Ain’t it just a bitch?
Not long ago, about a year, in fact, I had a friend diagnosed with breast cancer. I say ‘not long’ because a year in cancer time can either speed by or crawl, depending on your viewpoint. For me, it seems only yesterday that I found another friend at work, sobbing and trying not to make a sound. She had just gotten off the phone with a mutual friend, whom we shall call Ninja. Ninja had breast cancer. This is what my friend told me while valiantly trying to hold herself together. I did not cry, not much. Not because I wasn’t sad, but because I simply did not know what the hell to say or do. To explain, I have to go back a few years to my senior year of high school.
I was just an idiot kid. I thought that good people were rewarded and bad people got what they deserved. I was, if you want to use cute little labels, naive. I was also about to be disavowed of this terribly mis-informed viewpoint. My brother and my sister were both diagnosed with cancer within a couple weeks of each other. My brother was suffering from Lymphnomia – I believe that is how it is spelled, if not, sue me – and my sister had brain tumors. Neither one was a bad person. In my mind, I worshipped them both in my own way.
My sister was always there for me. She would pick me up from school if I was sick, nurse me, come sit by me if I had a bad dream, anything you might expect of a mother. I know, though I never saw her do it, that she always checked me one last time after I went to sleep, because I had a bad habit of pulling the covers over my head and she was afraid I would suffocate. She was fourteen years my senior and dealt well with being saddled with a bratty little sister. Our mother was going through her own health problems, so someone had to handle the kid. She did a more than acceptable job. She stayed with me all through my childhood and is the most prominent figure in my memories .
My brother was out of the house long before I was born, but I remember him because he was always there. He raised arabian horses and he was one of the first I remember bringing home the used and abused animals no one else wanted. He would care for them, try to fix them, love them, and I made a role model of him. I remember many holidays spent watching for one of his restored cars or one of the trucks he drove to appear in the driveway.
I have three other siblings, all of whom are special to me in their own ways. However, each one is an individual to me, worthy of love based on their own merits, which are unique. I could spend hours writing this, dividing them out, but this is not a blog about my crazy, overly large family. This is a post about cancer. It took my brother pretty quick. It was only about two years and he was gone. Forever. No more horses, no more cars or trucks. No more bearhugs or someone to ruffle my hair and ask if I was being good. No more. I was too naive, still, to understand this concept. I was standing at the edge of my life, how the hell could his end that quickly?
My sister was not so quickly felled. She always said she was too mean to let it get her. She said she would live longer than any of us because she was that bad ass. For a long time, I believed her. For one thing, I could not believe that my funny, beautiful, caring sister, the one who taught sunday school and read her bible and always came when I needed her could ever, ever, ever die. But each time the brain tumors came back, it was like some small sliver of her got cut off. It was just a small thing, something I noticed, but tried not to because I still had most of her. Unfortunately, those slivers add up. Eventually, there wasn’t much left of the woman who had changed my diapers and told people in K-Mart… at fourteen… that the baby she was holding was hers. She always did have a great sense of humor, even if others didn’t always get it. About three years ago, I had to open my eyes. I realized that my sister was just a shell and she was, for the first time ever, going to break her promise to me. I had to look death straight in the eye and accept that no matter what I did or how hard I fought, he was going to take my sister away from me. I only believed it in the dead of night, though. In the daytime, I struggled hard to retain the last vestiges of innocence, to deny the possibility of her being beyond my reach.
I don’t know at what point she gave up. I have my suspitions, though. When something just attacks you over and over and over, I think it bleeds your life away in those tiny little slivers and when you notice something is missing for the first time, it has already been gone for a while. I’d been living with my parents and my sister – she was living back home, by then – for nearly nine months. I was waiting for my dogs to get their six months on their pet passports and I was waiting until we had the money to move them. I remember how hard it was to live there and watch her walking around like a zombie all the time, how hard it was to deal with her new quirks and problems. She was so much like a child, then, that sometimes – and I am terribly ashamed of this – I got fed up. I took her places with me, though, and I tried as hard as I could not to hate what she had become. I tried to talk to her every day, even though a simple conversation was nearly beyond her. She would repeat and repeat and repeat the same things over and over, usually well known observations that she had made a thousand times in her life or to tell me – fondly – what a brat I was when I was a kid. I dreaded taking her out of the house; if she saw someone familiar, or someone who just looked familiar, she would start rambling, pointless conversations. If she saw a baby, the whole day was gone. These were just the small things, though. The hard part was having to watch her like a misbehaving child. Here was the sister I looked up to the most. Here was my second mother, the woman I called for advice on men when I got older, the sanest and kindest of us, a fucking adult, and I could not leave her alone in a store. I had to dog her every step because she would pick things up from the shelves, fumble them in her constantly shaking hands, and drop them. I had to appoligize for her to people who couldn’t seem to understand that she was sick – or thought that she should be kept off the streets because of it – when all I wanted to do was get in their faces and tell them to go fuck themselves. It was, without doubt, hard. Not because she fell down sometimes and seemed to forget how to use her legs, would keep them curled under her butt, even if I picked her completely off the floor, but because I knew the way she was and knew that there was no way she would want to be this helpless. Cancer stole not just her health and her life, but her dignity. If cancer were a person, I’d be in prison for tying the bastard down and proceding to torture him in every possible way… in my grandest dreams, this includeds hot pokers, gasoline, and lots of sharp stabbing implements.
Then the day came that I had to leave. My husband was waiting; I was going to visit him for a month. It wasn’t the first time, of course; I’d gone to visit for a couple of weeks before, but now I was going in preperation of moving the dogs and myself back into a life that did not include my mother cooking me dinner and my dad hovering over me like I was a kid again. It was nice, in a way, to have these things. As an adult, it was good to just be able to relax and not think about what I was going to cook or who could let the dogs out while I ran errands. I wouldn’t have stayed, even if I was free to; eventually, getting treated like a kid again gets old. I kissed my sister on the cheek the morning that I left to tell her goodbye.
“Where are you going?” she demanded to know. She always wanted to know, even if I was going out for a run or just out to my car to fetch something I needed. The question always had the ring of desperation and I think she might have grabbed hold and refused to let go if she had the strength.
“To my husband, in England.” I’d told her this about a hundred times by now, but the surgeons had cut out the part of her brain that captured short term memory. She would, eventually, recall what I’d told her, but it could be days or weeks before it sunk in.
“No you aren’t,” she protested and the way she looked at me made me cringe inside. If I could have cancelled that flight, I would have. There was a plea in her eyes, as if my presence was the only thing that kept her holding on. I know that isn’t true; there were others, far more patient and kind than me, to give her that incentive. That look, though, told me that time had grown short. I was coming back, but who knew if she would be there? The entire trip to Chicago, I agonized. I bit my togue when the urge overcame me to just abandon the trip utterly – and even my husband if I had to – and run right back to her. When the flight took off, all I could think about was how wrong this was.
My intuition was right. A few days before I was due to board a flight back to the states, I got that phone call that made me wish I could have traded places with my sister, I would have. Of the two of us, there is no doubt in my mind which one of us was better. I didn’t cry. I couldn’t cry. I was numb inside. Everything anyone said to me fell on deaf ears; she could not be dead. There was no way it could be real; the world simply could not exist without her. Not until I was standing in the middle of Gatwick Airport without my passport – which was sitting on the kitchen table in our new english house – did any sort of emotion make an appearance. As I faced the very real possibility of not being allowed to go home for my sister’s funeral and say one last goodbye, I started to cry. I scared the people so bad they put me on a flight home anyway, reasoning that I was American and my husband had emergency leave paperwork to proove it; there was no way they wouldn’t let me in the country. All of this, of course, was a blur to me then.
I didn’t stop crying for nearly a week. There were times when I bawled like a baby, times when I just tried to keep it quiet, times when all I could do was cry in my head because I’d already cried all the tears I had. All those years knowing this could happen made no difference. It was like saying I could get in a car wreck; I thought if I was careful enough or good enough or just pretended this wasn’t real, then it would go away. It might be a stupid way to approach the issue, but, really, she promised, didn’t she? And when had she ever let me down?
I don’t know how this goes for other people because I am just me, but let me tell you how death went in my fucked up little world. First there was the numb shock, the disbelief that she was really gone. Then there was the anger. It was more like fury, really. I wasn’t angry at her. I was angry at the gods. I’m not Christian; I stopped believing in that particular god before I was old enough to understand what it was I didn’t believe in. Before you flame me, let me make something perfectly clear. I DO believe there is something more than us, something powerful and wise and worth believing in. I do not, however, live my life according to the words of someone I have never met. I am a pretty good person, though we all stumble once in a while, but I am a good person because I believe everyone has feelings and family that cares about them, not because of the threat of Hell, which I also do not believe in. My mother made me the way I am, and I am glad she did. My gods work for me, usually. But when they let my sister die and forced my mother to bury yet another child, I became enraged. It didn’t last long, because when you believe the gods are truly wise, you have to accept that they know what is best, even if you don’t. After the rage faded, then came the regret. It wasn’t just the regret for all the things I wished I’d been able to tell my sister, or all the things I wish I hadn’t. It wasn’t just regret that I hadn’t done everything possible for her or with her. It was regret for the world. If you are reading this and you never met my sister, you will never meet her. And your life will be poorer for it. She made people laugh. She fawned over their babies – even the ugly ones. She would have given you a view of someone who is not just nice because it is polite, but is nice because she really cared about everyone and everything. I mourn not just for the passing of my sister, but for the world; it is a little darker and colder for her absence. I still, to this day, feel that empty hole where she should have been.
Which brings us to that day with my friend. I didn’t know what to say. Ninja is another of those people, those wonderful, rare people, who bring light where they are. She is beautiful, though she does not seem to know it, and loving and funny with three gorgeous little girls. She is one of those good mothers with a strong hold on her kids. She is an angel and she is as near and dear to me as any of my family. Could I choose to be just like her, I would. I have never told her this because it is my way to not say what I feel for my friends, a bad habit that I’ve never been able to break. I’m too shy and too reserved for such verbal displays of affection and coming from me they always sound fake anyway. Only in my writing am I ever so honest, so I hope that someday she will read this. Any words of comfort I could have hoped to give my friend stuck sideways in my throat, blocked by the inability to tell the lie to myself. I kew that someday I might have to stand in a world that knew no Ninja. I couldn’t tell her that would never happen because I knew far too well how easily it could. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to collapse on the floor screaming ‘it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair!’. I wanted to hunt down the cancer fairy, tear his little wings off, and stick his wand in the most uncomfortable orriface I could find. I was terrified. Absolutely terrified. I wasn’t aware that I’d still been as innocent as a child about certain things, or that I’d lost that innocence when my sister died. In that moment I was painfully aware of what was gone and utterly unable to get it back, even long enough to comfort someone else.
I wonder, sometimes, how the best of us can be stricken with such difficult burdens. I am not a great person, as I’m sure anyone can tell. I carry burdens that I have made for myself, carving out blocks of guilt from stone to heft upon my back and torture myself with when no one is looking. It is a mental sort of self mutilation. Did I get cancer, I would assume that I deserved it… and I probably would. I don’t steal, I don’t cheat, and I rarely lie. When my husband goes TDY or gets deployed to some god forsaken armpit of the world, he knows that I am home every night playing video games and that the only other male in his bed is my big, dumb dog. However, I can be many not so nice things. I am vain, on the side of wishing I was prettier, I am selfish at times, I forget everyone’s birthday and anniversary, and I tend to turn into a mega bitch when someone is cruel to me rather than turning the other cheek.
Ninja, on the other hand, has done nothing to deserve such a fate. Neither had my sister or brother or the father of an old friend or any of the others I know suffering – and dying – from different forms of the disease. Most, if not all, of them deserve to be healthy and happy forever. They say cancer knows no discrimination, but, sometimes, it seems like it is purposely aiming for those that make this a world worth living in.
This is not a story without at least one happy ending. Ninja handled her cancer with a sort of grace that made everyone else admire her all the more. When she was sick or tired from the radiation and chemo, she tried to smile anyway. She made jokes about her condition and the things she had to face, just to make the rest of us feel better. When her hair started to fall out, she shaved her head and grinned. She wore her shiny scalp with pride and was not ashamed. She decked her bald head out in pretty scarves and crazy hats and she was still more gorgeous than all the rest of us put together. Now, almost a year later, she is healthy again. She has a new rack, one that will never sag or show the ravages of time. She’ll probably be the only granny ever asked to pose for Playboy. So, I suppose that is the point of this post. To show that there is always hope shining on, even in the darkest of hours. And to remind people that those you hold dearest are not permenent fixtures. Sometimes, people die who shouldn’t and sometimes those who deserve to live actually do. And the rest of us benefit if they make it through. Life can be a bitch, but there are times when I’m just happy to be here, to have the friends and family that I do, and hope that someday I can grow up to be just like them… and that I never again allow myself to believe that there will be time enough later to tell them how much I care.
All typos and errors should be excused; the spellcheck isn’t working and I’ve played around enough with this tonight.
