something from a while ago:

i once heard my neighbor screaming for help. i finally located a pair of feet sticking out from under his Chrysler. a disturbing resemblance to the wicked witch. the tire jack akimbo. his chest pinned between oil pan and concrete. but a small consolation in the angle of the tipped jack; not utterly crushed, just utterly pinned. with enough air for the screaming. the screaming mad. indignant really. we called 911 even though he told us not to, and the fire department came. they levitated that car off him with their impossibly powerful hydraulics. proud with the strength that men have in their tools. we all feel a bit stronger when we are not pinned under cars. and believe we never will be.

how can a car be so agile and responsive to the slightest touch at 70 miles an hour and an implacable mountain after it has landed on us? Zeus’s finger pressing down ever so slighting on the roof. its dead rubber and steel probing into the softest watery tubing of us. and we cannot ever ever possess the strength needed to lift it. budge it. you cannot budge a car upwards. you cannot. it is dead weight. it is weight beyond caring.

i am reminded occasionally that things actually exist. and not just because i think they do. i could never remember the kind of detail required to create the world every day. the cracks and the cheese puffs and the wars. it looks as if we are in and part of, the world. and sometimes heavy shit falls on us. and crushes our guts. and this is not always just an opportunity to grow. or a metaphor. or an idea. sometimes, even when we are deep in thought, the world is full of rocks and water and teeth.

when animals die they become so heavy. i have lifted stiff cats and calves. the leg bones of bulls. the hand of a woman who had been my lover. it is uncanny the way the formerly living have of making us feel burdened. left behind with a body that does not recognize us anymore. and somehow we inherit all the worries. little birds flitting around the hawthorne tree.

when my dog does not wish to be moved off the bed she employs a form of passive resistance i like to call “the slinky”. her little 20 pound self becomes a near 8 foot according of slippery water weight. and in case i were misreading her cues, she will often growl her displeasure. she becomes the sort of thing one would only like to move with a large spatula.

could it be we instinctively fear the weight of death? or the silence? the sincerity? is it possible one of the trillions of things encoded into our dna is a natural fear of the formerly animate? or maybe even the fear of those who could, at any moment, cease animating? i get that sometimes. i am rudely revealing the horrible weakness in the whole system. how breathtakingly easy it is to fall prey to the weight of the body. succumb to gravity’s siren song. to fall down and dissolve.

make way and make room people. we are crowded. time is a bird bath and we all want to get wet.

I got an xray the other day.

hold your breath.
relax.
arms here. i’m going to scoot you forward.
okay, hold your breath. relax.
all done.

And the efficient young twerp began reviewing my “films” before I’d left the room. so in what I’m sure was a violation of protocol, i see my xrays before the doctor or radiologist. And I do not want to see my xrays. or my CT scans, pet scans, bone scans and not even my MRIs.
I will hear them tell me yes, more tumor, no, less tumor. That’s enough. i do not need more than a thousand words.

and images have a way of sticking in your head and making you feel like they are the only relevant view of your life.
I’ve seen what those pictures do to young emergency room doctors; making them very earnest and apologetic.
Tough break.
Yes.
I’m sorry.
It’s okay.
I don’t know why I always feel like I need to console them. They just seem almost disappointed in medicine, their life’s work or in god maybe.
Besides, i don’t feel they are capturing my best side.
but these xrays i see. in both lungs there are colonies. little blooms of cities at night from the sky. some big cities.
i get dressed and go into the bathroom and sit with my head in my hands.
what does a girl who has xrays that look like that do?
how does she live?
i put my hand on my chest below my sternum. i don’t feel any of what is there. 1 inch away.

What does it feel like to know you are going to die? Isn’t that right? is that what we are wondering?

well, i don’t know. i can only tell you what it feels like to be in this body. and i will tell you that i don’t really know know what is happening. not really. and this has always been a complaint of mine. Life keeps steamrolling along and it never gives you the chance to take a minute and figure out what just happened. we are always rushing on still confused. and between the fevers and the drugs i am not always my most lucid. these are big puzzles and i am not running on all cylinders.

that being said, i think i am testing permission. The permission everyone says is mine but no one can help me understand how to activate. Permission to be ornery. to release myself from the confines of interpersonal disciplines and be indulgent. it is much more difficult and much more like work than you might imagine. irritatingly, it turns out there is not an autonomic switch of those given a terminal diagnosis.
being sick does not turn you into someone else. you can say to yourself “if i were terminal i would finally take this life in hand and live the true thing”. but i am not finding that to be the physics of my circumstance. i am still myself. oddly, somewhat disappointingly just myself.

at the same time i am being firmly expected to let go the constructions i normally wear out into the day: i am here because i can help. i can be nice. i am good. i am young. i am strong. i am lucid and aware. i will give a bit more than i let you give so that i might never feel beholden. i never need anything. i don’t lose my temper. i don’t react. i can always run away, drive off, walk off into the hills. i can always start over.

these are the outerwear of my identity. the operating system that no longer works so well. and i am letting go, i guess. my body makes the rules here. i don’t have a choice. if if i am too sick to get up to feed myself, i have to ask for help. so i am trying to explore this other way to live. see if i can pretend i am flying and not in a free fall.
if these are my last months i have this idea that i must give myself permission to move differently. tell the truth in a more vulnerable way. ask for more and try not to hide my humanness. the needs i have. the utter failings. i will tell you it is tricky to seek something i have been hiding from myself for a hundred years. i am trying to forgive myself my longings. the longings i haven’t had to admit.

and when i am up nights coughing. throwing up. when the utter fragility of this life is so lurid. i try to imagine my hands opening up. watching things float off. i cannot ride my bicycle. i cannot climb this hill. and i try to feel peaceful about them. ah well. it’s okay to change, i say. it’s okay to become something else. and like i am talking my horse through sharing the trail with a rattlesnake: “easy, easy”.

and yes, i think, my young life, this youngish life, i will lose it. this body will stop moving. will become waxen. and the people i love will have no choice but to put it in the ground. sometimes i look into the mirror and tell her that i am sorry. that she will be lost. but i don’t know this body as well as i know the others. i know deborah’s face better than my own. i know who i have loved. i know their precious faces and bodies. i know more what it would be to lose them (anguish) than the idea of losing a thing whose absence i will not be around to appreciate.

but my life? there are picture albums of a time already past. i ran track in 7th grade. i was an awkward teen. i fell in love in my 20’s. my 30’s. my 40’s. i remember so little of it. isn’t our past lost to us all? so here i am still. living an uncomfortable narrative. maybe what i will truly lose is the moment after next. at some point. there will only be this moment and no next. and in the ways we depend on things we don’t realize we depend on, for me the world of possibility is already on hiatus.
i am driving a body that i suddenly realized is ephemeral. and i can’t quite sort out who is me and who is she. or whether the distinction is important. i imagine her end as quiet and dark. but mine? i do not want quiet and dark. because i am a body. alive. and life only wants itself. i am curtained by the knowledge and desire of a body that wants to live but is filling with tumor. a body that has lost its way. and where she goes, i go.

i spend a lot of time thinking about what stones might know. the family of beings that never know death. i think about the vibrations of quantum physics and what implications that might have for an afterlife. i will tell you that i want to find myself suddenly fluent in the vibrational tongue of all matter. wormholes and the sensation of densities. big light and open air. the interpersonal relationship between the stem of a phlox and the wind that bends it.
i want to suddenly remember everything that the living body has forced me to forget. when deborah runs her hand over moss on a stone she looks like she is remembering something. something that niggles at people brimming with wonder and curiosity. we are seeing it but not seeing it clearly enough. we are dimensionally blind. we are confounded by the glare of a fixed perspective.

and my dearest hope for my death is to suddenly remember. a great breath in and holy holy holy…out. i want rest for this tormented body. a moment of ease, yes, and then the relief of remembering.

i am being given a 4 and a half year stroll around the wilderness of the idea. i wouldn’t know how to fall in a hole and suffocate the same way now. the panic is done. thankfully. that was acute. that was bitter suffering. now i am watching and waiting. trying to find the places of connection and joy.

and i think it is okay to die. it is what we are here to do. but it is hard to know how to act when you see it coming. there is no magical transformation, just love and the pedestrian march of days.

and it is okay to live. and it is okay to stand and let the wave of grief crash over us. it won’t kill us. that is what the death of my first girlfriend gave me. i learned to grieve. to have faith in the process. it is terrifying. and it changed me utterly. but it did not kill me. it is okay to become something else. it is okay to let the people we love become something else.

she sat in the white chair near the couch and offered me 20 of her years.

and i smiled and said, oh cynthia. but her eyes were serious.  i could tell she had sat in some other chair or maybe lain back on her bed, staring at the ceiling. she had thought, i would give her 20 of these years.

so i say thank you. and then she says, we are a long lived people. i could spare 20. and then i believe her. she would if she could.

she would let the nuerochronologist stick a needle into the temporal stream that spirals delicately around her left temple. we would watch the 20 years snake through the tubing and collect in a special glass container. it is liquid. the color of 2000 summer sunrises blended together. a rose honey i think. and i would sit in the bed next to hers and watch her face.

they would make sure to take exactly 20 units. 20 years off her life.  one has to be wasted in the process. one year is lost to residue in the tubes. the spillage. the imperfect transplant process. there’s nothing to be done about that year.

i would get 19. she would lose 20.

i remember how my dad would sometimes substitute teach PE when i was in high school. and he would walk the line of us poor white-shorted dorks and if anybody laughed or looked sideways he would say “drop and give me 20!” everybody thought he was hilarious. and i did more pushups than anyone. it was like we were slapstick partners.

but how could i take 20 of what gwen and earl worked so hard to give cynthia? she is brilliant. and the person in the room that everyone likes. and she would give me 20 summers of hauling her REI gear into the beloved doug fir forest. 20 years of seeing her boots on dirt trails. 20 years of sketching weeds. 20 years of new books. 20 years of perfectly loving the people she loves.

my god. what a thing! i would only fuck it up. whatever time she gave me, i could not possibly be worthy of  it. but the fact she would offer…would hand over this precious stuff, so i could keep fumbling around, making even more of a mess, is nothing short of everything.

my friend kim wyatt from alaska used to say that the most valuable asset we own is our time. if you offer to spend time with someone, you are giving a gift.

i have spent the last 10 years or so being cynthia’s friend. every moment she has given me has been treasure. has made this world more interesting and exciting. we have crawled through the psyche of ourselves and everyone we know like daring spelunkers. we are brilliant philosophers and comedians and love each other wholly and without doubt. and i think this is enough. time enough. gift enough.

and when she is 102 and knows a million more things,  i will be so happy.

i have so many pieces of paper that i must consider here in this house: taxes, medical insurance, last will and testament. but instead i watch ellen on tv, check the latest poll results, walk the dog.
this dog has not said one word to me in 5 years and yet we commune so amicably. or maybe i just think we do.  still half credit.
my new theory is that dog language is body language. what one living creature can say to another.
the way one body speaks to another without words. it is why i love the idea of healing through shamans even though i am utterly skeptical of the associated ideology.
one body telling another to live. get better. stay here on this planet with us.
i had an aztec medicine woman mash (stolen) flower petals on my head the other day. and then lightening hit the tree next to the building we were in. it cracked all around us as she performed her “flower bath” ceremony intended to piece together a soul in disrepair. to heal me. i consider the premise hooey (and was offended at the implication)  but what else do i have to do? i enjoyed the rare oregon lightening and the novelty of ritual. the rarity of a sacred act between strangers. the intent of one body to compel another to thrive. also, who am i to say? lightening did strike after all.
i felt both honored and on the verge of laughing out loud. in my book,  an afternoon well spent.
the other day i watched one of those nature programs that is not actually about nature but a guy who filmed nature. they are always self-congratulatory and have lots of shots of these men scanning the horizon in a very noble and important way. describing how they got great close-ups of their tigers by bivouacking in a hole and pooping into a bag for 5 years.
i hate when i get duped into watching these.
they almost never show the tiger. just lots of the guy and the guy interviewing the guy stomping around siberia where the tiger used to be.
and here’s why i watch for as long as i do: sometimes they show the original footage. the tiger in the snow.
i grew up in cold grey places. i know what silence a frozen forest can hold. what an intrusion we are. in alaska, montana, come november, nearly every furred body in the woods is brown or white. and you probably won’t see the white ones unless you are bivoaked in a hole. and you never  see the 475 pound tigers.
so i watch this dumb show because i’m fascinated with the orange and black stripped tiger in a snowy woods. brown trees, white ground, grey sky. it lives there, like a giant camp fire stalking over snow.
last winter i went home to the ranch in montana. it was during a cold snap and everything froze solid. -12 degrees. the trees creaked with it. and the grass, crusted with frost, crackled with each step. every rock and twig was flocked with cold.
i wore nearly everything i had. plus my dad’s oversize down jacket and my mom’s fur trapper hat. and 2 pairs of gloves from the glove caddy on the back of the closet door.
then i moved like a space man down the hill and into the hidden meadow.

the air was full of ice. cold crawled into my nose. miniature ghosts floated out from between my lips.

i stopped in the center of hidden meadow.  it is where i always go to seek counsel. with a thousand former selves, my grandmother, and sometimes even my college mentor. she died 5 years ago of ovarian cancer.

i never know what i am making up and what is truly there. i am circled by aspen saplings that have had their trunks tattooed by rutting elk. it is a sanctuary of symbols to me.  a loose ideology. but i always feel compelled to go.
alice walker said “it is fatal to love a god who does not love you back”. when i am here, i think, it is fatal to make up a god who does not give a shit. but i have done it anyway.
sometimes i feel loved. that i am from this meadow. that i am a beloved daughter. and i laugh about how huge and lovely it all is. and even if i die, it really is okay. but sometimes, when i cast out with my longing, i hear nothing back.

stupid. i know better.

i lie down in the center of the circle. i am struck with how warm i am. inside this great coat, these layers. i am genius mammalian heat. i carry myself out into this deadly insinuating cold, like a small candle of 98.6 in a gale. my body resists frozenness. i am the astonishing mammal. a cradle for the tiny sparking heart and the electric diamond brain. a rare sighting here. if the trees cared to sight me.
i do not think they do today.
i wonder about falling asleep here. sinking into the ground. i close my eyes and try to imagine the stillness to come. and it is, like every other time i consider this, an exercise in peaceful surrender.
we hold heat. share heat. touch one another. and when we lose heat we no longer live. when we give up the ghost, we become cold clay.
i have loved this body. truly. i have found joy in the helter skelter pursuit of being alive.
a long time ago i decided that the first joy is joy in the body. but i must confess here: i don’t really know what i mean by that exactly.
i don’t know, for instance, what the second joy is. joy in the mind?

that is much more tricky. the body can only be doing one thing at a time. i could be riding my bicycle up a hill. and there is a conspiracy of body and linear time.  the mind is not so good here and now, but the body is irrefutable. alive or not alive.  the mind is a tangle of then and now and heaven to come. no wonder death is a puzzle.
when i am riding a bicycle up a hill, i am a creature. i am body. i am an army of synapses all striving together. it changes how i think. it changes what i know. i am permeable to the experience of the road and trees and people walking their dogs and swift air and gravity. i am absolutely alive. and somehow, for me, this is joy.

and now, when my body can no longer ride this bicycle up a hill; when i sit and read facebook to distract myself; when my lungs are invaded and bleeding, i do not want to care about the body anymore. i want to pretend that i never cared. the best way to avoid being sad at losing a thing is to attempt indifference. i don’t care if you leave me. i never loved you anyway.

in my defense, i didn’t do this consciously. it is a funny thing not to be able to cut one’s losses and walk away. it turns your brain inside out. i can’t leave the situation, because the situation is my body. all i could do, were i in desperate need of control, is prematurely end my life. and that is an unsuitable solution.

so now i am in search of the second joy. or the joy of walking and not riding up a hill. or the joy of stretching and not lifting weights. or the joy of music. the joy of story. tell me what other joy you know. tell me, you heat-holding humans.
also, you should know that the incremental loss of a body’s ability is real loss. not an idea.
also, i know i am not a tiger. but i am indigenous to the planet. spawned from the intention of the primordial ooze. i have not come from aliens or from a manufacturing plant. i did not begat out of the old testament.
and it is not all personality here on planet earth. we love one another. the bodies that contain us. that make the loving possible. the quick smiles of the people we love are sustenance. we read these bodies like horizon of home. we know the storms, the meandering trails and the heat of the summers.

it is all, only, ever, life.

on going. and once again, it is different than how i ever imagined it could be.

and once again there is sleep at night, breakfast in the morning.  i check to see how my mother’s dahlia is fairing on the back porch. it has bloomed purple.  i planted 2 tubers in a $10 pot from grocery outlet and placed them by the back door. 2 from an entire shoe box full of the arthritic sea anemones she mailed me.

i place my fingers along the track of my collar bone. seeking the hard super ball there. checking on it. two fingers now? or one and a half?  i stand still and look inside. i can change the shape and size with the position of my head. the way i hold my shoulders. my fingers. i can change the shape and the size by imagining it growing or shrinking. but it is always there. it is never gone.

maybe today it is bigger. maybe it is getting longer. i try not to be deluded. but perhaps i must take the deluded road now and again. a short trip. for a change of scenery. get out of the mean city.

and also, one can only stand around for so long every day feeling up one’s tumors. at some point one must harness up the dog and take her for a walk.

a few years ago, on a trip to the coast i saw a tall thin man with rubber boots walking toward me. he had a baby under his shirt. its head poking up above his collar bone.

when he got closer i realized it was not a baby but a growth. a tumor. and the side of his head was patchy bald and covered in small growths. he was pale yellow. i smiled at him the smile i had prepared for a nice man keeping a baby warm on a blustery day at the beach but then i added a little extra- we all have our growths- smile. he smiled at me the wary smile he gives girlboys sluffing sand off their yellow dogs on the steps of the cabins down the street.

did he ask something impossible of his life? and life tried but all it could come up with was a head on his shoulder?   did he want a silent baby to care for- a quiet companion? too bad about that movie.

why this and not something else?  and, at the the time i was tempted to think that i didn’t have a big baby head stuck to my shoulder because i’m just not the babyhead type of person. but i don’t suppose he was either. it is tempting to think that we are safe from babyheads because we won’t think babyhead thoughts. because that is not our story. that is not kind of thing our author would write for us.

i find it interesting that i now i have my own little bud of a baby head. my own malignant offspring. i can tell you i never saw it coming.

and in my opinion it is not a story arc kind of issue. or not one before the fact. i just don’t think we can predict. that is what is terrifying.  it is the inexplicable intersection of life, soul and body. and the truth is we will never know why any of it has gone this particular way.

the chances of any of this are a billion trillion or so to one. as i have it figured. and i once got an A- in advanced algebra.

the bugger is that we cannot prevent all the unforeseen tragedies from raining down.  we cannot race the taxicab to the corner in exchange for our grandmother’s life. we cannot prevent our mother’s back from breaking, or her heart from exploding by avoiding the sidewalk cracks. even if we try hard. even if we pray and night with tears. sometimes the tumor just gets bigger.

and there is nothing left to do. but just be close. go forward hands held out to the terrifying life. the only best part is that i do not have to do it alone. i ask; walk me up to the precipice please. walk with me. as close as we can get. then i go. then you stay.

i sometimes feel as if i have not fully been able to understand this life. and perhaps that’s what makes the idea of losing it so much harder. i wish i could understand. the problem is that it keeps happening even while you are trying to figure it out. like trying to do long division in your head while standing on the floor of the new york stock exchange.

i never do come up with a good number. a reliable equation. nothing that works every time. there is no machine that sucks up all the food in the fridge and spits out mashed potatoes, roast beef, creamed corn, and a salad with ranch.

no. this life is full of pitfalls. it is built in hi-jinks and calamity. bloody awful crashes.  a sloppy infected mess. i wonder how we ever get it all cleaned up again. i think some places must have to be abandoned for years after. because of the messes there. Chernobyl style break-ups.

even when we love with our whole open chest, full kite sail of joy billowing up behind us, even when we offer it all, it’s still going to be a fucking mess. guaranteed. maybe moreso. and we never see it coming. we people never see it coming.

what good are these giant heads?

or the babyheads or the heartbreak or any of it. this life is not to be trusted. except it tends to carry on somehow. trustily. and will, i presume, whether i am here or not.

i was ten pounds and two weeks late for my birthday. my mother was 44 and a half that day. one year older than i am now. not that you need to know that. it isn’t at all relevant to the story i am trying to tell. unless at some point we need to talk about that sense of owing someone. that calculation of burden divided by consolation that that we know how to do instinctively. i didn’t ask to be born. but i am real grateful it happened.

it’s an odd thing to be grateful for. existing. because without it, we do not suffer.

has anyone ever taken a moment to grieve for the gazillions (a rough calculation) of people who never came into existence? what brilliance and surprise and nuance does not now exist? well, of course not. what do we care? and what do they care for that matter? besides, there is enough to grieve here. things we have smelled and tasted and loved. precious things we have held with our hands and somehow lost.
we are perpetually losing.

July 31st 2010
we are driving in to rapid city. thunder heads frothy and full of sun. we have been on the road for 2 days.
there is the earnest mumbling of an old woman who can’t hear herself coming from the backseat. I hear little snatches…he maketh me to lie down in green pastures…though art with me.
chocolate stains on her white pedal pushers. dingy white visor.
my father opens both windows in the front suddenly, scaring me and mom. she asks, what was that?
he didn’t think the window was sealed completely.
she says, oh.
the whole business freaks me out a little. we are not a stable people.

August 1 2010 1:52pm
my mother won’t let me in the back seat so I can’t get away from my father’s chatter: “cows.
people are from kansas.
here comes some more lads on cycles.
there’s a sign says home of  laura ingram wilder. was she an author?
me: yes, laura INGALLS wilder. she wrote little house on the prairie.”
mom: is that all corn? I can’t tell. I had to have tina tell me what was in the salad bar.

this is true. I watched her scatter bacon bits across the fruit salad and watermelon bowl.  she tried to retrieve a dropped zucchini spear, got ahold of an invisible one instead and deftly dropped it onto her plate. and we moved on.

mom woke me up in the middle of the night rummaging and knocking things over. when I got up and put my hand on her back she started singing good morning goodmoorning. I kept repeating real loud- we don’t have to get up yet! I showed her my phone ( because she didn’t have her hearing aids in) which read: 5:42. so she says yippeedoo- we’re burning daylight!

so then dad starts signing through his cpap mask, hops up, stubs his toe and screams so loud I think that the poor sleeping bikers next door are going to break in and stuff us in the ice machine. the night before my father had somehow spilled a gallon or so of ice on the floor.
anyhow, now we are barreling blearily down the road, minivan cruise control set to 78.  down to a fight about mcdonalds vs. anywhere else. and also how I won’t eat in smokey cafes.

August 1 9:30pm Rochester, MN
they seem to have taken to this new time zone with zeal. it is 930pm here and my father has been asleep for an hour. my mother, praying for the same. she is sitting at the corner wood-veneer table in her underwear, silently mouthing words. I imagine she will pray until she feels comforted. and at this point, if jesus doesn’t show, I will personally track him down in whatever dive bar he has holed up in and drag him outside by his fucking skirt, and tell him that unless he gets his fucking priorities straight soon, the only church he will be figurehead for is the church of my right boot. that’s right jesus! be a god or go home! at least buddha doesn’t lead on old ladies who pray their faces off every night!
anyhow, I gotta go to bed now because there is nothing else I can do. when the lights are out. bed is the only option.
tomorrow is doctor appointment. oy oy.

August 2
We arrive at 11:15 for a 12:30 appointment. The marble floors and walls of the temple, i mean clinic, are reassuringly bright and beautiful. ordained.  people are tiny. the foyer, huge.  downtown Rochester is mayo clinic. a complex of glass and marble edifices reaching skyward. The infirm and miracle seekers ride a thousand buses and vans from a thousand hotels and are channeled through the revolving doors into the inner sanctum.Mayo. Miracle Mayo. The Best. The doctors all wear suits. I assure her that they will probably run more tests and that we won’t have to suffer any verdicts until Wednesday or Thursday.
after discussions with nursing coordinators and pancreas researchers we get into a room finally with a tall paunchy indian doctor/intern who asks mom what her story is. in her words. he touches her leg lightly with his long clean fingers and turns his brown concerned eyes and attention to her.
turns out her mother and her grandmother both died of pancreatic cancer. oh.
i am still hopeful of some anomalous cyst. some tidbit. like the one on the bottom of her right foot. we all three sit on a floral couchette in the exam room. sitting for the news. dad has mom’s purse between his feet.
my mom introduces me by way of explaining that i have stage 4 lung cancer and am doing great! it’s like i’ve won the track meet in 8th grade all over again. but doctors see right through this accomplishment. they are always skeptical. patronizing of miracles. he says, great!
then he brings up the computer. apologizes for it being so slow.  shows us the CT scan slice by slice, noting a hernia, then topographical features such as liver hill and stomach ravine. the pancreas  has come into a new peninsula.  he assures us this is unusual although the whole thing seems like more of the same rorschach. the only thing i can clearly identify is the spine. reminds me of the cow bones down in hidden meadow hiding in the crab grass peaceful for years. the vertebrae. white and clean.
eventually doc says, we are 95% sure this is pancreatic cancer. and if you were a 30 year old guy we would operate right away. this would be a cure maybe. but because of your heart.. and because you have had pulmonary embolism…this is a rough surgery. 10 days in the hospital and 3 months recovery. But it is your choice. i’m sorry. this is rough news.

when he says “cancer” mom says “oh no”. a descending growl. a song of understanding and surrender. it is the same same song she has sung to every disappointment, every calamity. every bit of brokenness to ever befall any of us. it is the thing so intrinsic to her person that i doubt she even knows of its existence.
it was the same thing she said when i told her i was gay. at first she said “you’re getting what?”. her hearing lost even then. and then i yelled, no- i’m gay!
“oh no”. in the growly voice.  and i went on to explain how my roommate of three years was actually my lover. she worried that god might cause suffering in my life.
in the dr.’s office. i am sitting there dreading the next part.  the collapse of family order. I feel my body flush with fear and my throat choke and the magic exceptionalism that has become the family identity falls away.  we are the typlical page 52 article of mom’s family circle magazine. cancer and cancer.

I put my head on my father’s big shoulder and cry. he cries and mom reaches across and pats our hands. she is comforting us.
the brusk white doctor rushes in and interrupts our awkward moment . he sits down, leans back with his legs apart and begins to talk importantly.

in the elevator with us on our way back down to the lobby is a girl , maybe 11 years old, with a big moonpie face, standing too close and staring at me.  she asks me my name with the weirdest, highest voice i’ve ever heard.  I say hi. and look away. she sounds like a fairy. or a chipmunk. mom says hi and grabs her grubby little hand and shakes it. the girl holds mom’s crooked beautiful fingers and stares at them. then she turns her hand over and kisses the back. it is so tender. and so unsanitary. my mother placidly allows this fantastically intimate gesture. and the girl lets go after a moment.
i am filled with the sensation that my mother possess an immense intelligence that i do not have. will never.

aug. 3
mom is trying to make the hairdresser at fashion aire salon in rochester cry. when she tells people “i don’t want surgery. i don’t want chemo. I’ve had a good life.” i think they all want to cry a little.
and i wonder at this. by all accounts so much of her life has been hard.  the second oldest of six.  her father was an alcoholic sugar beet farmer. and when my mother was 9 her mother who woke up one morning and couldn’t walk. the random strike of polio.  she would have one more child but would never walk again.

but after my mother left home she found a beautiful man, a man that made her laugh and took her dancing, after she found beautiful don and had three of his children, this good life took him away. an electrical lineman. a foreman. he climbed up a pole on his day off. he was on his way to a fishing hole but there was an emergency. an outage. so he climbed up a pole. a line that should have been shut down. touched a wire and said “oh jesus”.

she went to the morgue and they showed her his body. a beautiful young man’s body. slim and roped with muscle. dancer and teller of jokes. father of her three children. she said to him, oh don, this can’t be. this can’t be.

and the story she tells us is  how her loving god took him away from her to teach her to love god. to bring her back to the fold.  she and don were unequally yoked in the eyes of god. he was not a christian. they would go to bars and dance.
so god slapped her awake and put her on the righteous path.
where she met my dad.

it is simple to understand.

i finally realize that the hotel here is way super Christian. the old and infirm stagger in and they are wheezing and crying and they are saying how they got bad news and the high decibel young desk clerk says “well, we’ll put you on the prayer board. and you know, just when things are there most difficult that’s just when God reigns down the biggest blessings, you know double for your trouble.”

1 month ago
i am driving up the bumpy tenth mile driveway. the same one. from mailbox to house. back at the ranch. the mortar of my psyche. where, if time ran all at once there would be thousands of me swarming over every hill. and the place where, whenever i am here, every other place feels like something i’ve made up.

i am walking in the door. coming home bald. again.
it hits me so forcefully. my sense of failure. letting the cancer back. my mother always offering to knit me a hat. or buy me a wig.  i look so much like mr. clean now. so gay and bald. even though she has prayed. she has prayed so much for me everyday. every night. and what have i to show? after all her hard work. the cancer is back. and i am bald again. and gay, still.

after the meatloaf and cauliflower and broccoli i walk out along the ridge. i want to inspect the remains of the cairns i have built over the past couple years. these rolling hills are rich in foreign rocks. hitchikers dropped by ancient glaciers. the cairns are always all knocked over by the cows. but i like the impermanence. never the same thing twice. i start at the nearest, clear off the big base rock and start rummaging in the ruins for a good starter to my new tower. something precarious, i think. minimalist.

i am thinking about an article i read recently by a woman who was diagnosed with  (a treatable) cancer of some sort and was angry about it. very very angry. she said that everyone she knew who had cancer was really fucking mad. and that she couldn’t tolerate all these media images of people who were noble and stoic because it was a fantasy. cancer makes you mad.

and i ask myself, on the hill, looking over hidden meadow, why have you never been angry?
because i deserve it.
ah.
i deserve it?

and i think back to all life i have lived. and how i never have felt quite entitled to all of it. never been sure that i am allowed to just go out and make up a life. i have tucked in with people in whose goodness i believe, people who feel entitled to their lives. and i have lived. but it has always felt that at any moment it could upend.that  i will be found out.
and maybe i don’t feel like i deserve to have cancer but i have never felt entitled to all this life either. i have been getting away with something here. all this joy. all this light and air.
i have loved who i have loved. and i understand risk.

a couple days later my mom and i are taking her daily constitutional out to the mailbox and back. she likes to hold my arm. i try to steer her away from the freshest of the cowpies.  she never wears a glove, even though it’s barely 40 degrees outside.
i tell her about the article and ask her if she’s angry.

“no. well, i’m 86 years old. and i guess i have to die of something. and the hospice people tell me that they won’t let me suffer. so i’m grateful for that.”

and she asks me what i am afraid of.

and i tell her that i’m afraid of dying. and that i’m afraid of being a source of pain for the people i love. i don’t want to be a wound in people’s lives.

and she says she worries about leaving all the people who depend on her.

and we walk a long ways without talking.

and she says “tina, it’s okay that you have cancer. it’s not your fault. you can’t help it.”

and i feel something break open in me. she has said it.  and now i am crying. which you would think would be easier to hide from a deaf and blind woman. i can’t speak so i pat her bare hand with my glove. and eventually i say-thank you mama.
because it is the strangest thing. to have her approval for.  approval for having cancer. but there it is. approval. god is not punishing me.

and i think of her sitting in her chair sometimes, how she’ll stare at me. and i know she can barely see. her world robbed of color and detail. but she inspects, nonetheless.

and i ask her “how do you know?”
she says, without hesitating, without asking me what i mean, she says “because you and i are the same.”

and i wipe my face and my nose with my gloved hand. and we walk on.

and then i tell her “it’s okay that you have cancer too mama. and if you need to die, you can. and we’ll be okay. we’ll be alright”.

and we walk the rest of the way home and then i make her tuna salad for lunch. carrots and grapes on the side.

i will tell you secrets. horrible secrets: my chest is tight. my breathing more labored.  i imagine the solid gelatinous masses pining for one another. merging at some unknown moment and pinching off the air in me. the trachea. the middle of my chest. where i have tattooed the tree. the brachiate. and the double spiral of the milky way. the vortex of suffocation.

it is supposed to be “slow” but i do not believe it anymore. even a snail’s pace could be tomorrow. or the day after. i want to believe in this new drug. but it seems unlikely. i keep thinking about the oncologist’s minor chord  “i am sorry”.

i am waking up this morning. if my body is under me, or on top of me, hard to tell. then i am standing.  and the slant in this old floor pitches me sideways more than usual. that is a clue.

people have been so generous. and it breaks my heart.  thank you.

the  people i love and people i do not know. making this commitment to this idea. or to me. i don’t know which. sacrificing some small thing they surely deserve. need?

oh oh. i am not in control. do not give what you don’t have to give. okay?

i feel lifted and supported. carried. and i am learning to open wider to let it all in. let all of you in. i am learning where i have been closed.  how i can become bigger.

this is huge life. this is wild open life. being carried and loved this big. the vulnerable and visible life. that we all belong to the people we love and there’s nothing we can do about that. it’s just the way it is.

it is damn sure some of the best living i have ever done.

6 weeks ago
i went on a bike ride today. in an utterly innocent body. there is no hint or ache or muted scream from any of the four corners of the beast. all is perfectly seated pistons. eager happy legs. big volume heart and lungs. a thing more interested in the chase than itself. i found myself thinking- maybe we misunderstand cancer. maybe it isn’t really so terrible. because right now, it doesn’t feel terrible. and i know how the rest of that goes, what with the “not yets” and the insidious nature, and so on. i know. i remember coughing blood. but even then, just me and the little spot of blood in my hand; innocence.

i will confess that i am having a nostalgia for the past that never existed. again. i watch too many BBC period dramas. romanticized suffering. where you get to die at home in bed. surrounded by the people who are tender for your mysterious body and the loving it makes possible. and you are never sure you are dying. until you are. the internal is as cosmic and unknowable as the ethereal. we conjecture and guess. they put hands and leeches on. fret and change the cloths. pray for intervention. but the cosmos above and within, moves how it will.

and it is true that these modern days we don’t die the thousand times we could. from infections and broken bones and tuberculosis. we are cocksure modern ghosts. but there is a price, i think. we hand over control to the scanning machines and to the waiting rooms. paperwork. a co-pay. we truss up god in scrubs and submit our terrified hearts to florescent overheads. and there is no room for the village in the waiting room.

we give over our bodies or the bodies of people we love. submit to the intermediary with an advanced degree in detachment. we become our pathology. and forget the hands of lovers. forget the swirling cosmos inside us.

and unless you lack insurance, the body doesn’t get to keep its secrets. i spent the morning listening to the autistic tap dancing of the MRI. the quiet cocking of pistols at the poker table. someone performing CPR on a songbird. and as a finale, the copulating of the hammer and the dental drill. i was choreographing an awkward modern dance all the while it probed my brain. running its fingers under the folds and lobes of my earliest smell of horse, the fear of outliving my mother, my lust for parsnip.

i worry about becoming unrecognizable to the mama bird. i worry i’ll be handled too much. and leaking quicksilver out the seams, the natural life will take one look and fly away. that by not dying early and quickly, i have forfeited my humanness.

the walking undead. in exile. it is the danger of the dark magic they perform in the infusion room with the green-apple colored recliners. ice water in paper cups.
at what price?

this is all hooey of course. but i realized that it is an element of my unease. and needed rooting out.

and the part i can do something about is the hands. maybe not the leeches. but remember to feed the soul. tell the truth. try to leave behind something tangible. heal our sore hearts first. let it all in and let it all go. remember the cosmos and spend a few evenings with our heads tilted back.

my great uncle laurence was a skeleton in a plaid shirt with a crooked belt and he hated wildlife and baby kittens. he once soaked a cow carcass in gasoline and lit it on fire so the coyotes wouldn’t eat it. they didn’t. and it just sat at the end of the meadow and rotted. and my dad with the weakest stomach on Indian creek. the worst barbecue ever.

he drove an old chevy truck, the back full of dead moles and gophers (in season). and he liked to show them off. he had giant blue rheumy eyes. and you could see every tear and sparkle because of his pop bottles. other than that stuff, he and i were the same. we were dry in the humor and we both liked vela-mints.

when i was 7 he gave me a little gray plastic box that contained a child’s tool set. a real saw and hammer and wrench and screwdriver. they had blue child sized handles.

it started because i had stolen several of the beautiful heavy stainless steel tools my father kept in the tool box attached to the side of his john deere tractor. i took a few things out and hid them under a quarter round of doug fir in the wood pile. he had so many. and i didn’t have any.

a few days later i was busy staying off to the side while my father cussed and searched through the tool box on the tractor and eventually the gas shed. it occurred to me slowly that i had that thing. i might be responsible. i was never responsible for anything. but it dawned like the dawn’s Earl Lee Light that tools were individuals. each tool did its own thing!
he needed to attach the hay wagon to the tractor. Because there were giant high school boys on the way to pick up bales and show off throwing them high up. and he needed the one pin. a pretty, heavy stainless steel one.

i ran back to the house and tipped over my secret log and unearthed the tools. i kinda knew i might be in trouble, but i was the youngest, and really, i was pretty proud to be solving such a big problem.

i spread them out in my hands to show him. i remember his confusion. his flare of anger. he asked my why on earth i would take them. i explained about my tool deficiency and how i never realized he needed all of them. but then he was just so glad to have the thing back. and it showed initiative i think, taking those tools. my father always was a sucker for initiative. “do something even if it’s wrong!” he used to scream.

uncle laurence was not a feminist but he had been a carpenter. and i guess he believed that everybody (even 7 year old thieving girls) ought to have their own tools. and he went out and got me the child’s set. but they worked like real ones. especially the saw and hammer. so i started building things. even if they were wrong. i nailed up foot holds to the sides of some of my favorite cottonwoods so i could see out and spy. i put together rickety bird houses with only two sides and mash-nailed them into branches. i made boot-jacks for everyone for christmas that year.

and one evening, i was downstairs pounding together some things just for the pleasure of pounding. because I was a builder now. not so much a planner. and when i turned the mess over i realized i had made a pulpit. like divine guidance! it had a little slanted top tightly secured to a 4 by 4 sitting firmly on a not so rickety base. and it was exactly the right height for me. to lean over top. search the eyes of my congregants… to preach! i’d never made anything so excellent! i was so taken with the whole idea i nailed a little shelf about half-way down for my bible. and then i hauled it all upstairs to show my mom and my sisters.

They were all standing in the kitchen icing some cinnamon rolls.
“I’m gonna be a preacher!”
I showed them the bible holster.
Oh man, that was hilarious.
And cute. But my sister sandy, the christian librarian had to break it to me.
“girls cannot be pastors. only men can be ordained.”
“oh”
i am so ridiculous.

i think i know now why the preacher preaches. why any of us preach. we want to believe. believe our own brains. believe the story we are telling ourselves. about how we are doing the right thing. with the new idea. the one that will set us free. but it’s hard to believe if it’s just us amening to ourselves in a vacuum. we are feedback monkeys. we can’t be sure until the congregation waves a hand or nods.  we need to see ourselves reflected. i am in here are you in there?

the preacher man needs us to believe so that he can believe.

we are one another’s congregation. we preach and drink and grieve and plead our cases. we write sacred scripture at each other’s kitchen tables and proselytize to the heathen hearts of those who know us best. and if we can get them to believe, oh boy. if they believe my narrative of salvation…we are all saved. we are diverted from the precipice. and we carry on. like magic. that did it. we can now carry forward. she believes in me. in what i said. and now we can curl up in the sanctuary of each other’s bodies. our common story a shelter. we are cemented in the fellowship of food and gossip and facebook likes. we are one another’s church. we belong.

so here’s what i need to believe: i want to believe that there is beauty in this place in my life. a place i am told is closer to the end than not. to believe in beauty within and in spite of and because of the biopsies and contrast dye and pain and the infusion chair where i sit. my little body. the one i always drive.

sitting below the 12 foot doctors numbering my life in months. this month and the next and the next. they see a straight line of months and squint into it. counting. the closest distance between now and then is months. years? it is hard not to march straight with them. it is hard not to be conscripted by the jolt of fear into the fight that everyone wants you to fight. and it’s true, there is a powerful instinct to resist death.

to say, not me. i will not die. and why? well,  because i have never died before.

but i will not say no no no. i will not battle cancer. i will not battle time. i will not fight.
fighting is full-time and i only want to build. i want to create something.
even if it is wrong.

and also, i cannot see that fighting will prolong my life. it will only occupy my heart and mind with war when i would rather occupy it with life.

and i need to confess something right here. and to say it, feels like a magician revealing a trick. but i having been preaching my entire life. even after they told me i couldn’t. i have been proposing theories over tables for years. passionate expositions. sometimes i get converts and sometimes just profoundly fascinating conversations.  it is my favorite thing about being this self.

always it feels like if someone else believes me, i can create a more tangible internal landscape. lushly populated. a place to live and relax when the life outside is full of terror.

so right now i am working on a theory of a new place to be. when the medical reality is looming like everest. this impending death. unknown number of days. straight ahead. and it is imposing and demanding all of our energies all our attention. it is mesmerizing,  this promised death. how it can be said in short, easy to pronounce, words.  but words that are utterly useless in helping us navigate the cosmic untethering.

and i keep feeling this pull to side. i am listing to starboard. the pull of an internal landscape. something to the left or right of me. something shiny swirling in the eddies of this horrible momentum.

and here is my faith. what if we are curious for a moment? what if there are secret paths everywhere? to small delicate moments. to the feel of cool air on your arm and warm across your cheek, or to let someone shave your head, or to eat the most delicious beet you ever ate, or to laugh laugh laugh because someone knows how to tease you perfectly– what if these mercies bend time? or shake it loose? or make it irrelevant?

i believe there is lateral time. that this life is full of hidden landscapes. if we explore. look straight into what is terrifying. i believe that connection is time. joy is time. and love is time.  and that i have all the time in the world.

i cannot control that this is happening. but i can create something from it. i’m asking you to help me. i am in need of stories. your art. your humanness. your presence. help me have faith that this exists. because it does. right?

so i need help. tell me your stories. the places you have been. that dazzled you. confounded you. and we can the let lazy brilliant ideas drop off our fingers onto the floor. where love is so big and plentiful it makes sickness seem like a mute brown bird outside the window. hardly worth noting.

i will tell you about this thing. but i can’t tell it all at once. there is no road to summary.

i want so very much to be able to answer accurately people who ask me how i am.

i think, well, i can walk.

deborah can’t hardly walk.
and i have this huge sense of being loved and cared about.
i can’t emphasize what a consolation that is. feeling like you are not worth loving is a thing that can take the skin right off a person.
i haven’t had it much in my life or for long. but it surely made an impression.

mostly, it is a sense of the surreality at the whole affair. you have to go about the business of breakfast and the tiresomeness of putting on extra layers against the rain, while casually breathing in and out the end of time. it is a residue on the tongue. it keeps you from seeing in sharp focus or up close. everything is wild and big. everything eats stars.

the meteor is headed straight into the upper atmosphere and soon, perhaps sooner than we can guess, everything, your little body, your ideas, everyone you have loved imperfectly, the grass the mastodons and your homeland, are smithereens. or less even.

we might not even get to clap the dust off our minds and survey the damage. see? no wonder i’ve lost a little fine motor control.

the problem, of course, and i do think less of myself in that i perceive this as a problem, is that the meteor is only coming for me.
this just means that i can’t run amok, arms in the air, with all my fellow nearly departed. there is none of that looting camaraderie here. i have to keep it down. be cool.

what’s worse, is that there’s all this hollywood precedent where you have to be stoic and full of wisdom. or positive. man, i can not tolerate thinking positive. it feels like intentional self deception. positive thinking wants to deny me the opportunity to explore the rare awful wilderness laid out in front of my feet. even though it looks like it will always be dark and treacherous. but it won’t. because nothing is only one thing. and thinking positive will not let me go forward into this deeply interesting land. will not let me see what is actually beautiful about it. when there is only one acceptable destination (the one i have decided is positive), there is more life i don’t get to have.

anyhow, so here’s what is actually hard about have stageIV metastatic lung cancer with a dollop of recurrence:

A) people are often glad to notice that they are not me. i don’t blame them. but i do wish they didn’t think it was so horrible as all that. it freaks me out. i start to think maybe i’ve got it all wrong. if you are so terrified of the thing i got, maybe i am completely misreading how horrible it is that i have it. maybe i’ve been completely stupid! i should be freaking out too!

the problem is that freaking out is some seriously aerobic exercise. you can only keep it up for so long. then you have to do something else. or go somewhere else. like another reality. (more on that later)

B) it’s feels a little personal sometimes. although of course i know better. this is a dish we all get to taste. some of you for a second or two maybe. and some of us get to relish its complexity for years and years. we never seem to finish. there is always more. this interminable last supper.

this is an interesting thing that i never considered before. we are all born without knowing it. we gradually become aware that we actually exist. and some of us will die without knowing it and without considering it much, if at all. and some of us will die watching it roll in like a lazy storm. so what would you prefer?

(it’s a personality test)

Back in the saddle again.

Maybe a little less lucid than sometimes. Pain pills and their support staff of diuretics . The last few days have been an exploration of what this body of mine will do with this particular cure. This treatment. Which is not a poison. It is not what you would think of even as a good old fashion toxin. It is more subtle and graceful. I had never appreciated it before. It works on levels i barely believe in. DNA. It is a disruptor of mitosis. Do not grow anew. Do not refresh. Surrender. Let go this urge to live.

The conundrum of cancer again. The cells seeking life. Dividing with vitality and seeking to populate the body with themselves. But they have lost their way. Lost the plan. Unchecked growth. Deregulation. Rampant colonialism. I imagine them wild with fear, running over the plains and valleys of my body.

My chemo woke me at 6am this morning. It always wants action early. How can you ignore this day? So I showered and saddled the dog in her special purple harness and drug her up 60th ave. She doesn’t have chemo and doesn’t always understand the need to move early.

On our way back I break into an awareness that the tick tick tick sound getting louder is most likely a very large, very fast dog bearing down my back with thankfully overgrown toenails. So i did, what is now, sadly, a muscle memory instinct. I simultaneously pull up on the leash and swing my body out so Tuley launches into the air in a swift arc. As she become airborne the brown blur of the (shepard mix) dog glides underneath.

The hard part of this maneuver is catching her after she’s airborne. I always wonder if she in any way appreciates the necessity of this. For some reason many dogs regard her as close kin to a groundhog. Or at least something god gave for eating. This dog has a collar but no tags. And looks as if someone has overestimated his loyalty to them.

So now the dog is barking and lunging and trying to get a taste of Tuley but is maybe a little afraid of me. And he follows and barks and dances at me when i try to walk away. I don’t like him at my back.

Then I am angry. So I turn around and pursue the dog. Throw a tin can at it from someone’s recycling bin. He dances away and then back. Hackles raised.

Then I want to kill the dog. This random bully from someone’s careless life. I want to do at least some small damage to this animal. Would relish my hands on him if i could. I lock the plastic retractable leash and begin to swing the handle out like a really wimpy blue ribbon medieval chain mace. He dodges every time i bring my arm back.

One part of my mind is aware that I am wanting to kill more than just this dog. This marauder from someone stupid’s yard. A directionless dog looking for some fun. And it found me. And I want to kill him for his trouble. And the dog is hiding behind a bush in someone’s yard and I am wondering if I can justify damaging someone’s landscaping in pursuit of my tormentor.

But then a garbage truck comes down the street. I raise my arm and ask him to call animal control. He says how bout I give you a ride? So me and Tuley (who sits on the big middle console like she’s always been a garbage truck dog) ride away from the bully. Saved by a Rose City Sanitation man smoking a cigarette.

And I think that’s a fine ending to a story.