what I didn't say

I talked recently with a friend who’s wife has metastatic cancer. I hadn’t talked with him in awhile, so rang to see how things were going. This past week is pretty good he said, but it’s been a tough time. She had been in the hospital, out of the hospital. The treatment was working, but not completely working. There were side effects from the treatment. Side effects became worse than the cancer. Hospitalizations and home and despair and hope and another deadline, always another deadline. But for now, she was out and about and living life.

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I remember those deadlines and those good days and bad days. How lifetimes could pass in moments, and then how a week could seem like a whole era of life. In a journey like this, time crawls and then leaps and jumps tracks altogether. I remember feeling like we were living in an entirely different parallel universe from the day to day world around us. We were intimate with the essentials of life and death, of the startling confrontation with the biologicalness of our beings. I remember dreading yet another drive to Dana Farber, and yet also being relaxed there because it was the only place where our surroundings reflected back our true life’s work of that time.

My friend’s story sounded so familiar. I remember how lonely the journey could sometimes feel. In a fast paced world of carpools and permission slips, of work deadlines and too many unanswered emails, I remember feeling Other, and yet so earnest in trying to get it right for B and also for everyone outside the bubble. I remember taking conference calls in waiting rooms, looking for cell signal near windows in hospital corridors, juggling the mute button to hide the sound of announcements and food carts.

What I wanted to say to my friend was: I see how uncertain and different this is; how elemental and real. How the pain and tragedy of it are so nuanced and extensive that it’s impossible for anyone else to comprehend. I see how it is not your journey but someone else’s that determines your days and your fate. How you can’t control any decisions, and yet every single one has an all encompassing impact on your life. How in some ways your loved one is more awesome and themselves than ever before, and in other ways, has already gone and has left you alone on the hardest journey you have ever faced. I see the times at night when you awake in a panic to catch your breath and remember again that it is not a dream. I see what it is to float like a dandelion feather as the currents shift around you because there is no anchor; there is no answer or way to do this right; there is no way to ever be enough. There is only the best you can be right in this moment, which sometimes isn’t that great.

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And yet, I said some of that, but not most of it. The depth and dimensions of each cancer battle is a unique tragedy. All of that above is about me and not about him. Instead, I mostly listened and reflected back, feeling each piece of the story, really wanting for him to sense that someone else saw, as much as another person can, what this was for him.

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Hearing his story also made me realize how much our life has changed. We are back to carpools and permission slips and too many unanswered emails; and yet it is different. In many ways life is harder, but in other ways it is better; I know that I am a better person at least. I am still an early sapling of being N without B; still feeding the roots and growing a few sprouted leaves to stretch toward the sun. How many lives we have in one, if we are so lucky.