Chances are good

Striding onto the gym floor this morning-- the only way I can stay fired up-- a too too thin man in a white tee shirt and navy pants, half-smiled at me. I kept going; who is this? When I looked back from my rowing machine, I saw it was someone I know. His wife I had heard, has serious colon cancer, and so I left my station to talk to him, add my concern, offer some support. 'Well, she's better now that pre-op chemo and radiation are done. All of us will probably get cancer, you know, and at least she's very fit. Still, chemo and radiation really did a job on her.' Despite it being a Friday, I worked out hard today, partly because this story stuck, partly because someone our family is very close to, a 34 year-old young woman is struggling with brain cancer. It felt right to get into the pool for laps, where I could suspend myself away from reality, get into a womb state. But in the shower I cried. When I got home, I felt compelled to check out my gym friend's gloomy pronouncement. looked up the odds of getting cancer in one's lifetime. According to the American Cancer Association, based on 2009 statistics, the odds of developing or dying from cancer of any kind are one in two for men (44.81%) one in three for women (%38.1). Those are high odds. No one really talks about this. Instead, we choose to focus on the odds for particular cancers where the odds are much, much, lower. Like 1 in 182 are the odds for women developing brain cancer, 1 in 21 for colon cancer. My mother had colon cancer, and outlived it. Everyone without cancer thinks they can escape it, or beat it, and people who've had cancer would prefer not to talk about it. What can anybody do, beside give up smoking, stay active, and get cancer screens? Genes figure big. When I moved onto the gym area this morning, I think I knew who smiled at me. But facing him meant facing cancer, and I needed a a couple of seconds. I'm still in great denial about the real possibility that I'll get cancer, or Rob will, or someone I'm really close to. But why focus on it now? It feels entirely inadequate and embarrassingly out of scale, but I'm going to send encouragement cards today. One of them, all sparkling and silver is about the beauty of a snowflake, and inside it reads, 'if only time could stand still.' For these two women, I'm sure they would agree.

Things like aging, happiness , wealth are relative notions. “I’m leaving MedFit and going upstairs to the regular gym,” my mother told me recently on Facetime, “because there are too many old, very disabled people where I work out, and they take too long at the machines.” My mother just turned 90. A friend broke in on a conversation several of us were having about new adventures. “Striving? You know at this point in my life, I have no more aspirations. I’ll be perfectly happy if I could just do more of what I like: reading and writing the occasional poem.” This friend is 64. I am driving up-country in Rwanda with a local friend, to deliver his extended family potatoes, rice, and money to pay for their single electric bulb. He’s a project manager for a Swedish telecom firm, rents a modern four-room house on a severe slope reached by a heavily riveted road. “I am lucky to have means, because I can share more,” he confided. He provides tuitions for seven young family members, in addition to his two kids.

My Dad's Quarrel with Dying

I have taken to reading poetry everyday. The hope is that I will rekindle my capacity to invent metaphors. It’s a needed skill for fiction writing, one of my goals this year. And so I chose Wild Metaphors by Edward Hirsch, a book bought in an earlier decade. So far, each poem is about night, and death, too too dark for me right now, as the anniversary of my father’s death looms. But maybe it’s a good thing to read these poems, since the images go straight to my grief, and him. This morning I had a silent weep in the early hours of the morning, as the sun rose, shrugging off its persimmmon coat, then a tangerine one, and now, in its full naked glory, is standing on the horizon saying, ‘Move! Be!’ I cried because of these lines from “Poor Angels:” While the body sits glumly by the window Listening to the clear summons of the dead Transparent as glass, clairvoyant as crystal… Some night it is almost ready to join them. Oh, this is a strained, unlikely tethering, A furious grafting of the quick and the slow: When the soul flies up, the body sinks down And all night-locked in the same cramped room- They go on quarreling, stubborningly threatening To leave each other. I cried because my father, so quick on his mind and so graceful in his body, became trapped by the crippling diseases of the very old, and suffered so. He never gave up the quarrel between life and death, and clung to life, gently scolding us for asking him to sign a living will, a week before he eventually died: “Well, if there’s a chance I’ll make it, I don’t want them to not help me.” We were crowded around him in a wheelchair in his new room at the rehab facility, with the Hospice five-point document on a bedside tray in front of him, trying desperately to give him back the control he desperately wanted. We wanted to save him from being readmitted to the hospital, hoping he could die elsewhere. Who among us would tell him that his life was just about to end?