Finding light, The Gift (Mary Oliver), No Going Back (Wendell Berry), Only Once (Denise Levertov)

Good morning everyone. This is week number three in my second cycle (one cycle = treatment every week for three weeks, then rest a week), and I am sitting in my chemo chair hoping to get drug today.  This particular chemo has been pretty easy for me, but it drops my already meager platelet count low enough that I have had to skip weeks.  This cycle, I have received drug two weeks in a row, which is a miracle, and I was hoping for success this week too.  Unfortunately, I have just learned that my platelet count is 30,000, too low to give drug safely.  My other problem is that my hematocrit is also quite low, so I am settling in for a long day of waiting for blood to be typed and crossed and then given. 

Weirdly enough, I don’t mind sitting here.  The new cancer center is lovely.  My chair is heated, I am reclining, I have my computer and a cup of coffee, and there is no one around.  I am in my own little niche and no one bothers me.  This set up is quite nice, actually.  I really couldn’t tell that my HCT was so low.  In fact, I felt so good that I even went to Pilates on Tuesday.  I have been unable to move since then, but it was exciting at the time.

Ok, so both of my kids have gone back to school and I have been feeling sad.  We had such a nice holiday break together.  Neither kid felt quite ready to return to school, either.  Our oldest had been in Spain for the Fall semester, and his growth and maturity were such a pleasure to see.  He felt very differently about going back to school after his experience overseas, too.  My sister and I drove with him up to Connecticut, and he talked about being both anxious and excited to return.  Then he took off in my car for the wilds of Maine.  And guess what?  So far, he is happy and healthy and living in a very different environment than last year and feeling truly engaged in his higher-level classes.  I’m so proud of him, I can barely stand it.

Our youngest also had a short break as she went back a week early to rush.  I have no idea what this sorority thing is about, but she too has matured so much in one semester.  I trust her judgment and know she will find a house that she can love.  She even came to chemo with me over the holidays.  She made me pancakes and then came with me and sat through the infusion.  I have had cancer since she was 2 years old.  I have had chemo about 6 times in different forms.  We talked about this disease that haunts me and is a constant for her, and there she was, this beautiful young woman, talking and laughing, sometimes being sad, but so getting it.  She is amazing.

So I’m feeling their loss a bit.  Endings are hard for me, and they just seem to keep coming.  I am sad, but don’t get me wrong-- I am relieved as well -- that I am truly retiring from Case as a Society Dean.  I really went on leave without a clear plan for return.  Now I have one; I am not returning.  Chip and I cleaned out my office during the break, and this process was hard.  I felt both extreme relief as well as sadness.  All the work in all the file cabinets went into the trash; I will not be using any of it again and it is all out-dated anyway.  But all the pictures of my classes of students and the lending library I had, and other things reminded me of how much I loved the students.  All of this felt right, but sad too. 

So, let’s recap--no job, no kids, no platelets, empty house-- boy, do I need some light!

I flew back home to Cleveland from my sister’s house in CT on Monday.  By Thursday, I had found my house again and things were quiet and cleaned up, and I have had time to think.  Both kids are happy again where they are, and that really helps the darkness.  But I need to sweep out some of the heaviness in my heart and make room for light and opportunity. 

Truly, I have never felt more creative or supported as I do now.  When I am writing or doing art with my group of buddies, I feel that light.  My sister, my wonderful friend Betsy, and I are preparing for a trip to Ireland in June.  The readings and classes for the trip are helping me realize that Celtic mythology has played a huge role in many of the books my sister and I have been reading together.   I think this trip and all its background reading, including a lot of Yeats’s poetry and plays, will give us new ideas for that druid mystery book we are destined to write together (ok, and become rich and famous from).  I have even started thinking again about that tattoo I have always kind of wanted.  My kids cringe when the T word comes up, but I am going to do it.  I think a celtic something is destined to appear somewhere on my body…..we shall just have to wait and see.

So I am looking for light, and when I dig deep, I know I have some.  Even though my blood-work doesn’t show it, I feel better than I have in months.  My physical pain has improved a great deal, and my psychic pain, while it continues, feels like it is undergoing a profound change.  Darkness allows even the smallest flicker of light to show. Maybe only from being in a deep, dark place, can I begin to see my own light a little.  Now, from right down here, I need to claim my light and illuminate my own darkness.  Time to claim the power!  I’ll work on that.  How about some poetry?

The Gift  (Mary Oliver)

After the wind-bruised sea
furrowed itself back
into the folds of blue, I found
in the black wrack

a shell called the Neptune -
tawny and white,
spherical,
with a tail

and a tower
and a dark door,
and all of it
no larger

than my fist.
It looked, you might say,
very expensive.
I thought of its travels

in the Atlantic's
wind-pounded bowl
and wondered
that it was still intact.

Ah yes, there was
that door
that held only the eventual, inevitable
emptiness.

There's that - there's always that.
Still, what a house
to leave behind!
I held it

like the wisest of books
and imagined
its travels toward my hand.
And now, your hand.

ok, maybe this is a little heavy, but I like it:

There is No Going Back (Wendell Berry)

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

Only Once (Denise Levertov)

All which, because it was 
flame and song and granted us 
joy, we thought we'd do, be, revisit, 
turns out to have been what it was 
that once, only; every invitation 
did not begin 
a series, a build-up: the marvelous 
did happen in our lives, our stories 
are not drab with its absence: but don't 
expect to return for more. Whatever more 
there will be will be 
unique as those were unique. Try 
to acknowledge the next 
song in its body -- halo of flames as utterly 
present, as now or never.