A Severe Mercy
I’m crazy tired … savagely exhausted.
– Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions
The fatigue after this first infusion has been intense. It’s not a normal fatigue. It’s not like feeling tired after a long day of work, or even after pulling a thirty-six-hour hospital shift where your head is starting to get fuzzy but you know all you need is a good nights’ sleep. This fatigue is a foggy ache in the head, a burning of the eyes, a moving through mud, a leeching away not only of energy but all desire. That’s the hard part: having all this time, but no interest in doing anything. Having license to eat, but no appetite.
The fatigue feels like being transplanted to another planet. One in which I sleep and sleep but wake up no less tired. In which I must consider carefully what to do with the limited energy I possess. In which other people, living their regular lives, seem like a different species. I look at them and wonder if they know how nice it is to feel hungry and bustle about from task to task without a second thought. My kids have so much energy that it hurts to look at them. Or perhaps I’m just squinting because I can’t seem to keep my eyes open. These days, it’s hard to tell.
This chemicalized version of myself can do nothing but exist. And I don’t know how to live like this. How to live when I’m unable to do the simplest of things, for an indeterminate period of time. It feels like the ultimate stripping away, the onion being peeled back to its center: letting go of how my body looks and feels. Letting go of my classes and activities, my plans and timelines. And now, letting go of things I used to enjoy and still be able to do, peeling back and peeling back, until there’s just the space in the center, the space where there is nothing but being. No doing, no thinking, just being. That is the state of this planet I have landed on.
The main thing I feel besides acute fatigue is pain from the port. It’s been a struggle, this foreign lump on my chest that aches with a soreness that never goes away, making it impossible to ever be comfortable, signifying somehow all the things that have been done to my body and are yet to come. Hating it isn’t helping me, though, so one morning I laid my hand over it, over the whole morass of blue and green bruises, and whispered, “God, thank you for this thing that I know is going to help me in this journey. I accept that it is there.” That became my prayer for this whole miserable existence: This sucks, but thank you. I trust you, and accept it. Help me to discover what it means to be who I am when I’m not who I am.
I’ve been reading about Joseph, thinking about how it must have felt for all the layers of his life to be stripped away: his status as a favored son, his possessions, his trust in his family, his country, his trajectory in life. And yet, despite the pit and the prison, or maybe because of them, the reality of God became so sure to him, his identity as a child of promise so clear, that he emerged at a moment’s notice so full of God’s spirit that Pharoah himself could not miss it. So sure of the land to come that he asked his bones to be brought there after he died. He was able to see God’s mercy in the point of his greatest pain: you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. You meant it for death, but God used it for life. A severe mercy.
Isn’t that what all of chemotherapy is? Poisons derived from plants, meant for death, now pumped into our bodies because, though it robs you of any feeling of well-being, you trust that on a level you cannot see, it is giving you your best chance at life? I think about Joseph, peeled apart but somehow through his surrender experiencing a presence of God so real it freed him from hate and sustained him through pain, and I think, O God of Joseph, O God of severe mercies, O God of all planets I may find myself on, may you bring me closer to true life and being in all this. And if I cannot feel it, help me believe it, as I sit here and whisper my prayers.
