Daddy's Girls - 1961

I have three pair of pants that I can comfortably wear right now, and in a pocket of each is a cloth handkerchief.

The Mark of Jill.

My mother, Jill Burger, was ready when she arrived. Mom's got a DVD player in her car, wears cross-trainers on her feet and has finally shifted from getting her hair done at the 'salon' rather than the 'beauty shop.' I tell you this so that you will understand that my 72-year-old mother is about as progressive as she needs to be. However, some old habits die hard. When it comes to catching tears, Mom still prefers a dainty square of embroidered cotton to a paper tissue.

And she came well prepared, loaded up on hankies. And tears.

We cried together. I find myself in tears several times a day right now. I have never been much of a weepist; maybe that's why it wears me out. I am astonished at how my eyes seem to be able to endlessly re-fill, like a hole dug at the edge of the shore that the water will always seep into. I cry from fear, from confusion, from feeling unfamiliar in my body. From mourning my old life and old body that I failed to adequately appreciate. Surely some of the medication that I've been taking contributes to my emotional upheaval as well.

Watching my parents watch me struggle also makes me cry. As a parent, I can understand how heartbreaking it must be for them to watch their daughter in pain. I try not to feel guilty about being the source of their sorrow. Midway into a conversation, my father's voice goes all hoarse and he can't look at me. We stare at our feet and silently gulp and swallow, both trying to be brave for the other.

Mom and Dad left yesterday. They, along with my sister and her son, have been here from out-of-state. They all arrived the day after I got home from the hospital following surgery.
This family visit was planned long before I had even scheduled The Mammogram That Changed Everything. They arrived to watch my lovely and talented daughter (the five footer) graduate from high school.

The graduation and cancer surgery coming in tandem reinforces my long held belief that Life Is A Bowl Of Succotash. Tastes and textures always come in mixed up quantities. I've experienced so many raw emotions in the past few weeks, but have also had the soaring pride as I thought of my daughter's graduation. She marched for her diploma two days after I got out of the hospital. As she took this step into her future, I was there in spirit, cheering her on. I was happy that she had so many other proud family members preesent to applaud her accomplishment.
Prepapring for this event, we have been putting together the requisite Picture Boards, with a photograph of every signficant event of her life. How fast it goes, I kept thinking, as I thumbed through baby faces and school portraits and help her select the snap shots that are the freeze frames of her life.

Going through the albums, I stumbled into pictures of my own high school graduation. I was 17 in 1974; my parents, Al and Jill Burger, were 38 and 39. Got the mandatory snap with the grandparents. And, No, those aren't extensions.They won't be invented for years!

Jackson, Ohio. 1974.

I was particularly pleased that my sister Mollie was in the audience for the graduation. Mollie lives in Florida and I was particularly pleased that she was her for part of my recovery. A few days after returning home, I felt so miserable--tender, stiff, and itchy/sticky, with my hair hanging in snarled hanks. I longed to feel clean and refreshed. My doctor had prohibited bathing, so Mollie suggested that she could help me shower. Although reluctant to accept her offer, I agreed.
She stripped down and stepped right into the stall with me to ease my shakiness. Mollie is the only person in the world whom I would have allowed to take such intimiate care of me, the only person to whom I could reveal my bandaged and stitched-together shell.

I could only lean against the tile. Mollie's movements were both gentle and brisk. While she washed me, we talked about the shower that had been in our hotel room in Cancun: it had a shower head the size of a dinner plate, multiple jets shooting out of the wall and a window that looked out on the aquamarine sea. Our mother would have called it "real snazzy."

Just a little over a month ago, in mid April, I had been lucky enough to accompany some FM107.1 listeners on a girlfriend getaway to Mexico. I had been able to take Mollie as my guest. We had shared five days of frivolous fun--swimming, dining, walking on the beach, taking turns reading in the hammock on our private terrace, sharing a massage. We spent hours in relaxed conversation, reminiscing about our childhood and sharing plans and dreams for our children and the future. We spent most of our time at the resort and with others in our party, but the two of us left the property together one morning for a scuba trip. In masks and flippers, we had floated, face down and holding hands, admiring the silent world of darting, bright colored fish and coral shaped like brains and trees and fans.

Those five days of togetherness seemed so distant from this visit. I'm so glad we took that trip, we told each other, over and over. Right now, it seems like a lovely dream, the kind you want to hold onto after you wake up.

 Cancun, Mexico. April 2007.

Hurt or numb.

Those are your choices after surgery. The scalpel-altered places on my body either rdiate pain or have no feeling whatsoever.

It's not just my body that seems stuck between these alternatives. If I feel it, it hurts. Even loving kindness. Pushing away and going numb to circumnavigate pain is hardly tempting. Being unable to feel at all is actually worse. Better to suffer than to be deadened.

* * * * *

The day before my surgery, I let my thoughts wander and then idly followed their path.
I found myself wondering where my breast would actually go.

Sure, parts of it would be excised and sliced and dyed and slipped on slides and checked cell by cell. Samples would go to the lab for that damned damning documentation.

But what of the rest of the breast? Where would it physically wind up?

It's mine, after all. But only when I actually posess it?

Then I wondered what had happened to my grandmother's breast, removed in 1963.
And what had happened to my daughter's bum kidney, removed when she was a baby? My son's tonsils, taken out just this past December? My little daughter's two front teeth? My father's hip bone, replaced by a titanium joint decades ago?
I realized that it doesn't matter.

We are the sum of our parts, but when they're no longer of us, they're, well, no longer of us. Living tissue is what matters. What is excised falls away with little mourning. We lose what we're better off without.

I imagined my tissue collected with the other lost parts from those I love. I imagined the cells comingling to form a sort of sandbar in the middle of the river. A place where I can bank my self while I heal.

* * * * *

I have lived in many houses in my life.
Sometimes when I can't sleep I try to mentally walk through one of the many old rental houses we lived in when I was a little girl, remembering the cedar scent from a walk in closet in one house or the graceful turn of the stairs on the landing in another.

Since becoming an adult, I have had my name on the mortgage of six different houses, including the home where I live now.

It's interesting how I mentally move out and disengage myself from houses that I no longer own. Sometimes I find myself in an old neighborhood and drive past one of my previous homes. I'll note that the trees have grown taller, or that shutters have been added, or that the place looks smaller than I remember. These are fairly nuetral observations about a place I once owned by now have little interest in, financial or otherwise.

It doesn't matter what new owners do to a place. It's not mine anymore.

And that is how I am starting to feel about this body.

I went to the doctor yesterday. (I have a lot of doctors now--general physician, surgeon, plastic surgeon, oncologist.) The plastic surgeon examined me, and pronounced me on target for healing.

I am cut and stitched back up. Not what I once was. No. And yet--fine. I am glad to say that I feel good about how it appears. ('It?' I guess I mean how I appear.) Again, not quite what it was, but it's close. I don't look at myself and recoil in horror; quite the reverse. I can learn to accept this. Uh, these. In fact, already I am accepting how I look. More to the point, in my new body I will regain my mobility and be able to wear what I want without fear or feeling self-conscious. I will soon be me again.
Not the old me.

Actually, I'm a bit, well, perkier, in that department, if you want to know the truth.
This is all a high price to pay for perkiness, but I won't complain.

I'm mentally unpacking in my body's new house. I'm already losing interest in the place where I no longer live. But it doesn't feel like home. Not yet.

I was out on the Stone Arch Bridge the other day thinking about mom and shot this panorama of St. Anthony Falls. This is the first of many river photographs that I will be posting over the course of the summer. 

Race for the Cure, 2057
I'll be 100 years old.
Looks like I got a shot at it.

Right from the moment I saw that dense cloud in the middle of the mammogram, I've had a bad feeling. A brick moved into my chest, in between the sternum and the lump. It kept swelling and getting heavier. My fear, my dread.
I'm not fatalistic by nature. Quite the reverse. I'm naturally bouyant. But always a realist.

When I came to after the surgery, I remember my questions leading me out of the fog. What was it? Did they get it? Did they get it all?
I thought I would know right away.
Surgery was Saturday, June 2. The surgeon reported the sentinel node was positive. How far had the cancer cells been able to wander through my body? What else had the barnacles attached themsmelves to?

We had to wait. The report from pathology wouldn't arrive until Tuesday night.
My husband and I were in my room when my surgeon arrived to give us the news. She had a piece of paper in her hand that she waved as she burst through the door.

Ten nodes removed. Only one positive.
Margins clear.
A stage two cancer.

At last. Some good news. I saw my husband smile the first genuine smile in recent days.
"You're going to make it, baby," he said.
He is a man of reason. He does not tell lies. He relies on evidence.

I allowed myself to feel the first spurt of hope. It is a real thing.

I lost three days. No, four.

Maybe even five?

Saturday morning
They gathered in a circle around my bed and we gripped hands.

Prayed for healing, for help.
I looked in their dear eyes. Husband, children, niece, sister, pastor

We said bon voyage
Goodbye to the old shell

Then my boat was launched. I drifted out as they launched my
bed into the room where
two sets of hands re-formed me.
One surgeon to cut away the cancer
Another to rebuild from what was left.

Then the swirl of pain, fear, confusion.
My questions: Am I alive/what is gone/what remains
Dreams so deep and confused. I was in a cave, I swam through cold water.

Nothing prepared me for just how much this would hurt.
How I've been reduced to just a body.
An animal, shivering in its fear
I find it humiliating to be so reduced

I smell like pain and fear
My world shrinks to the size of my bed, my boat through the haze of this
I try to listen, to make sense of what they tell me
I can't stop apologizing
I try to learn about my new self
Nothing sticks
I can't be served by reason

Only kindness penetrates
Cool palm on my face, a tug of the pillow by expert hands
Women who work the night shift
Answer my call
Call me Darling
Check my incisions with a reverence that moves me
What skill the healers bring

A man comes to massage my feet
was I in his dream or was he in mine?

I am tethered to jars and bottles
I would float away without the tubes
That strap me to my bed, my boat

I am better now
Slowly returning to myself
I am back at home
But not yet at home in my new person.