“I do not at all like to cure one evil by another,” says Montaigne, no stranger to doctors or illness, who in one sense captures in a dozen words all of what feels wrong about cancer treatment today. “I hate remedies that are more of a nuisance than the sickness.”
He would not have enjoyed chemo. But part of me argues with him here—although maybe I am the dupe. It is an unintentional side effect, but there is a dark harmony in going through treatment that I do not want to ignore either. In treatment, the wrongness I feel in my life is a wrongness reflected in my body—my steroid puffy face, my bald head, my lopsided chest. And spending my days at the cancer center: It’s something I’m part of. I make sense there somehow. A lot more sense than I make at the gym or the elementary school or the grocery store or work meetings—or all the other places I’ve sat outside of for too long in my car taking deep breaths as I attempt to return to civilian life.
*
The sound I most associate with being Dan’s neighbor is the leaf blower. He is at it nearly every day. He never stops moving—leaf blowing, mowing, weeding, hosing down, hammering, scrubbing, holding the line. Next to his pristine house, our low-slung not-purple craftsman looks like it was devoured by a forest.
When I was spending a lot of time bald on our back deck—in the throes of chemo and buzzed out of my mind by the steroids—thinking, gardening, breathing, trying to get my footing in a world where I suddenly didn’t feel at home—I would often spend the day next to the sounds of Dan’s labor on the other side of the fence.
“We have to learn that what cannot be cured must be endured,” Montaigne also says. You see why I talk to him all day.
Over a period of several weeks in early summer, the deck was perpetually covered in drifts of these airy little clusters called “catkins,” fallen from the willow oak in the yard. You would sweep it clean and go inside for a glass of water, and come out to find it looked like an abandoned property. You’d pick up the broom again.
One morning—in socks and pajamas and no hair—steroids, nausea, nothing tasting right, nothing looking right, nothing right to say to anyone—I stood on the deck and held the line: I kept sweeping. I could not stop any more than the catkins could stop falling from the oak. I passed the whole morning in this way, the soft skin between my thumb and pointer finger eventually worn raw.
I think of Emerson, begrudgingly snared and re-snared by his garden. In his journal he writes: “With brow bent, with firm intent, I go musing in the garden walk. I stoop to pull up a weed that is choking the corn, and find there are two; close behind it is a third, and I reach out my arm to a fourth; behind that there are four thousand and one. I am heated and untuned, and by and by wake up from my idiot dream of chickweed and red-root, to find that I with adamantine purposes am chickweed and pipergrass myself.”
All that time of my sweeping, I could hear Dan puttering. For hours, he’d been slightly hunched over his patio, spraying steady lines of Roundup between the infinite bricks, eradicating the chances of anything unwanted taking root.
At one point as he walked up the back steps to his house, he paused and looked over at me sweeping—he who does not make easy eye contact even when someone is not bald in their pajamas—and we nodded at each other, as though acknowledging that the thing rattling loose in both of us was the same.
21. The Nipple Highway
I text Ginny: “I think we should consider expanding our business model to include a line of customizable photo cards so you can send your loved ones pictures of your nipple tattoos.”
We’ve both been reading about this guy, Vinnie Myers, who is based in Maryland and New Orleans. He’s apparently the grandmaster of nipple tattooing. He used to be a regular tattoo artist, but now his website says: Many things have changed over the past few years and now I spend most of my time tattooing nipple areola tattoos on breast cancer warriors.
His work is extraordinary, and women flock to him like pilgrims: nothing frou-frou. No flowers or dragons covering the scar. Just nipples of all varieties: pink and pubescent, dark and post-breastfeeding, large, small, one that even contains an artificial piercing. They look 3-dimensional and completely real.
We’ve watched videos of Vinny working. He wears hipster glasses, a tie, and a straw porkpie hat. “He is clearly our guy,” I write.
“Road trip down the nipple highway,” texts Ginny. “That’s our reward.”
Right now I don’t even have a breast. The whole idea feels like an abstraction. “A kind of updated Thelma and Louise,” I text back. “We’re gonna need to get a convertible.”
22. Myopia
Dying provokes nearsightedness in the caregiver.
We drive my mom back and forth to Duke, we spend long hours awaiting lab work and blood transfusions, we cancel teacher conferences and hair appointments, we administer water and pills, we greet hospice nurses, we sit at the bedside, we confer in the hallway outside her room, we wait. We become myopic about the whole thing, losing the ability to take stock of what all these efforts are about—and what they portend.
Myopia. Myopia. I keep thinking about that word. There was a polo and hunt club named Myopia near where we lived in Massachusetts, founded in 1882 by four men who were all plagued by nearsightedness—although I didn’t know until much later that the name was a flourish of New England wit. The place had nothing to do with my life—we didn’t ride much, even though my dad’s family is “horsey”—and we definitely didn’t hunt, but myopia always sounded pastoral and mysterious and lovely to me. I remember driving by the discreet sign and long mysterious drive along Route 1A with some regularity, and my decidedly unhorsey mother often unable to stop herself from tittering over the name.
“A la-di-da club called Myopia!” she would snark. “It doesn’t get any better than that!”
My mom worked for years as a medical transcriptionist and she always knew all the good medical terms: fistula, ketoacidosis, decompensating, myocardial infarction. I vaguely understood the eccentric discontinuity of a fox hunting club named after the condition of being nearsighted, but I didn’t really get the bigger social-class implications of not seeing the forest for the trees until decades later. She would have appreciated knowing that one of the club’s founding members was my dad’s maternal great-great grandfather, John Murray Forbes—something I discover when I google the place after my mother dies.
*
My brother, Charlie, and his wife, Amelia, live in western Massachusetts, but they come stay at my parents’ house in Greensboro after my mom decides to stop treatment. They are quickly sucked into our myopic vortex. Charlie’s working on a history PhD and Amelia is considering studying divinity, but our most animated conversations are around the topic of toothbrushing alternatives and the log of opiates. Sometimes we forget what “problem” we are solving, what enormous stillness awaits at the end.