One: Stages, Diagnosis, March 2009

Mills College MFA Reading May, 2006

Stages

Where to start. The diagnosis or before? How a life together takes shape the moment you meet. He stretched out his hand and said, “I’m Dan.” Someone who ordinarily lived in a shell, who saw his brother Pete shake my hand down at the river the previous day, but couldn’t budge from his spot at the Big Rock. The next morning, we met in front of the Lyons’ campsite. I was camping with them, our mutual friends. Then we were both swimming in the river, and he was wearing his scuba mask, and I asked him to hike the next day. Four years later, we have survived his cancer, what has amounted to an experience that was part shared, part not. For months my journal stared up at me, blank paper, until prior to surgery when we joined the support group, and another patient encouraged writing, which was all I needed.

I’ve always resisted classifying the human experience. People have a need to put things into groups, organize thoughts. Sometimes this is a useful endeavor. The self-help books say that when someone dies, those who remain go through stages of grief. I understand organization, indispensable in my life, enabling productivity and sanity in the midst of demands and chaos. But stages, I’ve resisted them, pulled away from the assertion that anything reasonable can be said about grief and loss. The same goes for cancer. These don’t seem like stages, but items, appointments. Here, I’ll put it into the “stages” we went through:

Diagnosis

Consultation

Research

Cancel the trip to England

Consultations with other surgeons

See an ostomy nurse

See an oncologist

Ostomy nurse

Go away for a weekend

Set the surgery date

Second pathology report

wait wait

Ostomy nurse

Patients support group

wait wait

Summer school begins

Surgery

A week in the hospital

Weeks at home recuperating

Partners and Patients Support groups

Working from home

Camping

Back to work

Diagnosis March 31^st, 2009

That day, the day he found out, my life was without meaning. Still in the wake of the death of my cat Cleo a year earlier, my vision was darkened, a shade separating me from the world. That day in particular felt lifeless. After teaching my English classes at Laney College, I got off Bart and went food shopping at the Mexican grocery store. Usually I would walk all the way home from there, but, tired, I took the bus. As I walked up the street from the bus, I saw flashing lights in the distance. Were they near our house? I couldn’t tell. Walking faster. Dark red. As I got closer the light became lights, the emergency vehicle became clear, a paramedic unit. A couple of men in uniform were talking to neighbors up the block. Relief. It was not our house.

Legs shaky, I hurried up the steps and opened the front door. Without missing a beat, I started preparing dinner, jambalaya, one of Dan’s favorites.

I was upstairs when I heard him turn the lock. I came downstairs to greet him. He said, “I have to talk to you. Upstairs.” Why upstairs? Because it was where we spent time during the colder part of the year.

You know how you just know?

He said the polyp was cancerous.

He said, “I don’t know what to do.”

I held him. I told him, “It’s going to be okay.”

What spiraled from that moment, a point of unreal, a lump in my throat too large to digest, was a new reality, undeniable, something I couldn’t ignore.

Everything was shaped by this diagnosis. On Bart the next morning, on my way to school, a guy sat in back of me talking on his cell phone, shouting, “Fucked up! This guy hit me bro!” Then it was the other guy’s turn to talk, this one suddenly quiet. I was still in a state of shock, and like someone who takes a shot of whisky when bad news happens and does not feel the affects of it, the dialogue behind me went through me and left without a trace. Normally, it would have revved me up or at least entertained me.

The weekend following the diagnosis, Dan and I spent a lot of time together, like when we were first involved. We didn’t do much—walked around, ate out. We talked of life insurance and health directives, of wills and trusts, of his kids and me. The health directive would ensure his wishes would be carried out. Since I wasn’t his wife, I would have no power over anything. Sunday night he said, “It felt like a second honeymoon.”

He seemed to be doing okay, but then, later Sunday night right before bedtime, he said “I ran out of positive thoughts.”

“It’s okay,” I said.