Enduring the Millstone.
LAST WEEK I FELL ILL–Throbbing headaches punctuated by vicious and insidious migraines; hello nausea, my old friend; pelvic pain a touch too close to my once swollen Lymph Nodes igniting paranoia that the beast had returned and things would soon go full-Dantean Ninth Circle. Day-after-day, I probed those troublesome spots in my pelvis, hourly trying to talk myself down; surely, it was just muscle pains from how much I attack hills with the dogs. False alarm: It was just a cold, which in a sense I find funny because I never, ever get colds or the flu, so of course I'd get cancer.
It seemed prudent to take some time to rest, watch Baseball, and let the standard Autumnal Rhinovirus run its course. See, the thing about me is that I'm a stubborn bastard. I'm supposed to be taking things at a measured pace while cancer remains chief amongst my life challenges, yet each day I'm up early, powering through my morning rituals and assailing my daily routine. I simply despise sitting idle, even if I have a perfectly legitimate excuse to do just that. As much as it pains me to say it, such an industrious mindset is part of what put me here. My already fierce work ethic may be undermining me; Igao style whisperings that cancer has robbed me of my best, most productive years.
"Never mind treatment!" he whispers, a hot mist of spittle peppering the edge of my ear, "You must return to work! Make up for lost time! Lost productivity! Lost wealth! Lost value! Men don’t live as long and you’re already half done—you’re fucked!”
A triage nurse reminds me that Chemotherapy compromised my immune system. In my determination to feel normalcy and vigor, I've been taking stupid risks--pushing myself too far every day, cramming goal after goal into every hour and barely sleeping; the rhetorical urgings of my preferred life-coaches bursting in my 3 AM head like depth-charges: "Don't be lazy." "Show up and do the work." "Grind!" All sage advice for the healthy, but perhaps not well suited to someone with cancer.
No one has seen me in a few weeks. I emerge from Salingeresque solitude only to engage in late night chats with my friend Mar, who endures a similar Grenzsituation; life interrupted by major illness; cozy with death. She asks me "How do you feel about your journey? Gearing up for a terminal illness and then pushing through?" The question stopped me in my tracks--such had never been asked of me. Tears welled up from the depths of some untapped reserve; I was relieved to have the phone as a buffer so she couldn't see.
"I don't think of myself as a survivor because I haven't survived it yet," I offered, pacing the room like Monty over Market Garden. "I still have five years to go before I can declare myself cancer free. It could always come back; statistically it will. I feel like I've crawled out of the grave with my bare hands and am breathing fresh air again. Who knows for how long? So how do I feel... What is the feeling that comes up when I step back and take it all in? Bewilderment. Utter bewilderment."
This month is the one-year anniversary of my initial diagnosis with cancer--possibly terminal. I’m still here. I had no reason to expect that I would be here to reflect back on it, let alone write about it. My life is a shadow of what I want it to be at 37, and the spectre of that haunts me, but I’m still here to breathe the cool night air as I walk my dogs. My gait is all On the Waterfront these days, brooding and contemplative. I must look a phantom to the neighbours. Always alone, muttering to the dogs, Under an Indiana hat, 1941 Clifton briar pipe between my teeth—unlit because I was never really a smoker, apart from an all too seldom victory cigar. Still, the pipe helps me think; helps me tap into a mindset that’s enabled me to process the last year and condense it into words. Besides, I think literature should be underwritten with a hint of cavendish. My old friend Billy Shakes once wrote, through the cipher of a rogue turned king, urging his men-at-arms to assault the French gates once more, “imitate the action of the tiger!” I imitate the action of the man of letters I hope to become.
I haven’t touched a professional camera in over a year, something I thought would never happen. I packed most of my camera bodies away, avoid reading the trades dodging even the slightest reminder of life on set 'In all the silent madness of grief,' as Oliver Goldsmith wrote in 1770. Grief as thick as the miasma that has settled over the Valley in Oregon where I live. A freak weather anomaly–stagnant air, ash from two states on fire, trapped in a heavily populated area by a wall of atmospheric high pressure. A macrocosm of my inner musings: How often to leave the house, brave the lung-clogging miasma, and walk the dogs? Buy groceries? Surgical mask covering my face like some Beijing Businessman... Or the end of the world. Free will in a deterministic universe; endless chains of cause and effect. Things will go as they must. A man lives within it and stays alive.