Even Here, Love Abides (1st Place Creative Nonfiction)

Walking back into the cancer center for the first infusion feels both familiar and surreal. I cannot believe this is happening again; this was always going to happen again. I am picking up right where I left off. My 18-month hiatus should have been permanent. Instead, this cancer has not only returned, but has spread into my brain and lungs. Metastasized. Gone rogue into all the wrong places. 

The first time I walked back into a cancer center as a visitor after Round One of cancer, I had a panic attack. This morning, I feel calmly numb. Shock maybe? Or resignation?  As if this body walking in is not actually mine. There is only one couch in the waiting room downstairs, and one upstairs. All the rest of the seating options are individual chairs. Bryan and I always take the couch if it is open so we can snuggle while we wait. If the couch is occupied and only chairs are available, I slide in first, and Bryan takes what is left of the cushion. I scratch his back while he leans against me and answers the texts and emails that have piled up. He is the gatekeeper of everything right now – phone calls, emails, even letters that arrive by post (after the first one showed up talking about me in the past tense). So much correspondence offering beautiful recaps of my life, which sometimes feel like an uplift and sometimes like a eulogy. Bryan pre-reads everything and passes along what is safe. He deals with what isn’t on his own.

“I think it probably looks funny to people that you’re the one scratching my back, when you are clearly the cancer patient,” he says lightly, as he scrolls through another email. Historically, Bryan’s main unspoken job in any situation is to keep things light.

“Who cares,” I say. “It probably looks even funnier that we’re wedged onto the same chair.”

After I have been called back for the nurse to get a needle into my port and take blood samples, we make our way to the lobby upstairs. The couch is open here, so we sit side-by-side to wait for the nurse to call us in. A lanky man with white hair walks over to the desk and gives them his name. He’s pleasant and patient, and he’s all alone. The upper half of him looks like an engineer, but his jeans and shoes make me think of the kind of ranch that doesn’t require cowboy boots. The combination intrigues me and I have a hard time looking away. He’s built like Bryan, only slightly taller, and I can’t stop myself from turning and saying, “I really want to see you get gangly and white-haired.” My comment startles Bryan, and he has a hard time looking over at me, which makes me realize exactly what I have just said. My throat tightens and tears start to roll down my face.

“Right back at you,” he finally whispers, with a glance over and then back down. He doesn’t look up again. I think about what he might be thinking now, what image might be churning through his mind. I find myself picturing him at seventy, just him without me, and I have to turn and focus my eyes on the light slicing through the windows across the stairwell to keep from completely melting down.

Bryan at seventy without me. Everything about that is wrong. We were supposed to be old together. Our bodies were going to start sliding simultaneously in our 80s or 90s, and then we would take up skydiving and ride everywhere together on one bullet bike, no helmets. I have had one very specific image in my mind of the two of us at seventy, ever since we were in the Snowy Range in Wyoming with the 4^th Year Young Women, backpacking around the glacier lakes.

We helped run the hike for three or four years. Most of the girls had never camped before, let alone spent three days hauling a 40-pound pack across snow and scree and boulder fields. Elevation changes are minimal in that glacier loop, but it is still a tough hike for most of them. One year a girl showed up in flip-flops, so I gave her my lighter pair of hiking shoes for the duration. Some years the rain was torrential and frigid, and some years the lakes were warm enough for a swim. 

My favorite part of every trip was the horse sightings. Because the trail is long and relatively level, we would sporadically see groups out for multi-day pack trips. One year, a group of five or six horses squeezed past us on a narrow part of the trail. In the middle of the group was a woman who looked to be a fit 65 or 70, with long grey braids and chaps, followed by a lanky white-haired man in a flannel shirt and wicked leather boots – our ideal future selves riding right past us. Bryan and I exchanged a look of mutual awareness and excitement.

I immediately started prepping to put the vision in motion down the road. Within a few months, I had traded a friend for a pair of her old chaps, and she threw in spurs as a bonus. I already had a saddle from a former professional jockey, as well as several pairs of hand-me-down riding boots. And I had the waist-length hair and a good-looking lanky man who owns several fantastic flannels. All we needed were a few more years to add grey to our hair, and some horses.

That was the picture spreading across my mind as the man at the desk made his way to a chair to await his appointment. Only now, one side of that future picture was fading out. Bryan was riding past all on his own.

Maybe I will get on a horse again. Maybe, somehow, I will even throw on my chaps and pull off a three-day pack trip. But I will never have long grey braids, not even if I get lucky and stretch this out a few more years. The timing just doesn’t add up. After two years of growing my hair out since the last chemo, I had only recently been able to pull it into a tiny single ponytail. Braids would take half a decade. Long grey braids even longer. And the most optimistic timeframe anyone has offered me is five years. I simply don’t have the time.

And there is one more image of hope and expectation to add to the burn pile in the back of my mind.

Instead of the two of us at seventy together, I have jumped demographics alone. Everyone in this infusion room is old. Everyone is hobbling around with a cane or an oxygen tank, including me. I went from under-fifty-and-fit to aged-and-infirm all with one phone call. I am moving through time at warp speed, and have leapfrogged into the demographic of my parents.

Bryan and I talk about the many differences between cancer last time and cancer this time, especially regarding our revised role as parents. Last time, Bryan said one night, we needed to be strong. This time we need to be soft.

His statement feels like something I have understood before he says it, but somehow having him articulate the shift gives me permission to break open a little further, and to dismiss en masse all of the battle terminology flooding my way. This is a path we are walking, not a battle we are fighting. Those two things call for very different actions and reactions, and I am so grateful Bryan innately understands where we now are and what needs to be done, as well as what needs to be left undone.

I get a package in the mail the next day that includes a box of colored pencils and a coloring book titled something like “Inspired Sayings for the Cancer Survivor.” The Cancer Survivor – wow, that’s a blow. Every page has a battle mantra in bold, and the anonymous note accompanying the gift reads “Keep Fighting!” and “Kick Cancer’s Butt!” We drive home from the mailboxes with the open package in my lap, past our house, and directly to the dumpster, where I drop in the box and its contents.

It turns out that temporary cancer and terminal cancer inspire very different reactions from people. Three years ago, when I was diagnosed with Stage 1 Breast Cancer, we were flooded with cards and gifts featuring a relentless combat theme from people excited to be part of the fight. After all, who doesn’t love to back a winner? And short-term cancer is a winning proposition: where else can you get 97% winning odds and get to claim you “helped beat cancer”? Now that I have become a radically losing proposition, many people seem less eager to engage, other than to offer their condolences and a sporadic meal. A lot of people just don’t know what to say when “Let’s WIN!” is off the table. Their commentary has switched from “You can do it!” to “God can do it!” – with one harsh caveat. 

Apparently, the responsibility for whether God is going to “do it” is not on God’s shoulders, but on mine. The amount of faith that I have in God’s willingness to step in and suspend natural laws will decide whether or not this cancer kills me. The word miracle is thrown around a lot, but mainly in the Big Miracle, Full-Cure, sense. As if to say, either I have faith and will be cured, or I don’t, and I won’t. Either way, the outcome is my responsibility. The phrase Miracles Happen! has begun to grate in the way every sentence that begins with “At least . . …” or “It could be worse . . …” or “Aren’t you grateful that . . …” has for three years now. People insist on offering me variations that mainly boil down to this: Miracles happen to good people with adequate faith. Time will tell if you are one of them.

I find the idea neither helpful nor kind. The miracles our family sees daily have nothing to do with the number of cancer cells in my body, or whether I pray frequently enough. They are more like a soft summer cloudburst, misting us in something hard to define. Somewhere deep inside, I find myself holding tight to an almost absurd trust that God loves me, regardless of whether or not this cancer kills me. I struggle not to reply to the Miracle-cheerleaders with a sweeping history of human suffering, and an outline of the hubris inherent in believing oneself above and beyond it.

Instead, I try to offer half a smile and disengage. After all, there is nothing to be said. I can’t explain how these comments land, any better than I could explain childbirth, even after experiencing it. Without being launched out of Eden oneself, it is impossible to understand this dark and dreary wilderness –, not the brutal suffering, nor the beautiful vistas and minutia. Instead, I try to offer grace for those who can only see things from the vantage point of Eden, the place where good is returned for good and evil for evil. I simultaneously try to offer myself grace in this other place, where faith and hope seem impossibly hard to keep hold of—where God feels impossibly far away—but where love, even from heaven, still abides.