Following up, and a short remembrance

So first of all, thank you so much to those of you who read my last post. I am grateful for your time and encouragement and for middle age--I know life is more than (my) heartbreak.

Second, a short story from a few years and days ago. When I started my cancer treatment I picked MU's hospital system on the theory (please don't laugh) that I would be able to walk out of the infusion clinic and back across campus to my library for work, about a 15 minute brisk walk. I was told that the side effects of chemo don't kick in until a day or so after infusion, and I thought that since I had no sick leave built up at my new job, I could work until I started to feel really terrible.

The thing that I didn't realize before my treatment is that the psychological effects of sitting around getting poisoned infused are immediate. Chemotherapy is emotionally exhausting; just imagine a salon appointment where you have to make conversation with the person who washes your hair, cuts your hair, colors your hair, waxes whatever you get waxed, and gives you a manicure--and you are having all of these things done in the same appointment, so you need to bring lunch, AND all of those things are done by a different person, more or less. And the more times you go and it builds up in your body the worse the side effects will be, and infusion appointments tend to be quite long, so there's plenty of time to worry about what those side effects might be. So while work might have been a distraction from chemo, I never really felt up to it on infusion days. Side effects are insidious and far-reaching, something I remembered again on Monday when my former colleague and brilliant essayist William Bradley died from cancer that was likely a side effect of treatment he had had nearly twenty years before for Hodgkins' Disease.

If you came to this blog from my Facebook, then you might have been a friend of William's too, and you know how much he adored his wife. Man, he loved Emily. And Emily loved him. I remember when they giggled together in William's cubicle in the basement of  Tate Hall, where graduate and adjunct instructors worked, and how Emily laughed when Bill told her, "You're the prettiest girlfriend I've ever had." (Of course she was.) They were so funny and sweet and devoted. They adopted two stray kittens and they went to their first jobs together and when Bill was let go from that job, Emily left too. When it looked like he wasn't going to be able to get a full-time academic job near Emily, William chose to forgo accepting a position far from her and instead moved to Tiffin, Ohio, where they were together all the time until he died. It is fiercely, horribly, tragically unjust that their amazing partnership has now been dissolved or transfigured, whichever you prefer, by death.

William was also a great friend, even to those he didn't know well but who were members of the Cancer Treatment Club. He was so very kind to me during my own treatment even though he lived always with the possibility of recurrence, and his questions about how I was doing came both from his own experience and innate empathy. If he asked me how I was doing, he didn't do it in a way that implied surprise that I was still alive. He simply cared. William was just a damn good person.

But the the miracle and cruelty of most cancer treatment at this point in medical history is that we can successfully kill cancer cells sometimes, but that the process doesn't always succeed immediately; or as in William's case, treatment either causes or doesn't prevent recurrence further down the road. Jamie & I were talking about William's death, because I was crying about him and thinking about Emily too. He asked, "Why did you go through all that if you thought it would kill you, Mom?" and I answered, "because the alternative was immediate death." He thought about that, and added, "Besides, you had a little boy to think about, and a family. Four sisters, and you didn't want there to be just four sisters, not five." (Sorry, Mom & Dad and cousins and nieces and nephews; he forgot about you guys.)

That's right. You do want to live for yourself, but also for those who love you, as long as you can. William lived longer than he was expected to after his initial treatment, but he also lived lovingly and joyously and fully. It's a cliche but his life inspired me to try to live more fully and fearlessly, and that's just what I intend to do. I will enjoy my little boy and I hope to see him grow up and become an independent adult. I will enjoy being one of five sisters. And that's what I can do.