​CANCER and COVID
 
A year ago a woman I’d just met and I sipped lattes and chatted about the intimate horrors of stage IV cancer. In a more care-free, pre-cancerous life, things like death and dying, fear and enraged disbelief weren’t particularly appropriate introductory material in any conversation, but there we were in our most unlucky of kinships, diving in deep. 
 
She was a two-week cancer survivor while I was two years in. Being with her reminded me of the stunning despair I felt in the days immediately after my diagnosis. At one point she asked, how do you manage living with this?
 
It’s a question I’d given considerable thought by then. How do I live now that I’m carrying this previously unimaginable burden? And not just how do I live, but how do I live well? Is that even possible anymore? How do I navigate the world when the horrific reality of cancer has stolen an outsized portion of my thought life?
 
The best analogy I’d come up with is one I shared with her that day, and I’ll elaborate here: You know how you go to the gym, and occasionally you see somebody there who’s just utterly ripped? He’s lifting weights or she’s doing squats, and you look over and think, ‘Good God, so that’s what muscle looks like!’ and then you begin to ponder the sheer magnificence of the human form and your mind wanders to contemplate the hundreds or thousands of trips to the gym you would need to make for your body to perform in such a way.
 
That, I said, is going to be you. Not right away, but it is coming. Being diagnosed with stage IV cancer is like being told to walk through your life carrying the heaviest weight you can possibly imagine. Always. Morning, noon, night, 2AM, when you feel strong, when you don’t, through parenting, carpools, sex, family vacations, scans, mindless TV, work… Through it all, you’re going to carry this ridiculously heavy thing called cancer. 
 
And people are going to look at you and think, “How on earth?” because they won’t be able to imagine carrying what you’re carrying. You’ll be like that person at the gym, lifting shit they just can’t fathom lifting. And this will happen not because the burden gets any lighter but because you learn to carry it better. Your mind-soul-spirit muscles are going to get jacked and you will teach yourself a new definition of strength.
 
Christmas, your kids’ birthday parties, trips to the grocery store, waiting in line at the DMV, walking the dog – there’ll you’ll be looking to the untrained eye like an ordinary member of the human species. Little do they know you possess an unasked-for superpower, which is that you can stare death in the face and shop for breakfast cereal at the same time. You can mentally dance with the thought of not living to watch your children graduate high school while you try to figure out if the dishes in the dishwasher are clean, dirty, or some combination thereof. 
 
I have this strength. So does my friend, and so do many others I have the privilege of knowing and loving. Many of them have cancer but many more carry a burden that’s differently shaped but no less heavy. And I believe that we super-strength humans have something to say to the world about COVID-19:
 
It’s shitty.
We understand.
You didn’t ask for this.
We know.
You’d like to live in a land of make-believe where there is no pandemic and you can have your old life back.
Bless your heart, we know.
You’re angry.
Mm-hmm.
And now you won’t wear a mask because it threatens your freedom.
God, how I wish my political convictions could create a world in which the realities of science were irrelevant.  I’d join the Cancer-Free Party, an alliance of cancer patients who stop chemo treatments and refuse to get CT scans and brain MRI’s, as these things threaten the freedoms once enjoyed. (Much more, by the way, than your cloth facemask.)
 
We get it. The reality of COVID-19 is heavy and difficult to carry. It isn’t a burden you asked for and you would love, love, LOVE to put it down. Maybe that’s why you think and act like it’s not serious. But take it from the people around you who’ve already learned to carry unimaginable weight – ignoring the burden does not help you lift it and not lifting it will not make you strong.
 
Cancer and COVID-19 are just two proofs of life’s terrible fragility and unfairness. It takes so little strength to ignore or belittle these realities. But oh, when we dig deep – deeper, perhaps, than we ever have before – deep enough to find pools of power and resilience that we didn’t even know we had… When we dig deep and lift, we begin to train our minds and our spirits to bear the unbearable, and then to go on living, and living well. 

This week marks the two-year anniversary of my lung cancer diagnosis. On November 8, 2017 I wasn’t sure I’d make it to Christmas – my breath was that labored and the news that overwhelming. So I’m writing today to say…

I’m here.
I’m alive.
I’m making plans.
I’m not naïve about my diagnosis, but I’m also not limited when I think about the time I have.
I celebrate the contents of the last 730 days: family, friends, Juno the dog, pigs, a chicken coop, ducks, rabbit babies, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Texas, Cancun, volleyball, cross-country, Girls on the Run, science club, 3 5K’s, work, play, rest, love, music… 
I look forward to more.
I have a large stack of books to read.
I have words and songs I want to write.
I can’t wait to get seeds in the ground this spring.
I’m thinking about building a deck. With help.
I’m making room for the best days of my life.

That last line? Impossible to imagine two years ago. Utterly impossible. But here I am, with cancer, rediscovering the simple, profound truth that joy is a source in a life well lived and not a result. My heart, my love, my gratitude for all, near and far, now and long ago, who provide such beautiful, compelling source material. Here’s to the year ahead. And the next…

​Meet Rosy and Gretta, two new members of the J-K mini-farm.  They are Idaho Pasture Pigs, from our friends Brian and Angela at Nature’s Roots Farm in Oxford, NC.  It’s been a thrill to welcome them and put them to work in the woods rooting up weeds, eating table scraps, and just being adorable.  Sylvia has always wanted to have pigs, and Karla, who grew up on a hog farm in central Wisconsin, is experiencing a sweet echo of childhood days.

​This morning began our fifth day with these little lovelies.  I headed out at 5:30 to walk the dog, feed the duck, and check on the pigs.  Dewy grass, clean air, clear skies, and a full moon… It felt nice to begin the day with these simple things.  Then I came in the house and Karla led me to the living room where our ceiling was bulging with a water leak right under the upstairs shower.
 
I feel like when you get diagnosed with cancer, your name should go on a list of people guaranteed to not have other crappy things happen in life – a no car trouble, no major appliance breakdowns, no wobbly-screechy wheels on your shopping carts, no leaky pipeslist.  Sadly, there is no such list, so stage IV cancer occasionally and weirdly gets temporarily upstaged by a plumbing catastrophe.  Sigh…  So we moved wet furniture and pulled out some fans, and I spent the morning calling contractors and insurance people.   
 
Having done all that there was to be done (for now), Juno and I went back out and spent some time in the woods behind our house.  Rosy and Gretta love nuts, so I took a jar with me and filled it with acorns and hickory nuts. That’s one way to handle a mess like this – spend an hour in the wood foraging for pig treats.  It was delightful.
 
I’m vividly reminded that we don’t get to write the entire script for our lives.  Some things just happen without warning and without permission. But we do get to ask, “How will I bear light even as I bear disappointment?” So, on days like today, I protect and celebrate all the light I can gather.  I give thanks for my own capacity to create, experience, and receive joy.  And like a pig with a pile of acorns, I dive in, head first.

I am a Body
 
I fell this week. It was a crisp Tuesday afternoon and my daughter Ezzy and I were breaking up firewood. I stomped on a branch and it shot out from under me. A brief second of freefall and then my back hit our front sidewalk and my shoulder smacked into a ceramic pot. It hurt. A lot. Nothing was broken, but I took some time to sit up. Ezzy was great. “Dad! Are you ok? What do you need?” Grace under pressure, that kid.
 
Living with cancer, incidents like this (and smashing my thumb with a hammer, slicing my finger with a fillet knife, burning my hand on the cast iron…) take me back to a simpler time when I could just curse, be sore for a while, lose my thumbnail, bleed a bit... Now I’m like, “Really? REALLY? In case you haven’t forgotten, I need no extra reminders of humanity’s frail form here. Honestly, lung cancer was quite enough.” 
 
I don’t really pray that way. Goodness, how do I pray these days? That’s fodder for another post. For now, I’ll just say that when pain is pulsing through your scapula, I think you’re allowed to espouse shitty theology if it’ll help you get through those first debilitating seconds. 
 
After a few days, a good hard fall and the lingering soreness in my shoulder serve as powerful reminders that I am a body. 37.2-trillion cells of blood and bone, muscle and guts, heart pumping, mind spinning, cancer… It’s all me, feeling and responding to life as I fly and stumble through it. By the way, I also believe that I am more than a physical body. I am spirit, soul, light, love, memory… But in an every-day, shoulder-meet-flower-pot sort of way, I am a body.
 
There’s a lot in my faith tradition that drowns our body-ness with shame – a litany of flesh-vs-spirit texts in the Bible and a long history of interpreting those texts to mean that our bodies are dirty, sin-born earthen shells that must be rigorously restrained. Add cancer to all of that and you add disease to dysfunction.
 
So I get the temptation, especially now, to differentiate the physical from the non-physical me – to watch even my fingers as they type this sentence and wonder about their temporal nature. Or to contemplate the cancerous cells in my lungs and lymph nodes and imagine my eventual withdrawal from earthly to less-foibled form. 
 
Next week I’m applying for disability and getting a CT scan at the cancer center. These are big days. So today I claim all the truth I can. I am a body, dammit, and in body I am good. The Divine Source that was known to hover over the chaos in those pre-creative moments hovers over the chaos in me still – the questions, the doubts, the endless wonderings, but also the 37.2 trillion cells of me, ordered and chaotic, behaving and misbehaving. God hovers over the physical body me, stirring the waters with dream, hope, promise, possibility… 
 
“Is it good?” I ask. The breath in my lungs, the touch of my skin, the pain in my shoulder, the Divine in and beyond me… They all say “yes.” ​

I was 23 years old when my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer – likely the same cancer that I have now. 20 months later she would die from that disease, and during that time, I experienced such a range of emotions – anger, sadness, fear, hope, dread, gratitude, despair…
 
I remember having this vivid fantasy that I could physically fight her cancer, as if her disease could somehow take human form and I could have some time alone with it in a room.  I’d fight unfairly, I thought. I’d be nasty, I’d sneak in weapons, and I’d come at it with everything I’ve got. I’d be ruthless.
 
Now I have all the time in the world to be alone in a room with that cancer. And the human form it has taken on is, well, my own. Only now I’m older, a bit wiser, less prone to violent fantasies, and more receptive to the reality that these cancer cells in my body – they’re my cells. They’re a part of me and they’ve just lost their way, growing beyond what my body was designed to do.
 
Today is Ash Wednesday. This evening the Farm Church community will gather at one of our gardens here in Durham. We’ll stand there on the soil, we’ll get out the ashes, and we’ll face each other’s human form and say the old words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”
 
I know those words now in a way I didn’t last year. And I live into hope that while my dust-self is coming, I still have time – time to love, to work, to give and receive… time to live fully into the life I’ve been given. And as I consider that which is temporary, I ponder that which is eternal, and wonder again about my mom, about her light that still shines, about the dust to which she has returned and to which I one day will also return.
 ​