Fear, Karma

I read an essay by David Rakoff this week called, "Another Shoe," about his second go-round with cancer at 49. The first time was lymphoma in his 20s, and this time it is a tumor in his shoulder, probably caused by the radiation he had the first time around. This cancer threatens to cause the removal of his entire left arm, which, as you can imagine, would be daunting for anyone but especially so for a writer.  However, he manages to write about it all with a searing honesty and humor I'd not really seen before.  At the end of it, he intimates that hasn't really learned anything from the whole ordeal per se, aside from extreme gratitude for not losing his arm, and deciding to live without letting the fear of death swallow him whole.  He also observes that we all are dealt a fair amount of shit in life, so basically, we all need to suck it up and get back to the business of grocery shopping, getting our hair cut, paying parking tickets, etc., because life continues on, whether or not we are participating.

I wanted to steal everything about this essay, down to how he nails "the depressing, neutral almond color of all aids designed to help the infirm and disabled," to his wider insights about the whole process of dealing with cancer. I can especially relate to that depressing neutral almond color theory after spending an afternoon in a store designed exclusively to sell these apparatuses. Infirms and their caretakers hobbled around the place as I searched for a new arm sling for Ma.  It was a horror show, plain and simple, blandly named The Beaverton Pharmacy.  If you never know what a compression sock or a commode look like in your lifetime, then you are a lucky person.  Ditto the large woman with bulging varicose veins who was probably shopping for a compression sock, who sat on said commode and threatened to use it, given that a clerk would not let her use the store bathroom. (You cater to the old and the weak and you don't have a public bathroom? Really?)

At its core, his essay made me think so much about my and my mom's journey through this, coupled with our mutual desire to understand it from a global perspective.  The bitch of it is, no matter our mutual love of processing and dissecting and analyzing, not to mention how many years she has spent studying the dying process on a spiritual level and helping people die on a physical one, most days, we are left with no greater understanding as to why. "Karma," is what she usually comes up with and she means this not only for this lifetime, but for a plane of past lives in a realm of space and time none of us really understand. She also ascribes to the idea that for whatever myriad reasons, her soul chose this particular set of circumstances for this lifetime. It's all incredibly difficult for me to swallow on any plane but I try to as much as I can, given my respect for her beliefs and the ways in which they have so influenced my own.

Speaking of karma, I made a hugely false assumption about the whole theory after my sister survived a cancer she shouldn't have six years ago -- I took it for granted that now, my family would be safe.  Ha! We had survived our brush with death and made it through.  Now, our lives would be normal, easier.  I can't say if I assumed this on a conscious level, but my naivete was quickly undone when her remission nearly equaled the destruction of our relationship; my skull was later practically crushed by the utter stupidity of this assumption when Ma was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

On a smaller scale, I did another sort of karma math recently, when I applied for the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. (An incredible long shot to be sure, 5 fiction and 5 poetry fellows picked out of a pool of 2,000 or so). There was a piece of me that thought, ok,  I've put my life on hold twice in the last six years in order to help take care of my family, so, now, obviously, I will be given this huge gift of time and funding to really start writing again and as a bonus, I will instantly know what I am going to be doing for the next two years, and as an added side effect I will leave in the fall, which will eliminate the difficult decision of when to leave Ma and viola, life will be easier! Because why? Because I've earned it.

I didn't get the fellowship, informed as I was by a form email that read, "Dear Mims" and went on re: my contribution to an overwhelming talented writing pool, and please, do apply next year, as they delight in seeing the progress of their applicants. Oh, screw you, is what I mainly thought, and then, I'm screwed, because now I'm going to really face how to continue do this writing thing without the safety net of funding and a chunk of time, and without the safety net that has paid the bills lo these last 10 years: waiting tables. (I have decided that after 20 years on and off in the trade, when I move to Northern California, that will be the end of my illustrious serving career. Come hell or high water, I'm determined to use my brain and my two degrees to make a living from here on out.)  Scary stuff, although now that I've had a few days to settle into that reality, I'm miraculously ok with it. Still scared, however, in terms of what the future holds for my career. When I am calm enough I can tell myself it's just the unknown, and in the last few years, I've had to plunge headlong into extreme versions of it, usually kicking and screaming. At least this time there will be some free will involved, and some choice about the next steps in my life.

I guess my main point here is that I have to choose every day to not let the fear of my uncertain future swallow me whole, especially in terms in how I will cope when Ma really does go. As Rakoff so eloquently points out, there's not really a whole hell of a lot else we can do. Sometimes, I don't know why I'm not living in terror of cancer, given that all my immediate family members have had some form of it; some days I think this gruesome statistic somehow implies that I won't get it, simply because they all have. I can honestly say that other than a few moments waiting for my mammogram results last fall, it's really never occurred to me. This is mainly because it would be such a massive waste of time for me to worry in that way, and I guess that theory comes all the way back around to karma.  As Ma commented early on in all of this, her 40 years of yoga, 20 years of vegetarianism, and 30 years of not drinking or smoking was, "Bullshit, really." What happens is supposed to happen, that is the part of life we can't control. We can only control our response when "it" does happen, and watching her throughout her life, and up close these past (almost) two years, her response to this diagnosis has been to live, love and do her best to give up her own worry-wart tendencies. She is right here, right now, nearly all the time, and as a result, her moments of suffering are brief.

I'm striving to live that way, and the other day I was struck anew by how most people don't.  I was grocery shopping, and the checker was laughing about how much kelp and iodine he'd sold that day.

"Why are people buying that?" I asked.

"To save them from radiation poisoning," he said. "From Japan. I mean, I was in New York for 9/11, and after people freaking out and duct-taping their windows, I'm just so over the panic."

"No shit," I said. "On 9/11 I was living in LA and my boyfriend at the time wanted to buy gas masks, and I said, 'Fine, but you know you'll be in spin class or something without your gas mask when the bomb hits.'"

I'm sure I said this much less cleverly at the time, but I did get a good laugh out of the retelling. But kelp and iodine? That's going to be the thing that saves you from this mess of a world?  Not that anyone had even said we were at risk, 5,000 miles away from real life-threatening devastation. I guess all I know at this point is this: you cannot prepare for the earthquake, the tsunami, the terrorists, the diagnosis, the radioactive fallout or the loss. But if you somehow manage to survive it, you can continue to live.