On short hair, short workdays, and long nights

It is chemo day 3, a glittering Wednesday by the sea. I have been teaching much of the day, a Conversations at the Growing Edge workshop, and now I am resting as my dear colleagues bring the day to a satisfying close without me. This workshop was on again off again as my treatment decisions got made, and as it became clear that I would be in chemo this week, we made two sets of complicated decisions that messed with a lot of people and for which I'm totally grateful. We decided to have Keith and Jane teach it for (or with) me and to bring it to Paekakariki so that I could be there sometimes even if I felt terrible at other times. And so on this post-Southerly brilliant day, this workshop I have taught in universities and houses and retreat centres around the world came to St Peter’s Hall.  And I came there too!

 

It is life giving to be with these program participants. It is life giving to be thinking alongside colleagues I adore. I love this work beyond measure and the people who come and take these workshops are uniformly wonderful—in very diverse ways. We have participants from New Zealand, Australia, the US, UAE, and China. From education and business and the non-profit sector. And we delve into meaning and connection and curiosity and confusion and love.

And I can keep up, though I do get tired more easily. I am feeling like I am moving through honey—everything is a little viscous and a little awkward, but sticky with the sweetness of being alive and in connection with ideas and people I love. I am recognising each day the gift of a life woven through with meaning. Even when I fall into holes, I find strength there to pull out of them because of the meaning that offers hand holds everywhere I look.

The beautiful Rene

Yesterday I had my hair radically cut. I have been convinced by the overwhelming data that this particular chemo cocktail just makes everyone lose her hair.  Everyone.  So I went to Rene and told her I wanted her to cut my hair close as short as it would possibly look good on the far side of bald so that I could have a sense of myself  in the nearer future than my old hair cut. She asked me questions about my opinion, and I just gave myself over into her hands. It was the most interesting experience of a kind of controlled surrender, not so unlike the way chemo felt on Monday. She cut and I watched, perched from somewhere near the ceiling, watching the woman with cancer get her hair cut off just as I had watched the woman with cancer get her IV put in. I could feel the scissors on my hair, watch my face change in the mirror, and be in it and out of it at the same time. Very interesting. And my friends were supportive and loving about it, along with the appropriate amounts of laughter and black humour. When Rene dusted me off and hugged me tearfully, she told me the haircut was a gift. It felt more like a blessing—the gift of her friendship, her artistry, and a bearable image of me that I’ll probably get a glimpse of before 2014 is over.

And then later, after the shot in my belly (ick) that Debbie the oncology nurse came to my house to give me (the service she provides is invaluable in terms of comfort and support), it all fell a little down hill. I tumbled down down, into aching bones and belly, into exhaustion, and came to a rest teetering near the hollow of misery. When I went to put my hair up to wash my face before bed and found no hair there at all, I fell into the hollow and sat down on the (heated and therefore extremely comfortable) bathroom floor and wept for my losses. Michael came in and joined me, and eventually Aidan was there too (you would really have to see how small our bathroom is to imagine how funny a sight this is with three of us). Sometimes being surrounded by love still isn’t quite enough to get out of the pockets of sadness.

The night closed in and the stars were obscured by the raging southerly. I took my exhausted and miserable self to bed. But the long night passes and the dawn does eventually come even as winter begins to move to this hemisphere (the sun doesn’t rise until after 7 this week). And there is another day to make another go of deepening of connection and curiosity and another day of Aidan infusing my water with something interesting (I’m supposed to drink THREE LITRES these first three post-chemo days and Aidan tries to make that task more pleasurable for me—today was ginger and lemon). And there is a rumply hall in a rumply village that I love on the cellular level. And the magic of seeing people in my place when I have only known them in theirs. And the delight of an opening, an idea created between us right in the moment. And the joy of a laugh between two people who were strangers just moments ago. And then I am tumbling again, but into joy and connection and that seems somehow a much bigger meadow than its more grey and miserable sister.

Tomorrow the forecast from the chemo predictions is for tired with a chance of achy. Friday the forecast gets more ominous as the drugs that prop me up these first few days trail off, and I get to see how the non-medicated me is taking to the yew juice that I am peeing out as fast as I possibly can. And the sun rises and sets, and the waves come and go, and we are all lucky to be alive.