What I figured out at the Adventure Park

Hello! I am writing this on the day after Passover, or on Easter Sunday, for those of the Christian faith. We started the morning seeing off our friends from Nova Scotia who had come for a quick visit, which was wonderfully fun. Then we went to church. The Hallelujah Chorus still gives me goosebumps. And I do believe in the Resurrection. I could give up all the other miracles if the theologians made me, the loaves and fishes and even the virgin birth, but not the Resurrection. My nine-year-old has pronounced it “ridiculous,” but I told him it is no more ridiculous than the fact that we are all here in the first place.

                The Resurrection story resonated differently for me this year, now that I feel like I have kind of snatched life out of the jaws of death. I feel for the first time I have a glimmer of understanding of what Jesus meant when he was dying and he said, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” And it was good to sing the Easter songs. Where, O death, is now thy sting? Truly.

                After church, I had my own Easter plan. Instead of our usual egg hunt and big dinner, I was going to get busy living some more. Specifically, I had a project to work on my phobia about heights.

                I don’t like heights. That is putting it mildly. I can’t even climb to the top of a household ladder. I can only get on airplanes thanks to modern pharmaceuticals, specifically Xanax.

                How this all will relate to having cancer, I will get back to eventually. Cut me some slack for a few minutes.

                I’ve been working on getting over this phobia for the last couple of years, since before I got sick. I have been to the top of the Empire State Building in New York. Then, when we were in Chicago, I went to the top of the building formerly known as the Sears Tower, now called the Willis Tower, where you can stand out in a glass box with a glass floor, 103 stories over Wacker Drive. I had to crawl out onto the glass ledge at first, but eventually I was able to stand up. That looked like this:

                Then, when we went to Montana to visit my mom, I walked a part of the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park which had completely flummoxed me a couple years earlier. I had tried to hike this with John and my three kids, and I absolutely froze up. Burst into tears. Couldn’t go forward or backward. Ruined the hike for the whole family, although I eventually was able to walk back the short little way I had gone.  

                Later that day, I decided I would have to go back there some time and do it if I was going to live with myself.  It took me a couple of years to get back there at a time when the trail wasn’t buried under 10 feet of snow. But in 2010 I did the hike with my friend, Steve. The outward trip was terrible; I was dizzy and panicky and couldn’t look at anything but the back of Steve’s neck as he walked in front of me. But eventually something cracked in my mind, like your knuckles cracking, only it was in my brain. I just literally snapped out of it. The trip back was fine. It looked like this. This is me:

                Now, back in Maryland, I had been similarly flummoxed several years earlier by a simple rope swing up at Cunningham Falls State Park.  At that time, I had chickened out of even once getting on the rope swing, which was basically just a knot in a big rope that you stood on and swung out over a ravine. Other people were having a great time with it, but I simply could not do it. It got to bugging me. I had set a poor example for my kids. But the next time I went up there, a couple years later, the rope swing was gone, so I had lost my chance to redeem myself.

                And then our school built a big Adventure Park full of high ropes courses on some land it owns. There are several different courses in the park, ranging from “purple” level for kids to “double-black-diamond” for strong adults.  I knew I would have to do it a ropes course there one day.

                It took me some time to get there. At first, I just was afraid. And then, I got all busy having cancer. Then I was too sick for a few months because of the chemo, and then I had surgery and my arm was messed up for a while, and I had to do physiotherapy and work with a trainer to get back my upper-body strength. But now my arm is doing great and I have no more excuses. So when the Adventure Park opened for the season recently, I couldn’t really put it off any longer.

                My son, Sean, who is 17, actually likes the ropes courses. Sean does them for fun. He pays good money for the privilege. He goes on the scarier, higher ones. So I asked him if he would take me on the bunny slope of ropes courses, and he agreed. I thought Easter would be a good day for it. The crowds would be small, I thought, and I would be full of the power of the Resurrection story. Nothing is impossible with God, as they say. I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. Right?

                I almost didn’t make it.  I almost got too dizzy going up the log stairway to the first platform, which small children were practically skipping up with no problem. Seriously, I have issues. But I wasn’t going to give up before I even started. I have some pride, somewhere, so I kept going. A park staffer advised me strongly to take a “purple” route, one of the ones designed for five- to seven-year-olds. The purple routes were maybe twelve feet off the ground. It may as well have been a thousand feet above Wacker Drive, as far as I was concerned.

                Sean went ahead of me, to show me where to put my hands, and to demonstrate which way the obstacles moved (which most of them did) and to warn me about any scary noises I was likely to hear.

                The first element of the course, a bridge made of netting between two trees, was not terrible. It didn’t move very much, and all it took to get across was more or less just regular walking. I made it to the other side.

                “Bam!” said Sean. In the bag.

                But the next element was not so simple. It consisted of a series of short four-by-fours, each suspended in mid-air, forming an extremely wiggly bridge you had to walk across. They did move, sideways and also forward-to-back. And they made scary creaking sounds, as if they were fixing to break any time now. And you had to step from each one onto the next one. I think it was about halfway across that that I just burst into tears. Now I was dangling in mid-air on a four-by-four that was swinging back and forth and creaking, and I was crying, and I couldn’t even let go of the cable to get a tissue. Altogether dignified.

                I looked ahead to Sean.

                “Hey,” he said. “You are from Montana.”

                That comment got me across that first bridge. When I got to the platform on the end, built around a large tree, I clung to the tree and sobbed.

                There were more elements. There was one that wasn’t so bad, basically a plain log, and then another wiggly, scary one.

                And then there was a tightrope. You had two cables to hold onto, and a third one to walk on. That was it.

                “They have got to be kidding,” I said. “Jesus.”

                 I started saying “Jesus” a lot. And then I started swearing. But there was no going backwards, and I decided I was not going to call a staffer to rescue me like a cat up a tree. I made it across. We paused to let a five-year-old scamper by.

                Then there was a bridge that was basically a stable horizontal ladder you could walk on, only there wasn’t anything to hang onto. That terrified me, partly because I have hardly any sense of balance.

                There was another bridge of suspended pieces of lumber, only the last one was at an angle, so that it made a ramp you had to climb up while it was all jiggly.

                “How am I going to get up this board?” I whimpered.

                “You are going to use the brute strength you have got in your arms from working out with your mean trainer these last two months,” Sean said.  So I did.

                The last element of the course was a zip line. This was the thing I was dreading the most, because you have to trust your equipment, basically a pulley hung on a cable, and just jump off the platform and glide. I was not sure I could do that. Sean was afraid he was going to have to push me off the platform, and when I sent him ahead of me he was afraid I would be marooned.

                But that one element was the one that turned out to be actually sort of fun. I could do that again. It was kind of pleasant. It did not go as fast as I had worried it would. I had actually worried I would black out halfway across, and the fire department would have to come get me. But I wasn’t even tempted to black out, or curse or cry. It was fun. Sean took a video and I was actually smiling:

                So, what does all this have to do with having cancer? There were three main things that struck me:

1. Having cancer has taught be a lot about how to mentally overcome unpleasant situations.

                I have always been pretty good at avoiding unpleasant situations or feelings. This made me a comfortable person, but a poor risk-taker. But you can’t avoid unpleasantness while you are doing chemo, or figuring out how to be a parent while maybe you’re dying, or working out how to stay married even when even when you are falling apart. You just have to figure out how you are going to do it.

                Getting across that first wiggly bridge was like that.

                I have heard cancer people say that having cancer makes you “stronger.” I used to think, well, that’s nice. I get it now. I probably couldn’t have done that zip line or that tightrope before I got sick. I hadn’t practiced doing hard things enough; I had just avoided them. But now I have breast cancer under my belt, and what is scary these days is relative.

                Margaret Mitchell wrote about this in Gone With the Wind. When Scarlett O’Hara’s mom has died and her dad has lost his mind and most of Tara has been trashed by the Yankees, Grandma Fontaine tells Scarlett, “Child, it’s a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she’s faced the worst she can’t ever really fear anything again. And it’s very bad for a woman not to be afraid of something…God intended women to be timid frightened creatures and there’s something unnatural about a woman who isn’t afraid.”

                Well, Grandma Fontaine thought it was very bad, but I think it’s great.

                Now, I am not kidding myself. Having breast cancer is not the worst thing that can happen, and I know that. I know full well that any number of things, such as having a child with cancer, would be much worse. But it was bad enough. And because of it, not only am I lots better at dealing with the fears I do have, but also there are some things that just don’t scare me much anymore. I used to be afraid of going to the dentist. Not anymore. And I never thought I’d be able to jump off a platform onto a zip line, but it wasn’t even hard.

                I think it was before crossing the tightrope that I said to Sean, “Okay, I have done four months of chemo. I can do this.”

                “I have no doubts,” he replied.

2. Now I am spending some time wondering, what else is out there that would turn out to be wonderful if I just gave it a shot.

               

                This sort of follows from the above. If that zip line, which was the thing I was dreading, turned out to be the one thing that was actually fun, what else is out there like that? I have to seriously figure out if there are other things that I have been avoiding, that are precisely the thing that would be best to do. I am sure there are.

                Or, as one of my church friends would say, I should be checking out my own darkness to see what’s useful in there.  There’s some pretty good stuff in my darkness, it turns out.

3. Having cancer sort of lit a fire under my butt to start living more fully and mindfully. The rest of you, anyone reading this, learn from my mistakes and don’t wait to get cancer to light a fire under your butt.

                

                If having cancer means you get to have a soapbox, my first soapbox would be one for me to stand on and tell my women friends to get their mammograms. But the next one would be for me to stand on and tell everyone not to wait as long as I did to get busy living.

                I have pissed around a lot. I have wasted a lot of time, sometimes in the name of motherhood or what I “should” be doing or out of fear of what might be inconvenient or impossible.

                I have a friend, Bev, who went to my church until she moved away, and we used to be in a Bible study together. She is currently fighting a recurrence of ovarian cancer.  On my one-year-survivor anniversary, she wrote me a lovely note. In it, one of the things she said was:

                “Isn't it a shame that we have to get this kind of wake-up call in order to see what is really important in life. People, don't wait until you get a wake-up call - do what is important to you in this life now! You don't always get the time Katie and I have had to make your plans! Do it now!!!!”

            What she said. Amen.