The wound is where the light enters...

I'm preparing to live
Believe it or not, desiring life is just as difficult as preparing to die. Hope is painful, it takes more courage than I sometimes have and it is easier to deal with either living or dying rather than being open to either.

A dear friend gave me great feedback on my aforementioned preparations for death: "F*** you Ned," he said with all the heart and love and determination and passion and pain that sometimes only cursing can touch.

He was right of course. His question to me at 2:30AM, while sitting around a campfire, haunted me.

"Do you want to live?"

I couldn't answer him at first. It was too holy a query to quickly respond with an offhanded, "Of course," and in my heart I wasn't sure of the answer.

Nothing do I rescind from what I've said: letting go of the need to be alive is an essential part of being fully alive. I also refuse to ignore the data and I refuse to live in fear. Facing death, allowing death to roll over me (to the levels my subconscious will permit) has been altogether positive, not negative, even as it is disorienting and disruptive.  It has been gift, not burden, a blessing, not a curse.

For me, wanting life out of a repulsion of death is not life at all.  Gripping too tightly to life and trying to avoid the alternative is to be dead already.  Not considering death, not looking at the statistics, not attempting to be open, is negative.

My dear friend understands.  He gets it.  “Ok” says he, “fine…” and yet “I want you to live…here and now and for many decades to come.  Call me a greedy bastard.”  J

That next morning he and I take the Porsche my dear friend Andi lent me and cruise around the Puget Sound, the top down, the wind blowing through my sunscreen-stiffened hair.  He tells me of a therapist who worked with clients who had aids, back when HIV was a death sentence.  The entire practice was built around helping them deal with death…until medicine caught up to the virus and neutered it.  Now a practice that helped peopled destined to die had to help dead-men-walking prepare to live again.  You know what? The most amazing thing happened…many of them couldn’t flip back to life.  The transition to death was easier than dealing with the new hope and even the reality of a long life being ahead of them. 

I understand.

Somewhere in the posture of “living with open hands”, one must not let go of passion.  Somewhere in being willing to die, one must not lose a strong will to be alive here as long as it is to be.

This is the work of being in tension, of being open to both and never foreclosing on either possibility.  Had I accepted too readily an early death from cancer?  What does it look like to fight for life not from fear of death but from raw desire?  What does it mean to burn for being alive here, not because of an unwillingness to move on, but from an awareness of how good life is here?

The truth is that ever since my mother passed in November of 2000, I’ve felt OK with my own eventual death, even if it came prematurely.  But as life continues, as relationships with kids, neighbors, family, with Jamie, deepen, there are more and more reasons to live each day.  It is a simple thing to want to live for your kids, but what I was being posited by my dear friend was would I like to live for me? for my own pleasure?  I didn't immediately know.

Hope is a four letter word. 

To desire life one must hope, and hope can be devastating.  A few days ago a client brought in a newspaper article he had printed off.  The headline referenced a team in Zurich that had cured melanoma.  The leader of this team of scientists had been a former student of my client’s wife, and he had been following his career with great interest.  My client is an MIT grad and a retired rocket scientist from a certain large aerospace firm…he is not one prone to flights of fancy.  My cloud lifted and all of a sudden I could see life stretching out decades into my future—I could hardly wait to get to my computer to read more.  But hope aborted and crashed quickly as I discovered that while indeed it looks like this young man has cured melanoma, his methods would only work at this point on people at the very earliest of stages…it had no bearing for me…and so the roller coaster of hope goes…and I’m choosing to stay on...

Finally the tears

This week for the first time in this experience, a flood of tears were unleashed.  I had been wondering where they were; they were welcome before this but had shyly remained inside biding their time.

There is a community where men’s tears are not allowed to touch the earth.  So holy are they, that when they seep up from the heart and brim in the eyes, the elders gather round with receptacles in hand.  As they flow down the cheeks, through the beard and start to crash towards mother earth, the elders catch them—not one is wasted.  More precious than gold, each drop is holy water to be used to baptize the uninitiated into manhood.

My tears landed in my oatmeal at Beth’s on highway 99, a dive of a breakfast joint famous for 12 egg omelets, pancakes the size of hubcaps, and stacks of bacon that must require the life of more than one pig.  Beth’s is somehow repelling and compelling at the same time.  They boast an eclectic clientele and like the proverbial car accident from which you can’t turn away, watching people dig with gusto into what must be 20,000 calorie breakfasts is both awesome and awful.  They don’t sell “chicken” but rather “fowl.”  I think they should strike “pork” from their menu and replace it with “swine.” 

There was a story that brought the tears on that morning…a specific act of kindness remembered and related to a buddy who was in town for the Husky game.  But it wasn’t the profundity of the tale that opened the spigots, it seems like it could have been anything—they were simply ready to come.  The next morning with Jamie they visited me in greater numbers—great shuddering sobs appearing with no warning; I received them with hospitality and gratitude, and only hid my face to shield River from seeing his dad lose it…he doesn’t need to see that happen…not now.  Hope is still too fragile for him to bear a storm, his ego isn’t yet strong enough to stand on its own…but he is getting there.

Do you want to live?

“These tears are a good sign,” my 2:30 am visitor later opined as he stirred the coals of the fire. “Greif is a companion of desire, but not of apathy.”  “Thank God,” I thought to myself (or did I say it aloud?)  I know I want to want to live, I desire to desire, I don’t want to silently slip too-willingly into the next world without a hearty fight to remain longer…but this derivative, this seedling of passion isn’t the same as the fully grown tree…

 

His question had hung in the air for what seemed like hours and we thankfully had changed the subject, though part of me was still mulling it over.  We began discussing his life, his dreams, his spiritual journey, his recent romance, his giddiness over the same, and it was in being in relationship with another person, and hearing their story—not just living in my own—when it came to me.  "Yes damn it! I want to live."  I want to live not just for my kids, for my calling, for my wife, for my neighbors, but for the sure joy of loving and being loved here and now. 

And I believe that I will.  I will live.

Three steps forward-two steps back

This week has not only ushered in tears and rekindled desire but more news as come.  I discovered that a fellow parent of one of my son’s classmates has melanoma in his brain.  Additionally a person I’ve gotten to know very well through business dealings over the last years has bladder cancer.  I’ve poured ashes on my head before, but this week all I could muster was a hearty cursing of this brokenness we call cancer.  “Fuck” falls short, but it is a start when said well.  We don’t have words big enough to do the job.  In some cultures they tear their clothes, they wail and yell, they live in ashes at such news.  Why we feel the need to put on a face is beyond me.  That this culture is so flat-lined, over-medicated, numbed out, and terrified of death saddens me.

It isn’t all bad news.  I also heard from a friend from my past who boldly emailed hope to me and to all my family who then proceeded to drink in her words like September rain.  A medical doctor back east, she has been at a conference and felt moved to go to a session that made no sense for her to attend, in the process missing a session that she actually really was supposed to have attended.  It was only after half the time was spent discussing melanoma and she then spoke with the presenter, a cancer researcher who it appears has options for me, that she saw that it made complete sense why she had trusted her intuition…

 

God bless the scientists who see the patterns that lay beyond the explicative powers of science, who trust that the One Who Holds Us All, the Logos, the DNA of everything, that this mysterious God can be counted on more than pure Reason…I’m at the beginning of looking into the options she has described, but it appears that some flights to distant cities to consult with even more doctors may be in the cards. 

A humble request

A few weeks back I wrote the first blog post of my life.  It was done so partly as a way of disseminating information and letting people who know me, know me deeper.  It was a way to speak to my community about life with cancer, about hope, pain, death, life, and everything in-between.  It has been used for more than these original aims.  People who have never met me, and people who have never met people who have met me, are reading.  This isn’t about me; I know that.  Likely dear readers you are here for many different reasons…Maybe it is the fascination of watching the car crash or a Beth’s customer swallow a Denver omelet, hopefully it is more.

In a culture where it isn’t customary for us to face death head on, for us to embrace our mortality as a gift, there are some ancient truths that need to be re-learned.  They are nothing new for sure, nothing that hasn’t been taught and lived out a million times before, but they are things that need to continually to be said and lived, especially in this culture.

So if you’re still with me, I would like you to consider sharing this blog, re-posting this blog, to “like” this blog, to send this blog to a friend or co-worker.  It won’t be because that person knows me, but because perhaps the gifts of cancer need to be known by more of us.  As cheesy as it sounds, I actually believe that you will be making some kind of difference by sharing a story of a sacred wound and the grace that is eclipsing it.

 

This being human is a guest house,
Every morning a new arrival

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
           Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,
Still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
Meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi