Now You Don't

I tried it: using this blog as a log. A log of chemo symptoms. It looked productive before I got it onto the page. It could have been brilliant. Not anything like those other logs of chemo symptoms you can read in blogland. How not like them? My log would not sound like whining. It would not read as a self absorbed list of woes. Alright, not all of them are as tedious as they sound.
But mine was. Those of you who tuned in were treated to several paragraphs of tics, pains, insomnias, shudders, spasms and general clutching. It could have been literature. It could have been made into a movie (after my graceful--and inspiring--departure.)
But it wasn't and it won't be. I deleted it tonight. Goodbye log of horrors.
Tomorrow's my third week of the third cycle. How goes it? Everyone wants to know.
So go get your own chemo.

Up All Night

We left Seattle as the late summer sun was setting: a car filled with three women and our stuff, heading east into the darkening Cascades. Trading off driving, eating, gossiping, rehearsing the upcoming events, the drive to Richland went quickly. The moon rose, turning the Columbia River into a bright sash across a dull landscape. It must have been having an effect on the local police that night, as they stopped us twice before we arrived at the agreed-upon meeting spot.

The first stop was for a taillight malfunction. The second was to let us know our car was over-packed, limiting our visibility, especially that one sign “NO MORE NUKES,” that we'd positioned so that it was readable through the back window. We congratulated ourselves on making them nervous, figuring they were expecting an influx of troublesome activists for the upcoming weekend of demonstrations at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The next day was the 41^st anniversary of the dropping of the “Fat Man” nuclear weapon on Nagasaki, Japan. The plutonium that gave the bomb its killing power had been produced here. By the time everyone arrived at the sprawling ranch house on the edge of town, there were five women and five men willing to go over the fence, and more than a dozen who would work support.

We talked late into the night, reviewing non-violent tactics and principles of passive resistance; reassuring ourselves about rattlesnakes, scorpions, barbed wire, land mines, spooked armed guards, and ground contamination. Even the officials at Hanford didn't know where all of their toxic wastes had been buried over the years and recently, unmarked dump-sites had been found leaking into the ground water. I remember a troubled hour or two on a mattress in a child's room before whispers pulled us together in the driveway. We divided up by gender into the two cars that would drop us at the spots we'd marked on our maps.

It was 3 a.m. on August 9, when we stepped out of the idling cars and ran to the fences, lifting wires to help each other through. We turned and watched the cars drive off down the road where they would drop the men. Sleep-deprived and intoxicated by the warm desert night air we walked slowly, whispering jokes, reassurances, prayers and songs

The big moon was high, but what I remember mostly of that night was how dark it was. I remember using my skin more than my eyes to guide me and my friends across the uncertain landscape. I was a small animal, not thinking about where I was or what I was doing. Acutely aware of the smells, the sounds of the four other women, breathing, whispering, giggling, I was brave and whole. We 'd talked for weeks about what we were doing there, why, what it meant to us: raising awareness about the danger of keeping Hanford in operation, remembering Nagasaki, reminding ourselves that the land, though saturated with radioactive waste, was like us. We talked a lot those days about how poisoned we ourselves felt, twisted and contorted by social pressures, fucked up by our families, confounded by the lies we'd been told about the history of our nation. But that night, the poisoned, imprisoned, toxic land, was, like us, whole, impossible to defile.

For me, up until that night, it had been a year of finding footing on new ground. It was the year I came out to my mother, the year I refused to let my father bully me any more, the year I resisted everything that felt false: fashion, sexual mores, police, authority, social expectations. It was the year I was locked up, knocked down, choked by police, threatened by soldiers, confronted by machine guns for sitting in the middle of a road, singing. And that night, for the first time, I felt innocent. Out in the desert, in the middle of the night, I felt the world changing all on its own, without my slogans, without my signs, without my resistance.

A "Cup of Comfort" Reject

It's been awhile, I know. I'm not even ready to say "I'm baaaaack!!" because what if I'm not. I can't really account for the past six months' absence except to offer up this essay, which I wrote when I was first diagnosed, but then cleaned up for a contest "How Breast Cancer Changed my Life" sponsored by Redbook magazine. The first prize was $5,000 which I spent all over the shopping channel in my head before receiving the rejection email last month. I cried. No kitchen remodel. No Rancho La Puerta. No long trip to Greece and Spain. No cashing in on hardship.
So fuck 'em. Here's the first prize winner of the "Cancer Sucks and Life's Good" contest. Whoohooo!! I can't believe I won!!! Wait until my friends find out!!!

Flavors of Life

The week I was diagnosed, at age 46, with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer, I did not sleep. Through long numb nights, I sat up with my computer, clicking from breastcancer.org to amazon.com., from research to shopping. I quickly spent $135.00 on cookbooks, and almost bought a slightly used Kitchen Aid, which I didn't have room for in my tiny apartment kitchen. I didn't spend much money on food during those early days of digesting difficult news. My appetite was only for the shiny colored pictures in my new cookbooks.

As days passed, I escaped the onslaught of test results, phone calls and fear, with fantasies of dinner parties, potlucks and casual gatherings with my now-desperately-treasured friends. In my mind, I gathered them around me and fed them triple layer coconut cakes, cream puffs, pies made of the freshest fruits of the season, platters of pasta, grilled rock fish, and fresh cheese. There at those imaginary tables I found immeasurable comfort. There I briefly forgot the new reality of a besieged digestive system: nausea, gas, constipation, heartburn, and pressure from friends and doctors to keep my weight up.

Food has always been the chewy center of my world. Some people, when faced with trauma, think about god or sex or shopping. I remember reading once that the root of the word “God” was the same as the root of the word “good.” Food is not my god, but it is most often through food-- cooking it, eating it, serving it, looking at it, writing about it, reading about it-- that I find divine comfort. Food is life, and faced with death, my response has been to have a dinner party.

In my lifetime, I’ve been anorexic, bulimic, skinny, ashamed-to-be-fat, proud-to-be-fat, vegetarian, vegan (for about two weeks, during which I dreamt every night about cheese) and omnivorous. I started cooking when I was ten. With the help of a Betty Crocker cookbook, I made family meals of meatloaf, tuna biscuit braid, stuffed zucchini. At 16, I started reading my way through the cookbook shelf in my local library.

By the time I was 20, I was married, with a subscription to Gourmet magazine, a Kitchenaide, a deep fat fryer,yogurt maker, and a raging case of bulimia.. I was a miserable little wife who couldn't keep my food down. I escaped into the otherworlds of James Beard, Julia Child and MFK Fisher. I was so weak, I couldn't imagine making any of the foods I was reading about: french puff pastry, standing rib roasts, curried lamb. For the first (and only) year of that marriage, I spent long, lonely afternoons on the couch reading recipes and fantasizing myself into satiation. The meals I cooked alone were eaten, ultimately, by one person: my equally miserable husband.

Almost thirty years later, on the eve of my isolation-shattering diagnosis, my relationship with food had already begun to change. As a staff writer for the local newspaper, my favorite thing to write about was food: new cookbooks, farmers markets, local cooks and eaters. I was building up the confidence to branch out, gathering email addresses of food editors at other publications. I could imagine making a life writing about food.

And then life as I imagined it turned upside down, and with it, my stomach.

I could no longer ignore the piercing breast pain that had been intensifying for several months. One June afternoon I got up from my typewriter and walked two blocks to my doctor's office. A week later, a cascade of shocking revelations washed everything away. It was in one breast. Then it was in both. Then, a PET scan revealed a network of cancer threading through my bones, my lungs, and liver. I started chemo right away. I lost my hair and my appetite.

The ranks of friends and family quickly gathered around me. There was so much they couldn't do, but what they could do was feed me. First, they created a calendar of meals where people could sign up to bring me food. It was a complex work of organization and it bore witness to the generosity of friends, co-workers and a few strangers. But there was a problem. Every time an eager enlistee called about bringing food, I didn’t want it. Some days it was because I was feeling okay and wanted to do my own cooking. Other days I was feeling so bad I didn't want anything to eat. I lived alone. Who else was going to eat it. Then there were the days when someone who wasn't even on the list had already dropped off a pot of chicken soup.

It wasn't the first time I resisted food, especially food that someone had lovingly cooked for me. What a close friend noticed before I did was that nobody could get it right. And I didn't really even know what right would look like. I knew I wasn't the only sick person to go stubborn about food. I remembered a few who had gone before me.

They were the residents of the first hospice for people with AIDS in Washington State. I worked there for four years in the 80s, taking care of sick people – mostly gay men - with end-stage disease: Kaposi sarcoma, pneumonia, dementia, brain tumors, high fevers, and wasting. One of my many jobs was cooking. Their job, it seemed, was to reject my cooking. It wasn't hot enough, not salty enough, too salty, not what they'd imagined, not what their mother made. It was not unusual for a resident to take one bite and refuse the rest, spit it out, tell me exactly what I had done wrong and how it should properly be prepared, or dump it in the trash can. It was not what they wanted. Nobody could get it right.

These days, the cancer is semi-stable and I have a great appetite. Everything sounds good to me. But when I sit down to eat, I quickly lose momentum. A few bites and I'm done. But I stay at the table, absorbing the pleasure I see on the faces of those eating around me. I rarely eat alone anymore. Lately, I've been enjoying food cooked by people who love me, savoring their generosity. I've discovered that, for me, food is just one way that life concentrates itself. It is the way I have found to give my life to those I love.

I suspect that when the time comes that I can no longer eat anything, I will find a way to food. I can imagine my death bed surrounded by baskets of nectarines, blackberries, freshly baked sourdough bread. My friends are there with their big appetites. They are perched on chairs, floors, bed and cushions, holding plates overflowing with the flavors of life.