Still Here

Descending escalators scare me. I am fine going up but not down. Add a suitcase in the airport or train station to the mix and forget about it. There is an unsureness in my legs, in my sense of balance which I first noticed about five years ago while hiking in Sedona. Navigating down Bell Rock, I turned to my husband. “I’m going to fall.” We eased our way down the mesa, with me clinging to his arm. Although in my early fifties and in relatively good physical shape, I felt ancient. My doctors think it is a lingering side effect of two rounds of chemotherapy, undergone nine years ago. “Go to the gym. Practice yoga.” I do both. It helps. Two weeks ago, alone in the flurry of Penn Station, I forced myself to ride the escalator down down down to the train platform. They still scare me, but it’s better.

A diagnosis of stage four cancer informs everything in your life thereafter. All of who and what I am today stems from that moment when I awakened to a wall of white coats telling me there was a polyp so large they couldn’t maneuver the scope around it.  After a tumultuous and terrifying year of monthly doctor visits and invasive medical treatment, there was and is now a certain clarity and acceptance of the importance of time. I know myself better. I listen to my soul, to my heart, to my now smaller gut. Not enjoying the book I’m reading? I put it down. Once, I would have never even thought of it; everything that’s begun must be finished. Instilled into my being from the time when I was learning to play Monopoly with my stepfather and sister. I would get bored, lose interest. “You must finish,” Pop insisted, after claiming the roadster as his board token and appointing himself banker. While cleaning out the house after his funeral, I came across the battered, taped up boxes of Monopoly, checkers, and backgammon shoved onto the back shelf of the front hall closet. Shaken, dust flew everywhere rattling the game pieces and shards of long ago memories.

I’ve adjusted my friends list. “You go to Italy every year? Must be nice,” a former friend said sarcastically. “It is,” I told her. Negative energy? Nope. Don’t have the time. Another who claims she wants to meet for drinks to catch up, to see how the kids are. No, she doesn’t. She wants to hear about mine so that she can feel better about hers. Clarity. It wasn’t always there.

Three years ago, we bought a mess of an antique house built in 1912. Although someone had recently lived there, it was uninhabitable. The three porches were falling off, the walls and floors were filthy, windows broken and shattered. I didn’t dare open the oven or any of the kitchen cabinets. It would have to be gutted to its studs and rebuilt, new wiring, plumbing and heating system. We knew we wanted it immediately. “You’re crazy,” friends said. “It’ll be an adventure,” I told them.  

We had lived in the same house, raising three children, for twenty three years. Two had moved out and the youngest was finishing up college. Now out of the medical fog, a sense of complacency had set in, one of stasis, replacing my previous feeling of impending catastrophe. No one gets everything she wants. But I seemed to. I thought I would die at the age of forty nine from stage four colon cancer and I’m still here. The stuff I can control about my life, I do, and I don’t worry about what I can’t control. Most of the time. Unless it’s about one of my kids. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen. Really bad. I can’t be this lucky. No one is.

Change is good. I didn’t always feel this way. Change represents life, joy, presence, challenge. Although I know anything can happen, I’m not prepared for everything that does happen.

Packing up a lifetime, storing away photos, Legos, baseball cards, art projects means I’m still here. Moving from a comfortable, suburban house surrounded by neighbors I’ve known for years, becomes a necessary next step. Maybe you should consider a less complicated move, one that will make your life simpler, I heard again and again. Why? Although sometimes wobbly descending the escalator, I’m still here.

I sit at my desk in my renovated house in a close-to-Boston neighborhood very different from my old one, trying to write, distracted by crossword puzzles and spider solitaire. I swivel in my chair at 10:30am when my neighbor Dan cracks a Bud Light on his back porch and wonder if that is the first one of the day. During an intense snowstorm, I watch the 75 year old Gordon from across the street maneuver the snowblower along his sidewalk, then gallantly cross over and clear the snow from ours.  “No big deal,” he tells me. I grab my shovel and we clear the the front steps of both houses together.

I’m cooking and need a lemon or capers or garlic, so I pick up my wallet and walk two blocks to the store. We walk to restaurants, coffee shops, ice cream stands. Our kids, who don’t own cars, can get to us more easily since we are a block away from the bus stop. The bustle of people on the sidewalks, overheard conversations, babies in strollers, barking dogs. Life.

The question “What do you do?” once made me fumble and sputter and reach for an answer, and I would describe what I used to do. I used to be in marketing. I used to write a newspaper column. I used to run a non-profit. Then, clarity descends.

I have no one, singular identity. I now interpret What do you do? literally. I write. I read a lot. I study Italian. I travel. I try to be a good wife, mother, daughter, friend. “So, basically, you do whatever you want,” a new friend commented. Yes. Yes, I do.

I’m lucky. I listened as a friend pondered how much we make our own luck and how much we are, well, randomly lucky. Thinking it’s more the latter than the former. At least those are my thoughts in this lucky place, in this lucky time.