Please

It’s the one-year Cancer-versary of my surgery. Coming up to this date, I wasn’t too worried, or overwhelmed. I wasn’t *marking it* the way I marked my chemo anniversary dates.

I knew it was coming but with life rolling out “back-to-normal” I had a full day running Thing Two to camp, going to the gym myself, taking the dog to the vet and then to the beach, making dinner, handling the laundry.

Who has time to think when you’re banging around life like a pinball?

But this morning, after meditating, when I sat down to write my Morning Pages, a very long-form poem poured out of me.

I cried as I wrote most of it.

As the very famous song from “Free to Be You and Me” goes, crying gets the sad out of you. 

So much sad, I didn’t even realize I was hanging onto this much sad.

Sad and scared.

I’ve been following more women on Instagram…women who are experiencing Triple-Negative Breast Cancer…the same kind I had. Many women are on the other side and are thriving. Some are in the middle of their treatment, and though they are keeping their chins up, they are struggling. For some of them, the cancer has metastasized. These women are showing us how to live.

Honestly, it is scary for me to follow these women. Logically I know I can’t get cancer from being around people who have cancer, but something deep down in my lizard brain rears up. I get scared.

I’ve been there. I don’t want to go there again.

And I’m still close enough to it, that…well, it’s like that terrible roommate or romantic partner or co-worker that you had. Maybe they aren’t physically in your space anymore, but the memories are still fresh and you are still wary and weary.

When I woke up from my surgery, the first words I remember saying were, “I’m alive!”

I sat up, took a deep breath, like I had been underwater, and said, “I’m alive.”

I heard other people as they woke up. They didn’t say that. One man said, “Where are you going with that snowball?!” Another woman said, “Bring me a carafe of honey violets.” Another voice, further down in the recovery salon, whispered, “Shhh…they are coming.”

But I said I’m alive.

I am so ready to be alive. And I didn’t know how much I had the fog of death surrounding my experience…living way down there in the triune brain, the lizard brain where fear, flight, and fight live.

Here is the long-form, free form, first, rough draft, poem…

 

3am

Alone at 3am

Alone in a house full of people

in a house full of love

 

One daughter rumbles in her bed,

a bear, wrapped in a hive of blankets

and stuffies

Only her hobbit feet visible from one end

her cocoa-colored curls spill from the other.

 

The other also

snuggles deep into a navy-blue cave

dark as deep space

not a glimmer of light enters the room

lest her sparse sleep be disturbed.

 

They are warm and safe and

unaware

I hope.

Shielded as they have been by us

and their youth and stories

where everything ends well

nothing overly perilous

and even if the mother dies at the beginning

the daughters persevere in the end

tied with a pretty bow or fancy dress.

So far their life has been a stocking hung on the mantle in anticipation

knowing with certainty, it will be filled

the way they know the sun will rise in the morning

the way they know there is food when they want it, a hug if they need it.

disappointment, fear, and

uncertainty has sprinkled grains in their life

so few times

they can’t recognize the taste

subtle as saffron.

 

He snores, his dense form reassuring in its

heft and weight. These 3am moments when he can lay in lightness, allowing the night to lift his spirit away from here.

He too is warm and alive,

filled with worries

that his wife might die

and the what-ifs that come with

what-then?

 

That I might die.

 

It’s nothing that any of us talk about

nothing we mention or discuss.

 

We take it as only one can

One-Day-At-A-Timing it

Letting-Go

Letting-God/ing it

While we pray incessantly, as instructed by St. Paul

subconsciously

the most powerful one-word prayer ever uttered by the

distraught and desperate.

Please.

 

Please

 

Please

 

In whispers, while smiling tersely and tensely, pretending everything is all right

while picking up the dog shit

and sorting the socks

watching the May Grey fold the skyscraper’s outline into the distance

grey buildings indistinguishable in the horizon.

 

Please

as we wait for dinner to arrive, delivered by a well-intentioned neighbor

as the flowers fade

as the blood results return

as the stack of gifts rises above the table in May

a reminder that things are atypical

like the lump near my heart.

 

Please

 

Please, do not let history repeat itself, leaving my daughters the way my mother was left

Please, let me see them grow

let me be assaulted by the teenage years

let them rail against me, resist me, let them rebel against my rules, run from me

let me be there when they return, mouth shut, arms open to

embrace their fragile bodies – now i know just how fraglie –

let me rub their backs while they sleep

let me

Please

 

I’m not ready.

 

I certainly wasted some of my precious time.

Is that true?

Maybe that is living too—

the drunken nights, road trips, hot wings and chocolate cake, movies and

museums

the gardens, started and abandoned and

replanted again with new intentions and

new hope

puzzles assembled, recipes made

closets cleaned, clothes and relationships and jobs and books discarded

because I’m not that person anymore.

Please

Allow me to be the person I was born to be.

Give me a chance!

I barter, alone at 3am

Please.

I want to live.

If I follow the treatment

If I obey

If I’m a good girl

Mother May I?

I

will

gladly endure this pain and fear and doubt

for the chance, for another pass at

Life.