And Life Goes On
I was here first, before you were here, before you ever planted a garden. And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
– Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris
How are the kids doing? People ask us that a lot. For the most part, they seem resilient to the point of obliviousness. When I told the kids I had cancer the night I got my diagnosis, I may as well have announced I had a cold: okay, but can you help me with this math thing? So I spent that first night doing absolute value equations and long division. It felt absurd, the juxtaposition of the cataclysmic and the mundane. Whatever happens in life, you can rely on the fact that long division never changes.
The kids, of course, have no context for cancer. They haven’t watched saccharine Nicholas Sparks films or heard stories about people who have died. They take their cues from us, and so we aim for a kind of calibrated transparency, discussing biology and each step of management, being open about how we’re processing events (I’m sure they overhear a good deal anyway) while maintaining as much stability and regularity as possible. There are a range of reactions based on age and personality: our oldest daughter, who is both sensitive and compassionate, is the first to ask after test results and check on how I’m feeling.
The boys, on the other hand, don’t seem to be taking any of this personally. When I asked the older one how this all makes him feel, his response was perfunctory: “glad I don’t have breasts.” I suppose not even cancer can transcend the self-absorption of the middle school years. His younger brother likes to offer prescient pieces of advice, such as how I shouldn’t read too much on the internet and how (of equal importance) I ought to bring a particular stress ball with me to the hospital (for some reason it is in the shape of a crab and feels quite slimy).
Our youngest is quieter. My husband told me she had mentioned being nervous, so I asked her about this at bedtime one night. “Oh, I’m not nervous for me,” she said, “I’m nervous for you.” What about? “If you have to lose your hair,” was the reply. “I mean, I’m okay with that, but I’m worried it will be hard for you.” Turns out she thought hair loss from chemotherapy was a permanent condition—come to think of it, why would she assume otherwise? I reassured her the hair grows back, and of course we don’t know yet if I’ll have to go through that at all (probably not?).
Conversations about alopecia aside, though, the kids seem to be functioning pretty much as usual. Sometimes it seems like everyone else in the world is functioning as usual—and this is something which islands you. Which puts you alone in a place no one else can see or sense or grasp. I feel at times like I’m living on an entirely different wavelength than anyone else in the house, traversing an entirely different set of sinusoidal ups and downs. Something small makes me cry; the kids bounce around the house in effervescent obliviousness. Something heavy weighs me down; my husband wonders why I haven’t moved on in logical fashion. I sense the build-up of things I need solitude and time to process; the inexorable machinery of chores and tasks grinds on without mercy.
But sometimes, that pushing on of life—and the exuberant, open momentum with which only the young live it—is a gift. In The Fault In Our Stars (not quite Nicholas Sparks, but close), a boy (with cancer) asks a girl (with cancer) about her story. She’s launching into her medical history when he interrupts, “No, not your cancer story. Your story… Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who become their disease.”
The kids do not let me become my disease. Cancer, they remind me, is something we’re going through, but it hasn’t really changed who I am, at least not to them. I’m still the person who cooks and drives and listens to basketball stats and homework complaints and can I make sure I get that tabouli they like from Trader Joe’s? I’m still the person who runs too slow and knits too much and spent way too long the other day carving an insanely detailed print into a block of rubber. I’m still the person who does long division.
I can see four redwood trees from where I lie on my bed. True to Eichler form, our bedroom has huge glass sliding doors which open straight to a view of the towering giants which have overtaken our tiny yard. I stare at their massive forms and imagine their roots spreading out all under and around our house for miles, these trees that were there long before we were and will remain long after we are gone, that live on an entirely different wavelength of time, and I imagine them telling me, this too shall pass. It is not a bad thing to be surrounded by beings which find our troubles irrelevant. The loneliness can be keen, to be sure, but we are tethered too to the truth that life does and can go on.
