Divers

 Yesterday we went down to the dive centre after breakfast and our gear was already on the dive boat. Delana, our PADI instructor flashed us one of his rare smiles. “You’re divers now—I set up your equipment for you.” Will, in his briefing on the boat, said, “Ok, just head down as soon as you’re in the water—you’re divers now, so we’ll just meet at the bottom and go from there.”  John and Tanya, the lovely couple we’ve been diving with these last few days, smiled on the boat ride back in after the trip to the spectacular giant clams and mushroom shaped corals. “You’re divers now,” they said. “Welcome to the most fun club in the world.”

We’re divers now. People say it as a form of identity—as if it’s who we are, not just a thing we do. Identity sounds fixed in its way, and pieces of it are, of course: things like gender, race, class, religion, national origin and the various forces that shaped you as a kid. But other parts of our identity are as slippery and fast moving as the flashing fish we’ve been watching underwater this week, a rainbow blur and then gone.

Last year at this time we tried diving for the first time, but it didn’t touch my identity which was painted thickly over with the cancer treatment. My nearly bald head made me a curiosity at the resort, rendering the tank strapped to my back nearly irrelevant. This year, my curly hair masked my trip through chemo just 13 months ago, and the tattoo peeking out of my bikini stood out much more than the fading scars from the surgery. It was the wetsuit and tank that marked us in this little tiny resort. “You’re divers, eh?” people would ask us. I guess so, we answered, the diver identity as borrowed as the wetsuits and tank.

There are pieces of our identity people feel happy to talk about, and pieces that seem oddly not in good taste to mention. Funny how last year no one asked, “You’re just out of chemo, eh?” even though the odds of a bald woman being out of chemo (rather than choosing bald as a fashion choice) are probably about the same as the wetsuited woman being a diver (rather than just being extra cold). At our resort this time there was a woman in a rather-familiar looking hat that she kept on at all times; I figured she was just out of chemo. And there was a woman with a heavy scar on her chest where an IV port goes and I figured there was some kind of cancer treatment there, too. But I didn’t ask either of them. Cancer seems somehow a private form of identity, to be discussed in hushed tones.

Dying, too, seems like that. My uncle Tommy has been moved to hospice care at home now, where he has wanted to be, and there are updates from the family each day. Tommy had a great day—an Irish band visited and lots of friends. Or Tommy is really tired today and sleeping a lot. I’ve been sending him cheerful texts with pictures of palm trees and the inane sort of “wish you were here” messages. None of us are mentioning the identity of the dying. How do I talk to him about whether he’s afraid or in pain, whether he’s wishing for the end or wishing for a miracle? Does his identity shift from living and fighting to surrendering and dying? Does the identity of the hospice patient overtake all the others—father, brother, writer, Air Force officer? I have no idea.

But perhaps I am unprepared for even the slight shifts in the current of my life that seem to shape my identity. In January we moved from Paekakriki to Wellington, and I felt my identity shift with even that small trip. “You’re a city mom now,” my kids tell me. I notice that my sense of myself as a writer shifted when the second book was published; one book might be a fluke, but two books makes a line and seems to mark me (to myself at least) as a writer. Naomi is off to university soon, and that, too, seems like a looming shift in identity—I’ll be one of those moms of kids grown and gone, hurtling towards the empty nester identity which is likely to be ours for the rest of our lives.

How much of our identity do we choose, and how much is chosen for us by our circumstances? And even as I type this I see that our choices are all created by our circumstances and we are choosing from a small subset of all possibilities.  It is a privilege to take on the diver identity given how expensive the pursuit is; it is even a privilege to take on the “cancer survivor” identity when in the developing world this cancer would have killed me.  Who do I want to be next? What combination of choice and circumstance will create the palate from which I will paint this next portrait of my shifting identity? How do we make sense of the ways we choose and are chosen, we write and are written by the world?

Today the wind picked up in paradise and the dive tanks that got strapped on the dive boat weren’t for us. Alex at the dive centre told us how lucky we had been with the still seas and perfect weather, and we saw once again that we hadn’t even noticed the way circumstance had written our opportunities for us as we descended dive after dive into calm, clear waters. We had credited Chris, our instructor in Wellington, and Delana, our instructor in Fiji, for our own easy competence rather than the fluke of tides and winds that made our certification journey easier last week than it would be this week. And of course Chris and Delana have their fingerprints on our ease and competence. And Michael and I matter too in this picture. That’s always the way, I guess, with the slippery fishes of our identities.  It is the speakable and unspeakable parts of our public and private lives as well as the swirl of the atmosphere around us that gives us colour and shape.

As I teach leaders about complexity, I am continually reminded of it in my own life: the way chance and choice weave a tapestry none of us could have predicted ahead of time. The unexpected conversation over lunch. The gig I took at the last minute. The lump my fingers brushed over in the shower one morning.  The vague wish that got amplified into a diving certification class that took me to Fiji one still July day, winding my way through coral canyons 18 metres under the Pacific ocean. I have no idea where the winds and tides will take me next, which combination of events I choose and circumstances that choose me will thread into the tapestry of next. But a new set of possibilities was created with this trip and with the new colour—diver—that weaves into my future.

Breathe

--> Michael and I are packing for our trip to Fiji (which still sounds exotic though it is the closest tropical island to NZ), nestling snorkels and fins next to shorts and tank tops as the July winter wind lashes sleet against the windows with stark staccato strikes. The last time we packed these things, it was my first trip out of chemo, the promised trip that got me through the long days and nights of cancer treatment. Now, a year later, I take an in breath and look out over my life again, above and under water.

We have been working on getting our PADI certification so that we can scuba dive, and Chris, our lovely instructor, keeps having to remind me to push my hair out of the mask; the last time I wore my mask, I didn’t have any hair to push away.  The PADI certification has been harder than we imagined it might be, and in many ways more wonderful. Chris at Dive Wellington greeted us on a cold Saturday morning—a motley circle of participants who were all looking to breathe deep underwater for one reason or another. There was the fellow who wanted to spear fish and collect kai (food in Maori), the lovely young couple who were wanting to swim in schools of fish on their next holiday, the two US Marines who do such things because they are there to be done.  Chris told us again and again that most of the trick to scuba diving was stress management and watching the breath, and during his patient teaching of the theory portion and in the pool afterwards, he showed us what he meant.

By Sunday afternoon there were nearly 20 of us in our wetsuits and scuba gear sitting at the bottom of the four metre pool in Kilbirnie.  We were clumped in little groups around our instructors, watching them signal to us, perform an underwater task with grace and ease, and then point to us to mimic it, anxiously and awkwardly. I was a raw beginner, misunderstanding some of the directions (and inhaling rather more pool water than I’d have liked as a consequence), awkwardly listing to one side with uneven weight belts, popping up too quickly or sinking like a stone as I tried and failed to make small adjustments to my buoyancy.  Chris watched the way I was likely to simply try a thing without centering and breathing into it first—getting ahead of myself in the desire to move through and on to the next task. (This is not a new pattern.) As he hovered in the water, telling me to breathe and watch and settle, I wondered where he had been all my life.

I wondered, too, about how useful this exercise would have been during chemo. The raw focus on the breath, on the present moment. It is always right now under water (how could that be not true on the land?). Never have I had a meditation so anchored in the breath as this is—every inhalation and exhalation is audible, marked, miraculous. Yet isn’t that always true? Aren’t all of our breaths a kind of miracle?

I shouldn’t be new to this idea, and yet it seems close in several ways this week. While I’ve been struggling to breathe underwater, I have loved ones struggling to breathe above it.  My great uncle Bill Gunther—my grandmother’s baby brother—is in the hospital with pneumonia. Although he has seemed old to me my entire life, it is hard to imagine him without a twinkling smile and a welcoming hug.  When I close my eyes, I can hear his gravelly voice in my ear: “I love you, girl.”   

And on the other side of the family and a generation younger, my uncle Tommy Fitzgerald—my mother’s little brother—has been admitted to hospice. Although he’s probably 20 years older than me, I remember Tommy as a new Air Force officer, as a young father holding his tiny baby. When Tommy was diagnosed with stage four cancer in late 2013, the doctors said he had only a handful of months to live. He and I were on the cancer train together in 2014, but as we know, the cancer train has many many different tracks, and his track looked heartbreakingly short while mine had (has) every indication of long. Chemo—a last ditch effort—worked wondrously for him. Tommy recovered enough to visit his daughter in China, enough to come to Aidan’s coming of age ceremony, enough to finally see his ancestral Ireland this year. In January Tommy and Aidan and I hung out with my mother and my aunt Betsy, and we talked about life and love and death and grace, and I learned more from him about the present moment than I had ever imagined there was to learn.  Every breath is a miracle.

Under the pool water I breathe in, bubble bubble out. I check my gauges. I hold my buddy’s hand. I look up at the slowly kicking feet of old women doing their daily exercise, the strong arms of middle aged men arcing through the water, the flailing legs of children racing for a ball.  Chris shows us how to breathe from my buddy’s tank, how to drop my weights and race to the surface in case of an emergency (humming all the while), what it feels like to try to breathe when my tank is empty.  There are no fish in the pool, just other strange beings in scuba gear down below, and the occasional glimpses of swimmers far at the top. We all breathe in, we all bubble out; each breath is a miracle.

I have been out of chemo for a year and three weeks now. My hair is a curly mop top, deeply in need of a cut. I have danced at Naomi’s school ball, celebrated Aidan’s 14^th birthday, and mourned my cousin James who would have turned 25. I have held my new book in my hands and watched sea turtles sleep on coral ledges 12 meters under water.  I have fallen back into a world where I am overscheduled, where I travel too much and work too hard (I am writing this on Aidan’s birthday, on a plane to Melbourne). I am learning and I am also not learning these lessons.

The things Chris teaches us about scuba are the same things I am also trying to learn about life. Breathe slowly and deeply. Never, ever hold your breath. Don’t go up or down too fast. Stay close to your buddy. Be aware in the present—of how deep you are and how much you have consumed. Every breath is a miracle.

I am a slow learner—above and below the water. Michael and I meditate on land in the morning, hold hands far under water in the afternoon. We laugh with Aidan at his birthday dinner until our stomachs hurt and tears pour down our faces. We walk from our new city house to paths through magical woods with vistas out to sea. While we make breakfast, we talk to Naomi to hear about her latest college visit on the other side of the world. In this last year I have learned how short life can be, how precious it is, how few guarantees we’ll ever get. In this last week, I learned that again and again. I reminds me of a Richard Wilbur poem I have always loved. It is always a matter of life and death, as I sometimes forget. This week I have learned what I have learned before, only harder.

The Writer

Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house

Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,

My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing

From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys

Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff

Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy.

I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,

As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,

And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor

Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling

Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;

How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;

And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,

We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature

Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove

To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,

For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back, 

Beating a smooth course for the right window

And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish

What I wished you before, but harder.