Water in the desert

Look on my friends, ye mighty, and despair.
Despair of might itself, stupid with self-love.

Let the mean girls whisper and bray behind their manicured hands;
Let the boys with the wilted asses and the John Wayne pouts
Play with each other in their loud, lonely corner.

Their games are not ours.

What say we let them fuck the hell off, while we conspire quietly together,
Never caring much what we will raise,  only whom.

Yes, my dears, let us touch, but touch lightly.
If we must build, let us build bridges, sills, and doorways;
If we make, let us make invitations.

Come, let's scatter our seed where the weeds already flower.
Let us mend, make way, and step out of the light,
leaving only our selves undone.

What do you know?

That's the question a beautiful new friend asked me last night, and I gave a rambling answer. I've got a more concise one now:

We all have the right to claim our own power, to beam our own light. Never to poach on, shadow, or blight anyone else's. Holding these two truths together is a tricky but worthy endeavor.

That's it. I'll let you know if I learn something more.

And you? If you had but one pithy lesson to impart, what would it be? 

Forza!
Gretchen

Take me to the river

Many years ago, Peter and I spent some time with an excellent local couples' therapist, Dr. Stephen Cohn, and we often return to a metaphor for healthy partnerships that he gave us then. He noted (like Rilke before him) that couples often feel a strong impulse to merge, to surrender their independence for a fantasy of perfect communion; he likened this to giving up the captaincy of our respective boats. Throughout the time we saw him, Dr. Cohn encouraged us to recognize and protect our essential sovereignty, never to abdicate our navigational responsibilities. "Same lake, different boats," he'd remind us whenever we got anxious over our inevitable conflicts (big and small) in judgment, value, perspective, preference, etc.

Dr. Cohn's choice of image might not have worked for us if we didn't both love water so well. I particularly love water that moves; I find living in a river town the next best thing to living on the coast. Pete doesn't share my bias against containment, as he's been "repairing" to Lake Tahoe all his life. (Granted, it's a big lake, and its deep waters are not still.) He's also more catholic in his enjoyment of different modes of being at or on or in the water. He's a proficient sailor and rower, while I'm only comfortable swimming and paddling. Even that second activity is relatively new to me. We celebrated my getting "doctored" in 2003 with a guided kayaking trip in the San Juan Islands, and I bought a boat a few years after that. Unfortunately, in a flush of "can-do" enthusiasm and a bit of careless portage, I separated my shoulder and lost all early momentum. We did pool our REI dividends to get a second boat five years ago, but between one thing and another - you know how it goes - we've been out maybe ten times.

A sweet man in a serviceable boat under the Tillikum Crossing.

Ten plus two. I really wanted to take advantage of this recent and rather novel sense of physical well-being before another surgery (tomorrow morning) knocks it out of me - I hope very temporarily - and we both wanted to take advantage of these spectacular summer days while they last. Thursday afternoon, we put in at Willamette Park and paddled north (against map gravity but downriver) to admire Portland's newest bridge from below. It's a beauty.

I figured that we should let laziness and inertia work in our favor for once, so I persuaded Pete to leave the boats sitting atop our car for a couple of nights. Yesterday morning we set out again, this time from the other side of the river and in a southerly direction. We glided between the doubled columns that support the Sellwood Bridge(s) old and new, passed mansion-dwelling yogis and golfers whose absence was noted at morning mass, saluted a man on a "hydro-bike" and a bald eagle who flew so low over my head that I could admire his yellow talons and their black blades.

Yes, we definitely need to do this more often. 

Forza!
Gretchen

Put a bow on it

A week ago I met a fella patient for lunch and a walk through Oaks Bottom park. W is a couple of months behind me on a very similar chemo regimen, and we're finding a lot that we share beyond our chemical tribulations. Our conversation rambled, rose and dipped with the shaded path, but there were a couple of questions that kept reappearing in the half-light and calling our attention, like birds flitting near but never giving us a clear view.

You might suspect that cancer patients keep lists of thoughtless and unhelpful things that others say, and I regret to report that your suspicion is entirely justified. We share these mauvais mots, trade them, roll our eyes, and try to laugh. I hope you'll forgive us and understand that it's a mode of self-defense. Many of us feel naked as shucked clams much of the time, and we're strangely most tender to the clumsy touch when it's well-intentioned. (My personal favorite came second-hand from Pete when I was first diagnosed. One of his colleagues responded to the news by saying, "Please tell me she's not bowing to pressure to go the conventional slash and burn route." Yup, that's me, taking the coward's way out through double-mastectomy and chemo! Sorry to disappoint.)

This is not to say that our membership in a clique none of us ever hoped to join can rescue us from our own oafishness and insensitivity - we're more than ordinarily capable of saying stupid, wounding things to anyone who dares to get close. To take but one example, I had sometimes joked to Pete before my diagnosis that I wasn't sure I wanted to outlive our beloved Barley (half dingo, half wombat, all dingbat, now nearly thirteen). When I tried out the same joke post-diagnosis, I struck flint: "That's not okay."

We're capable too, like anyone else, of saying things that are thoughtful and true to our own experience but plain wrong to others with our disease (or maybe more accurately, taking a cue from George Johnson, our disorder, our DNA-deep derangement). This wouldn't be a source of offense if we didn't feel some pressure to mirror each other, to seek solidarity in common responses to superficially common experience. For better and worse, however, many of us do feel that pressure to one degree or another; a desire to take the edge off our isolation can lead us to take the edge off our differences, which can ironically deepen whatever loneliness we feel.

W was talking Monday about one of her own "stupid shit people say" bugaboos: "Cancer is a gift." This we hear primarily from those who've "been there" - anyone without cancer saying such a thing to someone with it would probably (and rightly) get smacked upside the head. It'd be tantamount to marveling, "How great that you grew up poor... went to war... got laid off... lost your sister in a car wreck..." etc. It doesn't sound a lot better coming from someone in the cancer boat; it's too easy to hear it as a dismissal of all that's brutal and horrifying about living (and too often dying) with this derangement, or as a judgement of our individual failures to make lemonade from a bumper crop of lemons.

And yet... and yet...

Even setting aside the many ways I am fortunate in spite of my cancer (many of them in direct spite of it: the insurance, the drugs, the many doctors, nurses, counselors, pharmacists, technicians all enlisted to destroy it without destroying me in the process), even setting aside the many blessings I already had but have come to appreciate more intensely "thanks" to my diagnosis and the immediacy it lends (that's the right word) to this moment (blessings that include you, dear reader), even setting aside the new blessings that many have in mind when they say "cancer is a gift" (unexpected connections, increased clarity of purpose and value, decreased patience for trivia and bullshit), I do experience cancer as a strange bounty; with all that is healthiest and most perverse in me, I welcome it.

Back in February, two weeks into treatment, I took a three-day workshop with Karen Karbo and nine other writers who aspired to "make memoir matter." This could have been a very bad idea but turned out to be a very good one, thanks in great part to Karen's acute sensitivity as a writer and teacher and her willingness to wade with us into the muck (of trying, failing, trying again). More thanks were due to the other students, all equal to her example, a generous and truly constructive group.

I don't remember whether Karen directly posed the question of what writing meant for us, did for us, how it mattered on our end (as opposed to the reader's), but sometime on the second day of the class I found myself delivering a micro-manifesto, finding words for a truth that was only then settling on its roost.

I don't have any religious faith, any conviction that there exists "out there" a power that gives absolute meaning and coherence to life or its absence. I don't believe any power outside ourselves can or will redeem our suffering or the suffering we inflict. I believe that absurdity is essential to our condition; no one and nothing can rescue us here or in the hereafter from the painful paradox of being (in Ernest Becker's vivid phrase) "gods with anuses," glorious and beshitted.

And yet... and yet...

What I told my compatriots in February is that I believe fervently (if never absolutely) in our own powers of small "r" redemption. I believe in our ability to discover order where it accidentally exists, to make meaning where it does not, and to render beauty from chaos and contingency. If I claim "artist" among my identities, it's not in assertion of a talent but in acknowledgement of a reflex. Whatever life throws me, I will try to make use of it. I will study it, poke it, test it between my teeth, heat it in my little crucible and sear my nostrils on the stink it belches up. If I cannot make gold from lead, I will make tin. The making is all. The trying, the essaying, the testing of spirit and dross in infinite combination.

To someone of my peculiar bent, cancer is a gift because it is interesting in itself and exciting in its effects: it gives urgency to every project. Up to six months ago, I sat always on the sidelines of suffering. I have been waiting all my easy life for the other shoe to drop on me for once. It has. I own this little store of dirty metal; it's mine to smelt, mine to work. Rich stuff.

*******

Treatment days are getting to be good enough days that I realize I'll need a new ritual and a new excuse for shameless self-indulgence when they're over... and they're over very soon! I saw my oncologist, Dr. Christine Barnett, last week, and she was bubbling over with excitement, relief, and congratulations - very sweet, even if I couldn't quite meet her at that giddy height. When she told me, "You made it!" I confessed to a superstitious fear around celebrating prematurely. Her rejoinder: "Well, you've made it this far. There's no disputing that!" Yes, I have made it this far, and I'm almost ready to revel in that fact.

Two lunches out in two days: Monday with W, Tuesday (after treatment) alone at the periphery of a small crowd of small people cavorting in the wonderful, cascading fountain in Jamison Square.

What's not to love? "Bosco" (Italian for forest) is the name of the sweet chef's nonno (granddad).

I had intended to walk right through (the square, not the fountain - soggy jeans too steep a price for a moment of whimsical cooling) on my way to a favorite café but had my plans instantly altered by the shock of finding a tiny new cart serving gnocchi (!) from a shaded corner of the square. Gnocchi and nothing but (apart from Mexican coke and Perugina limonata, maybe the only legal requirements to operating a cart in city limits). Pesto or meat sauce? Pesto. Yay.

Yes, Portland is very nearly as ridiculous as Portlandia would have you believe. But there's nothing ridiculous about eating fresh potato dumplings from a cup (compostable, natch) on a sunny day among happy and slippery urchins. Oops - did I say "sunny"? No no no - we don't have sun here! That's just a fancy filter on my camera app.

Taxol #11 of 12 tomorrow. Haven't yet decided where I'll lunch...

Forza!
Gretchen

Civil warrior

From Susan Sontag forward, there's been a strong pushback against the use of war metaphors in relation to cancer. It's a good and mostly useful counterweight (I could have said counterforce...) to a perspective grown heavy with overuse. Our preferred metaphors have a strong influence on our favored actions and need to be questioned... until the balance tips, and the questioners need questioning. That's a job I like maybe a little too well.

As intent as I was a couple of weeks ago on fending off Sontag's take-no-prisoners attack on militaristic metaphorizing, I agree with her that it's not generally helpful in the realm of cancer research and researchers. Fighting and understanding are in most instances inimical, and a researcher is much better served by impassioned curiosity than by hostility or triumphalism. George Johnson has delivered an excellent recent critique of the war metaphor in this context and of the (false) promise trumpeted by many researchers to "make cancer history" (MD Anderson's current tag line). His book The Cancer Chronicles gives a more detailed (and fascinating) description of how the genetic errors that can give rise to cancer are the dark side of our adaptability and resilience.

All that said, and my strong pacifist tendencies notwithstanding,  I think that fighting metaphors have potentially healthy uses for cancer patients.

Here's one powerful argument in favor of making the metaphorical connection between cancer and war: it encourages a sympathetic connection between patient and soldier. On Monday I listened with better will, understanding, and attention than I'd ever previously mustered (enlisted? take your pick) to the active soldiers and veterans to whom NPR gave much of the day's air time. Their stories moved me more powerfully for their new and unexpected familiarity. Like it or not, G.E. Lessing had it right - mitleid (compassion) begins at home. Our own suffering makes the ground from which we reach out to suffer with others and perhaps to loosen the grip of suffering, if only with the solace of our company.

I've made a partial list of what I feel I partially share with soldiers. Many of these identifications spill out in other directions (e.g. to the aged and disabled), and none is perfect, but that's exactly the point, exactly what metaphors and analogies are for at their most necessary. The slosh of like into unlike rescues us from solitary confinement and its derangements. Here are some of the intersections I recognized between my own recent experience and that of the soldiers I heard on Monday:

• We have leapt, fallen, or been plucked from the world of "normal" (insofar as that exists for anyone) into a realm of alien sensations, perceptions, and expectations. Even when we occupy the same physical space as "civilians," our understanding of that common reality and how best to navigate it may be at a disorienting and isolating remove.
• We are tasked with entering situations that we would normally judge insanely dangerous and with acting or allowing others to act in ways that we would normally judge insanely violent.
• We often find it difficult to distinguish between useful and debilitating fear. With our lives on the line, we are flushed with the fever of urgency, and our instincts may or may not prove sound.  
• We are asked to entrust our lives to "civilian" leadership. Few of those who direct our course have themselves directly faced the dangers that we face or weathered the insults to body and mind that we weather because they have insisted on the necessity.
• Many of us are wounded, scarred, or imperfectly healed. Many of us have become uncomfortably intimate with our bodies' and minds' fragility. Our sense of integrity has been ruptured; we have come undone.
• We are often obsessively occupied with our bodies, with our fitness for the rigors we must endure.
• Our "uniforms," the outward trappings of our difference, can be helpful or problematic. We can excite strong reactions in total strangers, become the objects of affection, generosity, or admiration, also disgust, fear, even anger. Depending on our respective experiences of combat, we may or may not feel we have earned these spontaneous outpourings of emotion, but we are expected to endure them, too, with stoicism if not with good grace.
• We may find comfort in solidarity with other "warriors," but sometimes at the cost of erasures small and large. We may struggle to insist on the differences within our acknowledged difference.
• Those who love us will be pained by our pain, but their pain will rarely mirror ours. It is its own thing and has the potential to isolate us further, not least because we are often even less capable of sitting compassionately with their pain than they are of sitting with ours. The impulse to smooth, to fix, to deny, to flee can be strong on both sides. 

Cancer, like war, is not a thing but a process, a terrain. We move through it with broken compasses, trying to read true north from needles that never stop spinning. Crucially, cancer is always a civil war, with all the added insanity that suggests. We have seen the enemy, and it is us; we blow ourselves to bits to keep ourselves together.

But hey! This soldier is nearing the end of a difficult "tour," and she's hopeful that it's her last. Yesterday I made it through #8 of 12 Taxol "infusions." (I'd strongly recommend rooibos over yew-tree the next time you're shopping for herbal tea.) My numbers (blood and liver counts) are less than ideal but holding steady, and side effects haven't yet passed the level of major nuisance. It gets more reasonable all the time to hope that I'll remain within the parameters of acceptable damage for the full course of treatment, and yesterday they let me schedule my final rounds. I loved getting this one into my calendar: 9:30 a.m. on June 24th. It makes a tentative promise that by noon on that day I'll be ready to bid a grateful good-bye to my "unit" and get the hell out of the free-fire zone. Maybe my brother Greg will helicopter me to safety...

In the meantime, I'm playing hausfrau. Behold our new shower curtain (still need to pound in the grommets):

a shining loaf of honeyed buttermilk bread (recipe courtesy of Local Milk):

and Pazzo showing off my new lap blanket:

Forza!
Gretchen

How's That Mirror Treating You?

​Photo by Cea.

One of my favorite pieces ​of advice in the "are you fucking kidding me?" category came from a history teacher I had in high school, someone who knew me just well enough to be dangerous.

"Beware your self-consciousness, Gretchen. It is all that separates you from true happiness."​

Um, right. Thanks for that!

In a generous reading, this polished little turd of wisdom could be embraced as a "character koan," like Pema Chödrön's warning that the impulse toward self- improvement is a subtle form of aggression. To the ready mind, it could offer a twisted path to enlightenment. But for a sixteen-year-old girl already half-paralyzed by anxiety​ about how she appeared to others (awkward, boyish, freckled & unkempt), it was the functional equivalent of "RELAX!" or "STOP THINKING ABOUT THE ELEPHANT!" Supremely unhelpful.

I can't say that I've totally dropped the habit of looking over my own shoulder, and I'd be a fool to suppose that I ever will, but self-consciousness doesn't grip me so cruelly these days. It was never my enemy, just another histrionic friend with boundary issues: "Oh my God, did you really just say Albanian when you meant Armenian? Of course I know you're not an idiot, but honey, you do realize that you will never be taken seriously by any of these people ever again, don't you? Such a shame." Okay, maybe sometimes my enemy, but much less so now than in the past.

There are many things that have conspired to loosen the corset whose laces I used to tighten every hour. Only a few have arrived in the form of epiphany, and I want to share one with you now. Maybe it'll help you as it has helped me. I hope in any event that it won't put a nasty new twist in your knickers if they're already knotted. Here you go:

No one will ever know just how good you are. Or how bad.​ Or how smart, how beautiful, how worthy of love.

​This includes your mother. It definitely includes your father. It includes your kids, your best friend, your lover, your mentor, your doctor, your pastor, the clerk at the grocery store, and the alluring stranger on the bus. Most importantly, this includes you.

I'll admit, there's a downside to living with this truth. For many of us, I think, the concept of heaven is attractive not only for the obvious reasons (comprehensive health coverage, cotton candy clouds, long picnics and touch football games with all our virtuous friends and family, etc.) but also, strangely, for the promise of ultimate judgment itself. As much as we dread our moment with St. Peter (or whomever we've installed in the judge's seat), we long for it, too. We want to know: will the gates swing wide when our names are called out from the register, or will the trapdoor open beneath our feet?​

Unfortunately, the desire to know how we ultimately stack up leaves us dangerously vulnerable. There are plenty of people all too ready to tell us, people who will use our hunger for an answer to assuage their own desperate insecurity. Many of history’s most vicious tyrants have amassed their power from the common human reluctance to live in a state of ambiguity and doubt.​

At the same time, we are woefully ill-equipped to judge ourselves. Even literal mirrors teach us this: we part our hair and practice our smiles for the favor of a backward image, then wonder why we look so odd in photos. Catherine and John Walter have speculated that a "feminine" right hair part spelled electoral doom for Al Gore in 2000, and they've created a True Mirror to allow people to see themselves as others see them. The experience is almost always unsettling, just as it is to overhear someone talking about you without knowing you're there. Whose truth can you trust? Who has the real skinny?

No one. The Book of You will be open long after you're gone, and every competing draft will be written in pencil. You cannot know how even the smallest of your acts - your offhand kindnesses, your petty cruelties - may ripple out, or whether your mightiest accomplishment will become your greatest shame. You cannot know whether that element of your appearance that you find most repellent may snag the curiosity of someone who comes to love you.

Can you live with that? Can you navigate by your own dim lights and keep moving forward absent the comforts of false certainty? Try it, and feel your rib cage expand.

Forza!
Gretchen​