Day and Night

I wish this had not happened to me. There is not a day that I don’t wish this hadn’t happened to me. Every day is different now…. My life is different. Making sure I get enough rest, and good food to eat; making it to all of my treatments and every thing else. Preparing for and getting sick during treatment weeks, every other week.

Conversations with friends rarely does not broach the subject of the illness (which is natural and fine). Everybody that I see now, that I haven’t seen since before the illness greats me in the warmest, kindest fashion, engaging me squarely in the face, by gently grasping both arms the way a grandmother would when she had something life altering or otherwise sincerely important to tell a grandchild. They tell me they and their church are praying for my recovery. It warms my soul and heart so much to be such engaged and gives me so much hope.

I have to watch were I go, and how long I stay there. I am prone to “give out” quickly; and there are many germs out there, once entangled may delay my treatments again. I worry about the amount of hand sanitizer I use, but not so much as the flu.

I know now what it means to have cancer. I thought I new before, but I did not. Being of middle age, I had spent some small amounts of time thinking that “the show is probably half over now, if I am lucky”, and finding that mildly disquieting. As a cancer patient with a few months of adjustment behind me, those same thoughts not on having forty more years, but perhaps fewer than five. And this, remarkably less disquieting than the other, more normal expected longevity.

A friend of mine from cycling told me yesterday, that several of them had competed in a 5K run that morning, while others had gone on a long road ride and still others had gone mountain biking. It was a warm and gloriously beautiful November afternoon; a day I would have ridden 50 or more miles myself. As it were, I was happy to accomplish the pruning of one of my small apple trees, with frequent rests. When I regaled my friend with my own adventures of the day, he kindly and very warmly pointed out that most of our friends are going about their normal lives, daily, comparing that to my state of affairs within which my daily function, nearly every conscience moment is spent in some fashion, trying to survive. Much strength is gained from a friend who seems to know what you are going though and acknowledges it. I have many such friends.

Lessons, or at least becoming more knowledgeable of my own innate senses of empathy that exist in my life are like the clapper inside a large bodied bell, sounding off at least every hour when I am engaged with another cancer patient. And this, not in an alarming way, but with a sense of persistence or at least demarking an ever present thing – like a fine thin thread woven throughout all of us. There are many sick and suffering people not only in this world, but in our small community, in our neighborhoods, on our streets, and sometimes in our own families or even within our own homes. Before cancer, I never really knew what true and prevalent empathy I was capable of. My heart genuinely aches for others who are suffering, and I find this to be comforting, at least in regards to my own, previously untested or unmeasured humanity.

The fact that some things simply don’t matter anymore, or at least for a time, is probably the most striking of all the new emotions in all of this. What to have for a meal no longer leaves the realm of the practical. What to ware to any given function has less to do with the function than it does what is most convenient. And what of the several utensils I should use to consume a fine, holiday meal, at a fine dinner setting concerns me so not at all, it is all again alarming and concerning – an anxiety that, having so totally lost the original concern, feeds upon itself to become something all together different yet still exactly the same.

Within the extensive library of human poetry, it has been iterated many times that life is, or at least can be at times, cruel. But the same body of word, such as in Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees” cautions us not to take things for granted, especially the things that seem permanent and ever-present, but simply are not – like the cherry blossoms in spring time; come and gone so quickly, some springs we miss them entirely but believing we will see them perhaps next year, or the next – there is instilled in the occurrence, a permanency that is an illusion. Housman asks the question then, how many more times will I get to go see the “cherry hung with snow” (how many more springs will I be alive, and when I am gone, what will I know, if anything of the cherry blossoms).

Even Frost, in “The White-Tailed Hornet”. “To err is human, not to, animal” says Frost and that “Our worship, humor, conscientiousness went long since to the dogs under the table. And served us right for having instituted downward comparisons”. “Once we begin to see our images reflected in the mud and dust, we were lost piecemeal to the animals, Like people thrown out to delay the wolves. Nothing but fallibility was left us, and this day’s work made even that seem doubtful”.

But we can consider ourselves rescued from this bleak outlook upon the Human Condition afforded us by some poets, by the master of toil and suffering himself; William Wordsworth. In Ode: Intimations of Immortality, Wordsworth speaks of all the beautiful things in the world; rainbows, roses, bare heavens, waters on starry nights, bird song. But then he acknowledges a passing away from the beautiful aspects of our lives we can go though. To me, this poem is like a relief valve between the absolutely wonderful and beautiful things in a human life, and the absolutely unthinkable sorrows. And nearing the end of his own life, he writes “The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction…. {and} are yet the fountain light of all our day.”

“What though the radiance which was once so bright,
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”

“Thanks to the Human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me, the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that lie to deep for tears”.

And while not a day goes by that I wish this hadn't happen to me, it is my life; my journey; my toll to pay – it is where I am. At least for this moment, this day, week or month, nothing is going to change the fact that I am a cancer patient. Especially trying to wish it away. So having adjusted and grown to accept life on life’s terms, I will take the advice of my friends, and “take the journey” no matter what that is; day and night; sick and well.