Rocking the Pink (25 page)

“But I won't be with
you,
Mommy,” Sophie said. “I'd rather be with you at home than go to Disneyland with a baby sitter.”

And then there's Chloe, age seven.
My
“mini-me.” The anti-Sophie.

Chloe belly flops into the pool of life. She doesn't think about
anything but
right this very minute.
For better and for worse. She has not once in her seven years asked me what's for dinner. She doesn't need to know. That's later, and this is now. As if she's a yogini in India, she loves to tell Sophie, “Just be in the moment.”

In direct contrast with Sophie, Chloe throws her love around like confetti on New Year's Eve. She throws it up, up, up and away!—and then lets it shimmer down, down, down, dispersing everywhere. She never worries where it might land or that she might run out of it. And, of course, she never runs out. Chloe might be in love with a particular boy today (and she is always googly-eyed over someone), but tomorrow she will find a new love.

Darling Chloe is a ham. More than a ham, actually—so much more: She's a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Chloe would do anything, anything at all, to get a laugh. It's worrisome sometimes, but usually it's just plain funny.

When we were having dinner at a restaurant in Disneyland, Chloe politely excused herself from the table to use the restroom. A few minutes later, she returned and sat quietly back down in her chair.

And then Chloe leaned in and whispered to me, totally deadpan, “Winnie the Poop.”

I knew I shouldn't laugh. But I did. Bad Mommy! I snorted so loudly, I had to hide my face in my napkin so as not to make a rude commotion in the restaurant. More inappropriate encouragement for the ham-and-cheese-sandwich.

When I picked up Chloe from school one day in second grade, I asked about her day.

“Today was great,” she said. “Meditation class was fantastic.”

I hadn't been aware that the school offered meditation classes. “You're taking a meditation class?” I asked.

“No, Mom, I'm
teaching
a meditation class.”

“Really?” I tried not to laugh. “What do you teach in the class?”

“Oh, you know. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Think of a beautiful place.” She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Then she opened her eyes and shrugged her little shoulders. “Everyone thinks it's really relaxing.”

“Who's everyone? How many kids are in this meditation class?”

Her lips moved as she ticked off the names of her pupils to herself. “Eight.”

Eight second-graders stood around at recess and followed Guru Chloe in meditation exercises? Whatever happened to hopscotch and tetherball?

During my weeks and weeks of chemotherapy, as I was forced to spend much of my time in quiet pursuits at home, my girls and I discovered how much we enjoyed each other's company. Sometimes
we mulled over a jigsaw puzzle together, chatting the whole time. Other times, they taught me the latest card games they'd learned from their cousins. And sometimes—my favorite times—I'd lift up the corner of my bedspread and say, “Come on in.” And the girls and I would nestle in close in my warm bed and watch all six hours of my beloved
Pride and Prejudice.
At the closing credits, Sophie, who'd clearly inherited the period-drama-junkie gene, would beg, “Oh, Mommy! Let's watch it again.”

A few days before my eighth and final chemo infusion, I took Buster to the dog park. I sat on the park bench wearing my head scarf, feeling depleted but happy to be alive under the warm California sun. As I jotted song lyrics in my journal, a man of about fifty entered the gated park with his chocolate Labrador retriever. Buster started jumping for joy at the sight of this other dog, and, once the Lab was unleashed, they galloped off together to play.

The man introduced himself to me as Sal and asked me about Buster. What breed? How old? “He's very handsome,” he commented. And then he looked me in the eyes and asked pointedly, “How are you feeling, if you don't mind my asking?” He inquired with such warmth, such genuine caring, that I felt a prickle of a tear forming in my eye.

“Actually, this is my first day out of the house in a full week,” I told him honestly. “But I'm feeling okay today.”

He didn't ask me if I was a cancer patient; he already knew.

“I've had cancer three times,” Sal said gently. “And I had chemo all three times.”

Sal continued. “Twice, I was given less than a ten percent chance to live. But I never gave up. Ever. When it was hard, I let myself feel that. But I never stayed down for long. I always looked ahead to everything being better. And it always, always got better. It will for you, too.”

I was deeply moved. I told him that so much of the time, strangers either ignored me or uttered one of about ten stock platitudes. It had been a long time since I'd struck up a comfortable conversation with a stranger.

Sal laughed and nodded his head. He knew exactly what I was talking about. “Tell me the platitudes.”

I rattled them off, counting them on my fingers. “God has a plan. God doesn't give you more than you can handle. Everything happens for a reason. Stay positive.” (Mind you, I don't actually disagree with any of these statements, and I understand completely that some people don't know what to say. Still, when you've heard the same exact sentiments, however sincerely meant, from fifty people, it's hard to refrain from checking off a mental box when they're shared.)

It was fun to talk shop with a fellow warrior. It felt sort of . . . taboo to say these things out loud. Liberating. I was on a roll. “The one that actually made me mad,” I told Sal, “was ‘I know you wouldn't let anything happen to you. You'd never leave your girls.' That one implies that if I were to succumb to cancer, then I didn't care enough about my girls or try hard enough to live. Like, if I were to die, then I was just a bad mother.”

Sal chuckled. He understood completely.

I felt unburdened. I couldn't say these horrible, ungrateful things to anyone else, because no one else would understand. And if I said any of this to “civilians,” they'd surely second-guess themselves in every future encounter with me. I didn't want to cause any more discomfort around me than I already did.

I asked Sal about his family. He had three living children, he said, but two of his kids had died.

I couldn't believe it. My heart ached with empathetic grief.
The deaths of two children and cancer three times? What was God's plan in that?

Of course I told Sal how sorry I was. And that he was a shining beacon of hope for me. If he could survive all that life had thrown at him and remain so full of obvious love and warmth, then I could do it, too. Sal was my lifeline that day.

We then settled into talking about our dogs, our loyal and faithful dogs. How they had helped us both get through our treatments. How love transcends language and analysis—it just
is.

Just as I was telling Sal that Buster had not left my side for five days and nights after every chemo infusion, an older man of about seventy came into the dog park. He released his dog to play with ours and inched over toward our conversation. Since I was wearing my head scarf and talking about chemo, I figured him to be a cancer survivor who wanted to share his story, or maybe offer some encouragement. At any rate, his body language made it clear he wanted to say something to us.

Sal and I greeted him.

“Can I tell you something?” the man said, without preamble.

“Of course,” we replied.

“This is the first day I've been able to leave my house for a full week.” He held back tears. “My son committed suicide a week ago.” His voice was breaking, along with his heart. “I don't know how to survive this.”

I touched his shoulder, at a loss for words.

My mind was spinning. Here were three strangers sitting at a dog park one weekday morning in San Diego: a thirtysomething-year-old cancer patient coming down the home stretch of grueling treatment, a seventysomething-year-old man grieving the loss of his child mere days before, and a fiftysomething-year-old man who had survived each of the hardships we were suffering—cancer three times and the death of a child twice. What were the odds?

Sal offered the man heartfelt words of compassion and understanding, gleaned from his unimaginable similar losses. I saw the man's broken heart soak up Sal's words like a sponge, just as my fragile little heart had soaked up Sal's encouraging comments to me moments before. Sal was this man's lifeline that day, just as he had been mine.

Where was God's plan in that? Right in front of my face.

 

 

The day before my eighth and final chemo infusion, just for kicks, I tried putting eyebrow pencil on my bare brow bone (try saying that three times fast). There were about four eyebrow hairs still hanging on to guide my pencil, and I applied the most subtle,
color-matching job I could muster. I even used delicate feather strokes, as I'd learned several months earlier at a cancer-themed beauty seminar.

After all this effort, I stood back and looked at myself in the mirror—and then I laughed out loud. I looked ridiculous. Like Carrot Top, the comedian. I got a washcloth and wiped off the eyebrow makeup—only to realize that I had just rubbed off all four of my remaining eyebrow hairs. As I stood in the bathroom all alone, looking at my four eyebrows on this washcloth, I started to belly-laugh. I sat down on the side of the bathtub, laughing and holding my sides.
This is frickin' nuts.

And just like that, a switch flipped inside me.
I'm done with this.
Of course, I had one final chemo infusion left, and radiation thereafter, but you know what? I wasn't going to let those facts define me.
Hell no.

I was done deferring to every creak and pain in my body. I was done marking days on a calendar. I was done waiting to reach “the end” of treatment. Life simply could not be solely about
getting through
something—even if that something was chemo or cancer. It had to be about
living.
Life must be lived. Nothing changes that, I realized. Nothing.

It was a glorious spring day—a perfect day for a hike. Brad and I packed the girls into the car for a three-mile hike up a local mountain. With Brad as our fearless leader, the girls and I climbed and climbed, our legs pumping as hard as they would go. It took us over an hour to reach the top, but we were rewarded for our efforts: We could see all the way for miles, into downtown, out to the ocean, and all the way
to Mexico. The girls “oohed” and “ahhed” at the view—particularly impressed they could see a whole other country from up there.

From our peak on top of the world, Brad leaned in to me and whispered, “I still love my life; I wouldn't trade it.”

He had taken the words right out of my mouth.

Nurse Julie unhooked the chemo tube from my port for the eighth and final time, just as two other nurses handed me flowers and tossed confetti over my head. No more chemo smells. No more Barcaloungers. No more nausea. No more . . . feeling poisoned.
No more.

Brad grabbed my arm, and we marched out of the chemo lounge in triumph. We both knew the hell I'd experience for the next week or so, once the chemo drugs began wreaking havoc on my body. But we also knew another thing: This would be the very last time.

My next and final stop on the cancer-treatment train (and Jane's, too): about six weeks of radiation therapy. Radiation is designed to kill any remaining rogue cells that may have survived surgery or chemotherapy. Unlike chemotherapy, which is a systemic treatment (i.e., medicine is introduced into the patient's blood), radiation is localized, meaning that only the specific areas where cancer has been found are treated.

Before radiation actually began, doctors plotted the parameters of my radiation field precisely. As I lay naked from the waist up on a big metal table, a huge machine out of a sci-fi movie hummed around me, measuring to within fractions of a millimeter. Precise measurements were critical to ensure proper treatment: Radiating my breast, chest wall, and armpit? Good. Radiating my heart and lungs? Bad.