First day home

I am just up from a nap in the sunshine in my own bedroom, the windows wide open to the sound of the sea and the cool breeze coming off the water. Surely this is an enviable place to heal.

I am trying to lean into the healing place, and I’m wondering why that’s so hard. Some of the hardness is about the pace of it, about feeling breathless with a walk from the bathroom to the living room (in what is a really small house), looking out into a landscape I don’t have the energy to enter into today, struggling to find a book that will sweep me out of the darkness. Some of it is about the pain of it, about finding more parts of me sore than have ever been sore as I step back from the big painkillers to try to just make my way with the drugs that don’t make me feel so sick. Some of it is about the waiting, the wondering for the next few days what the biopsy report will say, the inability to know whether this healing is the last step of this treatment or just the next step on a treatment path that stretches out months in front of me.

And then there’s the thing that I talk with clients about all the time—what it means to return different into a context that is the same. There is a kind of disorientation of having gone away and had some major and transformative experience and then returning to a place where your life just sort of picks up as it was before. Many of our clients deal with this when head off on one of our programs—they have some kind of radical discovery about themselves, find new places they had not anticipated, feel their identities crack open a little as they make new sense to themselves. And that begins with letting go of some story they have had about themselves and who they are and what they’re about. Now I feel that motion in myself, in the actual pricking of wounds, the tightness of healing skin, the gaunt face peering back at me from the mirror.

Surely cancer reshapes the larger system of my life. In this way it is unlike a leadership program where other people expect me to move unchanged back into my old habits. My friends coax me to eat (Carolyn is currently starring in the role of my Jewish mother) and to nap and they take turns being with me so that I’m not alone too much. My firm is rippling around, trying to figure out what my cancer means to my colleagues and clients the first half of this year (and longer?). My parents, in-laws, and extended family are all making sense of their relationships with us (and to a certain extent with each other) in new ways. And Michael and the kids are figuring out what our family looks like when I’m sick. In this way, we all feel far from home.

And in other ways, we feel our delight at being home. Michael and I have walked around the garden (me in my new robe and flip flops), ruing the knee-high grass (weeds?) and admiring the ripe tomatoes. We sat on the bench in the sunshine, listening to the laughter of children from the sea, the thrumming of the wings of a tui in flight, the constant pulse of the waves. In these last 7 years, we’ve planted trees that are now taller than us, moved earth, built walls, scattered wildflower seeds. And while it looks overgrown today and just a little unloved, with some care and time, it’ll look less like a wild mess and more like the somewhat random garden it is: haphazard but beautiful, rough but well-loved.  It’s grounding to remember the ways that change and constancy are both the stuff of life. Lightening strikes and a tree falls and at first the difference is arresting and raw. And then over time a new landscape emerges, new views across the little valley and into the hills, new patterns of the wind through the leaves. I guess I’m like that now, recovering from the lightening, searching for the new patterns. I will sometimes feel sorry for myself and sometimes feel grateful to be alive and sometimes feel all those things at the same time.  This may be what healing looks like in this season, here in this endless January at the beach.