Heads of kings, heads of angels

That there are darker, rawer things that I am scribbling down and not posting on this blog is something I confess to John and to Tita & Drew—who are both writers—at dinner after martinis and wine and a perfect piece of salmon.

That sometimes I do not post here unless I can pull the threads together somehow, unless there is a graceful metaphor in which to seek refuge and shape for this mess. That sometimes I worry that I function more like the PR team for Nina Riggs, Cancer Patient, rather than a terrified set of eyes staring into an unlit room.

That there are rough, ugly thoughts and scraps of prose that don’t fit. Where do I put them?

Here is one: In Paris it seemed like every single woman had two perfect breasts, each unscathed and rightfully hers, and no one else was just wandering about like a marked person with a time bomb strapped to her body (Je suis une terroriste I thought more than once, and every time I heard the wail of a siren I imagined it coming for me—or in my wake.). What a lie—a total impossibility—but I could not identify the ravaged look on anyone’s faces, though I tried. It was my failure, I’m sure. Maybe it translates differently. Maybe it was just that all I could see everywhere was the last version of myself in Paris: age 24, intact.

Here’s another: I hardly remember how romance works.

And one more: The grey then yellow light bouncing off the Seine in through the unshuttered windows of the apartment we were loaned on the Île de la Cité was so exquisite that I lay awake crying until my stomach balled and ached and I spent most of the night in the bathroom, missing my mom so bad because I could not call her and tell her, and all I could hear was her voice exclaiming about these very apartment buildings on my first trip to Paris at age 16 as we raced along the quai in our taxi: Who in the world lives there?! Can you even imagine!?

The other day, Tita and I discussed this writing issue some more in her minivan on our way home from an afternoon of very radioactive scans at Duke. Tita told me about an essay she’d just read about writing inside a very tiny space that makes you feel like you are held and safe and you can open yourself up to say the scary things and about a lit class she took in college called Studies in Evil. In the Evil class, they’d read Beowulf and Richard III and Genesis and explored how afraid we are as a culture of images of uncontained chaos (example: disembowelment). The professor had called them Images of the Abject. How we contain things and give shape to things in order to be less afraid of them.

Yes. The crafted idea does this. The metaphor does this. The intact body does, too.

In Paris we visited the Cluny Museum, full of artifacts and art from the Middle Ages. The most famous things there are the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, which are just the absolute best—if you love strangeness and symbolism and mystery.

But this time it was the collection of life-sized stone Jesuses from the 14^th century that did it for me—on the way to the cross, on the cross, dead in Mary’s arms—so human and agonized and open-faced and accepting all at once. Complicated eyes, resolved lips. I couldn’t help notice in the emotionally brutal pietà, though, that Jesus’s wounds were still the daintiest of paper cuts. No chaos.

Reveal the pain, but hide the wreckage.

Another thing I loved: a tremendous limestone-y room full of rows of giant sculpted heads—most of them ghostly white, only flecked with the occasional remaining paint chip: the once-rouge of a cheek, the once-blue of a crown. The labels read: ca. 1220, Les têtes des rois and Les têtes des anges. The heads of kings, the heads of angels, taken from the façade of Notre-Dame. And then, along a separate wall, a gallery of the bodies, lined up in rows like a choir, that I suppose the heads had once belonged to. Les corps.

I stared into their huge vacant faces. I liked the ones with parted lips the most, as if they’d been interrupted and had been waiting patiently these eight centuries to talk again. That’s what was in their faces that I liked: vacancy achieved through patience. It also made me want to bash their faces in and taste the stone as a powder.

Somehow I still don’t know what’s next. Somehow tomorrow is still the day I’m supposed to see the Queen and I am still staring very hard into the dark room. Somehow tomorrow school is canceled and the internet is calling for a treacherous morning across the region: wet snow, turning to ice—maybe later turning to rain.

Thank / you

Last night around 2am I woke up with the panicked feeling—kind of like choking, except nothing in my throat.

I’d fallen asleep hard—my head on John’s shoulder—without brushing my teeth or washing my face or taking my socks off.

But then suddenly: All the Things.

The school voicemails I haven’t listened to. The overdue library book on the table by the front door. An unmade kennel reservation for the dogs. The recycling that won’t fit in the container. Incomplete work. Unreturned emails. Unwritten thank yous. Unfinished parenting. The universe coming apart at the seams.

Yesterday was my last day of spine radiation. This round—although thankfully short—has been harder than the last. Exhaustion on a level I’ve never felt before, and then just a general ill feeling. I’m glad to have it behind me, as much as I’m afraid of what comes next.

I feel like I have cancer, I heard myself saying to John the other day.

There still is no concrete plan. I didn’t end up getting to see Dr. Cavanaugh when I was scheduled to—she wasn’t ready for me yet. Which is fine. I want her to have time to figure out the options. But I also wish I had some sense of what to expect of the coming months. I feel this churning uncertainty at the core of everything that makes it hard to find peace.

When I was in the hospital, I was paid a visit by a nurse who moonlights as a stress management guru. Nurse Jon—or Relaxation Jon, as my friend Tita who was visiting me when he came in quickly dubbed him—had a hypnotic voice and an almost unsettling command of the vibe of the room. He talked (or purred) to me and Tita and my dad about breathing techniques and mantras and allowing ourselves to be held by the bed or the chair or the world. I think he put us under some kind of spell. Time stretched and bent. Nurses and techs seemed to hover at the door, but were uncompelled to disturb us.

It happened that the Queen herself stopped in to see me when he was doing his thing, and even she immediately deferred to him, saying Oh, it’s you! I’ll come back! Your work is far more important than mine!

I cannot stress how unusual a stance this is for Dr. C.

No, no—please come in we all insisted. So she joined the four of us in my closet of a hospital room. She was noticeably different in his presence—a little fan-girlish—even as she did her normal shtick and he waited on a chair in the corner.

Listen to what he has to say she said as she left. And when she was gone, the spell resumed.

Since the hospital, I’ve been following his techniques as often as I can: calm, soft belly breathing, accepting the support of the chair/world, a positive mantra embedded in the inhale and exhale (Right now / I am ok) of each breath.

So, forty minutes into last night’s freak-out, I summoned some Relaxation Jon. Instead of the jumble of “undone”s, I began to visualize this swirling current of gratitude that flows from me to so many people in my life. For the love, the caring, the support, the emails and cards and letters, the donations, the meals, the amazing array of gifts and gestures.

Just yesterday I opened a package from my cousin Elise with a remarkable container of sand and shells collected from my favorite beach in the world.

I have received books and scarves and charms and the world’s cuddliest blanket and a bracelet of jade prayer beads that I now wear every day and a hand-painted potholder and a copy of a letter of recommendation once written for me by a most beloved professor and a perfect handknit pink cozy to house a hot water bottle for my back on the flight to Paris.

If I owe you a thank you, please forgive me. I promise it is not a lack of gratitude or appreciation. It is deep fatigue and a lack of focus.

But last night, I allowed every one of those things to flow through me, and it felt amazing. My mantra shifted to a simple Thank (inhale) / You (exhale), and with that came peace–and finally sleep.

Pretend burial.

Earlier this week, hurtling along I-40 on one of my final daily trips to radiation, I heard this thing on the radio about a teambuilding exercise that an employer in South Korea is using to raise worker morale.

During the exercise, employees dress in long robes and sit at low desks. Each writes a letter to a loved one as if it were their last correspondence. Sniffling and even outright weeping is acceptable.

Next to each desk is a big wooden box. But not an ordinary wooden box. The kind of wooden box that is a coffin.

When the workers are done with the letter, they lie down in the coffin and someone pretending to be the Angel of Death comes around and hammers the top shut. They lie in the dark inside the coffin for about ten minutes. The idea is that when they re-emerge they will have a new perspective on life, one that will make them more passionate about their work and appreciative of their lives.

This Christmas week was supposed to be the last hurrah of 6 weeks of radiation—my last day scheduled for the 23^rd, and then one whole day to pull Christmas together. Overall, despite the challenges of the last few months, I was feeling pretty hopeful and festive—beloved family coming in to town, the magic of internet shopping/wine drinking after kid bedtime, class parties, piano recitals, baking, the culmination of this whole mess of treatment seeming to be almost slipping into the rearview mirror. The only thing that was getting me down was my nagging back, which just seemed to not really be improving as quickly as I wished. I was feeling a little 90-year-oldish, but hanging in there—pushing through it when I could.

I thought about the Korean work burial a number of times. Intriguing, but the mandatory-ness felt kind of heavy handed. And I was skeptical about the boss’s clear expectation that his workers would reemerge with renewed vigor to work harder.

Still, it resonated with me that a serious, vivid envisioning of one’s own death could be a rewarding and enriching experience—a chance to take stock in that way we sometimes try to do at New Years but it gets all clogged up with booziness and roman candles and overpriced meals.

The Korean boss—who used to work at a funeral home—also has his employees engage in a rousing exercise of forced laughter before they sit down at their desks in the morning. Supposedly it stimulates the system, and if done regularly and convincingly enough can replicate the benefits of genuine laughter.

The night before my second to last treatment had been a particularly rough one—lots of spasms, hard to stand up and use the bathroom. At one point it took me around 45 minutes to summon the strength to walk down the hall to the office to get a roll of tape for present wrapping.

John drove me in to my radiation appointment that morning, and I needed a wheelchair, as I sometimes have these past few weeks. The receptionists slapped the yellow FALL RISK bracelet on my arm as they have done a number of times since early November. Radiation went well, as normal—Motown Christmas carols over the speaker—but when I mentioned to one of the techs that my pain was bad again and I was having a hard time peeing because my muscles were so tight, someone paged the doctor.

I already had an orthopedist appointment scheduled for the next day, but someone said, The quickest way to check this out is to send you to the ED and get an MRI. They were apologizing, but I was relieved. My biggest worry was that we would be there so long I would miss some of my afternoon commitments and I’d still be in pain.

An hour or so later—down a quiet hallway of rooms of gowned patients lying flat like me on their backs inside tight loud tubes, silent patients in their beds being wheeled to and from these sterile basement rooms, the pretend burial exercise came back to me again. As the machine clanked and buzzed and zapped all around me for about an hour as I lay impeccably still there in my hospital gown I thought Forget the angel of death. The angel of medical imaging is loud and terrifying enough. I would have six more similar scans in the coming days.

I did emerge with some euphoria. That machine reminds me a lot of what it feels like to stand inside my son’s room during ‘band practice.’ I said to the techs. I felt very at home. Thanks so much for that retreat.

 I’m not half bad at the forced laughing thing, either.

Now you just need to wait an hour or so for the results, which we will try to expedite, the ER nurse said, and we can get you out of here. So, John sat in the little chair in our little room eating gross hospital food and fussing with social media. I think I had some naps and maybe some pain meds that made the world of metaphorical dying simulation quite lovely and ethereal.

When the results did come back (very quickly!), it turned out it was the sucky job of the ER attending—who I hadn’t met yet—to remove the word “metaphorical” from the whole situation.

He was so young and cheerful and decided to start on a bright note: Good news—your labs look mostly normal. Ok.

But one thing to note—seems that you do have a significant fracture in your spine, at the L2 vertebra. And the way it is broken is very worrisome. It’s not a trauma break. It’s a pathological break, likely caused by a tumor that has metastasized from your breast.

I am so sorry, he just kept saying, I hate telling people these things and I’m not very good at it.

The world kind of broke open right there—or maybe the reverse is truer. Maybe the wooden box lid slammed down kind of hard on our heads.

We’re going to admit you up on the oncology ward. You will probably have surgery right away.

A stream of doctors after that—one crouching down to eye level with me, gripping my hand and not pushing away her tears. Another—Dr. Rosenblum—standing over me with the face of a mother whose daughter is very late for curfew. She kept patting my hair. John’s eyes from the visitor chair reflecting my own face back to me again and again: WAIT, WHAT? We kept asking each other, WHAT?

I don’t know what exactly will happen next, but you know that metastases put you at stage four, the crying doctor told us. This is clearly an aggressive cancer. It recurred before we even finished treating it. It’s probably time to put your affairs in order and make a bucket list, as hard as that is to hear.

A fuck-it list, John quickly started calling it—kind of the opposite I guess. What can we just say “fuck it” to and send splashing off into some sewer and not bother ourselves with anymore?

Turns out not many things!

It’s early days still, I know, but there is not a lot of ambiguity in the diagnosis. I will die of this someday pretty soon. But if lying in the wooden box—or the clanking metal tube—or under the hands of a weeping doctor—has underscored anything it is that there is no real fuck-it list.

I want all of it—all the things to do with living—and I want them to keep feeling messy and confusing and even sometimes boring. The hospital transporters bitching about their insane holiday hours. The Queen sitting on my bedside looking me in the eyes and admitting she’s scared. The sound of my extended family playing an improv word game downstairs around the dinner table. My weird chemo hair growing in suddenly in thick chunks. Light sabers cracking Christmas ornaments. A science fair project taking shape in some distant room. The drenched backyard full of runoff, and tiny, slimy, uncertain yard critters who had expected to remain buried in months of hard mud, peaking their heads out into this balmy Christmas air, asking WAIT, WHAT?

 

 

Found on Level 00.

Most of radiation is about waiting. The actual zapping takes about 15 minutes.

After you check in (name and birthday, have you fallen in the last 30 days, have you traveled outside the country in the last 3 weeks) you wait in the big lobby, then you get pulled down the corridor to change in a little booth—it’s kind of like the opposite of Superman: you go in your normal human self, you come out hospital-gowned and feeble looking.

Then you sit and wait some more in the Gowned Area.

It’s mostly the same people every day, so you can really get to know some folks. Sometimes you feel pretty social, and other times you retreat into your feeling-pretty-poorly shell and are more of a listener.

Sometimes you listen with a notebook in hand and are a little bit of a thief (and HIPAA violator?):

Ms. Sutton, the doctor would like to speak to you immediately.

This morning he wouldn’t even eat ice cream.

Love you darlin’.

I’ll shut up when I’m dead.

I’m just so worried.

Ooh, this place rocks—they have hospital ice!

Hi Crystal—it’s me. I’m down here with the nukes.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to tell you that you look just like Prince.

The radiation team loves to dance—they play the Motown/funk Pandora station every day over the speakers in the radiation chamber (name and birthday please), bopping around, getting down on it, all while they threaten you with your life if you move a smidge. You take them pretty seriously, even though they are all 24 years old. You ignore the hell out of Marvin Gaye.

Daddy’s fine, Mom—he just went to the bathroom. 

Love you.

Well, I guess all we can do is hope.

It isn’t nearly as obvious in this light, baby.

There’s donuts over by the scale at the nursing station if you want one.

Jesus is the only doctor who knows it all.

 

Usually people like to talk about The Lord back in the Gowned Area, but yesterday it turned to politics.

That moron really needs to shut his mouth and go back to just being a trillionaire.

$65 dollars to see Dr. Cook—forget it! Who can afford that?

You stay strong.

Love you, sweetheart.

Is the sun shining out there today?

 

One thing that’s kind of crazy is that despite the multi-million dollar machines, the whole radiation protocol feels a little MacGyver-ish—they mark where the lasers should line up on your body with paint pens and sharpies, they make a mold of your torso out of foam and duct tape, they increase the radiation to the chest wall by wrapping a rubber mat over the place where your breast used to be with masking tape.

I like thinking about the scheming, practical mind that came up with all this.

You need some help with that? 

The good news is we made it through another day.

Be blessed.

I’m going to miss you.

Behave yourself.

Love you.

 

Twenty-one treatments down, twelve to go.

You got you a nice tan going, says one of the techs this morning as she examines your chest. Looks like that part of you has been to the islands.

Aloha! You say when they’re done, floating in your gown out of the nuke room, back toward the Gowned Area.

Aloha! the techs call, the three of them clustered in the hallway outside the command center in their light blue scrubs, two of them waving slowly like your cruise ship was just pushing off, the other looking past you, beckoning back the next patient.

The next morning.

A couple hours after the sun rose on the morning my mom died, we left her body on the bed in her room and went for a walk to look at the chapel around the corner where we were thinking we’d hold the funeral.

My dad, Charlie and Amelia, John and me—the survivors. As we walked out the back door into the August morning I did feel a lot like we were passengers straggling out of the wreckage of a plane crash.

We were weirdly giddy, not good company for anyone but ourselves—delirious, shattered, and still under the spell of the gallows humor we’d become as dependent on as oxygen in the final weeks to stay sane.

“It’s ok to leave her, right?” one of us asked.

“I think so,” someone said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

It was the fantasy you have about your newborn after a particularly ruthless night—stepping outside, locking the door, and just walking quietly away from it all—only we actually did it.

So there we were—an awkwardly large group of adults for the sidewalk—ambling across Spring Garden Street and down Springdale Court around 9am on a Friday morning in late summer. The university had just gone back into session, and the streets were starting to fill up with students.

The doors of the chapel were locked, but Charlie and Amelia—who had never been inside it—peered in the windows to get a sense of the space as we stood on the porch.

Just then I recognized one of the backpacked students locking the door of her car and making her way toward campus—our kids’ much-adored babysitter, a graduate student, who we hadn’t seen in a few months since her schedule changed.

“Hey—it’s Anneliesse!” I said to John. She was walking right past us, about to greet a friend on the sidewalk.

Then I realized the friend was someone we knew, too—another beloved babysitter, Virginia, also a grad student.

“Hey you guys!” I was compelled to holler out. John and I walked toward them.

“Hey! Good to see you! How have you been?” All that stuff.

Charlie, Amelia, and my dad grouped silently behind us. What must we have looked like? Conspicuous. Or suspicious—I felt suspicious. Like maybe Virginia and Anneliesse were worried the reason they hadn’t seen us in a while was because we’d joined a cult.

“Great! Doing ok! How are you? How is the semester going so far?” It’s the only thing to say, right?

What is the alternative? I haven’t slept in days and my mom took her last brutal breath five hours ago. Right now she is lying by herself in her house around the corner. We’re scoping out this here church for her funeral.

I had no idea how to introduce my family to the sweet, smiling young women.

“I’m sorry,” I said to everyone as we walked back toward the house. “I just couldn’t.”

That night, two of my parents’ closest friends, Anne and Mark, came over to be with us. Their wonderful daughter, Molly, is the ground zero of babysitters for us. It is through her that we know Anneliesse and Virginia.

Molly came by the house, too, after her shift on the food truck. Anne, Amelia, Molly, and I sat and cried together with my mom’s body.

“Please apologize to Anneliesse and Virginia for me?” I asked Molly, telling her about running into them. “I’m sure we were so weird.”

I guess this is a long clumsy metaphor for the unsolicited answer to “how was your thanksgiving?” and the “how are you?”’s of the last three months and the “how are you”’s of the future.

She’s always right around the corner, alone in the house and newly dead. I’m always announcing I’m okay, out here in the world where it the sun is shining and something new is about to begin.

The walking wounded.

In retrospect it was perhaps not my best-conceived plan—taking the kids on an excursion to visit the radiation machine—but it’s so hard to know what will spark their malleable little minds and inspire them to be the doctors and scientists and poets of the future.

Freddy—who loves to stay up late reading about atoms and quarks—has been unfortunately stuck for a while now on the notion of being a Billionaire Weapons Inventor. And Benny has an entire notebook of recipes he’s conjured for how to turn humans into different animal species (tail hair of a Welsh Corgi, saliva of an ocelot, chocolate chips, sea salt). I thought nudging them a little from the Realm of Evil Science toward the Realm of Medical Science couldn’t hurt, and could possibly be at least as lucrative.

My radiation oncologist, Dr. Rosenblum, actually thought it was a good idea.

“Make sure to tell the boys the machine is called a Linear Accelerator,” she told John and me at the appointment before I started radiation. “That will get them interested.”

Her eyes might have been glowing a little too brightly, now that I think about it.

“Ooh—and wait—how old are they again? Eight and six? Yeah, tell them we’ll be using lasers to guide the photons and electrons to the right spot and that we will be using the exact same technology we use for radar. And that we will do it all from a remote command center with closed-circuit monitors! And that each machine costs millions of dollars!!”

That night, I mentioned all this at the dinner table as casually as possible.

“Hmmm,” said Freddy, a little interested. “What are the chances you’ll come away from this with mutant powers?”

“I imagine not infinitesimal!” I said, getting kind of worked up myself.

“I have two things,” said Benny in his Benny Way. “Is radiation a kind of technology and will you have hair?”

Me having hair again has been a primary concern for Benny for months now, and as we transition from toll booths to whatever he embraces as his next big passion, it seems the classification as “technology” will be a common thread.

“Yes! Radiation is in fact ultra high-tech technology! And doesn’t affect your hair at all!!” So many exclamation points—maybe I was selling it a little hard.

Then, a couple weeks later when Veteran’s Day rolled around and the kids had no school and John was off work and I had to be at Duke for my daily dose of radiation, I thought: perfect—a family excursion! Let’s all go to Durham and we can eat a hip delicious lunch on Ninth Street and browse through actual paper books at The Regulator and we’ll take the kids to see the beautiful Duke campus and the impressive gothic hospital that is saving my life and where I—and their grandmother—have spent so many important hours. And they’ll learn something about science to boot!

My first spidey sense that there might be some sound reason to why teachers don’t regularly take their eager elementary schoolers to tour hospital radiation facilities came just as we stepped foot into the waiting room—the same waiting room where I wait every day, where I have my usual seat and say my usual hellos and chat with the usual suspects and settle in for the usual routine.

Suddenly I was aware of so many wheelchairs. So many unsteady steppers. So many pale faces and thin wisps of hair and ghostly bodies slumped in chairs. Angry, papery skin. Half-healed wounds. Growths and disfigurements straight out of the Brothers Grimm. So many heads held up by hands.

I’ve seen them all before. These days, these are my people. I’ve talked with them and befriended them: Chris with pancreatic cancer who has a new painful nodule on his kidney. Beth on her second bout with breast. The loud nervous woman who is always wheeling and dealing on the cell phone, half her head shaved. Howard, the man I often sit next to back in the Gowned Area whose prostate is being irradiated and who is so hugely tall that his gown looks like a blue napkin barely covering his bare thighs.

The Feeling Pretty Poorlies— I know them—I’ve even been them—very recently—but I hadn’t really seen us as we are in a long time—the (mostly) walking wounded of the cancer militia. We’re kind of motley. We’re often asymmetrical. We’re wearing comfortable pants and bright scarves. We tend to either smile too quickly or not at all.

I watched my kids taking it all in—seeing me among my other kind. They were not the only children in the waiting room—school was closed across the state—and I saw them all scanning the room for each other with urgency, like we look for channel markers in the fog.

When I told the radiation therapist that Dr. Rosenblum had said it would be okay if my kids came and took a peak at the machine, I maybe mistook her “okay, whatever you want, crazy lady” look for being inhospitable. But then she seemed to perk up when we got back in the linear accelerator room and she got to explain to the kids how everything worked, and I thought: oh this is so cool. How exciting!

But then I noticed Benny wouldn’t stand all the way inside the room and that he kept staring at the oversized radiation warning symbol on the 12-inch-thick door. Somehow I hadn’t noticed the sign or the thickness of the door before. It’s like the opposite of a nuclear fallout shelter.

In the hallway, Howard lurched by in his too-short gown.

Then one of the techs kicked on the enormous machine to show how its huge arm could rotate—the floor opening up beneath it to accommodate its massive orbit around the radiation board, and I saw Freddy’s body physically stiffen.

To be honest, I hadn’t realized that all this time during my treatments the floor had been opening beneath me like some Tony Stark-designed doorway to hell, and I sort of wish I’d kept it that way.

“I’m ready to go now,” said Freddy firmly. Fearless Freddy! Freddy who injects himself with his own insulin shots, Freddy who goes downstairs alone at night to get a glass of water, Freddy who marches into the bathroom when his brother spies a stink bug and dispatches it into the toilet with his bare hands, Freddy who sat for close to an hour on the corner of the bed where my mom’s body lay, stroking her legs the day after she died.

“I’m done, too,” said Benny.

Neither of them had one single question for the techs—and that was a first. They usually live for the question portion of EVERYTHING. Last summer when we visited Thomas Jefferson’s lesser known house, Poplar Forest, the tour guide ran late fielding questions from my kids: Did Jefferson have a dog? Did he die of cancer? Did he like to go camping? Did he enjoy being president?

At Open House night for kindergarten, Benny famously raised his hand in front of the entire parent-student population when the principal asked if there were any questions and said into the portable microphone, “Um, so what do you do if you’re really nervous about starting Kindergarten?”

But here in the radiation chamber: nada.

That night my dad asked them what they thought of the trip to Duke.

“It was terrifying,” said Freddy matter-of-factly.

“I hated it,” said Benny. “I wish I hadn’t seen it.”

“It was pretty intimidating,” admitted John.

So—oops. I just exposed my kids to radiation and probably scarred them for life on their day off.

Except, then there also is this: the next morning as we bumble through our regular routine—me signing permission slips while I drink coffee on the couch before getting myself dressed for radiation, John knotting his tie and packing lunch boxes, the kids shuffling in to their shoes and coats—both boys come sit with me.

“Good luck at radiation today, Mom!” says Benny. “I hope you’re not scared, but if you are you can hug MacDuff when you get home.”

MacDuff is our new mutt. He’s extremely cuddly, and if I didn’t know better I might think Benny had conjured him from one of his recipes.

Freddy gives me a hug. “Guess what, Mom—I’ve finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. A playwright!”

Kind of blue.

New veins of grief. Or not new ones. Ones just revealing themselves.

Four three-hour drives in the last 48 hours between Greensboro and Charlottesville in the name of a cattle dog. But maybe more truthfully in the name of grief.

John’s been on a mission to complicate things with something that can fetch. “What about this guy?” reads his fifth email of the morning containing a link from petfinder.com, “He loves brisk walks and kids. He’s recovering from a scrotal infection and likes to dig but otherwise he’s perfect!”

I guess I’m not exactly dissuading him from his search. I’m in the market for something to hold and snuggle these days. Ellie, our old black mutt, is not a snuggler.

I love Route 29 as it climbs gently up Virginia. The uncrowded lanes and all the roadside family restaurants and sleepy service stations and the tiny towns of Hurt and Tightsqueeze. The aboveground pool dealers and pre-fab shed dealers and dump truck dealers. The sprawling ranch partially remodeled as a Monticello replica and all the crosses and the Dairy Queens.

That rolling stretch just south of Charlottesville where the median is lined with old trees just starting to turn colors this weekend—wow.

We drove up there to adopt Blue, the Australian Cattle Dog.

The boys wanted to give him a new name. From the backseat, for the whole ride: “Can we call him Maverick? Can we call him Vampy? Can we call him Sheriff? Can we call him Alberto? Can we call him Obsidian?”

The whole ride, Ellie panting like a madwoman in the way back.

I won’t tell every heartbreaking detail of this story, but Blue was a good boy and we adopted him.

I rode in the way back all the way home with him in my lap licking my face. I didn’t notice the three hours because I was very busy falling in love with his crazy black belly spots and what Freddy called his “boyish eyes” and his coy, smart face. He licked the boys’ ears from behind them and made them laugh. He obsessively watched every single person come out of a gas station and when it was finally John he started to whine and wiggle with excitement like he’d known him for years.

I couldn’t stop smiling at John when our eyes would meet in the rearview mirror. How about Pancho, he said somewhere near Lynchburg—and that seemed just right.

Pancho. You’re Pancho, I whispered to the dog. And you’re in our family.

Everyone was happy. Well, everyone except Ellie. She was having a quiet, protracted nervous breakdown on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

We still don’t know what went wrong exactly but what started out as the dogs seeming a little standoffish to each other when they first met in Charlottesville devolved into a full on mortal enmity after about 24 hours at home. They couldn’t be in a room together. Blue/Pancho would snap and bully. Ellie would quake and hide. We caught Ellie trying to dig out of her own backyard.

We spoke to a dog behaviorist on the second morning. “I can fix this,” she said, “but it won’t be easy. And in the end it may not be the right thing for either dog. If it were me, I’d take him back. There are lots of great rescue dogs in the world. You need to find the right one for everyone in your family.”

I won’t get into the details of the sadness of the boys, who had been conspiring about how to rig up a ramp so the dog could sleep in their top bunk, but after we broke the news, they took Blue/Pancho out in the yard and the three of them played basketball together for almost an hour—Freddy shooting baskets, Benny running around kicking leaves off the court, the dog leaping into the air to rebound the ball back to Freddy.

Blue and I left for Charlottesville on our own right after the boys headed off to school the next day. Ellie wouldn’t even come out from her bunker under the chair in the bedroom to pee.

We listened to NPR and Paul Simon the entire time because no one else was there to tell us not to. Blue loves “Under African Skies” but was exasperated by both the lack of clarity from the Dutch report on the Malaysian plane shot down last year over Ukraine and the murky pool of Democratic candidates on the eve of the first debate.

He sniffed the Virginia morning vigorously through the window crack then groaned a little and fell sound asleep with his head on my thigh and his body sprawling awkwardly over the gearbox and into the passenger seat.

The ride home: What is the opposite of a sleeping dog’s head in your lap while you drive?

That drive was the slowest of the four. I mostly thought about work and to-do lists. I felt overwhelmed and I cried a little. The next day I was due at Duke to meet my radiation oncologist and talk about the next phase of treatment so I also thought about tumors and cancer cells and what the hell the doctors say to you if they do all the things they know how to do and there is still cancer left.

And I thought: right now, this is grieving. My mom feels a million miles away and that distance is permanent and inexplicable and I’m really effing tired of feeling scared and losing things. I thought about why, one day when all my hair was falling out this time around, I was compelled to rewrite the last paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” by replacing snow with hair.

That was grief, I said to myself. It makes us dark and a little crazy.

By then, I was pulling back into Greensboro, and instead of going home I went straight to Target because buying poster board for Freddy’s social studies project about Panama was on my to do list. There, I promptly lost one more thing: my purse—with an unusually flush amount of cash stuffed in my wallet due to selling my dining room table on craigslist on a whim (dark and crazy I tell you)—left in the shopping cart in the parking lot.

I realized it halfway home and drove like a maniac back up Battleground. It wasn’t in the cart, still wedged in the return enclosure. I went back to my car—it definitely wasn’t there. I went into the store and must have stared wildly at the security guard because she immediately walked over to me and said sternly, “Mam, is there something we can help you with?”

They had it. Someone had just turned it in—an older woman who was in fact still standing there. I could tell by the look on her face she had clearly seen all the cash. “You’re very lucky it was me who found it,” she said slowly. “You could have just had a very bad day.”

As I was walking back to the car a text pinged in from inside my purse. John.

“Are you back yet? You have to check out this one. He’s smart and low key and gets along well with other dogs. Plus look at those ears!”

And there I was—because this is just what we do—sitting in the Target parking lot, door still open, clicking on the link.

Re-learning to ride a bike during cancer is almost like riding a bike.

Full disclosure is that I haven’t spent much time on a bike since 1992 when I was about 15 and a pack of semi-feral dogs were chasing me at breakneck speed down Lennoxville Road out by our old house in Beaufort and one particularly speedy, snarly one nipped me on the butt outside the fish factory and the whole time overcooked fish parts from the factory smoke stack were raining down on me and I thought I’m kind of over this.

Full FULL disclosure is that I did get back on a bike in 2009 at a lovely resort near Charleston, SC, when I was quite pregnant with Benny and recovering from a stomach bug and that was not pretty.

Anyway, desperate times. I’ve decided I’m done with feeling half-dead. And sometimes walking is boring, and all the fitness-obsessed beautiful people at the gym make me feel like an out-of-shape deformed freako.

And one more thing I’ve spirited from my mom’s possessions is her almost entirely unused bike. My dad tuned it all up for me, and it is bright blue and made out of something really light weight and fits me really nicely (unlike her Tevas).

So, I’m re-learning to ride a bike.

Full full FULL disclosure: I’m back on the ‘roids. That can’t have anything to do with this, right?

I took the bike out for the third time today, and it turns out it’s SUPER fun—especially cruising down Mendenhall Street all crazy and non-breaking!—but biking is somewhat different from what I remember. A little swervier, a little more terrifying, more bugs flying into my mouth, and the hills are a little hillier and the cars are—well—faster and more mechanical seeming.

Really, truly, I’m only 38 years old! But something has made me feel a lot older lately. I guess that’s what I’m trying to get past.

On my way up the last hill today I passed an acquaintance/neighbor walking his dog who stared blankly at me and my bright red face after I said, “Hey! How are you?” until I gulped, “Nina! Mendenhall Street! Breast cancer!” Why did I say that last part?!

Anyway, that made it click. “Oh hi,” he said, “Are you okay?”

First of all—HA. YES. TOTALLY.

Second of all, I DON’T KNOW! I really wish there was someone else we could ask for the answer to that!

Yesterday I had my third chemo treatment of this round. It went completely fine, but it’s never really the going in that’s the problem. This time I don’t have to do the yucky bone-achy flu-y Neulasta shot because it turns out last time it worked too well and made my white blood cells go into psycho-turbo mode and crowd out the rest of my blood cells and that’s what ended me up in the ER all short of breath.

So, the Queen has decreed that we are going to skip that this time. We are just going to avoid all germs and germ-likely scenarios and watch like Cerberus for neutropenic fevers.

Speaking of Cerberus, no vicious, blood-hungry hounds on this bike ride. Just a passel of ridiculously cute puppies that we may or may not have stopped to pet on the way home from chemo yesterday. Therapy.

More therapy: a truly wonderful, love-filled family wedding (yay Tristan and Sarah!!) up in Massachusetts this past weekend (WITHOUT KIDS: Melissa and Adam, I am your servant for life!) during which I felt miraculously well and danced for hours in heels and got to walk with cousins and family in Concord’s Estabrook Woods, the loveliest woods of my childhood, and even stand in the garden of the little brick house where we lived on the edge of those woods and be flooded with 450,000 memories—the worst of which was sticking my head in the grape arbor and being stung by a whole nest of yellow jackets and the funniest of which was watching my mom jump around and scream like a crazy person after getting her ankle entangled with a garter snake in the vegetable garden and the most-“me” of which was remembering lying in my bed on the night before I started kindergarten worrying that the house would burn to the ground and I would never get to be a kindergartener and the most surprising of which was sleeping on blankets on the floor by the backdoor because my room in the attic was being remodeled and waking up to a drift of snow on top of me from a blizzard that had blown the door open in the night and scurrying into bed between my mom and dad to get warm and the most fun of which was learning to ride a bike with my cousins on the dirt road in the field between their house and ours.

This month—two funerals and a wedding, three chemo doses, some puppies, a bike. Full full full FULL disclosure: Maybe I’m not half-dead after all.

Hum on the rails.

The other day I went over to my parents’ house in the middle of the afternoon, something I hadn’t done really since my mom died and all the funeral activity, but used to do daily—often even more. My dad was back at work, and I had an hour before I needed to pick up the kids, so I thought I would make some headway going through some of my mom’s things—or that’s what I told myself.

Her car was in the driveway. Her purse was hanging on the chair in the kitchen.

“Oh, good,” I had to stop myself from thinking, “She’s home.”

The dog, sprawled snoring in the hall, did not look up. The house was hushed and glowing with afternoon sun, an orchid was blooming on the dining room table. Everything seemed as it should be. I walked into her bedroom.

Seemed—such a sneaky word.

In the days right after she died, her bedroom had smelled like, well—death. We’d all noticed it. Not an outright bad smell, but kind of a cocktail of all the smells of those final weeks and days and hours. Lotions, clorox, incense, medicine, flowers, breath. Plus something else. Decay, I guess. The scent was in my nose for days.

She died in bed around four in the morning on Friday, and we kept her body there all through the next day and into mid-morning on Sunday. Hospice came around dawn on Friday to help us clean her and dress her—we opened the blinds and blasted the Beatles and put her in the funkiest outfit and Amelia and Charlie covered her in purple flowers. She looked radiant. She would have swooned over the taut luminance of her skin.

Something I didn’t expect: she didn’t leave all at once. And I don’t really mean that in an esoteric way at all. At first she was present, even though she was lifeless. But every time I would go into and out of her room, I would come back to something newly less “there.” The way her fingers were curled on her chest (those softest, most delicate hands—my earliest memory, I think!), her lips, the color of her skin. By Sunday morning it was her eyes—they’d changed to a kind of vinyl-looking film. They were not hers at all. Three days later at the crematorium (oh my, a story for another day), it was really only her hair that was hers.

The same thing happened with the death smell. When I walked in the bedroom the other afternoon, it was pristine in there, just as she kept it before she was sick enough to relinquish those duties to us. The cleaning lady had come. The marigold-print bedspread crisp and fresh and square, her neatly aligned unguents on the nightstand, her glasses and her green comb, her orderly stacks of camisoles and yoga pants on the shelves, all smelling of fresh detergent. I walked around the room twice, sniffing at everything—searching for just one whiff of her—organic, living her. It was not there.

I thought I was going to start sorting some of her clothes into piles—for Amelia and Anne and the Bargain Box, etc. Instead I stood there and cried for a long time.

And then I stole all her shoes.

I don’t really know what came over me with the shoes. It kind of started happening even before she died, after she stopped being able to walk. I would go over to hang out and while she was dozing I’d try on sandals and boots and clogs I’d never given two thoughts to before. And then I’d leave with a pair.

She’s almost a half size smaller than me, and we don’t even totally align in terms of taste. But I couldn’t stop myself.

As with her other things, my mom was meticulous with her shoes. She has shoes she’s been wearing for 25 years that look essentially un-used. It’s crazy, and I’m the opposite. At any rate, I’m not going to try to explain it, but piling all her shoes into a big shopping bag and lugging them to my house and tromping around in them in my room is something I’m doing these days. Plus, she had some pretty kickass cowboy boots.

I guess don’t totally know what else to do with myself. It’s been a month today. The whole month before she died felt like it was all about waiting. I know she felt that way, too. Waiting to die, waiting to fly to the moon, waiting for obliteration. One of the last things she said—sort of a refrain in her final days—was “Ok, let’s get this show on the road.” There was a constant flurry of activity—but it was all about waiting. Waiting to see what the world would feel like without her.

Now here we are, but I feel like I’m kind of still waiting. Maybe it’s just such a strong thread in the world of cancer-having that it has transferred from her to me. Waiting for results, waiting for news. Waiting for chemo. Waiting to not be able to do anything except stare at the ceiling and eat cheez-its. Waiting for all my hair to fall out again.

I’ve known it was coming, and in the last week I started getting the familiar hair ache. It’s kind of like when you’ve kept your hair in a ponytail for too long—or fallen asleep with it wet and pulled back—and then you go to let it down and it aches like a muscle you didn’t know you had.

You can’t quite nail down what exactly is aching—your scalp, the follicles, the hair itself. It’s just an overall sense of wrongness. I guess I kind of feel that way all over.

And then, this morning, just like that: no more waiting. Only drifts of thin snippets sifting down relentlessly onto my keyboard and desk and bed like snow. Now I just want to tell my mom about it and hear her say, “FUCK THAT.”

I was not brought up Quaker, but Quakerism has always kind of pulled at me and I live in a Quaker town, and lately I have been attending Quaker meeting.

The Quakers call the extended period of silence during worship expectant waiting, and I think that might be why I’m there. It feels like my whole state of being.

It’s not a thinking time or a praying time—it’s a waiting time, a time unattached to outcome, but also inherently hopeful.

I’m drawn to how unresolved it feels, how huge and open-ended and disconnected from logic and sense it can be, in the face of all these eddies of loss I’m swimming in.

Sometimes when I’m sitting in the pew—waiting—I am overtaken by this sense of myself sitting on a train platform—ready for an arrival or a departure—I’m not sure which and it doesn’t matter. I have a giant suitcase of really good shoes that I don’t quite need, and I’m just listening for a hum on the rails.

Death, chemo, and puppy shopping. (by JD . . . What? God, sorry people!)

Written by John.

Nina had her first round of Chemo Part Deux today. It went pretty much as planned. Except before treatment she made sure to ask her doctor if it was OK to go ahead with chemo, because her mother just died a little over a week ago and her husband and both children have come down with hand, foot, and mouth disease.

Maybe I should back that up a little: Nina’s mom, Janet Riggs, died in the middle of the night/morning of August 21. It was the end of a long (almost 9 year) battle with multiple myeloma. She died pretty much on her terms, though,and she was surrounded by family when she died. We held a service last Thursday in Greensboro and we’ll do another for more remote family and friends in Massachusetts this coming Sunday. We all knew it was imminent, but that did not make it one bit easier.

The thing is, having laid her mother to rest, there was literally no rest in store for Nina, because her doctor (have we mentioned that we ALWAYS listen to this doctor?) did indeed think it was a good idea to go ahead with treatment. Much to my chagrin, I wasn’t able to go with Nina this time because of the aforementioned pestilence: both kids and I were home from school/work. So Nina was going it very, very alone. Without her mom for the first time, without a functional husbandesque figure at chemo.

But, tough New England cookie that she is, of course everything went fine.The new chemo drug is heavier duty in terms of the nausea and so they gave her Ativan, along with the other anti-nausea drugs. And she prescribed herself part of a beer when she got home. So she’s sleeping SOUNDLY right now. And won’t get to proofread this. Heh, heh, heh…

Nina’s dad Pete and her brother Charlie picked her up from Duke so she would not have to ride the Ati-Van home. Ha! Get it? Anyhow, point is she got home safely thanks to them.

What I managed to do in Nina’s absence today was mostly look online at adoptable rescue dogs. I know you’re supposed to focus on one breed,so you can say they match your personality and get those cute decals for your car and whatnot, but I just like ALL the rescue organizations. So I may or may not be in the process of adopting and Australian Cattle Dog, Boxer, German Shepherd, Lab, or other sort of mutt in need of a home. We thought in the wake of death and disorder, it might be good to add some vivaciousness and disorder to our lives. Plus Ellie needs a younger sibling. We’ll keep you posted on that, too, as things develop.

Speaking of updates, Nina wanted me to say sorry she has been so long absent from updating this. She’s just been overwhelmed with her mom’s illness, her passing, the funeral, etc. We’ve had lots to think (and write)about, including the legions of people who have been helpful and supportive through all the sundry cancer woes. So thanks to all of you. And hopefully Nina will return to her updating soon and things will return to the level of quality writing you all have come to expect around here.