage of time, but the events of yesterday feel like a lifetime ago.
I fake it.
People who have had near-death experiences often speak of their loved ones greeting them, welcoming them. Mine did — my grandparents, their parents, people I have never known, but who know me, and here is what they say: “Wait.” “Not yet.” “Bide a wee.”
Bide a wee?
I didn’t see the light they describe, except that it lurks right outside of my peripheral vision, and sometimes, when I am very tired, or very sad, it blurs over and I can’t see anything except a brightness that overwhelms me, and there is a roaring in my ears, and I have to go throw up, and again, I hear it. “Wait.”
I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and so I continue with the quotidian minutae of my life because that is what is important: keeping my family fed, clean, loved. I’d also like to get a job again, at some point, or else this writer thing might work out for me, but I continually underestimate the effort it takes me just to function, or pretend to.
It’s an experience I’ve spoken about with a few of my friends. I’m lucky to have friends with whom I can talk about such things.
One friend, my Zen friend, says it sounds as though I have reached Nirvana.
Another friend, the incest survivor, never says much, but always manages, in her silence, to say exactly the right thing.
My friend who is the survivor of the after-school-special-esque case of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of a parent tells me to focus on other people, to leave the past in the past, and to focus on the future.
My friend who left an abusive marriage tells me over and over that I am brave, and that she is proud of me, and I appreciate it every time she says it.
I did have one friend, someone I though I could confide in, who found it too much to handle, and who ended our friendship. I wish I had the courage to say what I should have said, and that is “fuck you,” but I didn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t, because it wouldn’t have done any good and besides, the signs were there all along that she was really just a Stepford Wife hanging out with me to try and become something more than she was: shallow.
In defense of my former friend, it does sound crazy. There are certainly some psychiatric terms to describe how I’ve handled my experience.
Depersonalization disorder springs to the forefront, but when I have discussed my feelings with my therapist, she has said that my sensations are normal, and surprisingly common among people who have had experiences similar to mine, and that as long as it continues to improve and does not interfere with my ability to function on a day-to-day basis, I’m fine.
And I am fine. I just have issues.
That’s what I say whenever it’s clear that I have somehow failed to measure up to the minimum standards of my peer group: “I have issues.”
“We all have issues,” said one of my friends, someone whom I later found out lost her mother to alcoholism when she was in high school. “I have so many, I have a closet full. I call them my ‘shoes.”
It’s an old gospel song: “You got shoes, I got shoes, all God’s children got shoes, my Lord. When we get to heaven, we’re gonna put on our shoes and walk all over God’s heaven.”
When I do get to heaven, I think I’ll be able to leave my ‘shoes behind me on the threshold.
Chris has a fantastic Valentine’s Day weekend planned. He took the day off today, and tomorrow night we’re going to the symphony.
He’s already given me a great present.
He’s being super nice.
I’m trying to put a good face on it.
I still hate Valentine’s Day.
I didn’t used to hate Valentine’s Day, but seven years of breakups on or around February 14 sounded the death knell of my ever cavorting with lace hearts and chubby cupids.
If I made conversation hearts, they would say, “Let’s be friends,” and “I’m happy for you.” They would say “There’s no chemistry,” and “I think I might be gay,” or “Hey are you gay too? Oh.” Definitely there would be some that said “You’re not my type” and some that would say “You are definitely my type but not my religion.” There would be one conversation heart, a shriveled gray one that said in barely perceptible script, “I have a wife,” and a whole bunch of conversation hearts that said … nothing at all.
I hate Valentine’s Day. It’s not just that it’s mawkish, and forced. I hate it because you can’t win, especially not if you are a guy. If you buy your wife or girlfriend roses and chocolates in a heart-shaped box, you’re unoriginal and paid too much for flowers and chocolates, and if you deviate from the script, you have an almost certain probability of missing the mark. If you are a girl and try to do something nice for you husband or boyfriend, he’ll be disappointed if it’s not X-rated, and if it IS X-rated, he’ll either think you are a floozy or else you’ve opened a can of worms or, if it’s not a can of worms, he’ll secretly think it’s nothing special. Then there is the special hell of being single on Valentine’s Day, and, while I don’t know from experience, I can imagine that there is a whole level of misery associated with being gay on February 14, the day one gay friend described to me as “Heterosexual Day.” Inevitably the day ends in tears.
Chris and I have a tradition of un-celebrating Valentine’s Day by heading out to the seediest bar we can find for cheeseburgers and beer. I have a sneaking suspicion he would rather celebrate in a more traditional way, especially the way that opens up a can of worms, but he likes the part where he doesn’t have to pay through the nose for flowers and chocolates and a prix fixe dinner where the prix is fixed up to the stratosphere for bad chicken in a bad sauce and then tiramisu in a heart shaped dish, and both of us failing to not laugh at the cheesiness of the other couples in the restaurant. I love being married. I love my husband, and I also love that the biggest drama in my love life revolves around breaking wind beneath the covers, and the clichéd words earnestly uttered frequently by everyone who happens to be part of the marriage that I am in, “You are taking me for granted.” The married person writing this essay is married. It’s true. I’m not trying to be a happy-smug-married person — in fact, I’m trying hard here not to be a happy-smug-married person, but breakups are horribly painful, and I’m glad I don’t have to endure them every few months, and I hate Valentine’s Day for precipitating them for so many people.
Three weeks after we discovered that I had cancer, we were driving down to Houston to start chemotherapy. We had just learned that not only did I have cancer, but my cancer was bad, and I was probably going to die within a few months. We were in a phase of our marriage where the conversation hearts were mostly the ones that said nothing at all, but we were talking about it, and I started crying in the car. “I hate this,” I said. “This is horrible. I have the breakup feeling. I HAVE THE BREAKUP FEELING. HAVING CANCER IS LIKE THE BREAKUP FEELING. THAT IS SO WRONG!”
I’m glad I don’t have cancer any more. I’m glad I have a husband who loves me, and whom I love. I’m glad I have two healthy children, and the likelihood that I will live to see them grow up. But I also know what it feels like to slip through the looking glass.
Six weeks ago, facebook connected me with the man who was the youth minister of the Southern Baptist church I grew up in, and with his wife.
I speak of the youth minister when in fact, the church churned through a new youth pastor every two or three years, thereby giving me insight into how not to govern a nonprofit organization that would serve me well in my later career, but in the case of Tom and Jill, even though they were only at my church for two years and change, they had a huge effect on me.
It was through Tom and Jill that I learned that I don’t make friends, I just discover them — knowledge that has served me well during my peripatetic adulthood. It was also through my friendship with Tom and Jill, especially Jill, that I began to see adults as people, and as peers. That’s a tricky phase of adolescence, and one some people never quite achieve, but I did, and it started when Tom told me his wife was new in Miami and could use a friend, so I should step up to the plate.
That the new youth minister’s beautiful wife wanted to be friends with awkward tenth grade me blew my mind. I’ve never been good at pulling off false humility, but this was the real McCoy. I stopped short of out-and-out hero worship, but whenever I read Anne Shirley’s empurpled prose about Miss Stacey, her “beloved teacher,” the face that always pops into my mind’s eye is Jill’s.
Tom appeared on facebook a couple of months ago in the “people you may know” column. I waited a couple of days, thinking, “After twenty-three years, and two decades of being a minister with all the people they must have mentored, are they even going to remember me?” and then sent a friend request each to Tom and to Jill.
Jill started it: “You live in Dallas? Dallas? That’s four hours away! We’re in Oklahoma! We have horses! When are you coming to see me?”
After she repeated the invitation repeatedly, I figured it was earnest, and not just polite, so last Friday we loaded the kids into the car and took off.
I’m not above bribing my children into good behavior, but I know the limitations of that method, so instead I appealed to their better nature:
Miss Jill and Mr Tom are very important to me. If you kids are obnoxious I will be humiliated, and they have horses, so if you ever ever ever want them to invite you back, you’d better be polite, because if you are rude, you will not see these wonderful people, nor their wonderful horses, ever again.
In the case of my kids, better nature equals the cognitive ability to understand the long term consequences of actions.
It was, predictably, a wonderful visit. There’s lots to say about the joys of seeing old friends, and about the particular and unique wonderfulness of these particular and unique friends of mine, and I am sure I will say it at some point, but, Oh! Horses!
Jill saddled up two of her horses and plunked my kids on them and walked them over to the ring. There are a lot of joys in parenthood, but seeing your kids ride a horse for the first time has got to rank up toward the very top.
Then we plunked the kids in front of a movie and Chris and Jill and I mounted up to do some trail riding.
Seeing your husband ride a horse for the first time ranks up there with seeing your kids do it, only better.
Sitting on Jill’s horse, I could feel all the things that are wrong with me evaporating like mist rising from snow.
I know there is no magic bullet to curing cancer, to overcoming fear, to rebuilding what was lost, but if there were one, it would come in horse shape.
I don’t make a lot of predictions about the future, but I’m going to wager on more horses in our lives.
Erica was my first friend in Dallas. She and I lived in the same apartment complex and our daughters are the same age, not quite two when we met. She’s a lot younger than I am, but that doesn’t matter.
When you have small children and are new in a city, all of a sudden the world of potential friends shrinks down to people whose children are the same age as your children, or people who really and truly like small children, and who happen to share the same view of parenting as yours, and, in my case, people who understand that your child’s terrible behavior isn’t the result of bad parenting but is just a stubborn case of “she was born that way.”
Erica and I became friends immediately. It went like this:
“Hi,” I said to the mom who was walking with her kid.
“Hi,” she said. And they stopped to get acquainted as I sat outside, hugely pregnant, with my toddler who was busy decapitating the flowers planted around our swanky apartment complex.
“You are clearly not from Dallas. Your small hair and lack of a Texas drawl gives it away, plus the fact that you are stopping to converse with me instead of politely saying , ‘Hi’ and keeping going — back East we only say ‘Hi’ if we are willing to engage in conversation.”
“OMG I thought I was the only person who noticed that. Where are you from?”
“We moved here from Japan. Where are you from?”
“Philadelphia. Can’t you tell?” (I could, a mile away.)
“Oh! I went to college in Philadelphia. Where in Philly?”
“Bryn Mawr.”
“OMG I went to Bryn Mawr College. Pizzi’s Pizza is the best pizza ever. Is it still there?”
Then, at the thought of pizza, I leaned over and threw up in the bushes.
Erica laughed at me and told me she did stuff like that when she was pregnant, and, because she knew Mr Pizzi, gave me the secret of his amazing pizza crust.
It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
When I got cancer, Erica, who had just had her second child, said she would be there for me, and she was. She was one of a very small group of people who knew to bring over food and hang out with me while we ate. I usually took a nap or otherwise ignored her while the kids played, but if she was offended, she never showed it.
Then she fell off the face of the earth. A lot of my friends did that, and, because they were new friends, and I was impossible to be friends with, I didn’t get at all offended, but in the case of Erica I was worried, because her cell phone was disconnected and emails bounced back and messages left at her home went unanswered.
High up on the list of Things That Are Worse Than Cancer is divorce, and hers was a bad one, as far as I can tell: she tried to move back to Philadelphia with her kids and, because she did the wrong way, wound up losing custody of them. I found this out when she popped back up on my facebook page and, of course, I called her immediately and got the whole story, fairly, because my friend is fair. A lot of people jump to the conclusion that my friend did something to deserve having her children taken away from her in the divorce, and that makes me think that a lot of people also do not live in the real world, where people with money call the shots. When someone asked me, as they do not do any more, if my friend got in trouble with drugs and that is why she lost her kids, I said that their question is like asking whether a murder victim was in a gang or whether a rape victim had it coming because she was wearing tight jeans or a short skirt. My friend is pretty freaking awesome, and the fact that she lost her kids in an ugly divorce only says that she is naive about the mean things people can do.
“When are you going to come back to Dallas,” I asked her.
“I’m getting ready to,” she said.
A few months later, I got a message from her, “May I stay on your couch for a few days?”
I talked it over with Chris.
“Yes, but not on the couch, you can share Graham’s room, and there a couple of ground rules. You have to have a job and you have to pay rent.”
She got a job and she pays rent and a year and a half later we find that we can’t do without her.
God gives us what we need.
Yeah, sure, we are doing a wonderful thing for my friend, opening our home to her and bringing her into our family, blah, blah, but it just worked out that way.
We call her Kato Kaelin a lot.
People often assume she works for us as a nanny. She doesn’t, although she’s like a combination big sister/young aunt to my kids.
Watching The Blind Side makes me happy, because it is a wonderful story, and it also makes me uncomfortable because it is too close to home, and I wonder if it would have been such a successful story if the foster kid had been a stunningly beautiful twenty-something divorcée and not an all-star football player.
We feel better about giving a helping hand when the person doing the receiving falls neatly into one of our pre-approved categories of “People Who Need Help.” The Bible tells us to take care of widows and orphans, and I put Erica into that category even though her ex-husband is still around and her parents are not technically dead. Erica is first and foremost my friend, although I love her like a daughter, and when I have prayed for guidance about her the answer I have gotten is this, “Just love on her a lot.”
That’s clearly the Word of God because it’s not a phrase I would ever use. And so I do.
I have suggested, many times, that she go to church.
“You know that’s not my thing,” she has said, and I have prayed for her to know God, and the answer is, always, “Just love on her a lot and let Me take care of the rest.”
Evidently He did because Erica came home (from church) the other day, and mentioned that she was going to make an effort to add some God into her life. I had nothing to do with this, it was some other friends who reached out to her and brought her to church, one of the churches that takes a rock band and powerpoint approach to worship.
People speak of being born again, which is a controversial turn of phrase, even among Christians. I haven’t asked Erica whether she has been born again, or saved, or whatever the parlance is in the church she has been attending. It’s a concept I understand, because I grew up Southern Baptist, but in the wisdom of my age, I’m keeping an even keel.
“Aren’t you happy for me?” asked Erica. I was chopping onions when we were talking about her experience.
“I am, but if I were to make a big deal of it and show you how happy I was, you’d be uncomfortable, so I am trying hard to keep cool.”
Do I see an instant change in her? Yes.
She’s prettier, if such a thing were possible. She seems to be less fearful; she reminds me less of a thoroughbred. I think she is beginning to see herself as she is, as a child of God, beloved.
It’s all very new.
One change, though, is that when I pray for her I get a different answer.
As I have mentioned on this blog and elsewhere, I don’t particularly believe in the Devil. I’ve been an Episcopalian for 20 years, and I believe in not wearing white pants before Memorial Day. Nevertheless, either through the voice of God speaking to me in that still small way He has, or else an echo of memory from my Southern Baptist upbringing, I’m thinking that if there is a Devil, he is going to sabotage this new thing in Erica’s life.
She walloped herself in the eye with a hammer last week, and this past weekend, she fell down the stairs.
Yeah.
Not on my watch.
If there is one thing that cancer has taught me, it is how to pray, and how to ask other people to do so as well.
So, if you pray, please do so.
I spent, and still spend, too much time sitting in waiting rooms, at the doctor and at the airport. I wouldn’t mind, except that I do mind Fox News, which always seems to be the station of choice.
This parody is making me chuckle.
A lot.
I have good luck. Not as good luck as my older brother, who has great luck, but I would say that I have very good luck.
“How can you say that. You have cancer!” you might be thinking.
My response: “Ah, but I beat cancer.”
I understand what Lou Gehrig was getting at: yeah, it’s a bad break, but when you look at the big picture, things look a bunch better.
That’s part of being lucky, in fact: the very act of looking at the big picture.
It’s not just me who thinks this. British social scientist Richard Wiseman spent ten years researching the phenomenon of luck, and he wrote a book and a web site about his findings. The book is called The Luck Factor and so is the web site. Dr. Weisman breaks up what differentiates lucky people into several bite-sized bits; one of them is titled “See the Positive,” and another is “Take the Long View.” I spent time thinking about it. In fact, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about because it beats dwelling; in fact, “Don’t Dwell” is another of Dr. Weisman’s suggestions to people wishing to improve their luck. He’s put together a fantastic resource.
Luck was also a big part of our lives in Japan. Recognizing that I barely scratched the surface of even understanding Japanese culture, I noticed that anything that reeked of faux pas was termed “unlucky.” Many Shinto practices also revolve around luck; Shinto is an ancient practice with roots in early agriculture. What agricultural culture doesn’t offer prayers to the gods to assure a good harvest? Luck, in the tangible forms of sun and rain, is of vital importance to farmers; firm belief in luck seems be one of the many ways in which the Japanese agricultural tradition has held steadfast.
The Romans anthropomorphized luck into the goddess Fortuna, who oversaw the rise and fall of men’s fortunes, and they attributed to her whim both the good and the bad. Sometimes, you see her with two faces representing good and bad luck. She’s associated with the wheel which gives credence to the pattern of good fortune and bad following on each other’s heels, like a sine curve. I’d love to be able to quantify it, but how do you measure luck?
I’ve noticed that often, people with good luck are inclined to attribute their success to hard work, instead of recognizing when they’ve been lucky and transforming the realization into compassion, whereas people who consistently make bad choices often attribute their failure to bad luck instead of taking some responsibility and making a change.
There are things we can control and things we cannot.
None of us can control the circumstances of our birth: our birth date, our parentage, our native gifts, and our culture. Malcolm Gladwell addresses this brilliantly in his book Outliers which he calls a story of success and I call a clarion call to the bulk of people who read books like Gladwell’s, brilliant and successful, to stop looking so smug, and recognize how much of their (our) success is due to blind, dumb luck and not just hard work and wise choices.
We can control the choices we make: how hard we work, what we focus our efforts on, how we treat other people, how much we exercise, how much and what we eat, how much we sleep, how we dress, how often we go to church, and, to a degree, who we associate with. Bookstores abound with self-help volumes to help us make better choices. But we don’t.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we’re all doing the best we can, and some people make bad choices and some people work hard, and we all have good luck and bad luck, and not always in equal measure.
Some people get cancer. Sure, there is a statistical correlation between obesity, smoking, overuse of alcohol, consumption of hydrogenated fats, a sedentary lifestyle, and a bunch of other stuff and getting cancer, but on a case-by-case scenario, either you have cancer or you don’t, and there are plenty of more compelling reasons to make better lifestyle choices than the specter of cancer. There are worse things than cancer. Life isn’t fair.
Some people beat cancer. I’m one of them. Statistically speaking, you have a better chance of beating cancer if you have access to better health care. If you have the knowledge to know where to go to seek out the best medical care, or if you have the self-confidence to inconvenience your family and make them take you to a further-away facility. If you can afford to stay in a hotel for months at a time, or are have friends who are willing to put you up. If you have the courage to get that lump examined right away in the first place and not hope it just goes away on its own. If your treatment kills your cancer before it can kill you.
If there is one thing I take away from this experience, it some combination of recognizing the brilliant choices I made in the way I approached my disease, replicating that brilliance in the future choices I make in my life, and realizing of how very little of my success has to do with me after all and how much of the credit goes to the people I am lucky enough to have as family and friends and to the doctors whose care I was lucky enough to receive.
Dance with the Reaper 