As if it were...

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We are on the big college tour right now, which has a funny rhythm of me at the front of the room teaching at a couple of universities and Naomi and me at the back of the touring pack at a bunch of other ones. It’s a little bit of identity whiplash to go from guest lecturer to anxious mother, but that’s what this week looks like.

Yesterday, after lunch in the Swarthmore dining hall, I opened a fortune cookie and was advised: Live each day as if it was your last. Letting slide the bad verb tense, I have been puzzling over the ways my cancer experience leans me in this direction and also pulls me away.

The clearest example was my friend Nicki who was diagnosed with cancer in November 2013 and whose memorial service was one year ago today. I watched first as she was thinking she didn’t have as much time as she thought, so she cut back on work and threw herself into her PhD dissertation. Then she realized she had less than a year and she put aside her PhD dissertation and began filing memory boxes for her kids—letters to open on their graduation and wedding days, letters to their children she would never see. And then, when it was clear she had only weeks left, putting aside even that level of planning for the future and instead just sitting and having cups of tea with friends and family members, taking pleasure in doing the cryptic crossword puzzles or being read to by people who loved her.

So I get what it looks like to live each day as if it were your last. It means loving the sun on your face. It means hearing the voice of the people you love as a caress. It means a full kind of presence in your right now—the only time we have for sure.

And I’m also on this college tour with Naomi. If we were really living each day as though it were actually our last, we’d be surrounded by family enjoying the moment instead of wandering in the rain through liberal arts colleges she might attend in 18 months.  I wouldn’t be saving for retirement. I might stop exercising (ok, to be honest I for sure would stop exercising).

I wrote about this question more than a year ago: How do you make sense of the envelope of your life when some of the odds change, but you still can’t possibly know what might be next? I am in remission now and I hope to stay in remission forever. My doctor says the odds of my slipping out of remission are the highest in the next three to five years, but I have a friend whose sister slipped out of remission 30 years later. We are seriously in the space of the not knowable.

And yet, I keep picking away at the future as if I can use this new unknowable set in more helpful ways. When I was thinking about my tattoo, I told Melissa it would be worth going through the pain of getting it if I were going to live more than 5 years, but if I were only going to live 2 more years, it wouldn’t be worth it. She would have raised one eyebrow at me (if only she knew how) in her disapproval of that —and surely that’s an absurd way to be doing the calculations of my life. And yet mindlessly I find myself holding these different envelopes and wondering: Would I begin my next book earlier or later depending on the envelope of my life? Would I travel so much if I thought I had only five more years? (Or would I travel more?) If I knew I had 40 more years, how would I think differently about saving for retirement? A friend with stage 3 breast cancer tells me that she just zones out when people talk about a plan for the distant future; she spent the money they were saving for a beach house (someday) on a trip overseas with her family (now); one she can be sure she’ll enjoy, the other she not sure she wants to wait for.

 

This calculus is in some ways helpful and in other ways crazymaking. Some of the answer is just letting myself live in the knowledge that I can’t know: My choices today might turn out to be bad ones if an unexpected future arises, but I will have to judge these choices with the ruler I had in the moment I made them. We know from Dan Gilbert’s work that we are constitutionally bad at making decisions that are good for our future selves, so there’s no reason to believe I’d be better at that under these circumstances than under others.

Perhaps this first year in remission reminds me that I’m in a dance always between the past, the future, and the present, and that it’s a dance I want to continue to be mindful about. I want to hold on to those parts of my past that bring me delight to remember—or bring me learning to enrich who I am and how I think. I want to hold on to those parts of the future that bring me hope in a dark time, or that call me to be just a little bigger than I can imagine today. And while I don’t know what it means in practice to “live every day as if it was my last,” I do know how to savour a cup of Burdicks hot chocolate, to be enraptured by the buds on the UVA campus, to feel grateful for the dinner with Bob, to relish the time in the hotel room with Naomi sleeping quietly in the next bed. I don’t know how many days I’ll get; neither do you. Some of those days will be filled with the petals of cherry blossoms, and some will have fog is so thick I can’t see the taillights of the car in front of me. But even foggy days are part of the magic of my life, the magic that all of us are alive today, the magic that this day is not our last day, that we get the hope for a sunnier tomorrow.

 Here's the spectacular poem of the day:

Shoulders

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

 

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The Peace of Wild Things

Today Michael and I had a long walk up to the windmill near our house through a magical forest.

The Peace of Wild Things

By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

beannacht

For those who are feeling heartbroken...

beannacht

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

john o'donohue

A magnificent poem for a grey and rainy Saturday

 Setting Out by Wendell Berry

 Even love must pass through loneliness,
the husbandman become again
the Long Hunter, and set out
not to the familiar woods of home
but to the forest of the night,
the true wilderness, where renewal
is found, the lay of the ground
a premonition of the unknown.
Blowing leaf and flying wren
lead him on. He can no longer be at home,
he cannot return, unless he begin
the circle that first will carry him away.

(day 4)

Inking over

 

A year ago today I stared out at a sunset so painfully beautiful that I wept to watch it, my heart overflowing with the delight at being alive and the fear of the chemo which would begin in the morning. My body was coiled and taut, ready for the assault to begin. My curls were still long and soft around my neck. I had no idea what was going to happen next. In the morning I got up, went to the hospital, laid down on the bed, and began the process I hoped would help save my life.

Two weeks ago I found myself in a hospital bed in a very different setting. Melissa and Michael were there at the foot of the bed, as they had been during chemo. And there was a man with a needle beside me. But everything else was different. This was Kakapo Ink, and Roo, my gentle and kind tattoo artist, was about to make his mark.

There was a way these two experiences were eerily similar. I laid back for the nearly three hours of sometimes mild and sometimes biting pain in both cases, both making me a little light headed, a little dizzy.  Both times Michael held my hand, and Melissa cracked jokes from the foot of the bed. This time, though, I was choosing it.

In February I had gone to Kakapo Ink  (a new kind of tattoo parlour devoted to tattoo newbies like me—bright and open and lovely) and had met Roo and Katy who would design this piece for me. With their help, I described what I wanted: a tattoo that would help me reclaim this blank fake breast of mine, something beautiful and delicate that would make me smile rather than frown each time I saw it. Something that symbolized new life and love and hope rather than being a constant symbol of the cancer and loss and fear I have lived with this past year.

Over the course of a month or so, they sent me designs, and I printed them out and showed them around and thought about them hard and sent back feedback and waited for the next design. And then suddenly a few weeks ago, I opened my email and smiled. Yes, that was a design I’d like to wear forever. I’d like that to be a part of my body. (I'm including the picture Katy drew though we had to make some modifications of it once we got it on my three dimensional body--but you can see how pretty it is.)

Now it is.

I talk with my clients sometimes about writing their own story, about picking up the pen and making their own choices. I had never understood this part of the tattoo craze (to be honest, I’ve never understood any part of the tattoo craze) and I had never thought I would come up with a reason to indelibly write on my own body. But every time I catch a glimpse of me in the mirror now, I have a totally different sense of me. I used to shy away from my reflection, seeing myself as scarred, marred, damaged. Now I catch a glimpse and stop and stare. Wow, that’s beautiful I think, again and again. That’s me. That’s not me written by cancer, but me writing over cancer. That’s not me partial and broken but me taking the open space of a vacant lot and cultivating beauty.

This is a beginning of a new chapter for me. I need a hair cut. My book is out (Here's a picture of Keith and me at our book launch and you can order your own copy here Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders). We have a new house. Naomi and I are going to visit universities next month. I have literally inked over the scars of last year with new leaves of possibilities. I wonder what will flower next.

(And in a little coda, two more pieces. First, this from the NYT about life after cancer treatment . A little chilling. And this from Mark’s poetry box, Day 3)

After the Diagnosis

Christian Wiman

No remembering now
When the apple sapling was blown
Almost out of the ground.
No telling how,
With all the other trees around,
It alone was struck.
It must have been luck,
He thought for years, so close
To the house it grew.
It must have been night.
Change is a thing one sleeps through
When young, and he was young.
If there was a weakness in the earth,
A give he went down on his knees
To find and feel the limits of,
There is no longer.
If there was one random blow from above
The way he’s come to know
From years in this place,
The roots were stronger.
Whatever the case,
He has watched this tree survive
Wind ripping at his roof for nights
On end, heats and blights
That left little else alive.
No remembering now…
A day’s changes mean all to him
And all days come down
To one clear pane
Through which he sees
Among all the other trees
This leaning, clenched, unyielding one
That seems cast
In the form of a blast
That would have killed it,
As if something at the heart of things,
And with the heart of things,
Had willed it.

Lucille Clifton: "Blessing the Boats"

Here is the poem that ran through me with a jolt on the second day of chemo--the images were so powerful, yes, as a stand alone poem. But the extra power of it was that Lucille Clifton was in the English department (my department) at St Mary's College of Maryland (my tiny college) while I was there.  She came when I was nearly finished there and so I never took a class from her, but her form and her voice at meetings and walking through the halls fills me with love and connection to a place that was so important for me. This poem in particular is doubly important for me because St Mary's is a place where I started the crew team, so her blessing the boats is in part a blessing for me. Mark didn't know any of that when he printed the poem on thick cream paper and sealed the envelope with a golden circle. But the many layers of relationships in this poem--encircled as they all are by love and by water--swept through me on the (surprisingly easy) second day of chemo.

Lucille Clifton: "Blessing the Boats"
(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back    
may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

(Pictures today are from the last visit we took to St Mary's. You can see how long ago that was--maybe a decade.)

The gift

Nearly exactly a year ago, a box arrived in the mail. It was marked FRAGILE and wrapped with great care, but the contents on the customs form just read: STATIONERY. Why would stationery be fragile? I wondered as I opened the box to find another box and in that yet another.

The inner box was beautiful, golden waves with frothy tendrils in blue and white: a tumultuous sea, maybe. And inside, from my dear friend Mark, were thick cream envelopes, each numbered 1-90, each sealed with a golden circle, and each containing a poem Mark had picked out as a companion for my chemo journey.

My hair is back now, thick short curls, and my nails are strong again. The last of the chemo side effects seems to be behind me—except, I hope, the life saving effects which (I hope I hope) will long continue. Still, the memory of the kindness of the people around me covers me in an enduring cloak, perhaps best symbolized by these daily poems from Mark.

And, to spread the gifts of these poems out to whoever might stumble across this blog, here is Day 1. Watch here for the other days to unfold, here in this year where I don’t have cancer, and I get to watch my nails and hair grow again, here in this year when many people will be diagnosed with cancer, and they will find themselves inside the chemo tunnel. May these poems bring comfort and love to you, no matter which sort of tunnel—of delight or sorrow or love or illness or heartbreak or health—you find yourself inside in the coming months. These are with love, from Mark.

Day 1

The Lightest Touch

Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

  -- David Whyte