Three

Three years.

Three years cancer free.

My anniversary was this past week.  I let out an audible sigh when the hour passed in which my operation had taken place.  I remember every detail of that day.  I couldn’t recognize the moment with much more than a sigh as I was traveling for business at the time.  My arm wrapped up in bandages keeping lymphedema at bay as I flew across the country.  My head wrapped up in meetings planned for the week.  I took a pause in my day to remember that time in my life and to be thankful for my luck as that had a lot to do with where I am today.  Three years later my life is very much back to normal.

I can’t believe it’s been three years.  I thank my sisters and my friends who helped me get through it all.  Physically and mentally there were some very dark days.  My mother’s death amidst my own dance with cancer and all of the operations I endured because of it.  In the end, I prefer the figure I have now and very much like the scars that I wear.  They are a constant reminder of how strong I am and my new breasts are a work of art as far as I am concerned.  Cancer didn’t make me nicer, more compassionate or show me how to love more.  I was already nice, compassionate and capable of love.  It did make me less patient with people who get caught up in petty arguments and daily dramas of their own making.  I will never understand that behavior.  Yes, I am more aware now of each new day and how much I enjoy breathing in them.  I even like the dark, dismal rainy ones.

As of this week, I am working on my fourth year without cancer!

Mother’s Day

I love empty bird nests.  There is a still beauty about them when you find them whole at the end of the season.  Colleen has the one pictured above in her foyer.  It sits on a shelf almost blending into the concrete wall that surrounds it. I can’t help but marvel at the workmanship that created it.

Today was Mother’s Day and the sisters and I initially found it rather difficult as the day approached.  We have been at a loss for the past three years as to what we should do to commemorate it.  We miss our mother and the gaping hole she left in our lives is so very evident on this day.  This year a new tradition started and it is not one we love but know it is an intermediary one.  It is called, “Move the Coeds From Their College Dorm Rooms”.  There is nothing like hauling a refrigerator down a road to ease the pain of loss.

“Did you pack anything?” Colleen asked.

Her fledglings who look like grown women but shake their heads like kids hadn’t.  Not really in the way that was needed.  We went to lunch in a nearby restaurant and once fortified with omelets, we went back to the dorm to load the car.  It may have taken us 3 hours but we got everything packed up.  The car was stuffed to the gills and Colleen drove off later that day looking like she was escaping the dust bowl of the 1920′s.

I am lucky.  I had wanted children and the right man never came along to have them with.   Colleen had two very colicky babies.  Really, the worst babies I have ever known.  They screamed for six months straight and in that time I got to hold and rock them.  My maternal love had a place to go and it was needed even beyond the initial six months of screaming hell.  I am lucky because Colleen wasn’t possessive as some mothers can be.  She let all of us love her daughters and encouraged us to be active participants in their lives.  It has truly been a gift.

Colleen really is an amazing mother.  She has done a wonderful job raising those girls.

 

The lore of Wisteria

 

My grandfather used to say, “When you see a wisteria bush growing outside a house, there is usually a crazy old lady living inside.”  We’d laugh and as a little girl I vowed I would never get such a plant.  It had only been a few short years since I had nearly poisoned my sister Lisa with the pods that form after the flowers bloom in the early days of summer.  We were playing “house” in our sandbox that was just a few short steps from the back door of our actual home.  I was around 5 and she 3 when we decided to make “pretend” soup using whatever was in the yard.  The pods were perfect as were the beans inside when broken apart.  What no one realized until later was that those pods are highly poisonous.  Lisa had eaten an apple and didn’t wash her hands after touching the pods.  Hours later, her throat closed up and her face became puffed and distorted.  She looked a bit dire there and I remember the panic my mother was in when it was decided to rush Lisa to the hospital.  My memory goes blank after that moment but I do suffer a bit of guilt for no sound reason at all.  At the hospital, they figured out what had happened and we were never allowed to make “pretend” soup again.

Fast forward 45 years and the guilt has settled into mere knowledge.  The fear of what others think of me doesn’t strongly dictate what I do or don’t do as it once did.  I’ve also come to terms with the fact that I love the look of a wisteria climbing up the side of a house.  When I buy my home, I’m going to plant one in my yard if there isn’t one there already.  As the roots take hold outside, I will kick back and let nature take it’s course.  Yes, let the cards fall where they may and if it means I become a crazy old lady – so be it!

Saved by Friday

A few trees still only have their bones showing with nary a leaf in sight

Some weeks hold such strange energy there is nothing you can do but ride the storm.  This past week was one of them.  Nothing in particular was wrong but everything felt off and no task could be completed without a hitch or two.  By Wednesday, I wanted the week over.  I would whisper in the morning before I opened my eyes, “Please make it Friday.”  This morning I got my wish.

Flowers bloomed overhead this week. I did stop to look and admire.

Lisa ended her 10 year career with the company she worked for this week.  I didn’t like the way things played out so I wished a pox on everyone involved.  I was on the phone with Lisa when I did this and I admit I ranted it more than once.  “I wish a pox on them.”  Just moments later after hanging up with Lisa, I went out to my car to drive to an appointment and my tire was flat.  Super flat.  So flat it took a good half hour to pump it up so I could drive to have it repaired.  When I got to the little shop on 10^th Avenue and 34^th Street in Manhattan they told me in very broken English it couldn’t be repaired.  Hand signals accentuated the problem and that I needed a new one.  Of course, that was after the contents of my trunk were thrown up onto the sidewalk proving I keep far too much in my trunk.  It was a mess.

I had to drive to Queens to a Pep Boys there to replace the tire.  The fellow behind the desk said they were backed up and it would be a bit of a wait.  Then he made a face that reminded me of the one I make when I’m served peas.  I made the same face back at him and said, “OK.”  That was code for crap.  In all the tire “episode” took 5 hours out of my day and I never made it to my client’s office.  The pox I vehemently wished on others blew back at me.  I laughed at my lesson learned; don’t wish ill will on others.

Lisa is actually very happy with the turn of events and her future.  I was just being protective.

Beyond your own tiny web

While traveling through the South of France with a photography group, I made a most unlikely friend.  Mike was in his late 60’s; almost deaf and nearly crippled with legs ailing with age.  He also traveled in a much more powerful and wealthier crowd than mine.  His friends made world decisions.  My friends had to comply with the results of these decisions.  Still, in the back of a car as we drove from one beautiful photography site to another we bonded.  Lavender was in full bloom as were fields of sunflowers.  Amidst the visual and scented beauty we discovered our similarities.  We loved stories, photography, food and our pets.   At the time, I had a parakeet named Vivian.  I’ve spared you parakeet stories so far but sternly warn you, one day you will read one.  On that day, you will laugh heartily.

Mike laughed like a loon as I recounted tales of Vivian’s antics.  She had the ability to make me seem the fool.  Once the vacation was ended, we exchanged email addresses.  I can’t remember the year.  It may have been 2000 or the late 1900’s.  Hmm, that sounds like a very long time ago! 

Mike was my first “virtual” pen pal and as he and his wife traveled the globe emails were sent back and forth.  With 30 something years between us, his messages were laced with wisdom.  I don’t have the emails I sent him but I remember the problem I had that he replied to in the one I posted below.  My friend Harry gave me all of his photography equipment for the darkroom and it was shipped to me.  As I sat with it in my living room I was overwhelmed.  I wasn’t ready for this incredible gift and lamented my predicament.  Mike’s answer is one that I still read to this day.  It has aged well and continues to remind me there is a life beyond what I see or can even comprehend.  He has long since passed but his words remain true.  Here is part of his letter:           

Some of the wording in your last message rang sharp chimes in the labyrinth of memory, “I don’t make changes easily and it is funny to have the future arrive only to find that it doesn’t fit in the present,  A change must occur . . . . “

Many years ago, during one of my many workshops at the Santa Fe Photography workshops, while tromping in the boonies of northern New Mexico in a rather back of the moon barren area outside of Greer Garson’s “Ghost Ranch”, and a bit huffing and puffing tired from carrying an extra camera plus extra lenses, plus, of course, my tripod, I sat down on a large rock quite close to an unexpected patch of long-bladed green grass quite a contrast to its arid surroundings.  I noted a largish spider web high in the long grass with Mama Spider serenely occupying the very center of her creation.  I reached over and touched a strand of the web with a pencil; the spider tended her guy-lines and tried to read the movement of the web, but the message was incomprehensible.  The spider was circumscribed by “spider ideas”; its universe was “spider universe”, everything outside it was extraneous, and I realized that in the world of the spider I did not exist.  And I thought of myself tenuously (word invented to fit!) holding on to the center of my own web, with nothing but vast darkness beyond it.

I’ll spare you the usual trite blah-blah-blah of change being good, since this is not necessarily true, but change should invoke introspection since dealing successfully with change is not possible beyond our inner universe, and this is good as it confirms that our “inner universe” is truly all we have.  Once we’ve come this far we know how to re-arrange our present if we wish to embrace whatever is jangling our guy-lines, and uncertainty begins to pale.

That is the thought I will leave you with for the weekend.  May all of your guy-lines lead to something wonderful! 

A rock in a storm

The clock in Grand Central. It was the closest thing I had to a rock.

Liz had her drains removed today.  She got her new breast last week.  I know this and other details though I don’t know Liz and couldn’t pick her out in a crowd if my life depended on it. Her uncle is a close friend of mine and called me as I prepared for Easter.  His voice was measured in a level tone but dripped of concern.  His niece,  just 31 years old, was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“Would you meet with her and help her?”

It was a simple request and yet there I was with a TO DO list that ran for miles and an energy level that stopped somewhere around the third item.  I also knew Liz’s decision was far more important compared to the amount of chocolate I had on the table during Easter dinner.  We were introduced by email and I told her I was never going to bemoan her situation with her, she had family to do that with.  Instead, I was a resource for facts having lived through both operations and that she was welcome to ask me any question she wanted.  I also warned her that I would not make her decision for her.  Lumpectomy or Mastectomy.  That was her quandary and as her mind raced with facts, figures and emotions I knew I could quell those that she should not be concerned with.  I kept her focused on what she needed to remember and that was not beauty but cancer.  I did that with a gentle tone as she is only 31 and this was a very big decision.

I knew all too well the state her mind was in and that of the family that surrounded her.  I also knew the best role I could play for her was as a knowledgeable rock.  Something or someone to mentally hang on to when the winds of fear lifted her off to thoughts of terror.  I had been in her shoes and survived the decisions, fears and operations.  My being alone was a comfort as it had been for me to know other women who had tread that path before me.

We spoke on the phone and I offered to have her feel my breast, something I have yet to let a date do.  She declined but I knew if she needed to see it to make the idea tangible, I would let her.  Liz recited percentages for survivorship and debated which hospital to go to.  I listened and I’m not sure she even noticed that I didn’t weigh in on her decision.  I, between meetings for work, sat in a hotel room letting the voice on the other end of the phone chew and spit out loud the words that clogged her mind.  What I did tell her was, “Pay close attention to what your doctors tell you.  Your cancer is like no one else so base your decision accordingly.  Listen to your gut reaction when choosing a doctor and the operation you decide on.  You’re building a team and you have to respect and completely believe in the doctors who are working on you.  It is their advice that you should rely on and in the case of the plastic surgeon, she is the person who is repairing the body you will live in for the rest of your life.  Choose her with the same amount of care that you would a seamstress if your couture dress was torn.”  I also added, “If they tell you to have a mastectomy, you should do it.  Even though the thought of it is unimaginable, the reality is life goes on and there is even happiness after a mastectomy.  Lastly, you have to have patience.  Recovery is not a quick affair and that is when you need your inner strength most of all.”

My friend told me he thought I frightened Liz.  I might have but she keeps writing me and I keep answering her -  solid as a rock.

One special moment in time….

Yesterday, we flew over the storm that trapped me in Chicago.  We bumped and thumped over the clouds.  Belted in our seats, I was in the last row fighting back the urge to grab that little paper bag in the pocket seat.  I kept my dignity in tact as lunch remained where I needed it to be.

When we landed in New York the sun was out and it was warm.  Having lived the storm that was coming, I decided to run to the park and capture some photos of the trees.  A now or never in case the intensity was the same as in Chicago.  I feared all of the blooms would be blown away.

Central Park was beautiful and I was right to run up there to capture what already was a peak moment.  As I neared Bethesda Fountain I spied a gondola on the lake.  It was the only one.  I wasn’t close enough to capture anything wonderful.  Upon their return under the bridge we waved and called out to them.  She beamed and he shouted, “She said yes.”

We waved and clapped and for one special moment in time, everyone was happy. We forgot our own troubles and basked in the love and joy that tiny boat contained.