Chapter Eleven #2
The world juddered to a halt.
“What?” Maisie, Moth, and I all demanded simultaneously.
“Oh who the hell knows.” Dot flicked a hand like this was an annoyance but nothing more, and a predictable one at that, something you couldn’t really complain about because you should have seen it coming.
“Apparently it’s spread to my bones and that’s why my hip hurts.
No point in replacing it now because soon everything will hurt.
Or, I don’t know, maybe Medicare or Medicrap or whoever the hell don’t expect me to live long enough for it to be worth it?
Mind you, as far as they’re concerned, that was true anyway. ”
Our health insurers felt we were all living not so much on borrowed time as bonus time.
If we were going to insist on going garishly past our expiration dates, it was unrealistic and unreasonable to expect to feel good while doing so.
The polite thing would be to wait it out, this “living” thing, with as few demands as possible then accept with uncomplaining quiet grace when it was over.
“Oh, Dot,” Moth managed. “I’m so sorry, love.”
Maisie looked at the water glass in her hand like she’d forgotten what it was for.
“What can we do to help you?” I asked.
“Nothing.” Dot shrugged. “Evidently I’m beyond help.”
For the help doctors wanted to offer was a cure. If they couldn’t offer that—because what you had was incurable, because what you had was old age—they couldn’t offer anything.
“There are lots of kinds of help,” Moth said. Then, “I’m good at this, remember? Out of practice but skilled.”
“Good at what?” Dot said.
“Caring for a loved one with cancer.”
“I’m not your wife. I’m not even your apparently pregnant girlfriend.”
“Doesn’t mean you’re not a loved one.” His eyes flicked to me.
So I said, “Me too. Out of practice but skilled.” And then I added, because Maisie and Dot didn’t know yet, “I’ve been through this too.”
It was a sort of coming-out every time. I’ve had cancer.
I’m a survivor. It felt like bragging—I survived, so why won’t you?
It felt like guilt—You won’t survive, so why did I?
When I was young, it felt vulgar, speaking aloud something so awful and so remote as far as all the other thirtysomethings I knew were concerned.
And now, now talking about it just felt gauche.
Dot was right: At Vista View, cancer was a diagnosis too common to shock.
We were, all of us, the lucky ones really, and cancer in our seventies and beyond wasn’t tragedy, it was proof.
After you elude everything else that can kill you, cancer is what’s left to do the dirty work.
Whereas I hadn’t been old. I had barely eluded anything yet.
When you tell people you almost died but didn’t, they only hear the didn’t part.
But it was the almost part that almost killed me.
It had been too scary to look back on with relief, even with belief, let alone with gratitude that it was over.
The kids had been so small, and I’d thought I would have to leave them, that they would have to grow up without me.
I’d thought I’d have to watch them watch me die. And it had been unbearable.
Max was an infant. At first that seemed to be the problem.
Constant exhaustion is something you see a doctor about unless you have a baby.
When I asked later, they said tiredness wasn’t an early sign of breast cancer, that it wasn’t my fault I didn’t catch it as early as I could have.
But I’d known something was wrong and told myself it was just new-baby fog.
The news was initially bleak. An unspeakable five-year survival rate.
(Literally unspeakable. When they told us, Roger and I looked at each other and came silently and at once to hollowed-out, horror-struck agreement never to say it out loud to anyone.) There was radiation.
Chemotherapy. Terrible drugs. Roger rose to the occasion—doctors’ appointments and solo parenting and hospital visits and waiting on me—but it broke him. It broke us. I got better. We did not.
I got better, but only in most ways. I got better physically.
I got over the fear eventually and the trauma of the treatment and the trauma I’d watched my children absorb.
It stood me in good stead now. I had lived to old age, and while I was not without complaints, they were tempered by the fact that I was here to experience them.
Everyone says old age is a privilege, but I knew it in my bones.
Everyone fears death, but I had confronted that already.
It didn’t mean it went away. But at least it was familiar.
In other ways, though, it was the sort of thing you never got over.
And it was a conversation stopper, no question.
But Dot said, “I mean, sure. Who hasn’t?”
“Hasn’t what?”
“Been through it. Scary diagnoses. Scary prognoses. Tests that yield more questions than answers and more shitty answers than helpful ones.”
“There’s shitty,” I said, “and then there’s cancer.”
“These are the times that try men’s souls.
And I’m not even a man.” She paused then added, “But speaking of men, I’ve decided not to tell Petey.
” I remembered her saying, the night we met, that she’d gotten pregnant slow dancing at her senior prom.
This had struck me as unlikely, but clearly I wasn’t one to talk.
“He’s all the way in California. He has his own family. He doesn’t need this.”
“You’re his own family,” Maisie said miserably.
“And you’re mine,” Dot said. “All of you.” We couldn’t argue with that. “One of these days, you get something you won’t live through. Happens to the best of us.” She smiled, a little sadly, but not that sadly. “And, come to think of it, the worst.”