Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
–Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
Today I write from the chair. I see the faintly lavender Irinoteacan drip into me. The drugs are clear, it takes on color from the tinted windows that look east across freeways and treetops, a view that’s meant to be soothing. It feels like someone’s poked a hole in the bottom of my boat. The water is rising. I’m going down.
I can smell the 5FU as it drips into my jugular vein. One of the home health nurses clarifies, I’m probably tasting it, not smelling it. Its path is close enough to my palette that I can taste the treatment. It tastes like sour metal. Just in case, I cover the hip pack that my drugs travel in with a blanket, like a fart.
Chemotherapy is also hilarious. Before the big drugs, you get a round of pre-meds to help with the nausea, diarrhea, and constipation. One drug, Atropine, produces perioneal itch. After they drop the drug into my port, my taint itches something fierce for about 30 seconds. I grind my butt into the reclining chair like a lemon on a juicer. I laugh out loud at how ridiculous it all is.
I am having the best bowel movements of my entire life. I present this to my doctor: “How could this be? I have a solid tumor in my colon.” She leans forward, “treatment is working.” The prizes of a life lived on borrowed time.
In moments like these, the trauma of chemotherapy dissolves into these utterly ordinary and hilarious moments. Its significance is shrunk. The drama of treatment, the great storm of chemo, rendered quotidian and silly, more fart than fury.
When I was first diagnosed, someone said to me that “cancer is a teacher.” I thought to myself, “Fuck you.”
With time, though, I began to see that, as with so many facing death, we are invited to consider how to live out the remainder of our lives. Chemotherapy isn’t all hell. To live with cancer is an invitation, one that’s hard to accept at times, to experience clarity of purpose, to prioritize relationships, to carefully hold precious and fleeting moments of joy, to inhale the beauty and the horror of this embodied life. To exhale this braid of pleasure and pain.
We might call this attention to everyday joy “the sweetness”: the way the small things take on a profound significance, the way life glitters before you, the undeniability of beauty, the profoundness of the present. I picked up the term from Kate Bowler, Duke University Professor turned best-selling author and podcaster. About my age, she received the same diagnosis as me. Unlike me, her cancer contained a mutation that made it susceptible to immunotherapy. She’s survived years beyond the statistical norm. She asked a colleague, from whom she learned the term, whether the sweetness lasts? He laughs, no unfortunately not.
I’d add, though, that it’s recurring. And that indeed the wild and undisciplined process of grief is, perhaps not quite circular, but a ricocheting between despair and joy, hope and surrender, pain and pleasure, the profound and the mundane.
When I get home, I come into the bedroom to find that Zach’s folded all the laundry, arranged in neat stacks on the dresser for me to put away. I feel a surge of emotions, a whirlpool, a simultaneous twisting, of gratitude for the way his love radiates from the million small ways he cares for me and a panicked despairing over the finitude of moments like these. How many more laundry piles will I get to put away? The laundry takes on this glorious radiance because death is near, sending me under.
I half jog from the bedroom to the living room, tears streaming down my face, calling for Zach. He’s lying on the rug on his phone. I lay down next to him and sob into his chest. Death’s despair, abated by his love. Two witnesses to our mutual grief, observing these waves of emotion as they wash over us. Each moment inspires the next, and returns us to the knowing that grief won’t be disciplined, it will be felt. Though not forever. It goes on by, a minor, but terrifying episode, its transience a sign of the beginning of our acceptance of what’s coming. It hurts to accept, because I want to live, because it cools the warm and welcome distraction of denial. But I know despair will put me under the ground before my time is really up. I graze the underside of this knowing as I breach the water line of my grief and breathe in the love of my partner who cries with me. Grieving sends currents of electricity across neurons. It intensifies the vibration between life and death, an intensification born of their growing proximity.
It comes and it goes. Sometimes horror in the foreground, sometimes beauty. And as time has gone on, and I’ve sat with my imminent demise longer and longer, these two start to intertwine, to bleed into one another. The horror itself takes on a beautiful dimension and the reverse and it spirals together.
One of my brilliant students pointed out to me that as the dark closes in, the light comes up to meet it. Like two opposing magnets, the attraction intensifies, the energy between them gains strength, the vibrations more intense, as they draw nearer to each other. Likewise, as death draws closer, life shines brighter. As life radiates its beauty, impending loss reminds me that it can’t last, and around we go.
Grieving is no guarantee of clarity or insight. It slides easily into despair. Parker Palmer asks whether grief will shatter our hearts into a million pieces, lying useless on the floor? Or will grief break our hearts open into love? I struggle to embrace the latter. But the process is spurred on by the sweetness, these everyday reminders that love and beauty are still available, that life must be lived more earnestly than ever. The simple fact of beauty, the density of joy, the undeniability of their profoundness anchor me when despair comes.
Cancer contains its own mercy. Mourning is diffused across time. I’ve been dying for 9 months. The grief is so heavy sometimes, but as one of my favorite nurses points out, unlike sudden death, cancer leaves us time to prepare. A blessing and curse, twisted together, one containing the other, the boundary between them growing fuzzy, and I realize that this is living. This is the ride, the gift, the burden, the torment, the glory, of another moment.
The joys are myriad. I collapse on the couch after chemo, and I don’t hesitate to rent the $20 movie on Apple TV. Chemo days require padding, the experience is too intense, a good time to treat yourself. Stop hedging for some unknown future, you have the money, enjoy.
Morning coffee is golden. The smell of Zach’s cup speeds my waking. The dog and I come to the kitchen to say good morning. We embrace, he’s still warm from bed. The dog is the chattiest in the morning, “woo woo-ing” us in her Pitty parlance. We open the windows, the crossbreeze makes it feel like we’re standing inside a lung, like the house is breathing. The scene is perfectly staged, morning is remade in the golden light of cancer.
I return to teaching in Spring 2025. Just one course. I’m calling it The Sociology of Living and Dying. From day one, the students show me their hearts. Another, whom I ran into earlier in the day, I encountered again at the campus cafe. She comps my coffee and empties out the pastry case into boxes. “They’re going to throw it away anyway.” I share them later with my students in class. My mom sends flowers. I run into colleagues. They warmly greet me. A miracle to return to a job that sometimes feels more like a vocation. I adore my time with the young people. We read Lorde. Whatever comes, she writes in The Cancer Journals, “this beauty too is mine forever.”
A student bought me a “Comfy,” the successor to the “Slanket.” Half sweatshirt, half blanket, it works wonders on the cold I feel most of the time. The dog comes over to sniff it as it lays on the couch next to me. Zach quips, “Did you come over to smell your dad’s farts?” We fall out laughing.
The same student takes me to the park to paint, and to the botanical gardens, and to dinner where the Gyoza delivers a scallion zest so delicious I wake up thinking about it the next morning. She expands my world, makes it glow, ordinary magic.
Becoming unconstipated.
Then, re-constipating again after the process of becoming unconstipated leaves your rectum feeling like an over-fired civil war cannon, from which constipation is a welcome respite, like a familiar friend who stays too long.
A dear friend drives me home from an appointment where I received an injection meant to stimulate white blood cell growth. I’ve heard about this drug. My online parasocial cancer relations report that it sometimes makes you feel like your bones are breaking inside your body. I cry in the car. I’m afraid of the pain. Death feels so close in these moments, like I’m dissolving to ash on the floorboards. My friend holds my hand. I can smell his cologne. The radiant light emanating from our stacked hands anchors me as I despair. The great gift of friendship, lapping up against my ailing body.
Of all the joyous moments along this journey, Zach is the greatest, the most abiding sweetness. The source of my greatest joy. And not a soaring, elated, Rose arms-spread-wide-on-the-bow-of-a-ship joy. This joy vibrates down at the frequency of the ordinary rituals of everyday life. The examples are so many.
Zach has gotten really good at taking pictures. He even upgraded his iPhone. He doesn’t want to forget. (He also wanted to take higher quality “green circle” content for Instagram.) He takes a shot of the three of us: me, him, and the dog, in bed on a weekend morning. Everyone is enjoying that delicious warmth of not having to rush off, breathing together, lingering in the liminal moments of waking.
Every chemo day, I come home to my survival platter: packed bowl, big water, nuts, flowers, bucket. I’m so tired I can hardly move, so he walks the dog. He makes my soup. He kneels on the ground next to the couch and strokes my head while I cry, together confronting the certainty of my dying. Each quiver, the heaving, the bone tiredness, totems to this eventuality.
One day I come home from teaching exhausted. I’ve overdone it. I can tell because I’m cold, ice cold, a product of my constant near-anemia. I can’t stop shaking. I fall on the couch. He encourages me to our bedroom where he’s used two heating blankets and several regular ones to fold me into a soft, electric envelope. Relief washes over me like the electrical currents swirling around my body.
Sometimes I stare at him and try to memorize his features. The hair on his forearms terminates in a neat line at his wrist. His eyes are cobalt blue. The way his hair lays forward on his forehead. His clear skin. Mustache. Nose ring, really a stud. Two ear piercings. Watch. Tee shirts featuring local businesses he loves. If the devil is in the details, so is love, so is the miracle of our finite lives.
He got a tattoo of Saturn on his forearm, whose rings I learned, though visible across light years, are only 10 feet tall. It commemorates the Sza song by the same name. She sings about leaving this world and fleeing to Saturn. I love this song. The horrors of this world, the beauty of the next, saying goodbye, going out into the universe, but retaining some unity, one’s soul, and residing ever after a world away.
Find me there. I’ll be swinging my legs from my seat on the rings until you finally join me.
In awe of you. Siempre. <3
My beautiful boy. The struggle is real. How I wish I could take this from you.