December
20, 2012
Well, that sucked.
And I could leave it at that
but that would be chintzy—unfair to this journal, this chronicle of my
year. So let me try to make this post
more worthy of its predecessors. I’ll
begin where I began:
Well,
that sucked. But, after much misery, the
ordeal is winding down, like a clangorous monkey-with-cymbals toy one begins to
suspect will never desist. Let’s pause here:
Philosophic
View—Life is an array of the seemingly endless and the truly fleeting. Some of those seemingly endless events are
indeed long—one’s chemo treatment, one’s undeclared-major undergrad years, the NBA playoffs—but needn’t be very long to seem so—one’s
common cold, one’s transatlantic flight, the preacher’s sermon on a game day
when one missed breakfast for waking late with a hangover. Such is also the case with the truly
fleeting; event-duration is moot.
Whether a single moment of peace or the whole of one’s happy youth, good things are never so lasting as
we’d like.
I
must say, I expected a more monumental sense of relief when I reached the end
of my treatment. What sense did I
expect? That of Bunyan’s pilgrim, unburdened
at last? That of pardoned Barabbas,
guilty but free? That of a sweltering
farmland at the gush of the season’s first rain? I’m not at all sure. Probably because I’m not even sure exactly
what I do feel. Pause:
P.
V.—Expectations are hard to pinpoint when actuality itself is hard to
articulate. Wishing is easy, limited
only by the bounds of one’s imagination.
Disentangling a chain of events, kinked by months of workaday tumult, in
order to make sense of the whole thing is an action bound on all sides by
guts and gravity and the price of gas.
Maybe
what I do feel is suspicious. Suspicious of the chemo’s success. My doctor tells me things went well. The tumor was stabilized; whereas it had been
slowly growing again, the chemo did stop that particular rudeness. Furthermore, there is a clear (albeit unheroic)
reduction in the tumor’s size.
P.
V.—If in the face of facts one can feel inversely persuaded, are there any size
or sort of facts that can be positively compelling?
I am certain, however, that part of what I feel is the way a balloon-blower-upper
feels when, vein-gorged and purple-faced, the mindless, heartless piece of
rubber slips his lips and phubbers about the room, losing breath, losing oomph,
phubbering, phubbering till it reaches the floor where it phubs its last.
In
other words (one actually), anticlimax.
Because for all of the toil, the tumor remains. Just as it did after radiation. Just as it does when relatively dormant. It’s still there and will have to be dealt with
again. Like an unruly child for whom
punishment only works temporarily.
December 21, 2012
Be the
gloominess of yesterday’s entry as it may, there is much cause for elation.
·
No
more entire weeks of not being able to read.
Of all the things I thought chemo would affect in my daily life, I never
guessed that being able to read—focus, engage, progress—would be a casualty. I can’t be certain but I’d wager to say that
no entire week in the previous 25 years had gone by without a chapter or two in
the books.
·
No
more recovering from one bout of sickness only to start dreading the next
one. I can now recuperate in
stride. Depleted blood counts can rally,
non-tumor cells can detox without impending relapse.
·
No
more, shall we say, bowel concerns and gullet revolts.
·
And
MORE!
Also, cause for thankfulness.
·
I
lost only a quarter or so of my hair.
·
I
never got sick due to a weakened immune system—no cold, no flu, no leprosy,
nothing.
·
I
never lacked care. My wife took the
brunt of things with grace and near perfect patience, even when nothing could be
done but crawl to the next finish line.
My son never failed to chip-in—to fill water bottles, bring food, turn
that fan on, turn this light off, etc. Mothers,
fathers (in-law and in-genes), brothers aplenty and their magnificent spouses,
friend for miles and from miles going miles out of their way to support, pray,
and wish me all sort and size of well.
·
And
MORE!
[Tidbit: The more one says 'more' the less it signifies
anymore.]
December 22, 2012
When
I turned sixteen fifty-eleven years ago, I wrote a birthday poem for
myself. In the years that followed it
became somewhat of a sporadically observed tradition of mine. That first poem, I am glad to say, is in a
spiral-coming-unbound notebook in a storage unit, otherwise, I might feel
compelled to include it here. The others
are accessible but of less consequence presently, so I’ll spare you.
I
wrote one this year. Not on my birthday
because I was sick that week, but on the first day after the sickness wore
off. I will conclude my chronicle by
sharing it with you because it concerns erased slates, wishfulness, illness,
health, twinkling hope, and stark reality.
It’s a seasonal poem—the last season into the next one, whatever the last
has been or the next might be.
Sidereal
At thirty-seven, addled, stripped
To the raw skin of memory—
A consequence of medicine
And the sickness itself, I wish
I could recall the Milky Way
Without constellation, planet
Or Cynosure.
On
those long drives
To Knoxville from Bland, Christmas Eve
Now mostly dark, the frozen air
Whistling through the car cracks, I watched
The sky. How the moon bounced from view
And reappeared in the windshield
Or from my brothers’ side while stars
Took all the time they wanted—
Up and up, slow as hours, as miles
To the ever distant coal-pile
Of the Smokeys.
The
nameless stars
Are gone, their shapeless clusters
Are gone, their random amble, gone.
My greatest wish, more than a brain
Without lesion or panicked cramps,
Is to have my catalog cleared
Of Messier, mythology,
And hydrogen fusion.
I
wish
For an Orionless sky.
At thirty-seven, I wish to press
My face to the gelid glass
And see in Leo’s place a vast,
Velvet cloak pricked through with the pins
Of God’s own angels, hard at work
Embroidering the most wondrous
Mystery there ever could be—
The mystery of the miracle.
Not of light speed or warped fabric
Or multiversal maybes, just
Of the miracle, unlearned,
Raw-skinned, bounced and whistling.
***
Have a happy new year, everyone. I’ve got to say, I like my chances.