Melanoma Musings
I wrote this for a cancer support group, but thought others might relate so sharing here as well.
The exercise was to reflect on a quote and how it relates to our own cancer experience. I chose:
“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.” — Gilda Radner
I didn’t just want a perfect ending; I wanted a perfect everything. Perfect house and life and job and vacations. Perfect body and hair and skin. Perfect relationships and friendships. Perfect marriage and kids and pets. It took a cancer diagnosis to loosen my white-knuckled grip on a bunch of shit that I couldn’t control no matter how tightly I grasped the steering wheel.
If I’m dead, will it matter if my house is clean? Will I care if someone sees the dust under my bed and thinks I was a bad housekeeper? Do I want to be remembered as a good housekeeper or a housekeeper at all? If I reach my goal weight and am sick and tired, will I drag myself out of bed and don a bikini to sit in the shade and revel in my thinness? Is being thin something I want or something I’ve been taught I should aspire to? Is it worthwhile to strive for idealized relationships that exist {mostly} within fictional families when I have a handful of fantastic friends who stand by me through thick and thin? Do I need family members to care when my friends send prayers and good vibes that the nurses will hit the vein on the first try and that I won’t have any side effects?
Having the “worst case scenario” come to fruition a few times via the drug overdose of one brother and the suicide of another, I lived many years not only convinced that terrible things could happen but also preparing for the inevitability of the next terrible thing. My slightly younger self wrote: I feel a compulsion to write about sadness lest it sneak up when I’m not paying attention and steal my joy. I like to keep the darkness out in front of me where I can keep an eye on it. And yet, when my mortality was the “thing” in question, I stopped rehearsing grief. I relinquished the notion that I could predict and control the outcome and found a level of comfort in uncertainty for the first time.
The concept of “all we have is this moment” used to feel too woo-woo even for me, and I love woo-woo. Day by day, however, I realize that no matter how much we try to plan, arrange, control, and foresee, we cannot organize the randomness of the universe according to our preferences, and years of trying to rendered me more anxious than peaceful and more disappointed than certain.
Having just passed the six-month mark of living with a cancer diagnosis, I’m aware of my path diverging again. Cancer wasn’t something I regularly thought about. Reoccurrence is something I’ll never have the luxury not to think about. Life doesn’t have to be either/or; it can be both/and.
My definition of a perfect ending has changed. The idea of perfection, in fact, rarely steals my joy these days. I delight in simplicity. A cozy pair of socks. A candle. The way my little pup is curled up next to me every morning. Twinkling lights. A good cup of coffee. Baby squirrels playing. A new bird song. Noticing wonder instead of expecting tragedy. Am I in the middle or the end or the end of the middle or the beginning of the end? Does it matter? All we really have is this moment.
