The Faraway Nearby (10 page)

The self is a patchwork of the felt and the unfelt, of presences and absences, of navigable channels around the walled-off numbnesses. Perhaps it's impossible for anyone short of an enlightened being to carry the weight of all suffering, even to recognize and embrace it, but we make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies. I met a Thai Buddhist saint once who for twenty years took on tiny tokens and charms people gave him so that he would carry their suffering. Eventually he wore a cloak of a couple hundred pounds of clanking, chiming griefs at all times, and then it became too heavy or he'd carried it far enough, and he put it down. At the end of his talk he threw out tiny charms of his own, and I caught and kept one, a tiny golden Buddha in a small plastic bubble. I carried its imperceptible weight for many years until my purse was stolen out of my car while I was walking on a mountain.

The uses of empathy and pain were something I began to wonder about anew, when people began to drill into my flesh, to pursue me with knives. It was not long after the U.S. Army had been torturing people in a prison in Iraq. On this table on which I lay still and listened to the drill and then stayed longer as a stout doctor with a sweet Irish accent chatted with me and tried to staunch a little stream of blood that would not stop flowing, I thought of those elaborate tortures in the American-run prison in Iraq. It was as though I was in a version of Abu Ghraib run by angels, for I was being injured for the sake of my survival by professionals with endless altruism, and there was more to come.

“I
f I haven't put it clearly enough, the condition they've detected is like having something ticking inside me that could turn out to be a clock without even an alarm or could be a bomb set to go off at some much later date,” I wrote to the people close to me when I got the first round of diagnoses. “At this point in history, they can identify the ticking but not whether or not it's a bomb, so they treat it as though it were one.”

I was beginning to meet my bomb-defusing team, the beautiful oncology surgeon; the big amiable plastic surgeon; the solid, synagogue-attending head of nursing, who had the most unwaveringly attentive gaze I ever met outside of a lover; and a succession of nurses and aides, mostly devoted. I was beginning to inhabit the spaces of that other world where people weighed and measured and sampled me and wrote reports, as though I was a newly discovered island or a crime.

Afterward I referred to it all as my medical adventure, because I was unsure how else to describe a series of events in which I was not sick or injured in any perceptible way at the inception, but would be damaged and repaired by doctors. I was not even sure if I was going to qualify as a cancer survivor, since the condition they told me I had was in some versions only a potential precursor, though it was an invitation to think about mortality and embodiment and to spend time in some of the places to which cancer takes you.

Life was in those days grim; I marched forward in determination to move through the ordeals that had sprung up one after another and come out the other end. I was old enough to know that I would and that the grimness was passing weather, but it didn't pass rapidly. Now I can see that I was going to be remade, and the timing seemed good after the ordeals of the season before.

During that strange strained phase, I was fascinated by the surgeons. They seemed like gods, since they were going to exert such power over my life, going to see me as I would never see myself, take me in hand as raw material and promise to improve my odds by doing so. I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields.

Gods and artisans, since all the cool abstract science of modern medicine was going to devolve into their handiwork on my flesh, on cutting and sewing as though I was a garment to be remade. To cut and sew flesh was a peculiar craft, and to be their fabric required faith and trust. I studied them and got a faint sense of what it might mean to be one of these people involved in the fierce intimacy of other people's living and dying. My work matters, I believe, but it seemed so much more remote than theirs. In their work I was the text to be interpreted and the raw material to be refabricated, and the stakes were my long-term odds of survival.

I wrote to a friend that I was going to be cured of more than I had been diagnosed with. I was going to have to give up being unstoppable. I asked for help. I was not much in the habit of doing so. There were extremely unhelpful parents in my particular past, but asking is difficult for a lot of people. It's partly because we imagine that gifts put us in the giver's debt, and debt is supposed to be a bad thing. You see it in the way people sometimes try to reciprocate immediately out of a sense that indebtedness is a burden. But there are gifts people yearn to give and debts that tie us together.

Sometimes to accept is also a gift. The anthropologist David Graeber points out that the explanation that we invented money because barter was too clumsy is false. It wasn't that I was trying to trade sixty sweaters for the violin you'd made when you didn't really need all that wooliness. Before money, Graeber wrote, people didn't barter but gave and received as needs and goods ebbed and flowed. They thereby incurred the indebtedness that bound them together, and reciprocated slowly, incompletely, in the ongoing transaction that is a community. Money was invented as a way to sever the ties by completing the transactions that never needed to be completed in the older system, but existed like a circulatory system in a body. Money makes us separate bodies, and maybe it teaches us that we should be separate.

I once read an account about a wealthy Turkana man in Kenya's Rift Valley who offered to slaughter a goat in his guest's honor and then used one of his impoverished neighbor's few poor animals instead of a goat from his own large herd. The guest was perplexed, but the man who had offered his neighbor's goat eventually explained that he was thereby weaving him into the web of obligation and future gifts, strengthening his ties and his position, earning for him goodwill that was better than goats. The goods would continue to flow in both directions, but the immaterial goods mattered more and in losing his goat the poor man became a little richer. The host became someone he could go to for help and eventually did, receiving far more than a single goat.

Goodwill is something you put away like preserves, for a rainy day, for winter, for lean times, and it was moving to find that I had more than I had ever imagined. People gathered from all directions, and I was taken care of beautifully. My friend Antonia stepped in to manage the traffic. Afterward, during my convalescence, I occasionally wished that life was always like this, that I was always being showered with flowers and assistance and solicitousness, but you only get it when you need it. If you're lucky, you get it when you need it. To know that it was there when I needed it changed everything a little in the long run.

Even after losing the perfidious boyfriend and successfully parking the parent, it would have been easy to go back to the old ways, but this was a more definitive rupture in how I functioned. I canceled and rescheduled things, delayed the delivery of the book I was writing, said that I couldn't and asked if people could. Those people showed up in a thousand ways. The handsomest and most beautiful among them decided to tell me about damage their own clothes concealed, about lumps and cysts and scars and embarrassing ailments and anomalies you would never suspect.

My friend Pam, a family physician, serendipitously moved to my city to take a new job the week I got the first biopsy results back and took me out to dinner to explain them and alleviate some of my alarm. She showed up afterward in immensely kind and skillful ways. Other female friends decided I should not go to any further appointments alone, so I was thenceforth always accompanied. I thought this crisis would be regarded as women's business, but men showed up for me too. Among them was a tough older writer who had been my friend for a dozen years; he appointed himself my Irish mother when he heard the news. He was the one who detected my lowest point and jumped in to haul me out of it.

I gave away a lot of the apricots that winter, bottles of preserves and chutney and the elixir or liqueur that was finally ready, exquisite high-proof stuff that had turned golden during its months in the dark and acquired a delicate almond flavor. A bottle of it went to my friend Tom, who quickly welded a shower curtain holder for my eccentric tub because I was going to be forbidden baths for a while, and a bottle to Sam, who told me to get over being squeamish and give him the necessary details to make him useful, a bottle to Marina, to Amy, to my younger brother, and jars of apricots in vanilla syrup to various people, including Nellie and Ann.

These last two friends' stories were spun alongside mine those first months of the new year, and the stories helped me keep my bearings. Delicate, elegant, brown-eyed Nellie, the painter I'd known since she was in high school: twenty years later I'd been one of the few to notice at the opening of her first solo gallery show that she was also showing in another sense: she was pregnant for the first time. And then that January she called me to apologize for missing our rendezvous and explained that her water had burst and she'd had an emergency caesarean a few days before. The baby had been born two months early. She was in the intensive care unit but breathing on her own. She weighed two pounds, two ounces. The brain of the average adult weighs three. What does it mean to be a whole human being smaller than a brain?

I went to visit the sudden arrival a few times when Nellie was there, but the first time I visited alone, walking through the high-ceilinged gallery of incubators I was told I must not look at. Nellie's daughter was at the far end of the big room, and en route I caught sidelong glances of tiny lean human beings of all colors in their fields of soft white bedding inside clear plastic bubbles. The babies were dreams someone somewhere else was having. They were half-written sentences. They were little flayed rabbits. They were technological triumphs, since a decade or two earlier most of them would not have survived, and their survival now was due to techniques, machines, drugs, and monumental human effort.

Some of the premature babies might have been covered in lanugo, the fine fur that we all have at that stage when we're usually still swimmers inside our mothers; some might have all their blood vessels visible beneath their translucent skin; some might have no eyelashes yet; some might be too young to cry; but I only glimpsed them in passing. Sometimes the sacred and the transgressive are indistinguishable as something you should not look at, and they all looked as though they were not yet made to be seen. Their fat, their cuteness, their familiarity, had not yet arrived, and some of them radiated tubes and monitoring wires.

The baby girl I had the right to look at was an astonishment, a reminder of what else the term
human being
covers, since we so often use that term as though it meant autonomous rational ambulatory people in their prime, not the newcomers or the invalids or the otherworldly or the ancient. Nellie's daughter was too small to even breast-feed, and she was fed through a tube, but she was breathing on her own, and her mother went and held her bare skin to bare skin for several hours a day. In a picture from a few weeks after her birth, her fingers wrapped around her father's forefinger like yours around someone's arm.

What she thought and felt was almost unfathomable. We had all once been her, though most of us had been concealed from view for a lot longer. Nellie was fiercely devoted to her daughter and hardly concerned about the big scar of the C-section, though still a little shaky about an operation in which her guts had been laid aside on the table and there was a chance neither she nor her daughter would make it.

They made it, but Ann was embarked upon the long, slow process of not making it. Nellie was a decade younger than me; gracious, midwestern, genteel, fair-haired Ann was a decade older. She had had breast cancer twenty years before, been treated, had recurrences and more treatment, and finally the ticking bomb had exploded like a dandelion clock and sown the seeds of cancer in her spine and her brain. When the cancer in her brain was discovered, I got an e-mail from her friend and assistant that went out to just a handful of people.

Thereby I found out that I was apparently part of her inner circle or otherwise of significance and set about visiting her and baking her pies regularly. She liked pie a lot. After the pie was too tricky to eat there were the apricots in syrup, which her sister spoon-fed her. She declined gently, in stages, but her will was as ferocious as that of the two-pound girl, and the few weeks or months she was given to live stretched into more than two years. There was more chemotherapy, a port into her skull to drain the fluid, a lot of monitoring, a lot of help, and not so much hope.

One of the curious things about illness and calamity is what you come to hope for and what you become grateful for. Ann's assistant wrote jubilantly at one point, “She got up out of her chair five times in a row when the therapist was there!” In my own case, I was grateful that I had only this brief tourist's visit to the country of the ill, that I had insurance that would mostly pay for it and means for the thousands more in bills, that I was being seen at one of the best medical centers anywhere, that I was going to skip chemotherapy and radiation, that my one scar would be undramatic and my treatment would presumably forestall the hard destiny consuming Ann. I never told her of my diagnosis; it was too late for that; and I kept visiting.

The last time she came to my house for tea, I set up chairs and a table on the landing two flights up the three flights of stairs to my apartment, and we had the first round while she rallied for the third story. Then she couldn't do anything so strenuous and just floated around her house and landed in various chairs or walked from steadying handhold to handhold. I wrote to a mutual friend that she was fading like a flower. She became less and less ordinary, if ordinary is the busy absorption with the practical and petty details of everyday life. Ann's abilities were ebbing and flowing and mostly ebbing all this time, but it was as though the casing was being worn away and the light inside shone more brightly.

The last several months or year she was in that saturated present of people who don't have so much past or future at their beck and call, and her own love and luminousness were increasingly evident. And then she began disappearing in stages, from speech, from walking, from most forms of doing, then in the end from eating, so that she didn't make much of a hill under the bedclothes. She'd always been something of an escape artist, a gracious self-effacing person who surrounded herself with people who liked the limelight.

It was typical of Ann that when she first became ill she made it an occasion to be an artist and to do something for the people around her. She was always turning the conversation away from herself, and the artwork she made in response to her breast cancer seemed to come from that reflex. It also asserted that she was not passive or defeated in the face of her illness. She tiled a hundred feet of wall in the entry lobby of a hospital building from floor to ceiling with big ceramic slabs glazed in soft colors. Each one had had a plant pressed into it, the plant's name inscribed, and then a cancer patient, survivor, or caregiver had graven a story directly into the clay, or Ann had copied a poem or a text into it. It was like an herbal, the old books of plant remedies, broken up and pasted to a wall, like a botanical collection that was also a collection of confessions, a murmuring you walked by on your way to meet your fate upstairs.