*
At the good-scan appointment, Dr. Cavanaugh—just back from a weekend of silent meditation—reminds me of the necessity of staying in the present with this stuff, not trying to extrapolate to the future.
“I’m not making any promises. I have no idea what this means,” she says, swiveling on her stool. “But let’s just take a moment to be in the moment and acknowledge this, right now, is great news.”
She shuts her eyes and assumes a vaguely meditative stance and takes some soft-belly breaths while I gaze at her.
Then, fluttering open a moment or two later: “You know—hold it not too tight and not too loose—isn’t that what the Buddhists say?”
Oh my God, yes! I want to yell. And: How?! This is the very crux of my whole existence. And honestly, of course—all of our existences, whether we realize or acknowledge it or not.
I am reminded of an image that one of my cousins—a woman who lost her husband to a swift and brutal cancer last year—suggested to me recently over email: that living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more—sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.
Speaking of abysses, when we get home after the good-news appointment I do my first googling ever of survival rates—meaningless as I’ve been reminded that they are. They are indeed truly hideous for my situation. Nothing new—challenging to stare right into on the brightly lit screen, though.
After that I abandon the medical website and refocus my attention on the Embers Motor Lodge. An Internet hit on an obscure travel site offers me the only glimmer of history I could find about it: an anonymous contributor talking about his father, who as a teenager worked at the steak house once attached to the motel alongside a waitress who was married to major league pitcher Tom Zachary, a Graham, North Carolina, native who was famous for allowing Babe Ruth’s record-setting home run in 1927.
There is now a discount cigarette outlet where the Embers Steak House once was.
After an almost twenty-year career in baseball, Zachary died just down the interstate in Burlington in the late ’60s. I picture his wife the waitress, season after season, simmering away as she refilled water glasses and asked diners what temperature they preferred their steaks. Let’s call her Faith. I imagine her driving a scooter along Route 54.
There is a period of four days while I am in radiation treatment and traveling back and forth to the cancer center daily when the scooter is missing.
“Something terrible has happened,” I keep saying to John. “I can just feel it.”
“It might not always be the worst-case scenario,” says John. “Sometimes it’s just regular life.”
I stare at him doubtfully from the passenger seat.
On one of those drives I notice the door to her room is open. There is yellow tape across the frame.
“Oh my God,” I say.
“Hey, come on. It’s not necessarily crime tape,” John says. “It could say CAUTION—maybe they’re remodeling. It could say CAREFUL WET PAINT.”
The next time we drive past the Embers, the tape is gone and the white scooter is back in its spot.
*
We grope toward the future. Spring comes. We replant our garden. We roast Easter peeps over the fire pit in the backyard. Bunnies and mosquitos are born. Lazy curls bud and sprout from my bald head. I restart physical therapy and Pilates for my back, despite the advice from the spine surgeon that it “probably isn’t worth it”—given my prognosis of a couple years.
I swallow bottles of pills and herbs and vitamins; I rub frankincense into my feet to boost immunity and lower inflammation; I practice soft-belly breathing. The kids sign up for baseball and swim team. I nurse their fevers, sign their permission slips. When he gets home from work, John carries hamper after hamper of laundry up and down the stairs.
John carries so many things.
We laugh at the dinner table. We snipe at each other. We try not to. We make summer plans. We are captivated by a news story that a hole has formed in the sun the size of fifty earths. A coronal hole, they call it—where hot plasma traveling five hundred miles per second is spilling out into interplanetary space every minute of the day.
“Are we in danger?” asks Benny, for whom the extinction of the dinosaurs is never a distant thought. “Isn’t it bad that something that is burning so hot and close to us is doing things that scientists don’t understand?”
“They’re not sure,” I say. “It’s kind of a mystery. But no one seems super worried about it.”
In the meantime, the articles we read tell us to watch out for beautiful side effects: the hot plasma leak has kindled a storm of dramatic auroras that can be seen from Earth. The sky is on fire, but it is basically okay.
I had a hunch my scans would be good news when we were driving to my appointment and we passed the Embers: The scooter was parked out front.
We are month to month—Lyla and me—but we are holding steady, I was thinking to myself. A controlled burn. It’s terrifying, but maybe we can go a good long way like this.
12. What Would Natalie Portman Do?
Sometimes I’m sad about everything: the way my grilled cheese sandwich tastes, how nice my socks feel, a song John is playing in the kitchen. One time he puts on this goofy Loudon Wainwright song that was on a mix tape I used to listen to during my commute from the boys’ school in Bethesda back into the District when we were newly married and everything was about to begin and it makes me burst into tears about the shortness of everything.
Freddy finds me crying on my bed up in my room—and I make no real effort to hide it.
“What’s going on?” he says, climbing up next to me and patting my shoulder. “What are you so sad about?”
“The idea of dying,” I say, not at all sure this is what you’re supposed to say to your nine-year-old. “And how much I love you.”
“Jeez. That’s pretty heavy-duty stuff, Mom,” he says. “When I feel that kind of sad I play my drums. You should try it sometime. I go in my room all sad and mad and when I’m done I feel like a new person.”
“That’s really awesome,” I say, wiping my cheeks, thrilled that we have destroyed our neighbors Josie and Joe’s baby’s first year of sleep for a decent reason. “I should give it a whirl one of these days. I bet I’d like it.”
In the movie version of my life, one day one of these waves of obliteration sweeps over me while John is at work and the kids are in school and I peek into Freddy’s room and give the drums a go and sob and play and find peace. I know I’ll probably never do that, but I like imagining it now whenever I look in his room. Like Natalie Portman or some other gorgeous girl whose nose doesn’t swell when she cries, bent over the drum kit sobbing and raging at the universe until she can’t anymore.