What Actually Matters

My mother, at 91, has adopted a new phrase, "Oh, it doesn't matter."  She will say this after most things when her attention has drifted off to a new subject, and, frankly, she's usually right. 

I think about this phrase, and her, and wonder how different our lives would have been if she had adopted this attitude much earlier.  When I was growing up, everything mattered to her, immensely and intensely.  As her only child, I suffered the consequences of her extraordinary attachment to things that absolutely didn't matter.  The landscape was constantly shifting, with huge seismic upheavals, as I tried in vain to keep up with the current set of rules, which were based on the current set of fears, which were based on the current set of incorrect assumptions.  Everything wrong mattered to her, and everything right went completely unnoticed.

Most things, actually, don't matter.  And if you are graced with a day in which the little things are bugging the shit out of you, it probably means that nothing huge is going wrong.  So, in a way, being cranky and pissed off is a good thing.... because you have the luxury of being cranky and pissed off.  I have found that, when things that really do matter start happening, all those little irritants magically just disappear.

So what does matter?  For me, there are just four things that Actually Matter:

• Health
• People
• Art
• A sense of infinite potential

That's it.  There are other things that could go on a longer list, for sure.  Justice, peace, honesty are attributes that are important.  Or maybe there would be money, appearance, and status for some people.  I guess there are lots of lists.  But let me just explain mine.

Health.  Game over if that goes away for good.  That's pretty self evident.  But in the larger picture, I define health as the degree to which your body, mind, and spirit are harmonious and in balance.  So health is important not only because without any of it, we're dead... but because with an abundance of it, we are very much alive, and able to appreciate our lives, and will be able to vitally enjoy the rest of the things on the list for a very long time. 

People.  Our connections.  The love, the bond between people.  Moments of compassion between strangers.  A shared belly laugh.  The way that one life can make a difference for so many people.  That strand of green light connecting heart to heart to heart to heart.  It's about the people, folks.  It's about our shared experience, our amazing ability to heal each other (when we choose), the moments we look into someone else's eyes and see ourselves, our history, and the infinite, all reflected back at us.  We are capable of inflicting such terrible pain on each other as well.  We are assholes to the extreme, and pig headed, and ignorant, and it's amazing our species has lasted as long as it has.  For all these reasons, both good and bad, people matter. 

Art.  Art is how we deal, how we understand, how we cope, how we escape, how we evolve, how we find meaning in all of the crazy randomness.  Art is the glue.  Art binds it all together. Whether creating or enjoying it, whether it's a killer episode of Family Guy or Van Gogh's Starry Night, art can give our souls some breathing room, a chance to reflect, a moment of insight.  Without it, life is an endless line at the DMV.  Think about it, and you'll know I'm right.   Art is the difference between the DMV and an orchestra tuning up before a Broadway musical. 

A sense of infinite potential.  We need to hope.  We need to have the feeling of possibility. I think we can sometimes find this feeling in believing in a classical God, or we can find it when sitting in meditation and realizing that all things are possible in the current moment.  It's the idea that there's a sky beyond our ceilings, a world beneath the surface of the ocean, a possible order in the universe outside our little minds.  I think our souls need to have a window open to this idea of potential.  It relaxes the brain, it enlivens the appetites, it shines a little light on the darker days.

To me, these are the Things that Actually Matter.  The rest?  It doesn't matter, as my mom would say.  And, I say this with great love, this time I think she's right.

Who is orchestrating this life, anyway?

Orchestras.  We know how they work.  There are a whole lot of different instruments, playing different notes, all of which combine to make music.  The musical threads are intricately woven together, hopefully producing something balanced and in harmony.  Everyone plays in tune, when all is going well, and the end result is a single noun, a piece of music, an entity.

As someone who has spent multiple decades backstage watching orchestras perform, I know all too well how many things can go wrong.  I've been through shows with a conductor taken so violently ill that the musicians had to perform an entire act without any leadership whatsoever.  I've been through shows where the chemistry between the podium and the pit has been so bad that it felt like witnessing someone try to pull a train down a track using a rope held between the teeth.  Painful notes, awkward silences, awful misses.  And I've seen brilliant synchronicity, where it truly felt like the music was flowing from the baton and out into the air, with artless perfection, like it was simply meant to be.

Not a bad metaphor for life.  We are all conductors of a vast orchestration, interweaving melodies of family, work, hobbies, friends, spiritual practices, home improvement projects, aspirations, avocations... there are many instruments that combine to make the music that we call our lives. We strive for balance and harmony.  We struggle to create symphonies of Beethoven-like importance: integrated, beautiful, possessed of a story arc that makes it all sound intentional.  Sometimes we succeed beautifully; other times the whole thing is a discordant fiasco.

When it comes to life orchestration, the issue really is how we spend our time.  And, for most of us, for most of our lives, how we spend our time involves in large part how we earn a living.  Even people who have the luxury of not having to work, still have to work, at something.  Time orchestration affects everyone.

Working for a living is mostly an Unavoidable Other type of activity, but most of us do have choices with how and where we do it.   I earn my daily bread working at a technology company as a technical writer.  It pays well and there's a whole lot about it that works great for me.  I have a lot of creative autonomy and I love and respect my co-workers.  It's close by and my company is a really decent company to work for.  The work itself is not heinous.  I love to write and even though the words are not the words I'd really enjoy writing (like these), I have been able to find ways to engage enough to keep it moderately interesting.  Is it creatively challenging?  Somewhat.  Is it the best use of my talents and skills and energy?  Not really.  Do I rue the fact that I have to sell 40 hours of my week in order to purchase and enjoy the rest of my life?  Totally.

In my process of deconstruction, I am looking at everything, and realize that the entrapment I feel with the fact of working for a living has within it many choices that I have elected to accept. Would I prefer to work full time in theatre, or write creatively full time, or teach, or manage a small business, or any number of other things?  Sure, I would.  But I would be introducing a lot of stress into my life as well.  I free-lanced for years and at a certain point it became clear to me that selling 40 hours a week of my life was going to get me more free time than selling my hours piecemeal.  At the end of the day, given a choice of making money for an hour or working on the latest screenplay... I'd always make the money.

Survival is an interesting thing.  For years I supported myself by working multiple jobs, sacrificing everything to get myself through college, going without food for days on end, being scared to my core that I would not survive.  That's imprinted itself deeply in me.  To me, the only path away from those fears has been to work hard, stay meticulously aware of my finances, and to keep hypervigilent about the wolf that still always feels a whisker's breadth away from the door.

Now, however, my survival concerns are physical.  I have a direct threat within my body that is being countered by strong medications that are also threatening.  But my amygdala, that little fight or flight center of my brain, doesn't register this.  It's still pretty concerned about keeping the wolf away, even though the threat is now internal.  And I keep weighing the two survival issues, because it's possible that the new moth I am becoming may need to rethink how she spends her time. 

All of these conflicting deep responses inform the answer to the question of who is orchestrating this life.  Who is the conductor?  Who's in charge here?  Well, I am.  And I'm not.  Part of what orchestrates my life are causes and conditions that happened long ago, some of which are obsolete, and some of which may still be in effect.  I do not have full control over how everything works out, and it could be argued that I have almost no control over anything.  We try as hard as we can to lead the wayward musicians playing the music of our lives, and hope for the best.

Orchestrating work with the needs of the body, mind, and soul has a lot of challenges.  There are levels of choices and tradeoffs.  In a perfect world, I could wake up every day and design a lifestyle that is perfectly balanced and which supports my mental, physical, and spiritual health completely. And, to the highest extent possible, I can try to do that.  But there are constraints... constraints set by real conditions, constraints set by my own personal choices, and constraints set by years of habitual responses to things from my distant past.

Who is the conductor here?  To the largest extent possible, I need to be.  But I also need to share the podium with shadows from my past, and people for whom I sacrifice in the present, and my own fallible self.  And maybe the way to best orchestrate this life is to simply pay attention to the music itself, endeavoring to serve the work as a whole as sincerely and purely as possible.  Maybe that's how to create those beautiful, meaningful symphonies.  Filled with compassion, and love, and as much harmony as humanly possible.

The Escape Clause

Here's my brutally honest confession: sometimes I like being sick.  I don't like the physical realities of it, of course.  But, at a deep level, sometimes I am deeply grateful for the time to take care of myself, to get away from the demanding schedules of daily life, and for the excuse to just stop.

I'm looking at that confession very carefully these days.  Because obviously you've gotta watch out what you hope for.

It's not right, or good, to like being sick.  This is not a good way to get a vacation.  This is not a good way to even out the pressures of daily life.  This is simply not an acceptable alternative.

So I'm looking at what this means, when I confront this very honestly.  And what I'm coming up with is that I seem to need an excuse, a permission slip, to stop.  That I seem to need an acceptable reason to take a break from the daily grind.  That there is a sense of deep gratitude when the life that I have consciously put in place is disrupted.

Whoa.  This opens up so many unsettling questions.  Who is orchestrating this life of mine, anyway?  Why is one part of me needing to find an acceptable excuse to take a break from the plan that another part of me has put in place?  Why is sickness acceptable when some other reason isn't?  If I feel, on some level, safer and better cared for when I'm sick, does that mean I'm not safe or well cared for when I'm well?  Whose job is it, anyway, to take care of myself?  And how in the world do I fix this so that I feel like I'm being taken care of enough when I'm well so that I don't have to get sick to feel OK?

Big questions.  Tough to grapple with.  And in looking at the answers, I'm finding that each one opens up even more questions and rabbit holes to go down.  So many, in fact, that I think I'm going to tackle each one individually in separate posts.  Because the orchestration of life includes so many factors, ones we have the ability to choose and not choose.  We can't be sitting around bemoaning the fact that we have an imperfect life, because life is -- by definition -- riddled with imperfections.  It takes some deep looking and understanding to get to the bottom of these things, with the goal of finding a way to create an inner and outer life that is comfortable and safe to to be in without getting sick.

I am certainly not someone who gets sick a lot, but I have certainly run headlong into a health crisis this year that makes it worth to start examining these uncomfortable issues.  Confessing that there is an element of relief in it makes me realize that there are other ways to escape our lives as well.  A happy hour drink on the weekend can rapidly become an any hour drink on any day, and suddenly the bit of R&R self care that you indulged in in the beginning has turned into something dysfunctional and destructive.  It is easy to batter your immune system; it is easy to fall into addiction; it is easy to blame dysfunctional relationships and let that be your way of not fully inhabiting your own life.   It is far harder to be healthy, and stay in the thick of things, and know that you are thriving and energetic and well supported by your own life decisions.

I keep coming back to this idea of who is running our lives.  Are we running our lives, or are they running us?  And I fear that, for me at least, my life was running me most of the time.  My inner landscape in the months (and years) leading up to my diagnosis was that of Indiana Jones, running like hell away from that big rock ball bearing down on him in the cave.  Absolutely running flat out trying to keep ahead of this force of nature which I have somehow loosed upon myself.

Which means I have to dig way deep and figure out how to change that.  I need to rejigger either the outer mechanics of my life, or change deeply my inner relationship to it, or both.  I should not have to feel like I'm at odds with my own self, needing to devise intricate subliminal strategies in order to get out of a contract that doesn't feel like it serves me well.  Our lives should feel, at the very least, like a pact that has been signed by all parties and negotiated by a very good advocate for our own well being.  We should be behind the things we're doing, so that we don't have to look for escape clauses and loopholes all the time.

This seems so fundamental.  But, as Ferris Bueller says, life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.

Chrysalis

I was trudging down the street this morning with my dog Sam and thinking just how broken and battered and shattered my body is getting during this thing.  My energy is so low that today I'm getting winded just moving from room to room.  I have a tissue expander inserted that feels like someone has shoved a cutting board in front of my chest wall.  My skin is inflated, preparatory to having the implant surgery sometime in the future.  My arm muscles are stretched and sore and tight, and I move them constantly in fear of losing that range of motion forever.

My head is splotchy, like a Rorschach test, with tufts of stubble splattered across my skull in shadowy clumps.  I have to wear something over it at all times, or else the stubble skritches back and forth across the pillow or the back of the sofa, irritating the inflamed hair follicles even more.  I have bruises on my arm from the various blood draws and infusions and injections.

Internally... another litany of weirdnesses.  I am suddenly acutely sensitive to smell.  I smelled tuna salad from across the house last night; a few moments ago a neighbor must have lit a BBQ using lighter fluid.  I can smell mayonaise from across the room.  I can smell my dog's ears when he shakes his head.  My stomach is a diva.  My headache threatens to come back with the explosions of a few weeks ago.  My mouth is sensitive.  My very bone marrow is agitated, forced to create white blood cells that it really doesn't feel much like producing at the moment.

I'm a mess. 

I'm also very OK.

This is not just a plastic smile saying that.  All of this is kind of icky and weird, and it's OK.  All of this sensitivity comes with other super powers as well.  I am sitting on my back patio and listening to our waterfall and feeling the breeze against my skin and thinking, daaaamn, this is nice.  It's the longest day of the year, I've had no hard deadlines or appointments, and I've just spent the day moving in and out of what my body is telling me.  This is how dogs live, maybe.  From point to point, just following their physical impulses.  This is how people live who are not over-committed.  This is how I'd like to live -- minus the Rorschach head and all the rest of the indignities of course.  With a sense of ... what is it? ... leisure?  Ability to flow?  Time to think and pause and absorb?

It's like I'm in the middle of a process, that's moving very very slowly, and I can't quite see what it's going to evolve into yet.  There are powerful forces at work here, forces of age and destiny and science and resolve.  There is a battlefield going on inside my body, at a literal cellular level, between the chemicals that my doctors are infusing me with and the renegade factions that may be attempting to hide out in the caves, waiting until vigilance has been relieved before skulking out by dead of night in two, four, ten years to try it all again.  I am the dark recesses of the jungle, the blacked out windows of Pakistan, the corridors of my body traversed by warring factions, taking out bits of infrastructure as they go.

It's like this:  Say you live in a house.  And the house is suddenly populated by invisible sneaky nasty little assassins, who only want to kill you.  And you obviously can't live like this, so you go to an assassin expert and he says, sure, I can take care of those assassins for you, but we'll have to call in my friend Steve.  And Steve is a highly talented assassin killer, but... he's lacking in some of the nicer social refinements.  So, if you you want Steve, you may have to deal with some of his vulgarity, and maybe he may have to bring his friends over from time to time, but he'll get the job done (or at least we hope he will.) 

So you have Steve come over, and he comes over with a tank, and a bunch of flame throwers, and a coupla dozen bruisers, and maybe a Mack truck, and a backhoe just for kicks.  And he proceeds to rip the roof off and destroy the plumbing and demolish the walls and upend all the furniture and break all your sentimental little ornaments.  And his friends have filthy mouths and insult your mother and kick your dog and create even more of a spectacular mess, and they live in your house for four months and completely fail to clean up after themselves the entire time.  And one day they move out (hopefully after getting all the little fuckers out of what's left of the woodwork) and then you can start the long long process of putting everything back together again.

It's kind of like that.

I'm living in this chaos, this warfare, with all these different battles going on simultaneously, and I just keep thinking, well, this is a really good excuse for some house cleaning.  And some remodeling.  And some serious reflection.  And... big picture, not necessarily on a moment to moment basis... I'm OK with this.

Which makes me think of a chrysalis.

I have never been a caterpillar, so I don't know what it's like.  But it seems to me that, as some point in a caterpillar's life, something huge and strange and unknowable starts to happen.  Strange urges come out of nowhere, daily life is radically dislodged.  For no apparent reason, suddenly it's all about making a cocoon (which of course there would be no word or concept for, having never had to make one before.)  But the notion is there, and the caterpillar can't stop it. It's an unprecedented life event that just kind of happens and suddenly it's all about that. 

The cocoon is made.  And the next thing the caterpillar knows is that now he's inside it, suffocating, trapped.  Again, no idea of why, or what the end result is supposed to be, or if it will ever be over.  To the caterpillar, it must be terrifying and stupid and completely opaque.  A course of events that has no guarantee whatsoever that anything will be any better afterwards than it was before.

We can assume the caterpillar was planning on going on with his caterpillar ways indefinitely. We can assume the caterpillar looked at the moths fluttering by and felt no sense of kinship or envy. We can assume that there was no ambition in the caterpillar's little caterpillar brain that said, hey, maybe we can fly.

And then this thing happens. 

Well, we all know how that story ends.  Being a moth is better than being a worm.  Just as being on the other side of this thing is going to be better than being in the middle of it. 

I'm in the middle, irrevocably evolving, struggling.  I have no idea what will be on the other side.  And, unlike watching the caterpillar and knowing that its story will have a good ending, I cannot say with 100% certainty that mine will.  I have good statistics on my side, but the assassin killers could be having an off day, and we just never know.

However, the ability to build a new roof, the opportunity to re-plumb the depths after Steve and his minions are done pulling out all the foundations out and strewing them around the neighborhood is very interesting to me.  I emptied out half my closet the other day; I need new clothes but I don't know what they will be... all I know is that I need to make room for something different.  I look at my face and hands and think "when I'm done with this I'm going to look very much different, like I've been through something, like I'm no longer unscathed."  I have some battle scars; I will have seen much more of the world through these eyes.  I will also have bought some time within the chrysalis... time to think and reform and shed some old skin.  I will have mutated from the inside out and will come out the other side completely changed. 

I don't know what I will look like; I don't know who I will be; I don't even know how long I will live.  I don't know anything except right now I'm trapped in the middle of this event and that someday I will break free of it again.

Self-Soothing

Anxiety makes me want to clean or fix or get ahead on work or do something productive.  Long to-do lists make me anxious. Chemotherapy makes me anxious.  Not keeping up makes me anxious.  The thing that makes me not anxious is getting stuff done.

I get a lot of comments in my life that I shouldn't work so hard.  In many ways, I see the merit in that. Absolutely, my life has been out of balance.  Absolutely, I need to find time to see the spaces around the tasks, rather than have all the tasks themselves piled up chaotically waiting for them to be checked off the checklist.  I totally get that.  But I get hung up on it as well.  It's like, sure, I get it, I shouldn't work so hard.  But the daily tasks, and the job, and the stuff I do with my life starts then piling up.  And I like to knock the to-do's off that list, because it makes me feel better.  But then I start working too hard, which means I feel anxiety... and we go down the rabbit hole.

You can call this a lot of things.  You can call it perfectionism (which, I assure you, it's not... there are many things I produce and tolerate and sometimes even nurture in grossly imperfect states.)  You can call it OCD (although I balk a little at that because it implies a lot of hand washing and checking of locks and obsessiveness to the point of dysfunction, which doesn't really happen.)  You can call it attention to detail, being a Virgo, a radically good work ethic, or merely a product of a life lived with a certain amount of passion and involvement.  You can blame my early years when I was on my own at 18 and living hand to mouth for so long that I never fully was able to relax.  You can blame me or my brain chemistry or my inability to correctly prioritize my involvements, but with managing a household with kids/dog/cat/spouse/and currently broken sprinklers, a techjob, a non-profit arts organization, my writing and theatre endeavors, and (currently) cancer treatment -- the bottom line is that I have a long to-do list.

I have found that one of my most stressful times during this process are the days when I'm just starting to feel better.  When I'm sick, I'm OK in terms of stress.  There is only one urgent item on the to-do list: get through it.  I manage my symptoms, I try to sleep, I Just Get Through.  That part is awful, but easy.

Then I start feeling a little better.  I have 50% energy: what to do with it?  Do I do the household bookkeeping and make sure all the money is in the right accounts?  Do I check in with work and start chipping away at the mountain of stuff waiting and accumulating for me there?  Do I proceed with the list of self-care items that I really should be doing as a priority -- walk the dog, walk in nature, write a blog, take a moment to sit outside and just relax?  Do I call my mom and assuage her anxiety?  Do I start on my overdue taxes?  Do I spend time with Roger or my boys and share some quality moments with them?  Do I just read a book, or indulge in some visual content?  How about keeping up with the blog? Suddenly, the second I'm feeling better, the options widen out incredibly and I feel absolutely bombarded.  It's like peeking up over the foxhole and seeing fifty incoming missiles heading right towards me, all labeled URGENT."

I get immediately stressed.  And so I write everything down, which helps.  I then try to figure out which will be best for ME, and I get stymied again.  Am I talking about what will be best for my body?  My mind?  My soul?  Remember those Unavoidable Other things I talked about awhile ago?  Where does doing the taxes fit into the holy triumverate body/mind/soul? Well, it's a little bit of a mind satisfaction, that's true.  But kind of also an Unavoidable Other.  As is balancing the checkbooks and paying the bills and calling the termite guy and refinancing the house.  Sure, all necessary.  But low in caloric value when it comes to feeding the soul.

I have been struggling with this for years.  It's, frankly, harder to juggle this while there are lots of people in my life, because I get (I feel) a lot of judgment about what I tend to do (which is take care of the Unavoidable Others and the Mind lists before taking care of the Body and Soul lists).  I can't stand a long list of Unavoidable Other stuff hanging over my head.  My thought process is usually to just get all the yucky stuff out of the way first, and then work up to the good stuff.  I know it's backwards, but it's how I do things.  It keeps me way on top of stuff that could otherwise cause problems (like overdue bills), it keeps the decks cleared and clean for other activities, and basically I just don't perform or think well when there are a bunch of niggling things to do that can just be gotten out of the way and never thought about again.

I'm like this with the house.  If it takes less than a minute to do something, like wipe down the counter, I do it.  Every time I pass by, if it needs it.  I put stuff back where it belongs.  I keep things swept up.  I move stuff from one room to another.  I am constantly replacing and restoring, and it keeps order (ish) in the household so we don't spend huge amounts of time either doing massive tidying, or looking for things that are lost.

So, my inner monologue goes, shoot me.  I'm sorry that I do things in this order.  I feel guilty for sweeping around and cleaning up when everyone is kicking back and relaxing.

But, thanks to a small throwaway comment from my therapist, I have finally come to realize something profound about myself.  This IS how I relax.  This IS how I self-soothe.  I make order and it makes me feel better.  This is the fact of ME.  To other people it looks like work.  And work, everyone agrees, is BAD.  And too much BAD WORK makes people sick.  Which is why I'm sick.  This is the grossest of all extrapolations, but it is the message I get subliminally (and give myself consciously).

I DO run around too much, and stop too little.  I feel it.  But there's a very subtle, but huge, different between running a life and a life running you.  Many times before I was diagnosed I just felt crushed by the amount of details that were expected from me, from my various commitments.  If you're ever bored and don't have anything to do, get highly involved in a struggling arts organization: you will never have a spare moment for the rest of your life.  Jobs are a good source of a to-do list.  Having a household of four drivers and four cars, one of which is always in the shop, it a good way to spend a lot of time talking about who is taking what to where and who is dropping off whom at the train station.  How about a dog with a skin allergy?  HOURS of fun.  And there are bills and money and household repairs and all that.




Add to that the NEW stuff I need/should/want to do.  Exercising a half hour a day.  Taking some soul time to write, and to go outside and look at nature, and to eat a little more thoughtfully, and to put space around my activities so I'm not just screaming from one thing to the next.  These are good things to put on the list.  REALLY good things.  Important things.

The problem is, they are just now added things to the list.








I am crushed by the to do list.

So how to deal with it?

Obviously prioritization helps.  And balance.  But the takeaway I got from my therapist is that it's actually just OK to do it.  That I don't have to try to force myself to find peace and serenity by scrambling around looking for a mythical pause button that will force it all to go away for awhile.

It's OK to knock things out.  It's OK to pay the bills.  It's OK to fix the door handle and vacuum up the dog hair.  It's ALSO OK to write a blog, or take a walk, or read a book.

The point is that it's ok to do (with caveats) whatever it takes to self -soothe when the anxiety is high.

My self soothing for anxiety means working.  I work, I get stuff done, I feel better.  When I force myself to stop and ignore those missiles marked URGENT coming at me, I feel worse.

It's OK to feel better.  In (with caveats) any way that works.

The caveats are obvious: you can't safely self-soothe with stuff like, say, chocolate in large doses, or complete avoidance of the Unavoidable Others, or just channel surfing all day hoping that watching Swamp Drillers will make it all go away.  You can't self soothe by sheer avoidance of all reality, at least not indefinitely.

But you can self soothe by working.  Or by exercising.  Or by writing or creating.  Self soothing, when done non-destructively, is a good thing.

The key, I think, is to try to find that balance again.  If you've self-soothed by working on a project for 12 hours, maybe you need to switch it up and find something else that will feel good.  It will help feed the well springs, and it will give you a little break from all the mind work.  If you've just gone on a long hike, maybe writing that blog will be a good way to coast down from that endorphin high.

Maybe there are ways I can train ourselves to self soothe in a more balanced way, so it's not all Unavoidable Others first, but maybe some soul stuff first, and then maybe some physical stuff, with a promise to myself that the anxiety reducing to-do list slashing will come afterwards.

That's what I've been thinking about this last week as I've been feeling good, going back into work, and trying to watch how I'm juggling the list and the missiles.

Today is chemo #2.  I am managing anxiety by writing (and, yeah, cleaning the garage and trying to fix the sprinklers) (and walking the dog).  Afterwards, the to-do list is put on hold for awhile and I"m planning on binge watching House of Cards until my eyes bug out.

The problem occurs when the anxiety and the to-do list recedes only when I'm feeling sick.  Certainly a big Life Lesson I want to learn while I'm doing this thing is how to relax when feeling good.  Thanks for listening to these rambles as I try to figure these things out.

Hair (Part ii)

OK, this is how fucked up it is to be a human being.

As I believe I made clear, I was totally and completely unhappy about the hair thing.  After I wrote that blog I went to a yoga class (very poignant on many levels), and while there I ran into the woman who has been "navigating" me through this all, a person from the hospital who is paid to help people like me make it through this thing.

She's amazing, and sweet, and has been through it herself.  And when I ran into her at the yoga studio, I told her about the hair falling out situation and she said I've gotta do the deed, like, now.  She immediately used my phone to call the appearance center at the hospital and made me an appointment for an hour later.  She explained to me that they will shave my head and do it right and help me with all my questions and it just has to get done.

So I ran home, Roger cancelled his afternoon client, and we went up there.

The woman there talked me through the whole thing.  How she'll shave it very close but the little stubble will eventually fall out as well.  The follicles will go dormant and I'll be chrome dome pretty much through the end of the chemo.  Then it will start growing back, somewhat tormented at first, but eventually it will find its strength and get all better.  The chances are good that I will still be brown and not come out fully white, and we all agreed that there are many people in the world who can help me with gray hair if it becomes an issue.

I sat there in the chair just wanting to get it over with, and wanting with all my might not to have it be happening, and... eventually... she turned me away from the mirror and started at it.

I made some joke about not having my head shaved since 'Nam, and Roger watched, and I felt the razor against my scalp.... and... all of it fell away.

And as it fell away I felt, kind of, better?  Sort of?  Like, FUCK, finally this was happening and I'll never have to anticipate it ever again.  And, seriously, the hair had been bugging me as well.  It was hanging heavily and kind of sticking to my neck and making me sweat.  And as it fell away I felt, yes, better.

Finally she was done.  She said I have a beautiful head and, whether she says that to everyone or not, I decided to take what I could get.  And then she spun me around. 

And who was looking back at me in the mirror?  My father!  And my brother!  And it was so... GOOD to see them both.  She says almost everyone says the same thing, which I find fascinating.  But I was looking at my dad for the first time in 14 years, and I was looking at my sons, and I was, looking at myself as well and even though I didn't look exceptionally happy.  I did look very, well, fine.

It was OK.

And then we played with scarves and wigs and hats, and I tried on this brunette wig that my guardian angel unseen friend had left on my doorstep the day before, and threw my new hat on top of it... and I looked pretty damn good.  Actually, pretty damn better, to tell you the truth.

And ever since then, I've been having a blast with it.  I'm getting all girly and learning how to tie scarves and accessorize.  My son's best friend gave me a bad ass tiger bandana and I walk around feeling, actually, really good about myself.  Earrings look good without all that hair around, and MAN, it's, like, literally so very cool to walk around without any hair, especially in the heat.  It feels kind of great.

So, I'm just so amazed and confounded at how this works.  I was dreading this.  And I knew there was a slight chance it would pan out to be better than my exceptions.  Actually, on a philosophical level I knew there was a great chance it would be OK... but this has turned out WAY better than I'd imagined.  Like, to the extent that I'm thinking I could actually do this again voluntarily.  I mean, I've had haircuts I've hated a hundred times worse than this thing. It's the ultimate low maintenance 'do, and with all these scarves and hats around, it's actually kind of girly girl fun. (True fact: I went to the Ahmanson the other night as a BLONDE, if you can believe it, and actually had a thought while people-watching that I felt sorry for all these people who had to deal with all their hair.)

That's how fucked up it is to be a human being.  We are totally our own little suffering factories, and if we could just wait until something actually HAPPENS before we decide how good or bad it is going to be... well, we could probably get a lot more done, and sleep better, and be nicer to our children and spouses.

Hair

It's happening.

All day I've been feeling hair falling on my arms, picking it off my clothing, seeing way more than I'd like between my fingers when I run them through.

My hair feels sick, cloying, and hot.  I feel hot all the time.  The hair on my head sticks to my sweaty neck.  I keep putting it up but I don't want to stress it out by combing it or brushing it.  Even though my hair looks terrible, it grieves my heart to the core to look in the mirror.

Hair.  It's the first thing to go when someone wants to rob you of your identity.  Think death camps, think boot camps, think convents.  You want to humiliate someone?  Shave their head.  You want to erase individuality in a group?  Shave everyone's heads.

The biggest crime the Beatles committed, according to my parents' generation, was growing their hair over the tops of their ears.  Over the tops of their ears.  Fast forward to the later '60's and '70's, when men had hair down to their waists, or out to their shoulders, or both.  It became a symbol of ethnic pride when both men and women started proudly sporting afros.  More than anything else about us, our hair is how we proclaim our individuality and the way we go about the world.

Hair is our vitality, our qi. It grows and flows and curls and twirls.  It dances on our crown chakra like little dancing vibrations reaching up and out to the gods.

Mine is going.  I can't help it and I can't stop it.

I really am quite bereft.

It is the next descent down into the underworld.  I have been graced, thank GOD, with a few days' reprieve in terms of feeling pretty good.  Unfortunately, these days have been spent with too much busyness and not enough down time; my soul is staggering around with bags beneath its eyes wondering where all the inundation came from, and knowing full well that it is the same old thing: taking care of business, keeping up with commitments, following responsibilities first.

And while I try madly to catch up in hopes of catching a breather soon...my hair dwindles down my arms, falls on my lap, stays behind in the sink.

I am hoping that once it's off I'll be less weirded out by the whole thing.  That, like every other step of this journey, the anticipation is worse than the event.  That once we shave it I may even like the new me, that the new identity may be surprising in ways I can't imagine at the moment, on this side of it.  Maybe it will be freeing.  Maybe it will be a relief to get it over with.  Maybe, after all, I'll still be me and it won't even matter.

I hope so.  And I hope that this is part of a glorious metamorphosis, when all is said and done. That, on many levels, outside is matching inside transformation, and when I'm through with all of this I will be able to say I've shed more than just my hair, that I will have shed lack of wisdom and misplacement of priorities, that I will have shed bad habits and wrong action.

Once again, this thing is taking me down roads that I never dreamed I would have to travel. Pushing me towards limits of discomfort and despair that I had thought were left behind during the extremities of my  youth.  These are whole new levels... both good and bad.  As a friend said to me tonight: the problem is that it's both so good and so bad, at the same time.  It's too much, it's so much, it's beyond my ability to control or even comprehend it.

Yesterday, a dear friend brought me some scarves from Washington, where she lives.  We sat in my backyard and practiced tying them.  They are beautiful.  They flow and make me into a whole new kind of feminine.

And then today: an unmet friend brought me an amazing care package.  She is a fellow survivor and friend of a friend who has somehow been called to be my personal guardian angel.  She packaged up some baskets of scarves and hats and other head paraphernalia that I may need and dropped them off at my home.  She gave me two wigs... cuter than my hair has ever looked... and even thought of providing baskets for me to put the stuff into.  Packaged with such loving attention to detail.  Given from the heart.  So compassionate I could not even stand to open all the packages yet.  Too much.  Too much love. 

We will see where this new adventure leads.  I can't say bring it on, because I don't want it.  I can't say I'm game, because I'm not.  But I do know I've never said no to a new experience...and the choice isn't really mine anymore anyway.

At the end of the day, it has to happen.  It has to happen because better days have to happen.  It has to happen to get through to the other side of this journey.  As long as I keep my cakes to use to escape the underworld, I'll be fine.  I can see horrors and experience humiliation, but as long as I can keep myself together, I'll endure it.  I'll make it through.  I'll finally grow a new identity that will be built from the tears and tendrils of the old one. 

Chemo is a harsh dominatrix, and not in the fun way.

I just thought that was a funny line.

How Are You

So, I had this bath the other night.  Not just any old bath (not that I take them often), but... really... I think it will be known as The Bath in my mind forever.

My dear friend Jill from New York sent me a care package awhile ago consisting of some girly stuff.. a funny book, a healing salve, and a little brown box with kind of artsty stamps on it, tied on the top with sealing wax, and labeled as containing bath salts.  I played with the other stuff, and put the little brown box away for later, because I just don't really take baths that often.

The other day I decided to open up the box to at least see what was in it.  It was filled with straw packing and then a beautiful frosted jar with a label on it: Wild rose and goats milk bath salt -- consisting of Dead Sea salt, epsom salt, pink himalyan salt, goat's milk (WTF?), wild rose, glycerine and essential oils.  It also proclaimed itself to be "wildcrafted and organic."

Opening up the jar, I see that this is some seriously cool shit.  Huge salt crystals, kind of glopped together with oils and the goats milk, with actual buds of roses thrown in for good measure.  It smelled wonderful.

So I gave it a try the other night.  Roger was asleep, so I did the whole deal... a candle, soft lighting, closed the door, gave myself up to some personal indulgence.  And as I slipped into the water, I realized how absolutely crazy it is to not do this more frequently.  My poor beleaguered cut/poked/inserted/extracted/infused/expanded/subtracted/medicated body felt better than it has since the surgery.  It was so simple!  And so rare.

And it was the rarity that made me start thinking.

"Self care" is usually thought of as trying to squeeze in time to get to the gym, or the spa, or Whole Foods, or something else in the middle of taking care of the job, the kids, the husband, the parent, the house, the dog, the cat, the stranger on the street, or basically anyone else who steps up to our counter and takes a number.  Once everyone's needs are dealt with, then we take the last number and try to squeeze in whatever we can at 11:30 at night, or 5:30 in the morning.

Or we get militant about it.  This is Me time we proclaim, as we screech out of the driveway, burning rubber down the road, to make our mani/pedi appointment goddamn it and everyone can go fuck themselves if they try to get in the way.  We burn ourselves out to a point where we are about to go all Howard Beale on the world, and then we take some Me time with our middle fingers up and while guilt and rage seethe through our bodies.

I am sure there are people who have figured out how to balance these extremes.  This is personally a challenge for me.  And laying there in the warm water, the goats milk and epsom salts gently seeking entry points into my skin, I realized that this may be what this whole breast cancer thing is all about for me:  How to figure out, truly, how to take care of myself in a way that is balanced and harmonious and healthy on all levels.

I failed immediately, of course.  I had two busy days this week, between my son's graduation and some work related stuff I got involved with yesterday.  After work, I also spent a good hour purely socializing with a group of co-workers, making it two full days in a row, out in the world being almost normal.

Well, the chemo/cancer gods did not like this so well.  Or I had a reaction to this white blood cell count boosting injection that they gave me on Wednesday.  Whatever it was, the fist of an angry motherfucking god came down on me last night with a vengeance.  I was reduced to absolute paralyzed pain, every bone aching and my head splitting open with a migraine-sized headache as big as I've ever felt.  I could not move, I could not think, I could not even whimper without hurting more.


I finally took some ibuprofen PM last night, slept solidly for a few hours, and then took something stronger this morning when the headache was starting to get cranked up again.  And while I was laying there, waiting with teeth clenched for the new meds to kick in, I had a thought.

This whole idea of taking care of oneself kind of implies that we know how we are feeling before a hammer strikes us on the head and smites us down to our knees.  Right?  In theory, I should have known when to leave the social event before I overdid it.  In practice, however, I don't really know when too much is too much until I'm clobbered and slink away into the corner to lick my self-inflicted wounds.

Is this just me?  I wonder how many people actually know how they are feeling.

I also started thinking of the phrase "how are you?"  It's not "What are you doing?"  It's "how are you being?" As Roger says frequently in his teaching, we are human beings, not human doings.  We ask ourselves and others how we are... but do we really know the answer?

In the hospital, they always ask what your pain level is on a scale of one to ten.  They provide a whole chart of how to assess this -- from happy to crying faces, to verbal descriptions -- to help people assess accurately how their pain level is.  Too bad we don't have charts to help us know what our other levels are.  How fulfilled is your soul today?  How mentally vibrant do you feel today?  What is your body telling you today energetically, emotionally?  How creatively inspired are you today?

I don't know if we know how to assess these things.  I sure don't.  It feels like I just go off on tangents waiting to hit another bumper car of obstacle, or I get so pent up that I give everyone that old middle finger again and run off to Starbucks to write for an hour.  It's so ... random. It's so lacking in true information.

Being vs doing.  As I explore these things I think the answer is out there, but that it doesn't have to do with more lists of things to do.  I don't think it has to do with better time management.  I think it is truly, deeply, more fundamental than that.  I think it's a way of being in our lives and finding a sense of balance and harmony from the inside out.  So that we know when we are depleted creatively, or we know when it's time to shift gears from work mode and go bicycling.  So that we know how we actually are, on multiple scales, and can then chart our courses accordingly.

To the LACHSA Class of 2014

I spent the day with family and friends of my youngest son as he graduated from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.  LACHSA is a unique school that serves the entire county, dishing out the usual menu of high school academics, a well as providing a conservatory-level visual, performance, and cinematic arts education to the talented students who have proven worthy to attend. 

The graduation ceremony was held at Walt Disney Concert Hall, a glorious architectural affair, with incredible acoustics and a pipe organ that takes your breath away. The long afternoon was spent celebrating the innumerable talents of these amazing young musicians, actors, artists, dancers, singers, and filmmakers.  For nearly four hours, we watched them perform before us, presenting us with the pinnacle of their talents as they hover on the cusp of their next great adventure... college, professional life, travel... the world as expansive as it will ever possibly get in their lifetimes.

The hall was incredible.  The lighting was deeply saturated and endlessly delicious.  The magnificent organ was incorporated into one of the orchestral offerings ... stunning us with its vibrancy and power.  Using the binoculars, I watched the alcoves housing the pipes opening and closing, to adjust the volume and acoustics of the sound.  The lighting in these recesses was an exquisite teal, offset by the rich ambers used to light the carved wooden pipes in front.  Incredibly beautiful, ornate and fascinating.

The performances were inspiring: the youth and strength of the dancers' bodies reminded me of how explosively healthy the human body can be; the sensitivity and boundless creativity of the visual artists humbled me; the intimacy of the jazz musicians with their guitars and basses and saxophones made me long to master a musical instrument and know it as well as these kids knew theirs.

And it was a major day for me.  I wore a bit of makeup for the first time in over two months.  I dressed up and (thanks to my new stress and chemo induced weight loss program) looked like something approaching good.  (I was also probably the only one in that theatre... although maybe not... who spent multiple moments just being deeply grateful that my hair was still attached to my head.)

Most of all, I spent the day in the company of hundreds of people enjoying art, and not talking about blood cell counts and prognoses and side effects.  Instead, I gave the day over to commemorating a rite of passage, watching this group of very amazing kids shimmy and shake and take selfies as they crossed the stage, heading off into a future full of possibility and opportunity and obstacles and challenges. 

It was a brutally long day, don't get me wrong; but it was great to be out in the world, saturated in music and visuals and the creative spirit.

And as I watched this long pageant unfold before me, I came up with the following message I would like to send out to this group of brilliant and beautifulyoung men and women who have spent the last four years together:

To the LACHSA class of 2014...

As I watched you today I wondered where your paths would take you.  I wondered where you were going and when you were coming back.  I wondered what you have been through to get to this moment, and whether you will look back on this day as a high point, or just another springboard to the future glories you have already earned.

I thought about life and all its rituals and changes. Your faces are so beautiful.  Each and every one.  Your eyes are bright, your bodies thrumming with energy. I beg of you to not take that for granted.  Be good to those bodies you strut through the world today.  Take care of them.  They will serve you well.

Hold your friends close.  You guys are a great bunch... funny, loving, incredibly caring towards one another.  The LACHSA experience makes you very lucky; you are able to go out into the world with your tribe already fully formed, possibly the first of many such tribes.  Keep the tribe intact.  You guys are good together; you will never find anyone who knows you as well as you know each other, and time will only deepen and enrich that.  The early tribes are the most precious.

As you go forward, you will find challenges and grace, moments of both pain and sublime joy.  Because you have your art, you have a way to navigate through all that.  You can create your music or painting or inhabit a character or make a film to understand how this thing called reality works for you.  You can use your art to interpret yourself to the world, and also to make sense of the world back.  You can use your art as a metaphor, a conduit, a litmus test, an emotional dowsing rod.

The art you have just spent four years perfecting will see you through the rest of your life, if you let it -- it will be your constant friend, lover, ally, opponent, nag, bitch, guilt tripper, therapist, and antagonist.  It will change and grow as you do.  It will give you a place to go that is uniquely and wonderfully and blissfully your own.

Art, whether visual, musical, dramatic, verbal, or martial, is the glue that holds this thing all together.  Without art in your life, life is a series of wakings and retirings, with precious little in between to add any spice or resonance or meaning. But you are all lucky enough to have an art, and it will give you a way to be that will be radically different from the way normal people operate. 

Keep in touch with that thing inside you that creates and sees the world a little differently.  It will set you apart, in a good way if you can accept that, and it will be the thing that always brings you back. 

Congratulations for seeing it through.  At the end of the ceremony we in the audience gave you graduates a standing ovation, and you gave us one back.  Remember that moment.  All your friends and family showering you with respect and honor, while you showered us back with your thanks and enthusiasm.  Hold on to that... because we will be standing and supporting you forever. 

Go kick some ass in the world.  Go dare to know yourselves.  Go challenge yourselves creatively, and find friends to keep you grounded. Don't go terribly berserk the first time out on your own.  Just a little bit will take you a long way. 

But go, now.

Go forth and shine.

Feeling It

There are a lot of things I'm feeling these days, physically.  Overwhelming feelings at times, and usually not pleasant.

But all the uncomfortable feelings I'm having in my body do not remotely compare in potency with the emotional feelings I'm bombarded with nearly constantly.  These are good feelings, amazing feelings, profound feelings.  More than anything else, I'm feeling totally and completely loved.

This baffles me on a number of levels.  Not the fact (simple or astounding in itself that I'm loved), but that it takes such an extreme moment to feel it.  I personally love a whole lot of people, with a fierce appetite that -- when I think of it -- almost feels unbearable.  At this moment in my life, I am thinking about those people, and my intense love for them, a lot.  I am also lucky enough to be on the receiving end of that kind of devotion as well.  I am very very blessed by that, of course -- that is unquestioned and appreciated -- but it raises the bigger question: why now?

Why are we like this, that we can only feel these powerful positive emotions when there is a threat, or a crisis, or a fear of loss involved?  Why does it take cancer or earthquakes or extreme disruption to cause us to see our friends, our family, our acquaintances, even the entire concept of our fellow human beings with a new sense of compassion and appreciation?

What this means is that, when we're doing well and don't have cancer, everyone annoys the fucking fuck out of us, right?  That asshole in the BMW who just took three lanes to make the turn onto Fair Oaks.  Those morons at the pharmacy.  Those goddamn kids who leave trash on our back parkway (OK, actually, my compassion right this moment doesn't quite extend so far out as to include them, but... in theory... sure... let's move on before I get so sick that I love them too).  You get my point.

When everyone is healthy and our lives are going fine, our status quo is one of crankiness, resentment, and petty annoyance.  When we're on the battle lines, suddenly the scope of our perspective shoots way far out and -- as long as we're not bleeding our of our eyeballs -- we're all good!  The world is a beautiful place!  We are filled with a sense of loving and being loved.

I am deeply deeply hoping that, when all this is over, I can retain some of this perspective.  This goes along with the "let's learn this lesson the easy way, people" thing I wrote the other day.  We can all stay sick, moving from crisis to crisis, to get this hit of profound joy and connectedness or... maybe?... we can just take the hit voluntarily.  Keep this vastness in mind and incorporate that perspective a little bit more.

We all love and are loved.  I believe that is really true.  And if you don't feel it, look a little deeper.  Who sticks by you even when you're being an asshole?  That's love.  Who takes care of you even when you don't really appreciate it?  That's love.  And who do you do that for in return?  You may rail and rant and chafe about certain people in your life, but... as long as you give a shit enough to let them bug you... you still love them on a certain level.  Maybe?  Possibly? 

I have always been able to give it out, but taking it has been more difficult.  The ability to feel loved is being mindfully cultivated these days.  I'm letting people take care of me.  I'm accepting I'm not super woman and being OK with not trying to pretend so much that I am. (Ironically, I believe this is concurrently making me stronger.)  Far more radically, I'm taking all this love being thrown at me and incorporating it into my attitude towards myself.  YOWZA!  Self compassion!  That's a big one...and a subject for a completely new post.

In the meantime... my job is to continue to feel it.  Feel the bigness.  Feel the expansiveness.  We all have a life threatening disease.  To whatever extent that helps us appreciate the bigger picture -- in all its fullness and glory -- we need to use it to help us keep that perspective.

That Annoying Inner Music

I've long harbored a theory that the songs we wake up with in our heads and just can't shake are sent to us from our subconscious, transmitting a secret message like little aural dream fragments.  Once we decipher the message, my theory goes, we can dispel the annoying song bits and be freed of them.

It actually works, and (no surprise) it turns out that the subconscious has quite the little sense of humor.

These days, thanks in part to the long road trip that Roger and I just took, I have two songs.  They are incessant, and they are specific.  Because Roger and I are old Dead heads, the messages also happen to be taking the form of two Grateful Dead songs.

The first one is sixteen bars from Going Down the Road.

Going down the road, feeling bad (dum dee dum de dum de dum)
Going down the road, feeling bad (dum dee dum de dum de dum)
Going down the road, feeling baa-haa-haa-haa-haa-had
Don't want to be feeling this a-ways...

I hear every note, every syllable, every nuance.  At the end of the loop, it neatly splices onto itself and starts up again at the beginning, going around, and around, and around, and around again. Ridiculously annoying.

The other one: Wharf Rat.  Same album.  There's some intro music that floats around in my head when this one is going on, and then we get into it:

I'll get up and fly away... fly away..

 And then that repeats a few hundred times.

Wharf Rat as an annoying bit of inner music is a lot less specific, until it comes to that refrain.  That comes in loud and clear.

Seriously, people?  I mean, look at these lyrics.  Going Down the Road is in my head every time I'm going down the road feeling, well, bad.  And Wharf Rat tends to show up when I'm feeling pretty good. I feel like maybe I could get up and fly away.

I bounce between the two of them and, if I'm not really super sure how I'm doing, I can listen to the annoying music in my head and find out.


Hopefully by stating this out in the open, I will have acknowledged to my psyche that I'm getting it already and can move on to some other annoying songs.  We will see.

In the meantime...I'm going down the road.

The Dead Marshes

In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers, Frodo and Sam have to slog through the dead marshes on their long trek to Mordor to destroy the ring of power.  Thanks to Wikipedia, I don't have to actually crack open a book to find a very good description of what both the dead marshes (and, spoiler alert: chemotherapy) are like:

...dreary and wearisome. Cold, clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy milky surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long forgotten summers.

I think I am on the tail end of the first round of chemo.  The treatment was on Wednesday, and it's now Sunday.  Thursday I felt OK.  Friday I felt good... until I didn't.  Yesterday was a full blown dead marshes day, and now... this afternoon... I'm starting to feel the breeze on my face again.

It is weird to be undergoing treatment that produces side effects that you usually take treatment for. This is a hard core battle we're fighting  There is collateral damage that is deemed acceptable because the stakes are so high. You have a headache, you throw up a bit, you lose your hair, you sacrifice parts of your body... that's OK in this game.  This is not a treatment geared to make you feel better.  This is a treatment geared to keep you alive, at just about any cost.

I don't want to say it's the worst thing ever, because (very unfortunately) it's probably not.  The lousy feeling of having these chemicals permeate and pass through my body feels mainly like a very bad flu, compounded by the worst fatigue imaginable.  My body ached and stabbed and sighed.  My stomach was... nervous.  Not so upset that it couldn't hold itself together any more, but... very nervous.  Food was utterly unappealing and even though it wasn't an urgent notion, I did find myself thinking on several occasions that vomiting would not actually be so horrible after all. 

The fatigue.  Unbelievable.  I'm a stage manager and a technical director: crushing fatigue and I go back for decades.  This was on a whole new order of magnitude.  Sitting up for more than fifteen minutes was difficult.  Standing up for more than fifteen seconds pretty much impossible.  My brain would still be working on the assumption that it was my old body in control, and then I would find myself shuddering and shaking inside, trying to just continue to sit up.  Old rules no longer applied yesterday.

At one point yesterday I forced myself to sit outside and be in the air.  It was utterly pleasant... the water in the fountain making a cheerful sound, the plants freshly watered, a sense of peace because there was no way I was capable of any type of productive work.  And again, today, I was sprawled out on the bed.  Roger was reading a Beatles book, the ceiling fan was going, my body temperature and position were comfortable (for once)... and I thought... this would be sooo pleasant, if only I weren't so dog tired and sick.

I believe I had it fairly easy, all in all.  This is the first go round.  My mouth hurt but it settled down.  My hair is starting to detach, gradually, which is breaking my heart.  But all in all, it was just a couple of days -- this time -- that I had to survive.  I just had to get through one or two really bad days.  Today was better.  Tomorrow, I trust, will be better still.

The dead marshes.  The ragged shadows of long forgotten summers.  Whispers of better times, echoes of life.  Traipsing through these few days, I felt the call of the dead.  And even though I'm very far from there yet, I could understand a final moment when the body just sighs and gives in, too tired to fight any more.