Bittersweet

There is a new chocolate place at home—the Wellington Chocolate Company—where they roast their own beans and make them into single varietal bars like wine, listing the vintage and the origin of cocoa beans. This would sound naff, except the Madagascar beans (crop of 2013) taste so deliciously of raspberries that people at first don’t believe that there aren’t raspberries in the mix.  But no raspberries—just Madagascar beans and sugar, a treat worthy of the woman who has changed her diet in the hopes of keeping cancer away forever.

There is something very apt that the one dessert that is recommended for those of us who are trying to make our bodies cancer free zones is bittersweet chocolate. Here, at the end of the most aggressive part of my cancer treatment, I am coming to see that bittersweet is everywhere, not just in my chocolate.

I’ve noticed that one of the ways I can place an event in time is to go back in my memory and taste for a single feeling, unalloyed with others. Single varietal emotions are circa 2013 or earlier.  I picture myself somewhere, laughing or chattering or serving a client, and if it doesn’t have the ribbon of sadness in it, it happened before cancer. And it’s not that I wasn’t sad before—I was, and I was also sometimes joyful or grumpy or irritated or delighted. It’s just that now emotions seem to arrive pre-fused with others and I cannot un-fuse them. Every surge of delight has, in the back of it, a small keening sadness. This joy will pass. And each dip into misery has, to lighten it, a sparkle of gratitude for just being on the planet and feeling anything at all. This sadness will pass.

 

Today I am in paradise. I, who have been wearing merino beanies day and night to protect my baldy head from the freezing winter back home, have just now brought my sunburnt ears into the cool air conditioning to escape the heat and the sun outside. Yesterday we tried scuba diving for the first time; this morning Michael and I had a massage. This is a very very good life. I watch myself feeling a surge of joy and then the sharp kick of sadness. Happiness lives always with her sister Sorrow who reminds me of the fleeting nature of these breathless days. This holiday will pass. Those turtles will pass. These kids will grow up and move away.  And it isn’t that I’m searching around for the sadness or that the pathways of misery are so well-worn that my wheels find the sad rut in the road. It’s just that it occurs to me as fundamentally true.

 

In this moment, in every moment, we have a fractal of all that life has to offer. It is a tangle of sound and feeling and sensation; it’s a wonder we can ever focus enough to love or laugh or work. Cancer has tuned my ears to hear more of the cacophony than I used to hear, and sometimes I long for the single pure note of bliss or ease. I notice that I do not long for the single note of sadness or despair, and perhaps that is one of the brilliant gifts of this time. Cancer could be cruel and send me into misery, but instead it has been kind and has woven rather than unstitching. If it doesn’t let me feel joy without sadness, at least I am so much less likely to feel sadness without joy.

Each morning I look in the mirror and am grateful for the ever-fewer eyelashes and the disappearing eyebrows. My nails are starting to loosen from the nail bed. Chemo has not quite finished its great removal process. Here I am grateful for the sweetbitter feeling as sadness washes over me. I am the only bald woman here, and heads turn and children point as I walk through the dining room (and not because I am a great beauty or wearing a particularly smashing dress). But this too is fleeing.  My eyebrows will come back. My hair will grow. My hotflashes will decrease. I will return to my rightful place of an ordinary middle aged woman in a crowd of young families and honeymooners, no head turning necessary. But I am not looking to speed towards that time, because that would mean giving up the delight of this moment. I’ll take the beauty and the ugly woven together and wrapped in my head scarf.

The Madagascar Dark from the Wellington Chocolate Company is 70% bitter cocoa beans and 30% sugar. It is just the right blend to bring the raspberry chocolate tang to the front of my tongue, and an almost burnt bitterness to the back. I wouldn’t want those proportions of bitter and sweet in my life at all, but the result of it—the mix that brings out the full roundness of the flavor—is the point. Maybe the loss of the single emotions is actually a singular gain.