I belong to a United Methodist congregation, Mill Creek Parish UMC in Derwood, Maryland. Our church has a group called “God and Guinness,” which is really just a bunch of us who enjoy getting together, and we meet twice a month at a brew pub in Gaithersburg to have dinner. We usually have a topic in advance to start the conversation rolling, although we often wander far away from the topic and nobody minds. Sometimes, we never get around to discussing the topic at all.
Last night was God and Guinness night, and about six of us were there. The official topic, suggested by our pastor, Rick, and announced on our Facebook page, was, “What do you want to carry with you into the New Year? What do you want to leave behind? What positive changes did you make in 2011 that you want to build upon in 2012?”
We sat around for a while and ordered food and drinks. Our waiter, Jay, who knows most of us by now (or at least, knows our regular drink orders) brought out the sweet potato fries. I had an Irish coffee in front of me. We talked about music and football and other things for a while, and then somebody said, “How about our topic of the day?”
And everyone there, all friends of mine who know my year was filled with cancer treatments, looked at me. One of them said something along the lines of, “You’ve got us topped in the ‘What do you want to leave behind’ department. Anything you want to say?”
I laughed, and I said, sure, let’s leave chemo behind. That pretty much sucked. And radiation, too. And being afraid of dying is no fun, and having your children terrified that you’re dying is awful. And I’m bald and have one boob and scars on my arms and hands, and my fingernails are trashed and all that.
Everyone agreed wholeheartedly that I should leave all that behind. But they were, I think, a little surprised when I said there was a bright side, as well. I did not explain it well, but here is what I would have said if I had thought it through a little better:
Strengths to build on in 2012:
#1. I am alive. Yes, I am still here. I have time and I’m feeling great nowadays. What am I going to do about it? I’m going to do something other than be a housewife and child chauffeur, that is for damn sure. But what?
Still figuring that out.
#2. Almost dying, but not dying, gives you a certain clarity and focus. You figure out that some things (family, friends) are important. Others (television, bickering, lots of other things) are pretty much a waste of time. Similarly, you discover which people are truly your friends. You discover what you truly love to do. Me, I have started writing again, for the first time in years. For me, this is huge. I have been painting and drawing a lot, too.
#3. Physical and sensual things are great. As the immortal Warren Zevon put it when he was dying of cancer, I am enjoying every sandwich. A good drink tastes really good these days. Music is really something. Sex is awesome. I feel as sexy as I ever have. I know this is counterintuitive. For God’s sake, I am a 49-year-old bald woman with one boob. But I feel like I have finally gotten hold of a secret that my friend, Michelle, knew back in the tenth grade or maybe before. She was obese, and she had her share of health and family issues, but she was one of the sexiest people I ever knew. Why? Because she felt sexy, and she enjoyed the hell out of every minute. Men could tell that. Why did I take so long to learn that secret? It’s all in your head.
#4. It’s time to take care of myself, and I’m doing it, and it feels good. The doctors all told me that if I wanted to minimize the chance that the cancer comes back, I have to lose weight, get lots of exercise, and not drink much alcohol. So I am trying to do those things. It’s going okay. I have lost some weight and am working on losing the rest. I am trying not to drink very much. And I am exercising a lot.
I have a trainer now, a woman called Mija, who is not what you would call mean, but she is relentless. She almost made me cry at the gym yesterday, just trying to stretch one of my hamstrings to a normal length. Anyway, it’s not fun working out with Mija, but I feel really good when it is over. My body parts all feel connected to each other again. And I was able to do 60 minutes on an elliptical trainer yesterday, at a good clip, whereas just a few weeks ago I couldn’t jog one mile. Physically, I now feel better than I did before I found out I was sick. Who would have expected that, ten months after diagnosis? Not me.
This happened back in July. I was at the end of my chemo treatments and was feeling absolutely crappy. Eating anything was like chewing on flavorless rubber cement. I survived on ice cream and milk shakes for a time, but got to the point where my sense of taste was completely gone. I couldn’t tell what flavor of ice cream I was eating, or for that matter, whether it was cold. I had diarrhea much of the time. I was getting nasty migraines. I was not sleeping well, and I was completely exhausted. Some days, the medications left me pretty stoned.
Just then, the Borders chain went bust, and a big sale started at our local bookstore. All my kids had Borders gift cards they had been given in the past year, and we had to use them before they became worthless, so we headed to Germantown to the big sale.
If the store had regularly been as full of people as it was that night, it would never have gone out of business. The place was a mess. People were everywhere. The check-out line snaked to the back of the building. All my kids went their separate ways. I looked around a bit, and found a couple of things I wanted, but I did not have the energy to shop much. I just found a quiet spot in one aisle and slumped to the floor and started reading.
A woman approached me; she looked fairly normal and a little bit harassed, like everyone else in the store. I noticed her long hair with a twinge of jealously; I was bald as a billiard ball.
“I see your pink hat there,” she said in almost an accusing way, as if I’d been trying to hide it. “Are you having chemotherapy for breast cancer?”
I did not know her from Adam, and she was certainly cutting right to the chase, but I had learned through interactions at the grocery store and around town that that wasn’t so unusual. Total strangers would stop me and offer a little pep talk or occasionally, a hug.
“Yep,” I said. “Almost done with chemo. Next month, I’ll be having a mastectomy.”
“Well, that was me, six years ago,” she said, with a strange intensity. She was looking almost through me, and my two oldest kids came up to see if everything was okay. They hung around for a moment and satisfied themselves that the woman was harmless, and drifted away again.
“You know,” she says, “cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“I’ve heard people say that,” I said. “But I really, really don’t get it. You are going to have to explain to me why you see it that way.”
“Well, you’re still feeling pretty awful, aren’t you?” she asked, stating the obvious. I was red and puffy, and hungry and nauseous simultaneously. I was sitting on the floor because I didn’t have the energy to stand up any more. I was totally bald. I didn’t even have any eyelashes.
“Wait until six years from now. You’ll feel great.”
She said this with some authority and conviction. Mind, she hadn’t asked me what my prognosis was, or how it was going, or whether I expected to be around six years from now. How the hell did she know I was going to feel great someday?
“You’ll see,” she continued. “I don’t sweat the small stuff anymore. I don’t freak out, say, if I get the flu. Now it’s like, I lived through chemo. Flu is nothing.
“I know who my real friends are. I know what’s important and what’s not.”
My eight-year-old, Matthew, came up, wanting to know when we’d be done and what was for dinner. I said we’d probably eat at the Applebee’s across the parking lot, whenever we got through the checkout line. The older ones appeared, too, with their stacks of books.
“You’ll see,” the woman said. “It’s changed my life. You’ll see. Anyway, I’ll see you here again sometime. I know what your hat looks like, now.”
I thought that was an odd thing to say, given that the book store was closing forever, and I probably would not see anyone there again. But again, she spoke with conviction and authority, and I found myself wondering who this person was.
She wandered off, and we got in the checkout line. About five minutes later, the woman came rushing up to us again. She was holding a framed poster with a photo of Albert Einstein.
“Here,” she said, “look at this. This is what I was trying to say, sort of.”
The words on the poster read, “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle, or you can live as if everything is a miracle.”
“That was what I was trying to say,” she said. “You’ll see. Everything is a miracle now.”
She made her good-byes again, and left.
“Who was that?” my daughter asked. “She was weird.”
“I have no idea,” I said. “She was talking to me like she knows me, like she’d seen the future. MY future.”
“That’s what I mean, she was weird!” my daughter said.
Maybe I was too sick, or too messed up. My brain hurt.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know. She is the first person I’ve ever met that I wondered, am I talking to an angel, and I don’t know?”
Me and my kids in Seattle at Christmas
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