Anniversaries

This time of year is, for most of us, a time to consider past and present and future. For me, this time of year now has a second—and right now more powerful—resonance. This is the time of cancer anniversaries. Last November and December were those months last year when I had cancer but didn’t know—a sort of Eden before the Fall. As I watch the dates pass, I think, “Last year you had no idea what life was about to hand to you.” Yesterday, one year ago, I ate of the tree of knowledge;  I found the lump I wasn’t looking for and didn’t ever expect to discover.

The moment of discovery is indelibly etched. I was showering, thinking about something else entirely, and my soap ran smoothly over my body and then clunk clunk over this foreign shape. I tried it with just my fingers. Still there. I sat down on the shower floor, suddenly dizzy with the possibilities. I gave myself a firm talking to: I was 43 years old, for goodness sake. There was no history of cancer anywhere in my family. I had no risk factors at all. It was surely just a cyst and I’d have the whole thing cleared up by new years. I was still wet from the shower when I called the doctor.

And with that, 2014, not yet even dawned, spiraled into darkness.

I have had such mixed feelings about this year; 2014 has had cancer woven all the way through it. When I was first diagnosed, people said I could kiss the year goodbye—that it would just be miserable from here on out. And of course nothing is that simple. I have had a year of deeper fears and sorrows than I’ve ever experienced. And there have been beautiful moments in spite of it all. And perhaps most unexpected are the beautiful moments because of it all.

Many of those moments are about the love that has come from around the world. I got letters from old students, from clients, from high school friends, from brand new friends who began to know me through this blog. It was a year of deeper connection than I’d ever have imagined: me in my chemo bubble, seeing so few people for weeks at a time, but somehow more aware of the invisible web that holds me in place with others.  This time has been a fire that burns away some relationships and forges others to steely strength. I can’t think of a single relationship that is unchanged by this experience.

It has also been a year of standing much more strongly in the present of my experience. Reflecting too much on the past is painful; the future is too uncertain to dream about. That leaves today. I have struggled (probably with many of you) to focus on my breath, on the present, on the now. But one of the gifts of cancer is that there’s no need to try to focus on the now anymore—it just arises that way. I am more awash in the tastes and colours and sensations and emotions and connections in the moment than I have ever been. I have never felt so alive.

On this anniversary day, I woke in New York City. We have come on this wintery trip to Europe and the US because the summery one we had planned ended up on the cutting-room floor—a chemo casualty. Yesterday we got up early and walked down to the 9/11 memorial where the twin towers once stood. The events of this year have made me more porous to the beauties and the horrors of being alive.  Being in the space of this horror and then thinking about the fallout from it—the war on terror that has casualties somewhere in the world every day—took my breath away. Here I am, worried about the minor discomforts of my new body and the medical prognosis of my future, and each day there are families ripped apart in tragedies local and global.

Our breath catches for far away tragedies nearly too big to imagine. The planes that disappear from the sky. The children killed in school houses. The drones that fall on houses with sleeping babies. We are so fragile and our lives so short and we can be so horrible to one another. The deaths that don’t make the news change the world forever for the living, too. My friend Nicki whose cancer killed her in six months; my ebullient cousin James who died in a pedestrian accident five days before Thanksgiving.

Each of these moments could be a cause for us to retreat, exhausted, from the love that brings us so much pain. Or we could take that pain as the price of a life well lived, the entry ticket for a existence of glittering love and connection. This is the ultimate message for me of 2014, which I have often described as the worst year in my life. Here as the clocks start ticking over (it is already 2015 at home in New Zealand), I would like to revise that moniker. 2014 has been a year with more lessons—and in many ways more living—than any year I can remember. It has kicked me in the teeth and left me gasping and breathless. I have never wept so much—and most of those tears were for the losses around me and not for my ordinary little cancer journey at all.  I have found the strands of my life—the sadness, the delight, the love, the fear, the pain—forever tangled and inextricably bound. And now, from the vantage point of these anniversaries, I am seeing the beauties in the tangles, and finding the patterns in our connections.