Trigger Alert

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(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)My daughter Ally’s been living in Spain following her graduation from UC Santa Barbara last year. Occasionally, I send her articles about her alma mater, including one about a recent UCSB student Senate resolution calling for mandatory trigger alerts–warnings about potentially upsetting lecture or reading material, such as rape, childhood abuse, or racism, that might inadvertently traumatize students.

Now it is Ally sending me urgent messages from Spain about UCSB. But it’s not words on campus that have upset her.

“Did u hear about what happened in Isla Vista????” read her text.

Of course I had heard—who hadn’t, as Isla Vista joined the long string of names where innocents were slaughtered by an angry and alienated young man with a gun. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook, street corners every day in our cities. And now again, on the streets where my daughter has spent the last several years riding her Cruiser to class, partying on Del Playa, buying snacks at the IV Deli whose plate glass windows are now riddled with bullet holes.

Skype is inadequate for the arms-around-soothing these incidents require, though I tried my best. At least Ally was safe in Spain, where the rate of firearm homicide is less than 1/10th  of this country’s. Toward the end of our conversation, Ally, who has traveled alone extensively abroad, said, “I’m afraid to come home to the United States.”

This breaks my heart. And makes me furious.

The real trigger alerts are the ones we apparently dare not issue—those having anything to do with curtailing the availability and lethality of guns. Almost twice as many gun laws have been loosened than have been tightened since 20 six-year-olds were massacred at Sandy Hook. There have been at least 74 school shootings since Newtown.

Open Carry aficionados wear their weaponry loud and proud. One such demonstration in Texas inspired a mild protest from an NRA member who wrote on an official site that such tactics, which he called “weird” and “scary,” could hurt the gun rights cause. Since his statement caused undue upset, perhaps it should have come with its own trigger alert. So outraged were the highly sensitive (though strangely insensitive) members of Texas Open Carry that the NRA apologized and distanced itself from the offending member by expunging his post.

We do not need protection from words. We need protection from guns, and from those who cherish them above all else.

Binge

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Haagen Dazs

My husband, Jonathan, was out of town last week, and although I knew I would miss him, I also looked forward to getting lots of things done with more time to myself: Write, read novels, get going on turning my 26-year-old daughter’s long-vacated bedroom into a guestroom from its former incarnations as shrine and dumping ground. I also planned to eat salad for dinner every night and lose a little weight as a buffer against upcoming indulgent occasions. Instead I gained two pounds. I did eat a lot of salad, but I might have been ambushed by some late-night Haagen Dazs.

The real binge, however, was throwing myself headlong not into a pint of chocolate-chocolate chip, but into Season 4 of Parenthood.

Jonathan and I had tried a couple of episodes when the show first aired, but he didn’t like it, and I kept forgetting to watch it by myself in the rare free moments of a busy life. Then, in the fall of 2012, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands while recovering from surgery and six rounds of chemo for uterine cancer. I needed something that would absorb me without requiring concentration, or risk pushing me over the brink of existential despair.

I devoured Parks and Recreation and Modern Family, but Parenthood was my favorite. What’s not to like about a cast partially drawn from Six Feet Under and Friday Night Lights, set in Berkeley, no less? I was hooked.

By the time my cancer rolled around, we no longer had TV, so I could not watch Parenthood in real time once I’d made it through the first three seasons. I knew about Kristina’s cancer, though, from the way friends would say, “Do you know what’s happening now? Kristina has–” Then they’d stop themselves, either wanting to protect me from revealing the plot or from mentioning cancer in case they labored under the illusion that it wasn’t constantly on my mind.

Before long, treatment was over, I got better, and my busy life resumed. Plus, Season 4 was not yet available on DVD.

Finally, though, it was. Just before Jonathan went on his trip, I got the notice from the library that I had made it off the long waiting list. I had three nights of Jonathan’s absence to watch 15 episodes if I wanted to avoid late fees.

I decided to forget about converting my daughter’s room, and pretty much everything else besides work. Season 4, after all, centered on Kristina’s cancer. Calling it “research,” since I write about cancer now and then, I put Disc 1 in the DVD and sat back–taken back to long days watching episode after episode to distract myself from feeling scared and unsteady.

Here’s what other memories Season 4 brought back:

  • Telling our daughters I had cancer, particularly Emma via Skype, since she was working in Russia at the time. I remember watching the grainy screen as all the oxygen got sucked out of her. “I feel like I’m on another planet,” Emma said. Like Haddie in Parenthood, she couldn’t bear to be away either, and came back for an unexpected visit.
  • Wanting our daughters to carry on with their lives as before; downplaying our fears and bad days to reassure them as much as possible.
  • Being mad at my husband for saying I looked fine without my hair.
  • The relentless and unhelpful demand for positive thinking from people who don’t know shit.
  • Eating ice cream in defiance of the food police. (Do you sense an organizing principle in my life?)
  • Getting a fever and going to the ER on a holiday weekend. In my case it was the day before President’s Day, not Christmas Eve. I went right away, unlike Kristina, who ignores her deteriorating condition and almost dies of sepsis. There were no family reunions and presents around my ER gurney. All my scare did was cancel a dinner party and delay chemo by a week so I could finish a short course of just-in-case high-powered antibiotics.
  • Having a lot of helpful and caring people around, although with better coordinated food delivery so we never had a surplus of roast chickens left to rot in the fridge.

What didn’t ring true was looking like a deliberately bald haute couture runway model, or being perfectly made up all the time. In fact, my daughters dubbed me Gollem in my baldness. Oh, well, I’m in real life,not a TV series. Though I guess I could have had a shot at Lord of the Rings!

I’m looking forward to binging on Season 5 when it becomes available on DVD.

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What’s your favorite comfort food or DVD series to binge on?

 

Recovery Garden

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The Jewel Box, One Year Later

The Jewel Box, One Year Later

This week I’m celebrating the one-year anniversary of our garden with a post-chemo post I wrote last year:

I’ve long dreamed of an English country garden–roses spilling over trellises, beds layered with delphinium and hollyhocks, velvety lawns sweeping down to the pond. But we live in California, not in a BBC period drama, and our budget is not as outsized as my fantasy. Even if it were, there is no way our deer-infested slope of chert that gets 34 inches of rain in a good year could ever resemble the Emerald Isle.

So I’ve had to adjust my sights some. For years I’ve looked out on a weedy, parched patch of dirt off our back deck, adjacent to a slope of scraggly rosemary and oleander that the neighbors’ dogs use as a toilet. I’ve been meaning to call in the professionals for years to prepare the soil and install proper irrigation. But somehow the time is never right, and I’ve kept putting it off.

One good thing about cancer is finally absorbing that there really is no time like the present. And speaking of presents, my friend Mary, knowing of the garden dreams I’ve long harbored, gave me a wonderful one soon after I began treatment: Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates of the San Francisco Bay Region.

These authors know about deer and chert, and that we have neither the climate nor the staff of Downton Abbey. I drooled over every garden-porn page, and, in between chemo sessions, set about turning my fantasy into reality by visiting my favorite nurseries for landscaper recommendations.

Most of the people I called seemed like they’d rather be waterboarded than bother with our site and budget. But not the lovely Ashley, who said she enjoys a challenge. I was sold when she remarked about our patch of weeds off the deck, “This will be the jewel box of the garden.”

After years of waiting, we were ready to go. Fortunately, the list of plants compatible with deer, drought, poor soil, hot sun, and neglectful homeowners is not that long, so the design phase was quick. Every morning on my way home from my walk and latte, I hauled rocks from a nearby field for mini retaining walls in the jewel box. Ashley and her crew arrived and transformed the entire site in less than a day just by cleaning up 20 years of scraggle. They finished the entire installation, from irrigation to microbark, in another two. Ashley left me equipped with deer repellent and instructions for running the irrigation system.

She also left me with a beautiful garden and that deep happiness you get when you finally let yourself go for what you want. True, the garden doesn’t look as good as Downton Abbey or the photos in my book. The adjacent trees rain down eucalyptus litter constantly. The deer have messed up the shredded bark and sampled the verbena. Still, what a pleasure it is to switch my focus from scary things growing inside of me to the vibrant life springing forth in my recovery garden.

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What dreams do you keep putting off? Which have you finally made a reality?

 

Risk Management

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LupineThe bodies of two women hikers were found on Mt. Tam recently. Although officials say there is no sign of foul play, my Facebook feed crackles with alarm. “Creepy!” the posts warn. “Women: Please don’t hike alone!!!”

I hike alone almost every day in our local watershed. It’s miles from Mt. Tam, but the forested flanks of that rugged peak dominate my view. How far away does danger lurk? It‘s hard not to succumb to fear’s contagion.

My hike starts downtown, at the cafe where I get my daily dose of caffeine and news from the local paper. There’s more coverage of the unfortunate hikers; a story about a stowaway who survived a flight to Hawaii in the jet’s wheel well; a report that 75 percent of homes in the area are vulnerable to land slides. Two women dead, one boy improbably alive, our house at the base of a steep hill. What are the chances?

I begin the long slog through residential streets as I always do, listening to podcasts of Fresh Air or This American Life. This American’s life is lucky indeed, with enough time and stamina to hike each day, drinking in lattes, the spring gardens of well-tended homes, the natural beauty of the landscape. The uphill seems less steep with Terry Gross and Ira Glass to keep me company. My public radio hosts also keep me safe, in the same illusory way our daughters felt safe, attached through the umbilical cords of their cellphones as they called us on their way across campus at night.

Where the pavement turns into fire road is a sign noting the presence of mountain lions in the watershed. I think of the episode of Six Feet Under that begins with an overweight man jogging in the hills above LA. He stops to catch his breath, panting and sweating. You think he’s going to drop dead of a heart attack. Instead, a mountain lion drops out of the trees above. I glance up at the treetops, quicken my pace.

Today I have extra time, so I decide to vary my route. If I continue straight ahead deeper into the wilderness instead of turning left, I’ll avoid the grizzled mountain bikers who whiz by me every day as I scramble to safety on the edge of the fire road. Besides, I want to defy Facebook’s panic.

The smooth foot-wide path beckons. I pause a moment, thinking of mountain lions and trailside killers. The likelier dangers are ticks and poison oak. I can handle those, so I stride on through the dense stands of oak and laurel.

Just as Fresh Air ends, the path opens out to a meadow purple with lupine, framed by the rugged ridge across the valley. Clumps of white and amethyst iris dot the nearby banks; monkey flower and Scotch Broom run riot down the slopes. The air is clear. So is my head.

Some may seek peace of mind by staying off the trails. But I’ll continue to find mine on my daily treks.

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How do you find prudence and pleasure on the spectrum from denial to paranoia?

 

V is for Village

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Write on Mamas Co-founder Janine Kovac reads her essay, “The Next Prompt,” at Mamas Write Book Launch, Diesel Bookstore

It happens to be V-Day for the A to Z Blog Challenge, which I did not officially participate in except for carrying the letter E for a tiny stretch of the blogging relay on behalf of my writing group, the Write On Mamas. Unofficially, I cheated, and wrote a single blog post with just a lazy line or two for each letter of the alphabet to help kick-off our new anthology, Mamas Write: 29 tales of Truth, Wit, and Grit. WOM co-founder Janine’s initial entry for the official blog was “A is for Anthology.” You can read what she had to say then here, and what another WOM co-founder, Claire Hennessey, has to say today, in “V is for Victory.” (You can also read all the other letters in between on WOM’s blog.)

Victory because we had our first Book Launch event last night at Diesel Bookstore in Oakland, and it was a blast! The place was crammed with people who laughed and cried through the excerpts we read. The overflow crowd gobbled up the books almost as fast as the chocolate-zucchini bread from Bittersweet Cafe, the same treat that over the last few months had fueled the creative juices of our editing team, Janine, Mary, and Joanne. (Chocolate Muse, anyone?)

Just as all our children were once gleams in our eyes, so the anthology was once a gleam in Janine’s eye. Two years ago, when she threw out the idea of the Write On Mamas’ publishing an anthology, I thought, “Yeah, right, this will never happen.” The initial working title was “Writing Our Motherhood, Mothering Our Writing,” which none of us really understood. But wanting to be a team player and also to fake my way into productivity, I signed on, submitting a somewhat shitty essay before moving on to other projects. Why invest in something that was going nowhere?

The great thing about the Write On Mamas, besides the wonderfully talented, competent, and supportive mothers (and one dad) who constitute it, is that nobody else thinks that way. Or possibly everybody does when staring at the blank screen or page in isolation. But the alchemy of the collective transforms inertia and demoralization into something altogether different. It’s easier to be there for others than it is for yourself, and MUCH easier to be there for others when others are there for you. As the saying goes, many hands make light work (even though a small WOM core did the bulk of the heavy lifting). The Goddesses of WOM would not accept why bother, would not accept shitty. They kept at it, coaxing, inspiring, never guilt-tripping anyone through two years of submissions, rewrites, fundraising, professional editing, PR campaigns. And they did all this while also coaxing, inspiring, and never guilt-tripping their own children!

It really does take a village, particularly one blessed with kick-ass village leaders. I am so grateful to be a part of the WOM village.

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Check out WOM’s website for more book launch events and a whole lot more. Maybe you even want to join our village. And if you can’t find Mamas Write at your friendly neighborhood bookstore, you can always do the Amazon thing. Thanks!

 

The Habit(breaking) of Lent

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It's 8:01--do you know where your chocolate chips are?

It’s 8:01–do you know where your chocolate chips are?

My friend Jessica’s terrific piece on giving up sugar for Lent just aired on KQED’s Perspectives. It’s a humorous contemplation of what sacrifices Catholics like Jessica are willing to make in this season of resurrection.

The daughter of a lapsed Catholic and never-practicing Jew, I was raised as a Unitarian. This was on the more traditional East Coast, where we at least had churches with steeples and pews instead of fellowship rooms with folding chairs. Unlike the twice-a-year attendees our minister derided as the “Christmas and Easter crowd,” we were devout Unitarians by virtue of going to church more often than not. My religious education focused on science, sex education, and the belief that if Jesus were around in our day, he would be a hippie. Instead of sacraments, we had an interpretive dance choir of nubile teenage girls draped in scanty pastel crepe. Easter meant not sacrifice, but showing off a new spring outfit and downing drugstore chocolate.

Despite these perks, I envied my Catholic friends, particularly when they got to miss school at the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, returning the next day with huge black smudges on their foreheads. Were these related to the black marks on the sole I was always checking the bottom of my feet for? I knew how long it took for a beam of light to travel from the sun to the earth, but I was confused about spiritual matters.

As it turns out, the soft-core dogma of Unitarianism provides a soft landing for those who stray from the faith. Lapsed Catholics like my mother lose all of the faith but none of the beliefs. Stripped of comfort, my mother was beset by guilt, shame, and the threat of eternal damnation her entire life. But what does a lapsed Unitarian suffer—the renunciation of potlucks?

In my case, renouncing potlucks might be a good idea. They may not be the Devil’s spawn, but they are surely the curse of the Lifetime Weight Watcher, my new Sabbath calling of the last 13 years. Which brings me back to Lent, in case you were wondering.

My Weight Watchers leader Linda is, like my friend Jessica, an old-school Catholic with a serious sweet tooth. Linda regales us with hilarious stories of her 40+ days in the wilderness bereft of whatever she’s given up for Lent. Usually it’s chocolate. This year it’s sugar. Two years ago she told us that her 10-year-old daughter was giving up rolling her eyes for Lent. That one caused me to fall out of my chair laughing, but it also inspired me. First off, could I somehow introduce the concept of Lent to my then-teenaged daughters before their eyes rolled right out of their sockets? Second, what could I give up for the 40+ days of Lent to tame the food demons that still threatened to take me down a decade after more or less following the program?

That first time, I decided to give up dark-chocolate-covered almonds, which I loved to pilfer from the Trader Joe’s container in my husband Jonathan’s nightstand. I put them there to avoid seeing them in the kitchen every 10 minutes, but the chocolate almonds still called to me. Possibly their siren song was louder from upstairs—I used to love to pilfer Junior Mints from my mother’s bedside stand, the minty bite enhanced by the frisson of transgression. The ritual of the stolen candies commands quite a place in my psyche as well as my waistline. Perhaps it was time for the ultimate sacrifice, or at least the experiment in habit-breaking that Lent affords.

So for 40+ days I resisted temptation. When Lent was over, I went back to my old ways, though at a slower pace, sometimes even able to stick to the bargain I’d struck with myself, sucking on just one chocolate-covered almond. I noticed that they didn’t taste all that good—we’re talking Trader Joe’s, not Godiva—but I’m kind of a chocolate whore, no doubt hearkening back to waxy chocolate rabbits from Easter baskets past. So I gave up chocolate-covered almonds again for my second year of Weight Watchers Lent.

It worked. I had found the sacred secret to secular habit-breaking. No longer was I tempted to raid my husband’s supply, even for the cheap thrill of transgression. Not that Jonathan noticed—as a person with no food issues except for the pathological behavior of eating when he is hungry and stopping when he is satisfied, Jonathan forgot about the chocolate-covered almonds until rummaging around for his misplaced library card.

“You don’t need to buy these anymore,” Jonathan said. “They’re not very good.” Now he tells me!

Having mastered Level One of the Lenten challenge, I stepped up my game this year. I would never be so foolhardy as Jessica or Linda to give up sugar altogether—we lapsed Unitarians are not made of such strong stuff. But I did try to break two habits this year: eating chocolate chips out of an open bag (I’m perfectly safe from the approximately 30 unopened bags of Ghirardelli semi-sweet in the cupboard), and snacking after 8:00 p.m. I have lapsed a little, but it was mostly on Sundays, which I understand is now exempt from the strictures of Lent. Religious purists sniff at this sanctioned laxity the way baseball purists sniffed when designated hitters were introduced to major league baseball.

But hey, I’m a lapsed Unitarian—what’s a little failed renunciation to me?

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What have you given up for Lent? How do you go about breaking a habit?

 

 

Her/Us

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Her Movie PosterThe movie Her is a love story for our times. People pass one another without interacting, fixated on their electronic companions. Theodore, who writes others’ love letters for a living, is especially disconnected after his marriage breaks up.

Into the void steps Samantha, the perfect partner. Except that she isn’t real. Or is she? Samantha’s an operating system endowed with artificial intelligence. She has a consciousness. But whose? Her own, as it evolves through “lived” experience? The programmers’? Theodore’s? Perhaps Samantha is solely a projection of Theodore’s desires, a fantasy for which reality is no match.

The parallels to psychotherapy are many. How real is the relationship between therapist and patient? The work is intimate, yet we remain hidden. Distance and closeness are carefully titrated. Fantasy and projections–key transference components–abound. The real/unreal paradox is fertile ground in therapy, as it is in Her.

Theodore, meanwhile, turns not to a therapist but to technology. Asked to describe his relationship with his mother in order to personalize his operating system, Theodore says it’s fine, except that everything’s about her. Samantha (or at least her voice) appears, “an intuitive entity that knows and understands” him and anticipates his every need–the ideal mother/lover. Who doesn’t wish for perfect mirroring as an antidote to early wounds when undertaking love–or therapy?

Initially Samantha is all about Theodore. With her help, he starts to feel better. As with the mutual influence of therapy, Samantha, too, grows and changes. All is well, though trouble rumbles in the background. The idealizing transference soon becomes eroticized. Disappointment inevitably follows the intrusion of reality into fantasy. In an echo of how clients are loathe to share their therapists–or children their mothers–Theodore is dismayed to learn that Samantha is not there for him alone; she’s the operating system for over 6,000 people. Like Theodore’s mother, Samantha increasingly develops her own interests. “I’m yours and I’m not yours,” she tells him. Worse, the pain Theodore’s fantasy is designed to defend against is recapitulated: Samantha leaves, just like his ex-wife.

Is it abandonment? Or a developmentally appropriate separation? Samantha may start as an extension of Theodore’s psyche, but, as with healthy infant-mother pairs, they end as two distinct individuals. (Perhaps it’s part of the design!) Coming to terms with disillusionment, Theodore can finally write his own love letter to his ex-wife. He retrieves his projections, fully feels and mourns, and thus moves on from loss. Perhaps Theodore is even ready to try the whole disappointing, glorious mess of human connection again. For only when we can tolerate that the other is not an extension of ourselves, but another full and complete separate person can we risk ourselves for love–for real.

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This piece appeared originally in NCSPP’s “Impulse,” a publication for analytically oriented therapists in Northern California. What did you think of the movie? 

A-Z: A Writer’s Alphabet

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MomsCover_v3.inddMy writer’s group, the Write On Mamas, has an anthology coming out in late April: Mama’s Write: 29 Tales of Truth, Wit, and Grit. (It would make a great Mother’s Day gift, by the way, and I would say this even if I didn’t have an essay in it.) As part of our anthology’s kick-off, we’re participating in the A to Z Blog Challenge, where more than 2000 bloggers post every day except Sundays for 26 days, until they have run through the alphabet, letter by letter. Our group is cheating smart–blogging in a relay fashion, where one WOMer takes one day, then passes the blogging baton onto the next, for the month-long marathon. Today’s official WOM entry is here, but I thought I’d cheer along from the sidelines by jotting down a quick and dirty Writer’s Alphabet. Join in with your own entries!

  • A is for Avoidance, which is the most time-consuming aspect of writing. It also leads to . . .
  • B is for Binge Eating, which is one of the worst ways to avoid writing.
  • C is for Children, as in, “Please go away so I can write about how much I love you.”
  • D is for Deadline, without which I would never get anything written. Or done.
  • E is for Everything, as in “Everything is copy.” (Thanks, Nora Ephron’s mom!)
  • F is for Friends, who will (a) buy your book; and (b) stop being your friends after discovering that you’ve used random bits of things they’ve done or said in your writing.
  • G is for Grammar Girl, a handy online resource, particularly if, like me, you were too young to protest the Vietnam War so instead boycotted Miss Dubinsky’s attempts to brainwash 8th graders into parsing sentences.
  • H is for Huffington Post, a to-die-for publication venue whose compensation plan may lead to actual death should you depend on HP income for your livelihood.
  • I is for Internet, which you should turn off if you hope to get any writing done.
  • J is for Journaling and wondering whether or not you should arrange for your journals’ burning or publication upon death.
  • K is for “Kill Your Darlings,” the process of eliminating your precious verbiage to which you are erroneously attached. (Not to be confused with actual acts of sometimes-tempting violence that could land you in prison.)
  • L is for “Like Me” on Facebook. Or as my friend Julie said when asking everyone to go online to endorse her son’s entry in some competition, “Thank you for ‘Liking’ Michael’s project. And if you don’t like it, thank you for lying.” Oh, and by the way, please “Like” the Write On Mamas at https://www.facebook.com/WriteOnMamas.
  • M is for Modesty, which you must overcome enough to do the social media thing, but not overcome so much that everyone hates you.
  • N is for Nattering Nabobs of Negativity, by which Vice President Spiro Agnew meant the anti-war press. But all writers know the real meaning of NNN: those damn voices that live in our heads.
  • O is for O Magazine, an in-my-dreams submission venue.
  • P is for Procrastination. Try to make it productive procrastination so you at least have a clean house.
  • Q is for Query Letter, as in, “Dear Editor, If I put in ungodly amounts of time and energy for this fabulous idea, will you pay me in actual cash rather than in the opportunity to build my platform?”
  • R is for Rewriting. You can’t do enough of this, unless we are talking about your first and only sentence, or if you suffer from severe OCD.
  • S is for Social Media. About which I still know too little.
  • T is for Twitter. About which I still know nothing.

  • U is for “Under-commit, over-achieve,” my favorite bit of writing (and life!) advice from writer and teacher Leslie Keenan. Another favorite is from Joyce Maynard: “Pretend every word you use costs $5.”

  • V is for Village, as in “It takes a Village”—to which the creators of our anthology, Mamas Write, can attest!

  • W is for Walking, a crucial step in writing! Clears the cobwebs, gets the juices flowing, coordinates left and right brain hemispheres, and helps the puzzle pieces fall into place—or at least ameliorates the effects of B.

  • X is for XXXing out, which “Track Changes” will magically do for you. (Caution: “Track Changes” may also make you want to shoot yourself.)

  • Y is for Youth, which is wasted on the young but might eventually make its way into your memoir if you were far-sighted enough to keep a journal.
  • Z is for Zyzzyva, a literary magazine. When you google it, as I just did, you will also discover that Zyzzyva is a genus of tropical American weevil and the last word in many English-language dictionaries. Hence Zyzzyva’s tagline: “The Last Word.”

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What’s your last word (and first 25) for your alphabet soup of writing?

 

 

 

 

Steady Hands

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Stomach injectionFor the past week and a half, since my husband Jonathan had eye surgery to correct strabismus, I’ve been applying a thin line of ointment to his inner eyelids each night. It’s been something of a slapdash operation–the ointment sometimes sticks to his eyelashes, sometimes runs down his cheeks. It makes me wonder how on earth I ever got drops into our daughters for pink eye when they were little—Jonathan, unlike them, has not even screamed or squirmed. Eventually we figured out that if he rolled his eyeballs back into his head, the ointment got within spitting distance of the target area. Still, it’s a lucky thing I never aspired to become a brain surgeon.

All of which sparked my memories of a year ago, in the days following my last chemotherapy infusion, when Jonathan gave me my final Neupogen shot. (Neupogen stimulates white blood cell production.) For five nights of each chemo cycle, I’d lain on the couch while Jonathan swabbed my exposed belly with alcohol before carefully plunging a syringe into the fatty tissue. The first cycle we’d nervously joked about the movie Memento, in which an injection gone awry leads to amnesia and an excellent film. But nary a drop of blood did he draw the whole time. I can’t imagine entrusting myself to anyone else.

There were many steady hands holding me throughout six months of treatment–my doctors and the always cheerful Kaiser staff, my therapist, my yoga class, Michael at Pine Street Clinic, my daughters (who in honor of my remaining wisps of hair dubbed me Gollem), and, of course my many wonderful friends and family members who cheered me with delicious food, walks, emails, flowers, CDs, presents, visits, and funny YouTube links. I wouldn’t have made it through without everyone.

Yet the steadiest was Jonathan, who was there from the first terrifying news of diagnosis through it all: hours of surgery not knowing how far the cancer had spread; uncooperative catheters; private sadnesses and fears; doctors’ visits; a wife with no appetite who didn’t put dinner on the table but who still obsessed about her weight; hair loss; and all the usual demands like taxes and college tuition. On top of it all Jonathan worked 10-hour days to keep the paychecks and medical insurance in place, and he did it all without complaint. He even endured my most incessant question: “How do you really feel?”

I’m not sure how he really felt. But I feel incredibly lucky to have him: steady hands, steady heart, mind, and soul.

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Who’s your steady?

 

Anniversary Purge

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Recycling chemo papers

Today is recycling day. I toss into the bin a large cache, more than the usual fundraising appeals and advertising circulars. Chemotherapy and You lands on top of the pile, along with notes from consultations with surgeons and my oncologist, diaries tracking food intake, medications, and neuropathy ratings on a scale of 1-5, Look Good, Feel Better brochures, Radiation and You. It’s a good day for a purge—the one-year anniversary of my last round of chemo for a rare and aggressive form of uterine cancer.

I’d let go of a lot of things already: the sense of having an uninterrupted life; the veil separating me from mortality; my “lady parts,” as my friend Deb calls the uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, and cervix removed by the surgeon. Then my hair. Sometimes, though less than you might think, my energy, appetite, and spirits.

It was a long winter. But then it was the first day of spring, as it is today.

A year ago, at the end of my last chemotherapy session, the staff presented me with a Certificate of Achievement,  Certificate of Achievementwith accolades about my courage and perseverance. Such praise felt unwarranted, as it wasn’t so much a matter of bravery as complying with the recommended treatment in order to regain my health. But I did leave feeling grateful. And so relieved to be done.

Today I hesitate to add my certificate to the recycling bin. It’s strange moving away from active treatment. Along with the sense of relief comes the fear of moving beyond chemo’s protective bubble. Anxiety about cancer recurring simultaneously recedes and grows as time passes. Will throwing out my Certificate of Achievement jinx me? But I toss it anyway, along with magical thinking. I’m happy to be done with cancer’s clutter.

My cancer treatment included some Chinese medicine, and my practitioner, Michael, prescribed for Days 5 through 10 of each chemo cycle anything that would help my body cleanse itself of dead cells. “Cleansing can also be figurative as well; anything that you do during this part that helps you get rid of things is useful—cleaning out closets and the garage, completing projects, and resolving personal and business issues and relationships.” My garage is still a mess. But today’s purge feels very cleansing.

I’m hanging onto my wig, though. Maybe it’s like Fat Clothes, the oversized garments in the back of the closet you can’t get rid of after you lose weight just in case it comes back. You never know.

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