The Bloom of Cancer
Life changes. Sometimes I have remind myself of that, remind myself of times that I struggled and then bloomed. The struggle is often just as meaningful as the bloom. Here's a little essay about a challenge I faced, and how it made me better.
~
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a bucket list at a time when I thought my life would either be taken by Cancer or by my own hand. I’d been ill for several years due to tumors growing like trees in my body, their branches twisting my organs until they stopped working. Many surgeries later, the tumors had all been removed except for small pieces, which I had hoped would die on their own. But instead they returned, stronger and hungrier, consuming everything, consuming me.
My body was not owned by me during that time. I was an only an anxious observer, who worried about bills that lay unopened on the kitchen table next to printouts of platelet counts. Exhausted by medications, angered by doctors, I spent my days terrified, my nights in a dull dreamless sleep.
Cancer is a lonely business. People don't really understand what Cancer means: sometimes it means you will die. It's not popular to say so, but it's true. Everyone tells you "you will beat it", but no one wants to talk about the fact you might not. But you, you have this truth with you everyday: you wake up in morning, and it is there. It follows you wherever you are, this unnerving feeling that you are rotting inside. It stares back at you in your vanity mirror as you brush your teeth, making you cover all the mirrors in your house. It sits next to you as you drink your liquid Ensure meal replacement because you can't eat solid food anymore. It crawls into the phone line as you try to talk to friends, contaminating the conversation until you give up and stop calling anyone at all.
Photo: Creative Commons
~
One morning, I realized I had to make a choice: end life or find life.
I remember that day so well that I can recall details from it still. I was lying on the floor of my living room, and I'd been lying there for a long time. Overnight. I was cold, because the fire in wood stove had gone out, but I didn't care. I was so ill I'd soiled my clothes with urine, because by then, I'd become incontinent. My hair was tangled and dirty, since I hadn't showered in over a week. I had on a maternity dress that someone had given me, a ugly flesh colored peach dress, the color of a Band-Aid, and I hated it. My tumors had come back and my abdomen was so swollen I couldn't wear any of my own clothes.
My dog was hungry and pawing at the back door, and I made myself get up to feed him. Then I saw how he looked at me: his eyes were wide and alert to a stranger. Me. I went looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw someone in hell. Right then I knew I had to pull myself together. There was no one else to do it but me.
I cancelled my chemo. I threw away the medications. Driving out to the countryside with my journal and a blanket, I stretched myself out in a field surrounded by sheep and sunshine. It was in that same field that my bucket list was born, a list that kept me alive and saved my soul from sorrow.
From the start, I knew my list had to be that of a visionary: impossible tasks, a maze of places and things which required my full participation, a belief in the magical qualities of the Universe. Choosing tasks which were far away or took a long time to accomplish meant promising myself to be here longer than my prognosis. I knew I needed a list which would propel me out into the world, shot like a cannon into a neighboring country, led only by the desire to have more time.
I wrote until the light dimmed, the grass buzzed with night insects, the way back to my car hard to find. But while creating that bucket list, my pain, aloneness, and my fears were replaced with the gift of forgetting. I forgot who I was and decided who I would become.
Once home, I taped copies of my new bucket list everywhere: the refrigerator, the bathroom mirror, the dash of my car. I tore the list into narrow strips, one task on each bookmark, placing them in every book I owned, my wallet, the silverware drawer.
~
Slips of paper, everywhere, reminding me that I needed to live, scribbled with jumbled words, wishes:
-Skydive solo in the Nevada desert just after the sunrise.
-Spend an entire day at the top of the Empire State building and have a five star meal delivered.
-Jump off a pirate boat into the sea.
-Build a cross on the top of a mountain along the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
-Nap in Vita Sackville West’s white garden while reading Virginia Woolf.
-Become a Buddhist monk.
-Feel quicksand.
-Join a Catholic order of nuns.
-Be entirely alone in a desolate landscape of another country.
-Snowshoe in Canada.
-Be the star of a parade.
-Eat dinner with a famous artist.
-Work on a banana plantation.
-Plaster a city with poems in the middle of the night.
-Ride a train car to an unknown destination.
-Spend the night at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with an astronomer who can explain the stars.
-Travel around the world alone, taking my time.
-Be an artist.
-Experience nature.
-See everything.
These and hundreds more prompts to do the things of my wildest imaginings, crazy dreams that required endless resources of time and money which I didn’t have.
~
I was still sick, but my days were full of plans and preparations, and I began whittling down the list with surprising success, in no particular order. Some things were hard to manage, but explanations usually opened doors. Money was useful, but not entirely important: the sheer will needed to actually do something seemed to make it possible to do it, whether it was expensive or not. Other tasks proved impossible or ridiculous in retrospect: pirate ships were terribly hard to find, and the top of Empire State building didn’t allow food of any kind, so I’d had to make do with a hastily gobbled hot dog which I smuggled in under my jacket. Sometimes I changed my mind: being a nun sounded lovely until I realized I couldn’t even wear lip gloss, and snowshoeing turned out to be more torturous than fun.
The list kept me alive. I didn't think about being sick anymore. I treated my body like it was well, forcing it to do things it had never done: skydiving, white water rafting, ballroom dancing. And six months later, somewhere between talking stars with an astronomer in the Grand Canyon and almost getting arrested for plastering poems on streetlight posts in my city at two am, I felt better. The doctors told me I was better, too: the cancer was gone.
The bucket list had become a tool which changed me from someone who had obsessed about mere surviving.. into a strong woman who didn't care so much about living as she did about thriving.
I'd bloomed.
~
Five years later, I found myself traveling around the world alone, with a single task left to complete at the bottom of my bucket list. It sat, dangling like a loose thread, demanding to be pulled. Part of me wanted to pull that thread, close the chapter, and start a new story that had nothing to do with cancer. The other part of me was scared to complete it, thinking that once I finished, my life might be finished too.
The final thing on my list was to spend a month at the Louvre in Paris. I’d never even been to Paris, I didn’t speak French, and all I knew about the Louvre was that it was filled with beautiful art which most people only had a few days to see. A month at the Louvre. Impractical, luxurious, out of reach.
Yet despite an utter of lack of funds on my round the world adventure, I suddenly had an unexpected delay in Paris, forced to stay there for three months as I awaited a Visa to arrive for India. I knew no one, except for a glum Parisian art student, who had scribbled her telephone number on a napkin one night as we both tried to sleep in the Mexico City airport on our way to other places.
Led by a desire to actually sleep indoors rather than a park bench, I called her. By some twist of luck, she had a brother who was gone for precisely three months, who happened to have an empty apartment near the Bastille. I had the apartment for three months if I wanted it. I viewed this at once as both a miracle and a warning: the end of the list which had, in my mind, kept me alive. Perhaps the end of me.
~
I set off at sunrise the next morning, fed by warm baguette and the subtle light of the city. Gray to lemon yellow to gold. With light rain as my only company, I walked through Paris, until I reached the famous pyramid, splashed with water nymphs in the form of diamond colored drops, surrounded by Japanese tourists in candy colored umbrellas. Rain mixed with tears on my face as I cried tears, tears I'd never allowed myself to cry since forcing myself to get up off my living room floor all those years ago.
There was no need for a tour, plan or guide: the month stretched before me, and unlike the rushed tourists who had to chase down the usual suspects in between flights, I had the extravagance of time. That first day I spent with first sculpture I saw, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. A human figure with wings, perched on the edge of a boat, I imagined her taking flight each night after the Louvre closed. And as I had sat on the stairwell looking up at her, I realized that it was not the end of me, but rather the beginning of me.
Winged Victory of Samothrace Photo by Jasper Rooms
The month went by slowly, like a painting as it takes shape under the hand of a painter with only one canvas and a thousand ideas, each day layered with new colors and textures.
For thirty days, each morning I would walk through the city, stopping to buy my baguette and coffee, pretending to be offended when the waiter laughed as my grim attempt at French was replaced by sign language. Further on I'd dodge the trash trucks and the early morning graffiti artists to get a place in line at a bakery hidden in an alley, where I'd buy a warm croissant from a baker who smelled like cherry pie. When I'd finally arrive at the square of the Louvre, the pickpockets would smile at me in greeting, while the flower seller pushed a nosegay of bruised violets or tiny pink roses into my hands. At the entrance of the Louvre, the staff would wave me in, as they squabbled in furious French with the illegal ticket sellers just outside the doors.
After a few weeks, I could walk into the museum with my eyes closed. I knew the feel of the handrails, slightly worn yet smooth and cool. I heard the sound of the security guards shifting their feet, the hum of vented air, the sigh of shoes walking on marble. Each painting and sculpture seem to have waited for my arrival, dressed in their finest draperies and gilded frames, like flags in an endless procession of gladness.
The women of the Louvre invited me to walk past the crowds into their private chambers. Teasing. Whispering. Welcoming. The Mona Lisa, small and stained green, her plucked eyebrows raised quizzically at the crowds who came to admire her. Gabrielle D’Estrees caught forever fondling one of her sisters, no doubt wishing she hadn’t. Marquise de Pompadour, impossibly coiffed and powdered, permanently poised in pastels. La Grande Odalisque, her body stretched before the world, waited for gossip and visitors. Here were women unapologetic about being women: whole, incomplete, messy, divided, fertile, plump, merchant, slave, prostitute, courtesan, servant, old, nubile, lost, found, owned, free. I sat before them, held their gaze evenly, without blinking. Our stories were not the same, yet I found myself in each one of them.
On my last day at the museum, I said goodbye to these painted women I'd met, who at first had seemed two dimensional and flat, but really had come to life and become friends. Then I took a different route back to the apartment, and found myself on the banks of the Seine. I walked along the river, my thoughts on that woman who, many years ago, sat in a field and wrote out a list to save her life. I’d carried her list with me around the world, and as I took it out of my bag, my hands shook so badly it seemed as though the paper would take flight.
One last gesture, one last goodbye, one last promise made to that woman who was me so long ago. Her list was finished, and somehow I felt her end had come as well. I held the journal tightly and tore that final page of my past out. I folded it into a small paper boat, and set it in the Seine. It floated, small and white, like a dove, a peace offering to my old self. My eyes followed the little white boat as it moved down the river, past the barges, until it was gone. She was gone, too.
She finally got what she had wanted the whole time: to be free and not defined by cancer.
And I, too, was free. I still am.
(Please, leave comments or a simple "like" below. Just scroll down a bit! There! Thank you. It means the world to me, especially after I bare my soul!)