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I’m sitting in a summer dress on my tiny back porch, flowers in pots surrounding me and my garden spreading neat across the yard like it was always meant to be there, and here comes Amanda walking to the garbage cans at the alley, and walking back, smiling to herself and shaking her head slightly in disbelief, saying as she passes me, “Great! It’s a great Wednesday!” She dusted and cleaned and loved doing it, I said I weeded and watered and loved doing it. Great. It’s a great Wednesday.
Hours at my caretaking gig are decimated, so I’m considering calling That Lawyer who needed someone one day a week, I’m considering filling out an application at Magpie’s (local cake bakery), I’m considering (for once) not worrying but instead walking in song. If God got me through 2009, He can sure as hell get me through 2010. That’s saying something. Which reminds me — I got an itemized bill from Baptist Hospital West yesterday, two pages of entries like SET CONT FLW MNIFLD W/CHK VALV ($29.84) and HCG QL ($81.00). Some are a little more English-like: Sufenta Amp 2ML ($150.17), Morphine 10MG Syringe (who knew I had morphine? wow), and Surgineedle ($159.51). Others are comprehensible, sobering, like Anes General 2.25 hrs ($1550.00), OR Major IP 2.25 hrs ($8287.00), Recovery Room 1.25 hrs ($702.67), and all the sutures, sterile jelly, Percocet, drapes, towels, trays, tubing, sensors, binders, so on. The final bill was $16,070.82. Isn’t it amazing. Again, if I can rise from 2009 with joy, the same can happen for this year.
Should I move? Should I stay? Who can know the answers to these questions, if not me?
But the week is half over, and I’m going to make rent if I have to sell my body, because I want to live in this house as much as I have ever wanted to live anywhere, right now. If I move, it will have to be after the season, because I have a garden here, and my neighbors are kind. Also the birds are kind, cardinals, sparrows, pigeons (new, rather unwelcome addition), doves, grackles, jays, robins. Next year I may be somewhere else, but now I am here, on my back porch snug and lovely, in a dress. A dress, no less. I haven’t been wearing dresses because (fill in the blank — I don’t know), but today I put one on and its faded white flower pattern is growing inside my ribs with the patience of a morning glory vine.
I left JP’s this morning in the cold clear blue, sunlight glancing off the snow like arrows. I’m caring for her three nights a week for several weeks and this means staying in her guest bedroom, filling up her insulin syringe, coming like a shot when she calls in the night, listening mostly to her self-deprecating humor, unselfconscious wisdom. This woman is becoming dear to me, and when I told her that I was going to show proof of (decreased) income to Interfaith today, hoping they wouldn’t kick me out of the program, she said ok, oh honey I know that’s hard stuff, I’ll pray for you today I really will. When I got to Interfaith and handed over the two Ackermann check stubs and the copies of the two most recent G checks, the lady told me that I still qualified … by three bucks. I make $503 a month, now. You can’t make less than $500/mo. to stay in the program. This change of income had been a worry, but a small one, since I haven’t had room to doubt, these past months, that I’m going to make it. That my finances are going to make it, my body is going to make it, that I’m going to make it. After this I pulled into the Regions parking lot and waited with the other riffraff for the bank to open, deposited checks, and drove home under this sky, the cold clear blue.
I’ve forgotten what it was like to ponder death, or the unexpected. But unexpectedly I keep my insurance, unexpectedly I make so much money that I can think about spending it (instead of paying it), unexpectedly I’m friends with an eighty-year-old woman who takes Darvocet (my old friend!) and is slowly leaving life, whose life has been larger than I can ever understand, who told me tonight after I put her to bed that she loved me.
My life has changed so much in a year. Of course, the only thing about life that you can be sure of is that you never know what will happen, and letting go of what’s passing (I could call this “growing up”) and trying to not be afraid of what may be coming … is a new way to live, for me. The uncertainty of cancer & recurrence is like the uncertainty of relationships, all their inexplicable webs of pain and the inexplicable entrance of forgiveness, which in turn is like the uncertainty of bonds, to places or people or whatnot. I’m thinking about all this. How I never thought I’d get cancer, never thought I’d leave East Tennessee again, never thought anybody would stick around long enough to thank me “for being fragile,” and when I said “why the f-ing hell would you be thankful for that,” to say “I love you.” He said that. As if fragility had honor, as if I had honor.
After a lot of thought, today, I’ve decided I’m up for it. I know — the recklessness of it — but today I’m up for life. Which means of course, I’m up for suffering. I’m up for learning to be as patient as JP with the length of life. Since it is so very long, so long, so long. This after watching the mourning doves crowding the seed/breadcrumbs/wildlife feast the neighbors left out this morning. The towhee came back, too, isn’t it strange? No sparrows or titmice or chickadees? Just the doves, the towhee, and a female cardinal. Anyways sorry blah blah, but they milled around with the snow sparkling around them while I read about the older brother in the Prodigal Son story, I watched them and thought about my total frustration with my lack of fatted calf party, my reluctance to believe that I have the sort of honor that would make God say to me “you are always with me.” Somehow I am with God and He is bringing so much change to me. Humbling me & stuff. Which, as Mom said, is a gift, a sign of favor. I have wanted to be favored …
Marshall got me a subscription to The Sun this year for my birthday, and I’ve been reading the first issue (January) bit by bit since it came in the mail a week or two ago. The fiction seems to be a little weak this month, but The Sun is about people and their own lives, to me, and the essays and “Readers Write” are just luminous, I don’t even know how to talk about them without using metaphors of light and shadow. This magazine (& especially “Readers Write”) has found its vocation in hearing and publishing the voices, often the smallest, inner voices, of our fellow-citizens of today, our fellow-living-people, & I am poring over them with the intensity of just another person who has such a hard time engaging the world outside my own head.
“Readers Write” is a charged section this month, the tagline being “narrow escapes”; readers have written sometimes humorously but mostly seriously, sending in stories of attempted rapes, domestic violence, brushes with political violence in Burma and Vietnam, and the subtler violence within abusive relationships. Each story, not one longer than about a column and a half, holds an imperfectly captured danger and a perfectly expressed sense of escape, relief, and wonder. Wonder, that something should come so close and miss, or be so nearly embodied and then vaporize back into possibility. These stories are crafted with a precision that I’m imagining has come through the hundred seives of intervening years, and all the ponderings therein…I want to say that each one is written with the gravity a person gives to some central or iconographic moment in life, and with the same great care. It’s sobering, and you want to consider again your life and every invisible doorway.
This issue also has an essay in it by Megan Kruse, a former social worker in domestic-violence-intervention, one who dealt mostly with “women who were classified as having a ‘high risk of lethality’ — the ones whose abusers were terrifying, relentless, and always one step behind; the women who were likely to be killed.” These stories, of women who have to dye their hair, move their kids from house to house, change their names, and who still often follow a pattern of abuse and flight, abuse and flight, are fairly devastating. Strange to imagine that this happens all the time, that mothers are beaten to death or within an inch in front of their kids, their young kids, these new human beings who are building a way to understand their world, which is their mother’s world, which is cruelty’s world. These, too, are fellow-citizens, fellow-living-people, along with others who narrowly escape some grief or some accident. I, when I realize that my boyfriend makes sacrifices for love of me, am living inside the same hour as the woman across town who is leaving court with a restraining order in her hand.
I want to think about these things, and I want to not have PTSD. I want to banish suffering at the same time I want to understand it as holy, a place where God, inexplicably, is. I want to be a writer, and when I’m fifty, write down some wisdom that seven people will read and copy down for their friends. To begin: I want to write about my own “narrow escape,” now, of getting the pathology report back after surgery. Even though I really never saw it as a “close shave” or any kind of escape, I still see it as a door closed quickly behind me as I ran through it. I want to have some kind of fatalistic argument with my more flexible thoughts on destiny and ends … is any narrow escape really all that narrow? Or are they just whistling through the air at a greater proximity than normal? Or are all possible futures riding along beside us, equidistant from each other and from ourselves, as unable to intersect as parallel lines?
My twelve-month visit to my gynecological oncologist, though brief, was brief. Meaning, he under-charged me again (this time lower than last time) and my weight and blood pressure are “text-book perfect,” but I forgot I had to have another pap smear and (though I thought I was getting out of it) another ultrasound. Part of me is disappointed, because I just finished paying off my pathology bill and wanted to feel good about that for a while, but part of me wants the gravity of these things. I had cancer, and I want to remember it, I want it to not fade away and become unreal. Is it strange that I want to celebrate being alive by going back to the places where I was so afraid, going back to the same offices and procedures but with the knowledge that life is still as fragile as it was, but also still as rescued? Thoughts.
1. I’m at Coffee & Chocolate in the freezing icebox of this room, open almost 20 feet up roofward, the top six feet or so painted brick red and the rest a smooth blond-coffee brown.
2. I came here in a dress that Katie Gray sent from New York in a huge cardboard box that weighed 31 pounds. She and Emily cleaned out their closet and now I have these small shirts and shirt-dresses and little thin cotton dresses and sweaters that are hardly worn at all … it’s like … incredible, and reminds me of the years I was Not Buying Clothes, how great a gift a shirt was, a dress, a pair of gloves. I love that girl, that KG, and miss her today. She is fabulous. I love her.
3. I’m not sure if this dress is too thin. It’s perfect for summer, rose with tiny brown and grey dots, not fitted at all, and it feels like wearing a sheet or a handkerchief or a whisper. I was wondering whether it was decent, and then remembered Michigan by the Red House Painters and walked out the door. Today, I’m wearing what I want to wear. This is about my soul.
4. I’m seeing two girls walking down the road holding hands and wishing I was walking down the road with someone holding hands.
5. I mean, after I’ve got some things accomplished. Today I’ve already: watered the garden; made a lemon icebox pie; asked God fervently for a lot of grace for this long day stretching into the mist of the future & anxiety; listened to a bit of the new Mars Hill audio journal; and made the v. v. correct clothing choice of this thin cotton dress. I mean! Yeah!
6. Making lists like this sometimes feels necessary, as if I didn’t know how to organize my thoughts and needed this superficial grid to make me feel the comfort of a little structure. But God is bringing real structure back to me, I think, and I guess I need to call Britta, who offered to do some healing prayer with me.
7. The idea that God would ask me to remember pain & feel it & forgive is terrifying … but the pull of that connectedness is overwhelming all my resistance. I know that I’m disconnected in dramatic ways from memories and pain in my past, pieces disparate and sharp like shards of glass that I’ve forgotten and tried to disown, and if I want to be a whole person I need these lines drawn, dots connected, I need the ropes and nerves and ligaments to find each other and grow back together. I can only talk about it in physiological terms, because there’s still so much I have to learn about emotional healing … and because I watched my own body heal, in a way, from trauma. I see that happen. And if that can happen in a body, it surely must must right? happen in the spirit. Including mine.
8. Now they’re playing I Will Follow … ! … I used to listen to these songs, I used to remind myself of eternity via U2′s music and hearing this song is like another window opening. It’s almost unbelievable to watch how God is changing my life, how God has never left and never stopped with His perfect and precise thoughts over me.
the minute decades of the morning: you are up and washing
your face, you are putting on clothes, you are putting the
kettle on to boil and filling up glass jugs to take out
to water your garden. first the peppers, then the basil,
marigolds (who are making it, even though they got
almost all their leaves eaten down to the spines
the day after I planted them), tomatoes, one after another,
the rosemary. I’ve needed gardens in my life,
I need them, their order from chaos, their sanity
like “the sanity of hedgerows,” everything
in its place or almost in its place, all the different
uses and personalities living together in a small
city of leaves & flowers. because there are roses, too.
and I am the one, I’m the gardener, I take care.
the sun’s coming through every once in a while. the
clouds remind me of my work, first painting in
Fountain City, then looking over grant stuff either here
or at Coffee & Chocolate … or Java … not Remedy, I think.
now Knoxville has so many coffee shops! but I’m thinking
about how I need the nearness of God, how we’re asking Joel
to leave, now, and I’m thinking about where he will go. I’m
thinking about my appointment yesterday with Dr. McDonald,
how I waited for forty minutes and then he came in and was
glad to see me and chatted it up. he talked about Kierkegaard
and how two of his sons are English majors, how he’s
written some. he charged me $20 and didn’t make me get
a pap or CA-125 or ultrasound … this is fabulous … he likes me.
but this is all a mess, and I haven’t even included a hundred
other things, like all I have to do today, like all I have to do in
my life, like I was expecting to get it done today. or tonight while
I’m sleeping, in my dreams. I have such a hard time living
in the present, but God is here in the present moment, “all lit up
in eternal rays,” and I am going to only try to live here,
now. in this moment. with tea, lightly sugared, creamed w/ whole
milk, with the ripest and sweetest and tangiest peach
I’ve ever had in my stomach and not
on that square green plate anymore. it was the best
peach. Jesus, I need.
my branches like those, lifted up on string, the shade reached.
today is a day of decision. today is different than
yesterday, different than tomorrow, and I can be reached
in my unknownnesses. I can be reached by Christ,
and I have to carry with me where I go the knowledge
that He was the one who had the idea to compare me
to the branch of a vine, which needed
lifting up, pruning. which I do. today
is a day of decision, also because I’m finishing
Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, and there’s no
mistaking this, no mistaking K’s grabbing your shoulders
and making you look him in the eye: what are you
going to do, NOW? today? where is He, where is
Christ, except here?
“…and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out.” John 6
Three months out from my surgery and I’m still picking up pieces that were not lost. This, to me, is a sign of God’s incredible care. (“Not the least lash lost,” you know, everything that is beautiful is washing away but still being washed over us. “Kept with a far greater care.” Etc.) I should cite those properly but as you know I am not in school, ha. (Sigh! Wist!) These wonderful notes from you, Franz, and you, Nat and Austin and everyone are just … well, my living is soaked in these thoughts, and I’m getting on. God is taking far greater a care. I wrote this last night:
I remember things in the hospital cloudily, the first few hours in the room there at the end of the hall cutting in and out of memory with wide blanks and only half-recalled moments. It’s strange how others’ memories are awkwardly fitted into the sequence of my own, how I imagine Samantha crying but can only remember her and Nick’s faces when they first came in, such profoundly troubled eyes, such a weight of care that I had to remember and remember now with something beyond wonder or gratitude. How strange, that I had to lie in that bed in such a ridiculous gown and with such a preposterous amount of drugs washing through my heart, through fingertips, heart again, fingertips. That I hate it when I have to be gotten out of bed by someone already up, hate to be blotchy and frumpy when everyone is put-together, and yet I was watched in that bed by parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, pastor, old friends, new friends. And I wanted it, somehow, I could have kissed them all. Even though I could hardly change my knees over from one side to the other.
That series of moments, from getting into the blue gown to getting up for my first walk down the hall and back to the first night or second or third sleeping at home, these moments, so strange (my eyes filling over and again), like one of those old window panes that’s washed with blemishes and irregularities and distorts the view. Because I felt underwater, then, grown gills somehow, somehow able to open my eyes underwater like I’ve never been able to do since a child. Breaking the surface or backing up from the window—mixing metaphors–sorry–terrible—I just want to somehow be able to say before these moments become indistinct, and unwritten, lost, that the glass or water with waves in my vision in those days recedes, and I can take a minute to cry for something I didn’t know to grieve, then.
The weight of our existence has to be measured to us, I think, Emily Dickinson thinks, and Kierkegaard (yes! what an incredible quote! ”Suffering is the characteristic of God’s love”), by piece. It opens up my brain like a door, to know that the pressure of the real things of the universe are keeping our shape, keeping our guts in, but they live another life outside this that could crush us inside the seed of a second. Christ, the one outside the press of time, the one himself the press of the real, who holds off; weighs; measures; precise in his amounts as the builder of bombs or clocks, he’s the one who measures to me what I can balance and no more. Oh my scales are crazy. God I want the time and mercy (I drink it like water) to make the balance, reach equilibrium again not with jerks and upsets but with the slender crossings of legs, the hearing of birdsong in the early morning, the word in my ear, word in my mouth.
This is the word, then, weighed and whispered in my mouth, enough until the next one, that who I am right now is enough. I shade toward something right since the press of the real, the press of Christ, one grain at a time, Jesus Christ, he’s building me a building, calling me, and I’m called, am being called. Today, even though I have a terrible cold and am aching from top to toe, I believe in the care of God so much I could be shot for it.
Also, I miss blogging! Hell! Look what happens when I’m away! New power cord maybe next week, shipped perhaps from Hong Kong.
Wednesday, and a thunderstorm is supposedly coming through. Wednesday, and I’m going to really live, today. This has to do with listening to Will’s new cd, with seeing all these maples on Grainger Avenue whipping and rocking, with talking briefly to Austic C. about the GRE, with hearing all the neighbors’ chimes clinking and humming like you’ve never heard before like whatever’s running all the leaves up the sidewalk like hell or heaven is knocking on all our doors, too, with hollow tubes, with all these prescient tones.
These days in my life are full of omens, portents, words from God whom I once said was silent as any oracle. I hear, now, opinions from the Most High on my reflexes, the ones that have to do with closing up in response to pain. Which is, you know, ok, but I have some healing to do. Wounds close up on dirt and bullets, that’s the nature of wounds, the reflex. I hear opinions on my possession of humility and the sort of faithful living that lets one be unemployed and looking and still not desperate. Desperate. Well, for the proximity of Jesus, yes; the ability to make money, no. Things will come. Things also are coming I hear like
gifts. I can only imagine what this means. I hope it has to do with my art. I haven’t created (besides writing of course) in a long time. This 12″ square artist board and 9″x11″ canvas board and set of 4″x6″‘s in different colors are all leaning against the wall in my bedroom, crying at me and I at them. They wait. I’ve had an idea for one oil pastel for probably two years, now, oh god, shocking, help, and now I have another idea that I like even better. When will this day come? Please, soon. I want living to even out a little, just even a small amount, for a small piece of time. I found out
that the name for my condition is “nesting instinct.” This explains a lot. So when Charlotte at Dr. McDonald’s tells me to go ahead and get a boyfriend and start having babies I think, Oh great, like I needed a better reason to wish that would hurry up and happen, but then have realized in words, in so many words, in these exact words, that I’m scared to death of falling in love again. So here is another complexity. And yet:
Emily wrote me a note telling me I am precious, like a pearl, not a baby girl. I’ve taken accidental vacations from this truth a lot, and for no good reason. It sucks to feel worthless. And if I’m to believe my closest friends, then there’s no reason to live there today. I am precious.
Spring’s almost here and just so you can have a picture, I’ll tell you that I’m wearing a skirt and black boots and short sleeves and there’s lots of liberated skin, here! Lots, comparatively. But lots! Finally getting to join the party! Can all the thinking women that read this blog agree with me that leg-shaving is a oppressive practice? And not to be taught to daughters along with the virtues of sensible shoes?
Today, well, right now as a matter of fact, I am eating grapes and a pita with cheddar melted on it and throwing Patrick off the table for the fourth time in as many minutes. How would he like it if I walked all over his kitchen table with no shoes on. I ask. Not him, because he will not learn English.
Today is another day filled with things like dropping off a resume, depositing a check, writing a check, mailing a check, writing letters, finishing a book. It’s raining, has been all morning since I’ve been cognizant, and it blows through cold. It’s another one of those days that is necessarily a progression of miscellaneous pieces, but that I want to be connected by a single idea. Lived against the background of a single song. I’m measuring my life by pieces, now, smaller and smaller, but I can’t give up on a single connecting strand, sinewy, tougher.
The vent in the floor is blowing the leaves of my small dark houseplant against the strings of the guitar set in the corner, playing mostly an E flat but sometimes a C. It’s like the chimes I grew up listening to on windy days, brass tubes strung with clear plastic string in a circle, clattering, or singing, or clattering, or singing. There’s a connecting strand, here, hearing the central heat making music. These chance sounds I would almost rather listen to than anything else.
I finished Cold Mountain by Frazier this morning, and was surprised. I want to be stronger. And so, I will be. I will look back and see miles, I will look forward and see miles, too. I will learn what suffering has to teach, and there’s a lot of joy, there.
My griping! I can’t delete that last post like I said I was going to, because it would make this apology (almost mostly to myself and God) incomprehensible, and I want it to be comprehended: that I should be complaining is, well, incomprehensible. I’ve just come from the MedHelp.com (or org.?) ovarian cancer support site, and am completely humbled. As anyone would probably guess, the main things being discussed are not how lame it is to have to lay around after surgery or how annoying the pain is (really stings, you know?). Of course, the main topic of conversation is chemotherapy.
I read a lot of threads in the discussion boards…and then looked around at people’s profiles and blogs and things… Well, I just feel like I need to say here that I have so little to whine about. For whatever reason, I don’t need more surgery, a partial hysterectomy, a full hysterectomy, chemo. So many of these women are dying, and are talking to each other about it, and praying for each other. It’s beautiful, and I don’t know why I was spared that sort of beauty, but I was, and I’m grateful. So.
