On and From This Mortal Coil

My mom told me she bought the book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir of the year that her husband died and her adult daughter lay in a coma, about to die.

I’m not sure how to take that information. But my mom said she wanted to see how someone could turn that kind of grief into wisdom, or something that didn’t drown her, or at least something that could be spun into art, like a strand from Rumpelstiltskin. 

When I was 19, I had a breakup that shattered me. I had made a very drunken, public display of humiliation of both myself and my boyfriend that alienated a large group of friends and caused me and everyone else, including my suddenly-ex-boyfriend, to sort of revile me.

I spent a week without eating solid food, drinking only Dr. Pepper and smoking only Marlboro Reds (his brand) on the front stoop of the house my parents still shared. I was shell-shocked. I was numb, demoralized, heart-broken. I began to compose suicide notes on the computer (why not hand-written, I don’t know).

Then, my brother, Ben, said something very important to me: “I don’t want to be the kid in school whose sister killed herself.”

It was what I needed to hear. I got it. I got the isolation and selfishness of suicide. The clawing temptations to end something that begins something in the lives of everyone else you know. I couldn’t do that to him. I got it; and it saved my life. 

In the fourth year, the senior year of college, when all my classmates and roommates where heading toward graduation, and I was heading to the bar and failing out, I was also heading toward the prospect of returning to the home my dad now occupied as a divorced man. He and I had a tumultuous relationship at the time (not unheard of for us), and in retrospect, I think part of my self-destruction and manic partying/numbing was to keep me from thinking about moving back to that house with a man I was afraid of. Part of it, perhaps, was to even make things so chaotic that I couldn’t be allowed back to the house – that wherever I ended up would be safer than with him.

That place ended up being a psych ward for two months. Which, … was not pleasant, but kept me from him. And, in the end helped me to straighten out enough to pull some wits together to be able to move back in with him and my brother at the end of that summer my friends were celebrating their new adult freedom.

As I consider the closing of this cancer process, I have been nudged by this memory more than once. I have a fear of repeating the process of that destruction – knowing, as I do, that I will be returning to a job that makes me feel small, and, I fear, to the general pall of lostness and crippled joy.

This fear, these feelings of fear that I will repeat some self-destruction in order to avoid that which I label as diminishing, crushing, hopeless (as with returning home 10 years ago), has dissipated a little in the few days since it's appeared, but I acknowledge it, and tousle it around. Is this why I don’t want to do round 5 of chemo? Or why I stopped my antibiotics last week, under the reasoning that they were affecting my liver and causing me to sleep 14 hours a day?

The other day, I used a tool a therapist taught me in order to gauge my decision to do the fifth round or not. I asked my deepest self, on a scale of one to ten, how much did I internally support going for the 5^th round? The answer was 5; 5 of ten. Not high. But, then I asked the converse. How much did I internally support the decision of not doing the 5^th round? Answer, 2. Even less.

So, no. I don’t want to do this round -- Who would? – but I believe in that path more than I believe in not doing it.

I’m going to the doctor today to look at my eye again, and I’m going to have to fess up to having stopped the antibiotics (though, by the way, I’ve had more energy since I stopped them…even though the eye really hasn't improved). I’m scared that because of the chastisement my oncologist gave me when I left the hospital during the eye-infection debacle -- about playing it straight, and following doctors’ orders -- she’s going to revoke my 5^th round privilege, as apparently there were other doctors on the Chemo Approval Board who thought that if I was being such a petulant patient, then maybe I shouldn’t have it … but, she told me pointedly, she'd stood up for me, so, basically, play nice, and don’t let her down or make her eat her words.

Great. Now I have your reputation to worry about? Or to worry about not getting treatment that I need because I fucked with treatment I didn’t know I needed?

There’s a lot of chatter here. A lot of brain chaos, and a lot of crying lately. But, in the end, it’s all a choice. Either I am choosing to make decisions that support living, or I’m not. I can make those decisions no matter what job I hold. And I can hold the talisman of my brother’s brave words to me as a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to endure one more antibiotic or round of chemo, to make one more phone call, to wash one more dish, to write one more gratitude list, to craft one more blog – because I still don’t want to be that girl.

And, god willing, I’ll never have to be.