Happy Fourth

 

Happy fourth day of Christmas! It's also my fourth Christmas season alive on the planet since being diagnosed with incurable cancer. Yay for survivorship! On top of that, it's the first year since that diagnosis that the awful cancer hasn't been actively trying to kill me—my most recent scans show I've had a whole year of disease stability, in this, the most unstable of all years my generation has ever seen. So, ya know, deep, deep gratitude here, because I love a cruel irony that keeps an otherwise healthy, travel-loving cancer patient from running around the globe doing bucket-listy things during said spate of good health. But there's privilege at work. I didn't do anything to deserve being cut such an easy break at such an awful time. 

So here I am, for the moment, well enough to work (yay for editing projects!), and fortunate enough to do that work from home. Also on the list of blessings: there's a stocked pantry and fridge (and liquor cabinet). We got to see the bright--heavy conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter just over the horizon a few days before Christmas. We decorated the bare Bradford Pear trees in the front yard with Christmas ornaments and put up some lights and garland, and it only felt a little forced. I made a wreath and an advent calendar (both of which turned out okay) and tried to learn knitting again, and failed, again. My family gave and received nice holiday gifts (nothing too extravagant, everything thoughtful); we had delish holiday fare on the table, and everyone in my household and extended household has kept well.

Still, the shadows fall deep in the winter darkness, and they chill some part of my soul with fear and anxiety. Two of my best friends risk their lives every day on the COVID frontline, and I worry about them constantly. One of them got the virus and, thankfully, recovered after being pretty damn sick. 

December has some tough anniversaries for me too. Last year in December I lost two friends to cancer, one on December 4 and one on Christmas Day. The year before that, my dad died on December 3. As we approach a new year, I'm reminded that I lost another friend to cancer in this past year, another 2020 shadow. In March of 2020, my city was hit with devastating tornadoes, and on Christmas Day, just four days ago, a man bombed our downtown. 

And I'm still alive.

I'm doing, what they call in Cancerland—or probably in any Gravely Ill Land—survivorship. I'm living, with the disease in the midst of all that is crazy in the world. Phrases like "for now" "at the moment" "stable" "disease in check" pepper my responses to queries about my well-being, underscoring the temporariness of it, the other-shoe-ness, but also calling attention to the fact that I am in the most enviable of positions. I am well. Well enough, anyway. And I have friends and family members who have cancer and/or other severe health problems who are not well enough, who are struggling with treatment decisions, suffering from severe treatment side-effects, struggling to access treatment, friends who are actively dying as I write this.

I don't say that to be grim. We all live in this world, with its shadows and griefs and aching hearts, with lives approaching terminus. I'm not telling anyone something they don't already know. The losses, the anniversaries of the losses, mark the time for us; weirdly, they become steady points of reference in the before and after of this crazy kinked and loopy path we're on. Periodically the iPhone and the social media accounts throw up "memories" (gee thanks) that startle—oh! that picture was taken BEFORE diagnosis; that one was taken the last time I saw Ann, and that one was the last time we were all together. 

The one for this post was taken for The Fourth Day of Christmas in the fourth year of diagnosis. Four calling birds. Three french hens. Two turtle doves. And a partridge in a (Bradford) pear tree. Counting blessings. So many. So very many.

My Little Monster

The artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1755-1851) was a gifted badass. Painter, printmaker, water-colourist, sketcher—he became a student at the prestigious Royal Academy in London when he was just fourteen. He got famous as an artist while he was still a young man, made tons of art and lots of money (with his art, yes, but also by investing in real estate and other schemes). He pissed off his rivals, had a couple of scandalous love affairs, traveled, and sketched, and painted, and traveled, and sketched, and painted some more, then died peacefully, asleep in his own bed. 

Turner was dubbed Prince of the Rocks for the dramatic, dynamic way he painted landscapes (and seascapes). He most certainly captured the sublime in his towering alpine cliffs, or in the towering ocean waves that seem to bound off the canvas. You can practically hear the ocean crashing into the rocks. I can get lost in his paintings for days.

Fishermen at Sea,  by JMW Turner

That's just what I did this past summer, when the Frist Art Museum here in Nashville finally re-opened for socially-distanced, masked patrons. The Turner exhibition had been held over from spring, with many pieces on loan from the Tate in London. I went to see the show twice, and each time I walked each of the galleries twice, doubling back to look again at a favorite, or just to marvel at something I hadn't seen—really seen—the first time through. Honestly, there could never be enough time to truly see everything in all those paintings. 

The exhibit included many famous works—endless mountains and waves, monumental oil paintings, sweet watercolors, open sketchbooks. It was overwhelming. But during both visits my mind fastened on an unfinished painting that looks more like a work of abstract expressionism than it does a Romantic seascape. The canvas is covered in an ethereal, swirling yellow; there's some pink, some grey-blue, some red and orange, and it's just, well, beautifully misty and sunny at once. 

JMW Turner's Sunrise with Sea Monsters

"Turner seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy," wrote his contemporary, John Constable (according to the curator's notes). 

And nowhere was that more evident than in Turner's Sunrise with Sea Monsters, with its yellow-pink-grey-blue-red-orange "tinted steam," and, at the bottom, some dark swirls just beginning to look like fish or whales. Or the face of an underwater dragon. 

No one seems to know for sure what Turner had planned for this canvas. I'm fine with not knowing. I like it the way it is. An unfinished canvas is so very human, a perpetual work in progress.

I also love this painting because, on any given day, who doesn't have some little monster tucked away in the bottom of their psyche? Some kind of worry or long-carried grief. Some obsession. 

Or some physical malady, perhaps, quiescent for now. 

Maybe, like...oh...I dunno...late stage cancer? Because when you live in Cancerland, sometimes even in the most escapist of Romantic painters, you still see the work through the lens of your cancer. Because once you have cancer, or even have had cancer, sometimes it's hard not to make everything a fucking metaphor for your fucking cancer. 

Like maybe you're floating your little boat in the night through the rocks of the Cancerland Sea, grieving yet another recent loss of a lovely friend to the disease, or even the death of an acquaintance, a cancer compadre you "knew" on Facebook (both of which happened in the last few weeks). And you're afraid, very afraid of your little dinghy being smashed to pieces, of the sharks circling. 

But then, you step into another painting, and just like that, it's morning. All around you there's light. The rocks and the monsters are still there, of course. But now so is this swirling, misty yellow-grey-pink-blue-red-orange light, wrapping you in a kind of benediction. Like every sunrise inviting you (and your little monster) toward it, through the rocks and mist, into another imperfect day of an unfinished life in your imperfect, dynamic body. And you are grateful.

The Little Gods of Death

After spending the first two weeks of April in New York, I returned home to a stack of mail, most of which was junk, of course. But, in that pile of credit card offers and sale circulars were two packages. I opened the smaller of the two first to discover a book, of sorts. It was not one for reading, or not so much, but one for writing in. It had pages like one might find in an old-fashioned baby milestone book, with blanks for putting in important information and dates, much as one would enter a baby's height and weight, vaccinations, first steps, first words, first day of school, etc., all the details of baby's first years lovingly curated as a keepsake.

And apparently, the book I received this month is intended as a kind of keepsake too, because it says so in subtitle right there on the cover: The Healing Heart: A Special Family Keepsake, just above an embossed dedication to the memory of my father. Inside are pages upon which I am encouraged to write down the details of his funeral and burial, pages for filling in my dad's ancestry, and a page to list favorite memories. The book, a "gift" from The Heritage Company, also contains many pages of instruction and advice about how to grieve properly. Oh, and tucked handily between the cover and first page is a note listing the "caring friends and neighbors" in my local business community who funded this little project: a bank, a realty company, a water treatment service, a tire shop, a flower shop, and the funeral home. Along with the note is a booklet of small postcard thank you notes that, according to the booklet instructions, I am encouraged to send to those merchants.

I did not know projects like this, a funeral book with local sponsors (and by local, I mean my hometown of Saugerties, not Nashville, where I live now), existed. But I do know it immediately for what it is – a collaboration between the funeral home and The Heritage Company to turn a buck. And I suppose someone else might have opened the package and thought the book a nice thing to have, and perhaps might have been helped by it in their grief. But I find it creepy and a little predatory. I mean, a sponsored funeral keepsake book with accompanying instructions for grieving, along with a command to send thank you notes to said sponsors? I think I'm entitled to be weirded out by this "gift."

The second package, bigger and much heavier than the first, contained a desk clock. Or, to be more precise, it is a clock mounted in a piece of polished wood next to a plaque bearing my name and explaining that the clock was being sent to me upon my retirement in gratitude for my years of service in the classroom. I thought the tradition of clock- or gold-watch-giving on the occasion of

one's retirement had gone the way of the company pension plan, but no. And now here I am with an unasked for reminder of my own mortality. Tick. Tick. Tick. I would have maybe preferred an actual pension. Or if I had to be measuring something, perhaps an astrolabe. And what a strange tradition anyway. Retirement means not having to keep track of time, or at least not so very much. I wonder how many gold retirement watches got a second life in the pawn shop? My husband now and then likes to tell a story about a relative who worked her entire life in a cotton mill in a small West Tennessee factory town. She never missed a day of work, and she was never late. Of course the company gave her a clock in appreciation when she retired, and she, by all accounts, fairly relished the irony of any suggestion that she needed a timepiece.

 I suppose there's more to say here about the macabre serendipity of the book and the clock arriving at my house around the same time, these little gods of death, but I'm not going to read too much into the symbolism. It's enough that I have scans this week, and an appointment to see Dr. Shaw in Boston next week. Even without the funeral book or the retirement clock, I've got plenty to remind me that death is out there angling for me, for all of us. And what do we say to the god of death? Not today.