Patchwork

It is first light on Saturday morning, the time of day when all is black and white and then, slowly, grey and then, suddenly, the greys resolve into color.  Kapiti Island, which perches outside my study window, is missing this morning, covered in grey clouds that match the sky and the sea. It is the cloudy mornings that make the most stunning dawns, and also the most drab ones. You never know which is coming until it’s over.

It is Day 20 of chemotherapy. (I think of the days as capitalized during this chemo period.) And this third week, now tiptoeing around the corner to hand off to the first week of Round 2, has been much more of a mix than I’d ever have dreamed. I have tried to put the pieces together in the helpful narrative my brain (and yours) craves, and instead I have only a crazy quilt spread out before me, a drunken mix of colours and textures pieced together at odd and often unsettling angles. I’ll describe a little.

Grey velvet, threadbare: The week began with my hair falling out. It was surreal, seriously. I have wondered what it would be like—would it just fall down on the ground one morning and pool around my ankles like a pair of pants whose elastic has just finally given out? Would it wash off in the shower like washable mascara, the hot water just taking it off and down the drain? Would a stiff wind blow it off into birds nests?

Walking out with Melissa and Naomi into the hills on Sunday, I discovered the first piece—it hurt. It hurt to touch and it hurt more when the wind blew. I put on a hat to keep it from the wind—worse because then it hurt all the time. And when I’d give just a little tug on it, it would just come away in my hand. It was part party trick and part horror show and I worried that forever more in dreams I would be peeling my hair off of my head. Time to shave it off. I felt anxious and afraid and sorry for myself. And then an email from my father…

 

Black velvet, lush and thick: My Uncle Harry, my father’s younger sister’s husband, collapsed and died on the day my hair gave up for good. Out of nowhere, Harry was just gone. He had had a spate of health problems before, each frightening and potentially life ending, a heart attack, a stroke. But those were years ago and he’d made it through. And then suddenly not. I talked to my dad at his midnight, my sunset, the evening light slanting through the window and turning everything golden. We told stories about Harry, about how much he’d meant to each of us at different times in our lives, about the contagious giggle he had—so utterly and uniquely Harry—that marked him as a little boy even once he was the successful middle aged father of four. We talked about his grand children and about my Aunt Mary who had fallen in love with Harry in high school and not been without him since. We talked about age and death and loss and fear and love.  And Melissa came over and we put on loud music and shaved my head…

Burlap: It wasn’t the shaving that was so bad. Actually, as Melissa first butchered my hair with scissors and then shaved it with clippers and then (the next day after the stubble was still hurting) shaved it with a razor, we laughed way more than we cried. We put music on loud and Melissa brought in flowers and a candle and we laughed about how she shouldn’t quit her day job—I was not going to be a good model for her hair cut portfolio. And then, showering off afterwards I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, scarred and bald. I felt pity for the woman so sick with cancer--and then the flash of recognition that it was me. The cancer part of this thing came flooding back in and I laid awake that night thinking about my odds and fretting fretting about metastases. Funny what a visual will do. I’m surely no closer to death now that I’m bald—arguably the chemo is doing its job and killing cancer cells that might otherwise have taken hold in my liver or lungs—but the sight of me bald somehow makes my life feel much more fragile…

Paisley silk, purples and golds and greens: This week, a Week 3, I have had an almost normal work life—for regular at-home days, pre cancer. I have debriefed three Leadership Circle 360s, each with an extraordinary person. I have had a coaching session that felt like my new client and I were both rowing against the current with all of our might, and it took all of our combined strength to even stand still and then, together, we found a new way and the river opened to a set of beautifully branching possibilities that just hadn’t been there before. I got off that call tingling and alive and filled with possibilities. I have had conversations about complexity and hedonism, about adult development and spirituality and love. I have been moved to tears with gratitude about my worklife and the way it fills me with such meaning and purpose and joy.

Sunflowers on a cobalt blue background: And then yesterday, after a couple of early morning calls, we drove ten minutes up the road and picked up Michael’s sister Laurie and her daughter Amanda from our little tiny local airport. They were effervescent with delight about being here after traveling so long to come for the first time to this little country so far from home. Each part of our lives brings them pleasure—the food we cooked for dinner, the lush overgrown garden (with our first lime!), the tiny but character-filled rooms of our little house by the sea. They were complementary about my Jennifer wig (which I really like) and impressed with Clare—and they were just as happy about watching me in a beanie or bald-headed as I moved through the day. Being with them is just gentle and tingling joy, except that…

Royal purple silk satin jacquard: In the afternoon yesterday, Melissa came over and Naomi slipped out of her new school early and we all put on dark clothes (well, not Melissa) and we walked the 50m down the hill to Nicki’s memorial service. It was a good thing we got there early because soon it was standing room only, and then there were people sitting and then standing in a tent outside the hall. There were hundreds of people there of all ages and colours, all of us weeping on the rainy Friday afternoon. The service went three hours as people from everywhere in her life told stories about her, and it was nearly all the same story: passionate, determined, loving, pushy, generous Nicki giving to the world, loving her family, encouraging people to reach beyond themselves and build a new future. It could have been a retirement party except that the guest of honour was too young to retire, she was strangely absent, and the song her bearded and red headed son wrote and sang about her was keening rather than joyous. And then Steve, her husband, got up and said, “I think this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” and as he made his way through a funny quirky story about Nicki we laughed and cried with him, this man who had loved her so much and for so long. If it had been easy to see why everyone had loved Nicki, it was similarly easy to see why everyone loved Steve. And at the end when he described how hard it was to imagine his future as anything but bleak without her, you could almost feel the collective cells of everyone in the hall reaching towards him with love and support and collective anguish.  Ahh, if there were only something we could do to ease your pain, Steve, and that of your kids. And then we turn out into the rainy Friday afternoon, blinking in our losses, each of us knowing that our pain (really—I complain about being bald?) is minimal compared to the pain of the family that went home to dinner without their dogged, loving, funny mom.

At the same moment I was at Nicki’s memorial service, my whole Garvey family was celebrating the life of my uncle Harry. There would have been laughing and crying and bad imitations of Harry’s giggle rippling around a room filled with people who share my DNA and have a piece of my heart. Two funerals on the same day on different sides of the world. And of course there are thousands of funerals, hundreds of thousands, each day, all over the world. And babies being born, and lovers getting married, and people beginning their first job or ending their last job or finally closing the door on a bad marriage and walking off into a new life. There are people snorkeling in crystal clear water, swimming with turtles. There are people desperate to find the doctor who can finally diagnose the terrifying symptoms. There is mourning and celebration and love and boredom and pain and fear. This is the patchwork of what it means to be human, I guess, what it means to have a sense of the future and the past and a fear of our own deaths and a love and a yearning to be loved.

Today I’ll post this and then go for my pre-chemo blood tests to be sure my blood levels are high enough to get the yew juice again on Monday. I’ll walk in the hills with Melissa and Laurie, in this landscape that has softened into greyish greens and greyish blues as I’ve written. Tomorrow night I start with the steroids again. And then Monday, I’ll put a soft scarf around my bald head and begin the second of my four rounds of chemo. We will mourn what we’ve lost and celebrate what we have and always always connect into the love that is the fundamental fiber in the fabric of our lives. I hope wherever you are today, you love just a little more deeply and with a little more joy, remembering that every day you are alive is a chance to giggle like the little kid inside you with the sheer delight of breathing.

(The pictures today are three different dawns over Kapiti this week, because the sky is a patchwork too.)