The Cancer Journals

Not to turn away from the fear, but to use it as fuel to help me along the way I wish to go. If I can remember to make the jump from impotence to action, then working uses the fear as it drains it off, and I find myself furiously empowered.

Isn’t there any other way, I said.

In another time, she said.

I am writing this now in a new year, recalling, trying to piece together that chunk of my recent past, so that I, or anyone else in need or desire, can dip into it at will if necessary to find the ingredients with which to build a wider construct. That is an important function of the telling of experience. I am also writing to sort out for myself who I was and was becoming throughout that time, setting down my artifacts, not only for later scrutiny, but also to be free of them. I do not wish to be free from their effect, which I will carry and use internalized in one way or another, but free from having to carry them around in a reserve part of my brain.

But I am writing across a gap so filled with death—real death, the fact of it—that it is hard to believe that I am still so very much alive and writing this. That fact of all these other deaths heightens and sharpens my living, makes the demand upon it more particular, and each decision even more crucial.

Breast cancer, with its mortal awareness and the amputation which it entails, can still be a gateway, however cruelly won, into the tapping and expansion of my own power and knowing.

We must learn to count the living with that same particular attention with which we number the dead.

And I mourn the women who limit their loss to the physical loss alone, who do not move into the whole terrible meaning of mortality as both weapon and power. After all, what could we possibly be afraid of after having admitted to ourselves that we had dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? For once we accept the actual existence of our dying, who can ever have power over us again?

Now I am anxious for more living to sample and partake of the sweetness of each moment and each wonder who walks with me through my days. And now I feel again the large sweetness of the women who stayed open to me when I needed that openness like rain, who made themselves available.

In some way I must aerate this grief, bring heat and light around the pain to lend it some proportion

Every once in a while I would think, “what do I eat? how do I act to announce or preserve my new status as temporary upon this earth?” and then I’d remember that we have always been temporary, and that I had just never really underlined it before, or acted out of it so completely before. And then I would feel a little foolish and needlessly melodramatic, but only a little.

I feel like I’m counting my days in milliseconds, never mind hours. And it’s a good thing, that particular consciousness of the way in which each hour passes, even if it is a boring hour. I want it to become permanent.

There were fixed pains, and moveable pains, deep pains and surface pains, strong pains and weak pains. There were stabs and throbs and burns, gripes and tickles and itches.

It was the urge, the need, to work again, to feel a surge of connection begin with that piece of yourself. To be of use, even symbolically, is a necessity for any new perspective of self, and I thought of that three weeks later, when I knew I needed to go to Houston to give a reading, even though I felt weak and inadequate.

Pain does not mellow you, nor does it ennoble, in my experience.

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance, “I can’t possibly teach black women’s writing—their experience is so different from mine,” yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: “She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.