I Don't Remember

The other day, I carved out an oasis in a week that had far too much in it. I made a date with my friend Karen to meet for an hour and a half in the middle of the afternoon. Karen and I have been friends for 30 years. Our friendship has had many incarnations in that time, but one consistent aspect of our relationship has been playing games—Backgammon, canasta, boggle, all kinds of cards, and our mainstay, Scrabble. We’re well matched which makes for a good contest—our combined total is often 700 or more, and depending on the year and the time, who wins flips one way and the other. We share life over the Scrabble board.

In the years since I became a mother, I’ve never gotten enough Scrabble. It takes an hour to play a game and playing one game just whets your appetite and warms your word brain up so you just have to play two. And if you play two, why not be sated with three? And who has three or four spare hours to play Scrabble with a friend when you have kids and a home and a mother in town, a business to run, classes to prepare? I’ve been Scrabble starved for much of the last 17 years.

So I was delighted on our intergenerational family cruise to be introduced to a new word game called “Quiddler.” It’s played with a tall, beautiful deck of cards with gorgeous letters on them; it’s easily learned and it’s fast; the ten rounds that make up a game can be played in 20 minutes. You don’t have to concentrate either. You can talk about life or watch a movie or be interrupted and the game continues easily. It’s brain candy and it stretches all your neural pathways, demanding flexible thinking as you reform the words into different combinations in your hand.

The Wake-Up Call

 Tonight I went to the last formal meeting of my post-treatment cancer support group. Unfortunately in our case, the term “post-treatment” is a misnomer. Two of our seven members have been re-diagnosed during our year together and one woman died. Tonight I learned that a third member of our group just found out that her cancer had returned and is inoperable.

I walked into tonight’s meeting full of my own concerns about failing memory, post-cancer loss of identity, the lack of compelling passion in my life, how sick I am of taking pills and all my health regimens. I came in tonight aware of slipping back into busyness and too many lists. My life running me instead of me enjoying my life. This week, I've been going down old neural pathways I thought I’d left behind.

When I heard the news, I was immediately jolted out of this preoccupation with myself. My laundry list of concerns instantly seemed petty and insignificant. Someone I cared about was sick and scared and facing cancer again. And I knew damn well that with a slightly different roll of the dice, it could have been me. All of us sitting in that room knew it—it could have been us, it could be us tomorrow. I could be thrown back into the underworld, all of us could, just like that.

In the face of that reality, and in response to the news, my energy immediately dropped from my head, where a little man with a whip had been keeping me on task, into my body, my belly and my heart. I sat inside my breath, grateful to be alive, grateful to be cancer-free (for now, as far as I know), grateful for my life and this moment to live it. I sat there in our circle with compassion for my friend who has left the ranks of the healthy. Again. And for all of us who have crossed over before, in our tender vulnerability.

It’s such a thin line we walk, all of us walk, largely oblivious to our fragility. But tonight I am sitting with it. It makes each moment precious.

Where's the Passion?

Last week, I bought the memoir, Over My Head: A Doctor’s Own Story of Head Injury from the Inside Looking Out, by Claudia Obsorne, for a friend who’d suffered a serious head injury. I thought it might be good for her to read about someone who understood what it was like to suffer a TBI (traumatic brain injury), who could describe what it felt like from the inside.

The book arrived in the mail. I figured I’d glance through it before I wrapped it up and gave it to my friend. I read the first two pages and was totally hooked.

Claudia Osborne was a successful young doctor, with interns following her on rounds, waiting for her to dispense wisdom. She had an excellent job and a huge, promising career ahead of her. Then one day, she was out riding her bike when a 20-year-old driver hit her, flipping her over her handlebars. She landed on her head and was rushed to the hospital, eventually waking to a massive head injury.

Osborne’s book charts her first two years post-injury as she goes through an intensive rehabilitation program. Her task is to come to terms with the extent and nature of her injuries, while developing compensatory strategies so she can succeed at the simplest things. She has to repeatedly learn to put her shoes on after her pants, to shop for dinner in a grocery store without leaving her cart behind. Taking a bus (having the right change, knowing her destination, getting off at the right stop) or even leaving her house without locking her keys inside are major undertakings.

When the Unimpaired Look On With Envy

I came across a poem today, “I Tell You” by Susan Glassmeyer, that described the incredible love a man showed to his wife after her stroke, “one branch of her body a petrified silence.” The poem, written from the point of view of an observer looking on, included the line, “While we the unimpaired looked on with envy…”

I remember this when I was sick. How people liked to come and be with me because I had been lifted out of the mundane world of doing and obligations, schedules and busyness. The trappings of daily life had fallen away and I was living in the underworld, seeing across a vast open plain. Access to that plain only came by passing through the bottleneck of pain and discomfort, isolation and loneliness, nausea and vertigo and taste buds gone bad. Access to that plain came from facing death and opening my hands wide, fingers splayed with lots of space between.  Some people were afraid and stayed away. Others came to visit and sat by my bed. They wanted to drink me in. They wanted to touch the place I was touching and hoped they could do it through me.