I was on my way to see Art, my awesome hair stylist this morning when he called me. “I’m on my way,” I said from the parking lot I pulled into to get the phone.
“Art?”
“Art?”
“My dog passed away. He just passed away,” he said.
My heart breaks for him. I know how hard it is to lose a pet. His salon is filled with pictures of his dog. Art loves that little guy.
Of course, we cancelled the appointment and I hung up the phone. I wasn’t sure what to do — what’s the etiquette for when your hairdresser cancels on you because his dog just died? I called my super-efficient friend, the one who turned me on to Art in the first place when my hair started growing back and I desperately needed him. As it turns out, she had an appointment to see Art that same afternoon, so I ran out to the florist and got an orchid and a sympathy card in which I wrote “May he go on to the place good dogs and bad rabbits go,” a phrase courtesy of my brother-in-law. I met my super-efficient friend at school, gave her the loot to bring to him, and went to run some errands.
I’m a coward.
I should have driven the flowers over myself, but I don’t have the courage to see Art in the first fresh ravages of pain. It doesn’t mean I don’t care. I do. I adore Art. He’s the epitome of a perfect hairdresser — he’s a great listener, and, when I have the smarts to shut up while in his chair, he’s witty, funny, clever, wise, and kind. Plus, he is brilliant.
I’m like the scores of my own friends who, when I was ill, dropped meals off, rang the doorbell, and drove off because they did not have time, or courage, to stay and chat.
I got it then. I get it now.
We all do the best we can.
I hope the orchid I got him helps to assuage his grief.
Ignorance is bliss, right?
Another bromide of that ilk is this one: Don’t argue with idiots. I was 40 before I figured that one out. Here’s what led me to that brilliant conclusion:
“The macrobiotic diet is very important for anyone with cancer. You must especially never eat pork. That must be why the Bible says it’s wrong.”
“Fresh wheat grass juice will cure you. I read it on the internet. It must be true.”
“There is a cancer personality and you have it.” Helllooooooooo nineteenth century.
“Doctors don’t actually want to cure cancer because they would put themselves out of a job. Cancer is a multi-billion dollar industry.” I alluded to this one when the lovely French radiologist came into my exam room to explain to me that my cancer had spread to the fixed lymph nodes above my collar bone. “Can you fix it,” I asked him?
“Yes,” he said. “With radiation, we can fix it if you come here.”
“Great! You can fix it! Then you can quit this place and go be a pediatrician,” I told him.
“I like your sense of humor,” he told me. “You’ll make it.”
I heard this over and over again during my treatment: “Keep laughing. You’ll be okay.”
“Is that true?” I asked the most brutally honest of all of my doctors.
“There has been some research, and a good attitude is associated with survival, but a lot of it had to do with showing up to appointments. However, keeping a sense of humor certainly makes the process easier to deal with.” It’s the diametrical opposite of the people, so many of them, who told me “Laughter melts cancer cells. I read an article about it in Reader’s Digest.”
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
That’s what I tell myself at least, to make myself feel better about having less than a little knowledge about so many things — I’ve been living in a cave for eight years. Certainly cancer has kept me out of the loop, but also, I had a miscarriage and two children and lived in Japan. I’ve missed a lot.
Included in the set of things I’ve missed is something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
The more of an idiot you are, the more likely you are to be confident in your knowledge and abilities. I love this, I really do. It explains so much.
What I wonder most is where I fit in on the nifty line graph. Am I in the percentage of people who consistently perform poorly on the battery of tests but blithely think I did okay, or am I in the smaller percentage of people who kick the results out of the park but fret that I wasn’t sure about a couple of questions? The answer is that sometimes I am one, and sometimes I am the other, and most of the time I’m somewhere in the middle.
Scratch that. I’m not even on the graph.
Experiencing cancer is a crash course in survival. Most of the time, my back is to the wall and I’d better just keep moving without thinking because the capacity to reflect, to self-reflect, and stop and ask, “how am I doing” is a luxury so far out of my realm of possibility that I can’t imagine it. I don’t think. I just go, from treatment to treatment, appointment to appointment, and my doctors tell me how I’m doing, and tell me what the next step is, and I don’t think about the big picture at all, because I can’t. I know life is going on around me somewhere, but if I think about it, all I can imagine is flickering shadows on the wall of a cave.
And yet here I am, wondering how I am doing, constantly stopping to do the mental self-check. Are my shoes tied? Do my clothes match? Did I miss a belt loop? Is my hair brushed? Do I have on earrings? Do they match? Each other as well as what I’m wearing? Did I call that person by the right name? Am I missing ten thousand social queues and if I am, can I recover?
I think I’m doing okay and then I find out that I’m really not.
Or is it that I really am doing okay, but I’m just holding myself to too high a standard and I should relax and stop fretting?
Or maybe it’s that by the simple fact of my engaging in self-assessment, I have demonstrated that I’ve gone back into the realm of what life used to be like, and the answer to the question, “how much self-reflection is normal and how much is just pointless navel-gazing?” is that moderation is always a good thing, and that writers always spend way too much time looking into the psychic mirror.
I think the biggest question of all is, “How can I teach my children to stop and self-evaluate against accurate external measures so they can develop the critical thinking skills necessary to determine their own level of ability and performance.”
Then it’s back to another bromide: You can’t actually teach your children anything except by modeling the behavior you want to instill in them.
Oh, wait. That’s not a cliché.
Perhaps I should stop asking myself whether I am functioning at a level similar to the way I did before cancer and instead ask myself whether I am being the person I want my children to become.
He is six today.
It’s his first birthday since his first one where I have been healthy. I:
- Made pancakes from scratch for breakfast, with sliced strawberries.
- Brought in a home-made brownie-cookie cake, decorated with “Happy Birthday Graham and Chlöe” in colored writing-gel from a tube, which I had on hand in the pantry, and which I could find.
- Made a cake.
- Gave him the present I had bought weeks ago, kept hidden, remembered about, and remembered where it was.
These things may seem small, but to me they are huge.
There is thing they call chemo brain. It certainly beats the alternative, and I don’t usually bitch about it (much) but it’s real, and sometimes it’s frustrating.
It happens when I see a friend whose name I can’t remember, so I cover for myself by sticking a smile on my face and saying, “Hello, friend.” It’s better than calling someone by the wrong name, as I did my friend Nicole, for a year.
It happens when my husband goes into church without me and I can’t recognize the back of his head and have to get someone else to point him out for me. “We’ve been together for almost 16 years,” he said this morning. “You should know what I look like by now.”
It’s what makes me take 5x the time it should to do simple tasks, like laundry, or making sandwiches. Once I re-learn every step in a process, I’m okay, but the learning curve is vertical, and the scope of stuff I have to re-learn is vast.
Erica, our awesome housemate, calls it the whiteboard. It was there, in my head, but now it’s gone, only you can see a faint shadow. Another way I describe it is by saying that cancer played 52 pickup with everything I know. The cards are all still there, but scattered all over the metaphorical floor of my psyche.
For example: I had to re-figure-out how to brush my teeth, to figure out to find the toothpaste and toothbrush on the counter with nothing else on it (took 20 minutes), to unscrew the cap of the toothpaste tube, put the toothpaste on the brush, close the cap, turn the water on, wet the toothbrush, turn the water off, brush ALL of my teeth, rinse my mouth, rinse the toothbrush, and put it back. Now multiply that by everything you do in the course of a day. Walking, Driving, Cooking. Bathing. Conversation. Reading. Making love.
A life’s worth of minutiae I had to learn to do over again, from scratch. I’ve had people ask about what was the hardest part of my illness and then express disbelief or derision at my struggles to figure all this stuff out, or judge me for my failures and then strike me from the friend list. At the time, I reacted in silence, still in the thick of it, too shell-shocked, to numb to say what I should have said, so I will say it now. Fuck you.
I spent a lot of time being evaluated, tested, because I knew something was wrong. “My internal process flow charts — they’re gone. I can only do sequential steps. If I have to make a decision, it’s paralyzing,” I said over and over to the battery of doctors I met with to figure out how to fix this.
“You do realize that being able to articulate your problems like that means you are more capable than 99.9 percent of my patients. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use those terms to describe this problem,” said one neurologist.
Eventually, they sent me to a cognitive therapist who gave me some mental exercises to do along with a photocopied sheet of coping mechanisms (put your purse in the same place every day, carry a calendar, etc.) and pointed out things I should be aware of so I could work on them, and, so far, it has mostly worked, and now I am much too busy with my regularly scheduled life to take time out for cognitive therapy.
Except that I still find myself stymied. I’ll have a mountain of small jobs to do and I stand around. All the time. It drives Chris nuts.
I think I’m on to something, though.
My son’s sixth birthday party was yesterday. It was, predictably, a loot fest, particularly in the Lego department.
He woke up this morning at 6:19 am and began carrying a large box of Lego Harry Potter — The Burrow around, singing. Even before I had a cup of tea, I began helping him build it.
“I can’t do it without your help. It’s too big,” he said.
“You can,” I told him. “You do it one step at a time. See. here are the instructions, one step at a time.” And so we began.
One step at a time.
Not a huge project.
Just one step.
Maybe if I look at my life, especially the housework part of it, that way my house will become less like a huge pile of Legos on the table and more like the Burrow, which reminds me to take down our Halloween decorations because there is still a ghoul in our attic window.
Do you remember, or remember reading about, the self-immolation of Buddhist Monk Hòa thượng Thích Quảng Đức at a busy intersection in Saigon to protest the treatment of Buddhists under the (Catholic) regime that was currently in power in South Vietnam? I think if it every time I hear of another gay kid driven to suicide.
“So, when are you going to start waxing again?” Chris asked this a couple of years ago, when I was complaining about the itchiness of hair re-growing Down There.
“Not,” said I.
“Pout,” said Chris’s face. I elaborated, “When you lose all your body hair from chemotherapy, waxing loses its appeal.”
He hasn’t said word about it since. Waxing has been completely off my radar until last week when I got a phone call from my wild friend.
“Hey, I have a question? Would you go with me to get a Brazilian wax? You know what that is, right?”
“Hell yeah!” I said without thinking. “How long has it been since I got one of those?” I thought to myself. “Oh. OH!” I had forgotten.
Accordingly, this morning, my wild friend and I went out to Waxing the City and … well … you know the rest.
That’s a giant step back toward resuming my regularly scheduled life.
My favorite jeans are about to bite the dust.
They’re irreplaceable, because of the process it took to get them that way. I wore them to chemo 15 times, and then wore them as I sweated that stuff out of my body. Acid wash? Stone wash? Try taxol wash. The fabric is now almost tissue-thin and as soft as my great-aunt’s linen sheets which I still remember from that time we visited her in Wellesley, Massachusetts 27 years ago, along with her recipe for iced tea which was to brew it over mint and then stir in a small can of frozen lemonade concentrate.
I can’t replace my jeans, and I surely don’t want to, but I’m wondering which of my current indigo-dyed trousers is going to rise to the top of the heap and become my new favorites. I live in jeans, because I am a creature of comfort.
My more fashionable friend, upon hearing that chemo jeans are about to disintegrate, suggested that I try out jeggings.
I don’t get jeggings. I mean I do, in theory: they are leggings that look like jeans. Aside from the word, I’m not so keen on the idea. The idea of the jegging violates my natural fabrics rule … guideline … philosophy of life, and it stands in start contrast to my desire that objets de vie demonstrate integrity, that they should be what they appear. Jeggings are faux.
Word on the street is that jeggings are more comfortable than jeans. Well, of course they are, if you wear your jeans like the heart of the Grinch. There’s an easier solution, and I believe the excellent author of Eat, Pray, Love summed it up exactly: to buy bigger jeans. Easy for me to say.
Therein lies the heart of my perplexity, of my inability to get my head around the concept of jeggings.
It’s not such a big thing to go from a size small to a size less small, but still small, especially since the effort it is going to take me to get back into the smaller of the small size jeans isn’t onerous — I say now, heading into what Chris calls the Season of Fat. I should knock wood.
I have a lot of problems, but weight isn’t one of them. A good friend of mine, someone who is older, wiser, and measurably more successful than I am yelled at me once. “You skinny people just don’t get it.” She is right. I don’t. Sorry, but I don’t. I don’t take it for granted, either. I can imagine, I can accept, and not judge, but no, I don’t get it. Some things have to be experienced to be understood, and I imagine that being fat, like being bald, or like having one breast but not two, is one of them.
I have plenty of leggings including some new python-printed ones that fall so far out of my natural fabrics philosophy that they come round back at it from the other side: they look natural.
I’ve never been a follower of fads.
Why, then, do I find myself thinking about jeggings? I think it’s the neologism, the linguistic zeugma. It makes me laugh. I laugh because it’s exactly the kind of thing I would have laughed about before I got sick.
A friend, a woman whose friendship has been a blessing beyond measure to me, shared a confidence the other day.
It was one of those things that ranks a bad on the cancer scale, and I told her so. I am glad that I can be a friend with perspective like that. It’s the silver lining of all those times I’ve dead-ended conversations by saying things like “Choosing between two shades of off-white dupioni drapes isn’t like figuring out where to go to treat your case of advanced cancer. It doesn’t really matter.” This one mattered.
I didn’t say much of anything. There wasn’t much to say.
“I don’t want to deal with this,” she said. “Do I have to deal with this?”
Maybe by telling me, she’s begun. I hope so.
My birthday was yesterday.
I have a tradition with myself that each year, I resolve to do one fun thing for a year, to improve myself.
When I turned 30, I resolved to not drink a gin and tonic for an entire year, but instead to order girly drinks at bars. I celebrated my 31st birthday, as I had my 21st, with a g&t, and the main take-away from that experiment was a delightful thing called an amaretto sour.
For several recent years, my resolution has been to not die.
Last year, I resolved to not wear exclusively jeans and sweatshirts, but to try and look decent at least some of the time.
This year, I had a struggle. Do I resolve to try and breathe some life into my moribund writing career? That’s not the kind of thing you can do by sheer force of will — too much depends on luck. I seriously considered making a commitment to not buy anything for a year, but I am just not there at this point, right now.
“Focus on the positive,” I told myself. “What’s good?” There’s a lot to do in my house and garden, but I am going to do that anyway, so resolving to focus on those things is like telling my kids to make as much of a ruckus as they can.
What’s good.
My husband, Chris. He is good. He is so good, in fact, that he is perfect, which is a hell of a lot to live up to. But he is a fantastic husband and he deserves more credit than he ever gets for his role in this whole surviver thing, plus the part where I’m crazy about him.
I’m going to spend the next year of my life being the best wife I can be. Or at least trying to be.
This mom, Nerdy Apple Bottom, has nerves of steel, but it probably doesn’t hurt that she is married to a cop.
The link is to a blog post written by a mom whose five-year-old son chose to dress up as Daphne from Scooby-Doo. Evidently the moms in her kid’s church-based preschool reacted predictably, and she wrote about it. For the record, I agree with everything she says, and I think her son rocked that orange wig. I’m not sure what I would have done in her position, but I know for sure I would have said something along the lines of “I have cancer, so it might be my last chance to let him dress up as what he wants because next year, I might be dead.” It’s amazing I have any friends left.
A couple of the FOURTEEN THOUSAND replies to her post mention that if she lived where they did, in California or on the East Coast, the reception of her son’s costume choice would have been different. I haven’t lived in California, but there isn’t a major metroplex on the Eastern Seaboard I haven’t lived in, and I think they may have a point. I also look at the red state blue state map of the United States, and there you have it.
We don’t have a lot of shared values.
It’s true that the phenomenon known as “get me the hell out of here” experienced by people who grew up with the moral myopia of places like Dallas reinforces the cultural differences between the coasts and the middle — and surely, the opposite holds true, “I’m not raising my kids in a place with values like these, I’m going back home where people have morals!” I have several friends who moved their families back to Dallas for that exact reason, and, living here, as a parent, I can see that there is a lot of wisdom in their decision.
It’s also true that there are plenty of preschools, even in Dallas, the shiny rhinestone buckle of the Bible belt, and I assume in the midwestern town where Nerdy Apple Bottom lives, where the dominant culture would not bat an eyelash at a kid in drag. But she chooses to send her kid to school at a church-based preschool. And so do I. Because even though I don’t always agree 100% of the time with 100% of the social values of the other families in my school, I like the way they raise their kids. I like their kids, and I like them. My kids are learning a lot in their conservative-ish Christian school. The education is as good as any I’ve seen, but more, the Christ-centered culture of the school, one of love and kindness, is teaching them to love other people, even — especially — people they don’t necessarily agree with. Yes, my kids are learning that rockin’ a costume in drag would raise a few eyebrows. They’re also learning to be sensitive to that, and to respect the values held by other people, even if they don’t share them, and at the same time, to be true to themselves and to what they believe.
My kid’s school is Lutheran. Instead of Halloween, they celebrate Reformation Week. I wonder if one reason is to avoid cultural costume conflicts such as this one.
I also wonder, if I posted a picture of my five year old son in a Daphne costume, if my blog would go viral too. What a great post she wrote.
Dance with the Reaper 