When things keep happening, as things are wont to do, it gets easy to fall in line with a routine that then makes it easy to sink into feeling like life has always been this way. Like there was never cancer to contend with. Like I don't still fear for my life. Like it all transpired in a life that belongs to someone else.
It didn't, though. It happened right here in this living room, this house, this town. This body. And you were there for it, you remember.
I just have such trouble fitting the whole experience into my sense of my own life. Square peg, round hole. And so it is that I generally set about my days like any other person, only sometimes I want to stop and scream, DID YOU KNOW I HAD CANCER?! BECAUSE I DID AND IT WAS THE SCARIEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME AND SOMETIMES I'M STILL VERY, VERY SCARED.
But usually I'm not. Usually, I feel just like anyone else. Until these memories slam into me, tiny flashes of my own face in the mirror as I fasten a scarf around my baldness. My own finger nails, sore and brittle, peeling away from the tips of my fingers. The darkness that pervaded days when I lay sick and inactive. An image of my own feet, pacing in circles while I wait for a doctor or insurance agent on the phone.
I'm still looking for the places where all of these pegs fit. And trying hard to convince myself that I'm really making the space they need, instead of just wishing I could forget them all.
Which is really the contradictory kicker, because on one hand I want so badly to pretend it never happened, and on the other I am so scared that already there are things I've forgotten.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Friday, September 6, 2013
back at it
Hello my few abandoned readers. A lot has happened since I last made an entry here. I have a full-time teaching job. Oddly, this job is at a tiny parochial high school and two weeks in I am certain that I stick out like a horribly liberal sore thumb that just cannot be fitted to the conservative confines of this school. I don't think I'll get fired, but it looms as a more-real possibility than it has at any other job I've ever worked.
The job has its rewards. And its serious trials.
I am nearing the end of the reconstructive surgery process. My chest is now home to a strange contraption that stretches my muscle and skin, preparing them to eventually house the implant that will take the place of my long-gone cancerous breast.
I got my first post-chemo haircut last week. Just a trim, really, but it was satisfying to need that trim, and to put myself in the books for another cut now that the presence of hair on my head is a certainty.
Generally, things are good.
Still, reminders pop up that life keeps being hard in myriad ways.
Someone that you do not know whom I love very much tried to end his life a few weeks ago. He did not succeed, but survives with brain damage that is likely to leave him permanently dependent.
I talked to his mother tonight. We talked about bravery and about saying sentences you never thought you'd have to say. We talked about postponing the saying of said sentences because maybe, just maybe, we could hold out long enough and eventually they wouldn't be true.
But they are.
Her son has brain damage.
And she is brave. She is brave because she didn't cave in under the immeasurable weight of this disaster. Because she finds positivity to propel her through each day. But then--as she said, and as I said when people told me I was brave--what other option do we have? The irony of asking this question in light of this situation does not escape us. Still, it doesn't feel like bravery to keep going.
But I want to tell her that she is brave and strong and full of love and that these are admirable and important qualities. I want her to know that about herself.
And I want for her to have some reprieve from the people around her being in perpetually painful situations, some of their own making and others that are just chance. I want it to matter that she has tried to make their lives good. To change the course of events trickling back to and heaping themselves upon her.
It seems like there are people whose lives are not plagued by heartache and disaster. I hear about them, and I think I know a few. But maybe everyone's life is this hard and I am just unaware. I guess I don't believe in whatever metric might be used to gauge one against the other anyway.
This has been a year of many great losses, some good and some bad. Moving on keeps happening, regardless of how actively I participate. Maybe coming back here is a way to be an agent in the process.
The job has its rewards. And its serious trials.
I am nearing the end of the reconstructive surgery process. My chest is now home to a strange contraption that stretches my muscle and skin, preparing them to eventually house the implant that will take the place of my long-gone cancerous breast.
I got my first post-chemo haircut last week. Just a trim, really, but it was satisfying to need that trim, and to put myself in the books for another cut now that the presence of hair on my head is a certainty.
Generally, things are good.
Still, reminders pop up that life keeps being hard in myriad ways.
Someone that you do not know whom I love very much tried to end his life a few weeks ago. He did not succeed, but survives with brain damage that is likely to leave him permanently dependent.
I talked to his mother tonight. We talked about bravery and about saying sentences you never thought you'd have to say. We talked about postponing the saying of said sentences because maybe, just maybe, we could hold out long enough and eventually they wouldn't be true.
But they are.
Her son has brain damage.
And she is brave. She is brave because she didn't cave in under the immeasurable weight of this disaster. Because she finds positivity to propel her through each day. But then--as she said, and as I said when people told me I was brave--what other option do we have? The irony of asking this question in light of this situation does not escape us. Still, it doesn't feel like bravery to keep going.
But I want to tell her that she is brave and strong and full of love and that these are admirable and important qualities. I want her to know that about herself.
And I want for her to have some reprieve from the people around her being in perpetually painful situations, some of their own making and others that are just chance. I want it to matter that she has tried to make their lives good. To change the course of events trickling back to and heaping themselves upon her.
It seems like there are people whose lives are not plagued by heartache and disaster. I hear about them, and I think I know a few. But maybe everyone's life is this hard and I am just unaware. I guess I don't believe in whatever metric might be used to gauge one against the other anyway.
This has been a year of many great losses, some good and some bad. Moving on keeps happening, regardless of how actively I participate. Maybe coming back here is a way to be an agent in the process.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)