Cancer cells grow in an uncontrolled manner. They forget to die and therefore the diseased cells accumulate…Under the microscope, normal cells look uniform, with similar sizes and orderly organization. Cancer cells look less orderly, with varying sizes and without apparent organization.
—The Mayo Clinic Cancer Basics
So was it the end of dread? I’m sure you’re all anxiously wondering. Well. I began the week not, shall we say, at my physical or emotional peak. You may ask, when is a Monday morning ever one’s physical or emotional peak? And you would be right to ask this. But this particular Monday, I was suffering from a bout of ailments such as the first day of my period, utter exhaustion, AND the worst sunburn I have had in the last several years. After I left you last week, we went to the beach to spend the Last Day swooning in the sun. It was cool, one of those days where the weather is a manipulative sumbitch and you cannot FEEL the fact that your skin is being slowly broiled, due to the sweet salt air and the rush of the waves and the cries of happy children. We stayed out for hours. Jodi promptly feel asleep reading her art history book, and I was reading The Power of One and got quite carried away, forgetting that the bottle of sunscreen had run out halfway through my lathering process and that my legs had never gotten done. I didn’t even rotate, so I was literally toasting the backs of my legs. I got up once to go swimming, and it felt so good, I stayed in for a long time, happy the way you are when you’re a kid at the pool and you could stay forever, you are just so happy and diverted. I floated on my back trying to only see sky and nothing else, I swam underwater trying to use my whole body, feel all my muscles, dive like a dolphin, ride the waves. I felt my scalp tingle from the water smoothing my hair flat on my head (my flat head), and not once did my legs feel sunburned. But oh, they were. They still hurt, too, a week later, and I curse myself for my stupidity. Which makes me wonder:
Why are there some lessons you have to learn every few years? Like not to buy scotch tape from the dollar store (you KNOW it’s too shiny and it doesn’t tear right, and yet you do it anyway. It’s so tempting. It’s only a dollar! All the other tape is like $2.50! How can something that seems so right be so wrong?), or not to eat Cup-O-Noodles (it will never taste as delectable as it did when we were five), or not to buy $3 bottles of wine. Ever. No matter how pretty the packaging. Or Boone’s Farm. Or Andre. The list goes on. Or that crazy drunken college parties are not fun. Not really. Not unless you’re really smashed on one of the above fine spirits, in which case, you are already about to learn one of those crucial lessons all over again. Putting on sunscreen even when it’s not hot is one of those lessons. You think the worst that can happen is that you’ll get a little pink—so what? Soon it will turn into a lovely, luscious bronze. Not so, young friend, not so.
Which brings me to cancer. Which, I think we’ll all agree, is the worst that can happen from staying too long in the sun. I have been thinking about cancer lately. It seems like the invisible circle of Being Unaffected by Cancer that used to surround me like a shield is weakening. It’s like the ozone layer—it still basically exists, but there is plenty of room for evil to slip through the cracks. A fence with a hole in it is still mostly a fence, but a coyote can still get through and kill your cat, so you might as well have no fence. (Watch me use California-related metaphors with agility and grace. Anyone would think I had always been here).
I was trying to explain this to my students, and I still don’t think I’ve found a way to do it exactly right, but I always think about the health reports on the news, and how when I was a kid, and even to some extent now, when they talk about some exciting new drug they’ve developed or some breakthrough research in Lou Gehrig’s disease or some way to give people new hearts or eyes or hips, I listen to them but I don’t really hear. I think it’s because there are so many things in the world to worry about that when something so specific as a certain ailment comes along, I compartmentalize it. I think, “Maybe someday I will have to deal with that, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” and if I think about it much harder, I get scared or sad or convinced that I have it. Like head lice. You know how whenever anyone mentions head lice your scalp starts to crawl? I know fatal diseases are not like head lice, but when I think about them too much, my soul starts to crawl. So I tuck them away into the little pantry in my brain that I will never open unless I have to, where ominous eventualities are stored, the kinds of things you don’t want to think about because even if you could think about them rationally, without freaking yourself out, there is always the fear that the Law of Attraction will suddenly start actually existing and you will make these things happen just by thinking about them.
That’s where Cancer (specifically Breast) has been for most of my life. It’s also where I keep the Death of Close Family and Friends, Getting Blinded/Deafened/Lamed in a Freak Accident, Terrorism, and Kidney Stones. Every now and then something forces me to open the closet and face those things, but usually from a distance, across the dim musty light to which the closet is accustomed. Lately it seems like I’m getting closer and closer to having to take something out of the closet and really examine it.
First it was Dana, on The L Word. I should state that A) I know she’s not real and B) I realize this may be a silly way to begin to illustrate my point. But it felt like I had known her for three years. Known her from afar, maybe, in that…fictional sort of way, but when you think about how many women’s first true love is Mr. Darcy, it doesn’t seem so hard to imagine.
Actually, I lied. First, it was Justin’s mom. In college, when we were all so young and beautiful and busy and self-obsessed, we all quietly ignored the fact that Justin was losing his mother. Not ignored-ignored, I mean, we gave him hugs and everything, and tried to “be there for him,” whatever that means, but there was the terrible silence in which we knew that we all still had our mothers, maybe even complained about them or, hell, complained about anything, and while we knew that most of us would probably have to face that kind of pain someday, hopefully when we’re older and wiser and readier (yeah, right), Justin was having to do it now. And no matter how sympathetic we were, we could not possibly know what that was like.
Then it was Dana. And now, suddenly, there seem to be so many more. Sue, the mother of a boy I knew growing up, and whom I haven’t seen for years. My aunt gave me her son’s email address so that I could get back in touch, but I haven’t yet because I don’t know quite how or what to say. Jenn’s mom, to whom everything random and unfair in the world seems to have happened, now, on top of everything, has breast cancer. And Katherine, my mom’s best friend after whom I was named, after a sad divorce years earlier, finally became engaged to a good man she loved and then found out she had breast cancer. They still got married, this summer, but soon after that she had surgery, chemo, the works…which begs several questions. Why is life not fair??? And even if life is going to be not fair, why does it have to happen like that? Finally find happiness, and then bang, life plops in front of you a potentially fatal obstacle course.
There is a picture of my mom and Katherine where they’re both laughing so hard, the kind of laughing that completely distorts your face but you don’t know it because it’s too funny, whatever it is, so you lose all inhibition and just laugh. It’s in black and white, they are teenagers, and when my friends from college saw the picture at my house, they asked who it was in the photo with me. I didn’t understand at first, and then I realized that they thought my mom was me. I didn’t see how they could, but if I close my eyes and then open them on the picture expecting to see myself instead of my mom, it works. It looks exactly like me.
They were once as young and carefree as me. Once, they had something to laugh so hard about that their faces, morphed with mirth, transformed into the faces of their unborn children. And one day I will not be as young as I am now, and it could be, might be, hell, probably will be me and my friend from a longago, faraway picture having to negotiate a new and scary world. Will it be me, or will it be my friend? Why was it Katherine and not my mom? Why is it anybody? What’s weird is that, evidenced by the quotation that serves as epigraph to this essay, cancer itself, the cells themselves, mirror the randomness and unfairness with which they strike. They “forget to die” and so you must. Talk about life not being fair. And if breast cancer strikes one in eight women, which of my closest eight will it be? And if I think about this much more, will I draw this future negativity to me like a poisonous moon caught in my gravitational pull?
I tried to explain this to my students as we were preparing to go to volunteer for the day at the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. I told them I had no idea what we would be doing, and it might be menial and it might not seem like we were helping much in the grand scheme of things, but if it started to seem like that, they should think about One in Eight, they should think about the picture of my mom and Katherine, they cultivate empathy for perfect strangers so that when there comes a time when they need perfect strangers to have empathy for them, maybe life will decide to be just a little bit fair.
We had a beautiful day. It was a wonderful place to volunteer, because it was so well-organized they had plenty for us to do and everyone was genuinely friendly and positive and working in pursuit of a common goal. We spent the whole morning preparing to welcome the walkers to registration, and when we finally opened the doors to them, they came in droves and we were all cheering for them and they were so fierce and proud and determined (they had each raised a minimum of $1,800 in order to walk). And I watched my students, who, like me, had been bleary-eyed when we met at 7:00 AM, no doubt wondering why it was again that we were doing this and was it really going to look so good on a college application that it was worth such exhaustion. They worked so hard, with such enthusiasm, whether they were welcoming participants with pom-poms or putting together shelves or directing traffic or cutting off the long ends of participants’ wristbands. One of them was riding separately and got terribly lost, and when he arrived over an hour late he rushed in and said desperately, “Katherine, I’m here, how can I help?”
Simple words. “How can I help?”
How can I help feeling scared, how can I help my cowardice, how can I help the randomness and unfairness of life, how can I help when I am so small, how can any of us help?
But hearing those words, and seeing that work pour forth from kids who are so often shy or just caught up in their idyllic bubble of youth, I felt that dark and awful brain-closet become just a little bit less scary.
How can I help but feel a little better?
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