November

When you hear that you have that much to live – you start seeing that ”just living” is the major achievement of your life. Major. You begin to live with an understanding that time as at the sole measure for life. Living long is now an immense achievement in itself. Old people all are over-achievers. Old bums, old ladies, old soldiers, old neighbors – you thought they were just old people, but they are the over-achievers. They may not be living gloriously. Not at all. But they are living. Nothing that you would have appreciated before –blame the culture for out blind eye. It starts with the fairy tales. There is always a story in a fairy tale – the story culminates in a heroic deed, say, a heroic marriage- well, the culmination is preceded by the long anticipation of it, of longing and getting. But then, after that climax – there is nothing. The story ends. Did you ever notice the story always ends abruptly? Then nothing. Silence. Did the princess live long after she finally wed her prince? We don’t know that. Wait a second – is not the most important thing missing – the REST of her and his life? How long did they live for example? That is the question. Is Not the major event of the fairy tale – short and glorious – no, but how heavy and thick it was after that. Thick and heavy. These are the definitions of time. You suddenly realize that know nothing about these characters anymore – because you don’t know how they spent the rest of their lives.

Maybe I know how it happens to us, people who don’t think about time, that we can die without giving a thought to our own impermanence. We keep our fingers crossed that we will somehow manage to live without thinking about this, we stupidly hope that we will live tomorrow as we live today, and thus we continue to delay the moment of thinking about time – time and brutally simple things that start to unravel when you bring up the word “time”– death probably. With years, we become old and weak and delusional, and we cannot think at all, because thinking requires some strength and some courage. So we have an opportunity to die before we start thinking about time and death, even if we are very old. We can manage to live without thinking about time. Or most of us can. But there are sages among us, there are these superior people who must have thought about time – you can tell it by their beguiling eyes and by the rush they impose on themselves. Always rushing, always busy, always with their heads on fire. They must know directly how long the moment is and how short they are in the end. But say you were not among the sages.
You thought you would live and live and live – not forever, because you knew there was death – but long enough to postpone your thinking about time for the indefinite future. You hoped you would never sit down and start thinking about the time and death. But I was pushed to start thinking, and that made me turn to those sages and start trying to live differently.
Living without thinking about time was like holding on an old bad job – you need to be fired to realize you have been wasting your life on it. We usually get back from this blow of being fired from a bad job, I know we do. Consider it a mini-death, will you? You knew it was a dangerous dead-end situation, but you continued to be in it, avoiding looking at your grim prospects, avoiding preventing your mini-death. Why would we be so afraid of thinking – more than of failures, more than of our mini-deaths?
Living without the time. Thinking is too much work, too scary and too anti-death. It took me a push of cancer to start thinking about time and its relation to life. I was uncomfortable. I could have talked about it in abstract physics terms that have nothing to do with me personally. I should have done that thinking way back in my life, but I did not. I know people who did, but I was not among them. So I had to be pushed, like someone who was fired from his job, and I was pushed.
Same with generosity. I know a lot of people who are generous – without being pushed –without being sick or miserable- and I was not among them either. Or maybe I am too strict to myself. But now I feel what it is to be generous more acutely. I can’t pass a bum begging for some change – I don’t want to hear that three is a criminal ring set up to extort pennies from the laymen like me). And in the same way I was pushed to think about the time in my life. Now, there is “before” and “after”. So “before”, when I turned forty, I started to have my first panic attacks at the thought about how much time in my life has been wasted. Say, we all have these attacks when are forty, right?
Say, the attacks often came to you at work, when your career prospects started to dwindled under the jealous eye of an oppressive boss assigning you disciplinary tasks. Sometimes you would be caught awry in the middle of your disciplinary labors, and panic at the thought that you, an adult, a professional, a smart, etc woman would be playing the immature games of power with the oppressive guy who happens to be your boss. These would be the first pokes in your otherwise harmonious self-conscience. These would be the most acute bursts of realization that you were wasting your life on something that was not worth it, and the dull pain of guilt would start creeping in, but you would manage to suppress it. You would start to think that you were not doing what you “supposed to be doing”. You know how it goes, even if you never were sick, right?
For me it was cancer that made a lot of things irrelevant, and a lot of things invaluable. Time became all, right? College? Not so sure. Education – maybe. Jobs ladder- nothing. Class ladder- nothing. Social fears- nothing. Truth – everything. Life-everything. Time – everything. Time for what?
I still envy the sages with their heads on fire, but now, in my “after” part of life, I can probably think a little bit like them. About time. About how little of there is, and how banal it is to say that, and how this thought should not be dismissed just because it is banal. (May be my sages don’t talk much because all there is has been said already? )
Spending the day right –this is becoming a task. Making the day heavy with the good labor? I am trying. This is how it goes. I read my emails. I respond to some and skip others. I respond to all that are addressed to me personally. I read (should be reading more). I write a little bit, but not always. Have breakfast. In a good day – go for a walk (should not be skipping so often, and should be biking more). I cook. Eat. It’s 3 pm already! Here I consider the day gone – for making it heavy that is – alas. I sit with Simon when he comes back from school. I watch him eating and we chat. Then Naomi comes from school and I watch her eating and we chat. 5! Snack. If I am going for a meditation class that day – I am lucky. I spend a lot of the time on wondering around. Chatter. Snack. Reading emails. Tired. Too cold to go for a walk now. Try to write. To read. Tired. Sleep. I want to hide behind the backs of the sages now – they will tell me that I am too hard on myself, and that I should give it more time, ad that I should be doing more with my time, my gradually, gently, without pushing too hard. I listen to the music of their vowels. I nod. And then they rush to attend to their fire.
So, time.

My lovely friends just ran a fundraiser event for me and my family.
What a terrific people, each and one of them. Amidst their own pain and their own busy schedules with teaching classes, running businesses, taking care of their small children, thinking of their grown-up children in colleges, running the own jobs, making art, writing books, running barters, et cetera – they found all this time to run this fun and successful event on Sunday – full of other great people giving – buying art, bidding on silent auction item, buying raffle tickets, donating money, just saying a couple of brave and comforting words of support. These great people together made 7 thousand dollars!
Yes , my fundraiser brought 7 thousand dollars.
And then the next day my genius husband was laid off by this other type of people.
Who would do something like this – we are wondering. At least give a week a notice or something.
I feel really stupid now. Would not you? Not even insurance!
So, great and stupid.
Thank you great people.
Stupid stay in the dark.
Amen.

Alien people

October

I am an alien person and I have been an alien person for 5 months already. I look strange to all of you, non-aliens, you try to cover it, but you fear me, just as I did before I became an alien. I may be from a sci-fi movie , that fantasy being, that alien person, one of them,  who look the same. They are a combination of a new-born human, an old bold male, a slow thinking creature, a slow moving creature, a creature confusing words, someone very unsure of himself, someone hiding his freaky appearance from the outsiders, someone hiding. We are altogether hiding from everyone else but when we spot each other we recognize the alien nation types.

At first it was sort of bravely romantic, to lose the hair and state to the world – I have cancer. And I am sort of proud not to be ashamed. And that imposed bravery is now possible due to all those really brave and honest people who had cancer and publicized it to the extent that nobody now does not know that chemotherapy causes the hair loss and physical suffering. Like Lance Armstrong – his honest book about his doctors, his cancer, his mother, his sport, his insurance, his friends, his girlfriends, his wife, his child, all that in the light of his year with cancer, did the job – so that other –normal – people when they think of cancer now, don’t cringe right away at the thought of something as freaky as cancer. I don’t know what it is yet – but definitely people don’t cringe when they know someone is sick this way. Did I just say “this way” instead of cancer?

After a while I began to get tired of my new look. My alien look. I started to desire to grow the hair back and look normal, not like alien anymore. But I still can’t. Or I don’t know if I can. So I am stuck with the aliens for now. I am impatient. Not that I am ashamed or embarrassed to belong to the alien flock.  I am  just tired of this fetal look, no eye lashes, no eye brows, no hair. I knew it all well about it, even was wearing with pride, like Lance Armstrong and so many more or us aliens – but now I am getting tired of it, I want to strip it off. I suddenly see how much individuality the hair gives to us. Hair! Bold men, how I understand you now. But  they still have their eye brows and eye lashes – I guess that’s how much individuality they have. Sorry,  speaking of looks only. But can go back to my old normal self, with all the hair, and I am in rush.

I just had my last chemo – 5 days ago. So I fell done. For now. I want my old looks back, I realized. But I think I am going to do the trial where taxol is tried – if I end up in this branch of the trial- I will not be growing my hair for another YEAR. I will a bold-headed alien for another year! If I end up in the experimental drugs branch – I may grow some hair. And not be completely fetal.

Being fetal. Stripped off cute details of my cute ego. Hair. Braids. Colors. All that. No differences anymore. We, aliens, are all equal again, hairless and in the color of skin, just like the babies, emerged the womb, but lacking all those years of growth and personal lives. Looking fetal , being fetal. This brings you to your knees, strips your own self out. Now, maybe I wrongly understood my “own self”? If the simple change of appearance brought me down on my knees? And how about all those monk people? May be I should have been more thoughtful – just like them, the monks, the superior people, who did not have to through the disease to realize the false and shallow goal of individual looks- and pursue the absence of looks, self expressed through the looks- earlier?

I think old ways were better. They allowed people to be monks, freaks, and then everybody else who were just part of the picture, not the only way a person could be. Is this the age of individualism then, the age of intolerance to a different appearance? Or maybe we shallowly are used to expressing of individual self through the looks – only? I am definitely – what? – guilty? Can I use the word guilty here? Is this my personal guilt to be tuned in to a societal wavelength, or the “society” is guilty of “imposing” “shallowness” on me?

I know there are monks in the world. I have seen a Buddhist student, a young girl, she is wears a simple uniform, something ascetic and having no distinction, I would even say something ugly. She did not buy the impositions. Well -but she is Korean, may be Korea is more ideal in that sense, or laid back – and people are still not using the looks as expression of individuality, or maybe there is less imposition for individuality in Korea altogether – I don’t know.

I belong to the order of grown up-fetuses – the new alien tribe among us. “Us” as we were -before we joined the order, one by one. I used to be normal too. I used to belong to the majority. Now I belong to the order of alien people, I am reduced to the child monk of the new alien order, the order of cancer.

Rather, I was child five days ago. I needed so much care. So many hands to help me, to feed me, to hook me up to the chemo dripping bags on top of the rolling polls, to pierce my veins, to give me anesthesia, to surgically remove parts of my body, to consult me, to talk to me, to explain, to guide, to lean on. Now I am suddenly done. Done with being helped so intensely – I just finished my chemo – but I still bear the look of an alien. May be that’s why I am seeing all these aliens now. I am done with being a child but I still have the look of an alien, and it bothers me because I am too shallow?

August

Now I am feeling for the old people. I used to not notice them before at all, them, the old people. Not that they were not there, but I conveniently and fearfully would turn them a blind eye, feeling invincible to age, invincible to illness, invincible, untouchable by all that sort of ugliness. I was feeling invincible like the worst of the luckiest of us – those beautiful healthy smart types; the worst of the luckiest, because I did not feel enough for the old, the sick and the stupid.
Now when I see old people I remember how they seemed so infinitely miserable to me back then, before I got sick, and now they are luckier than me and at the same time, still miserable to anybody who is young and healthy. Luckier than me – because they managed to get to their age, and that’ just  big luck just for anyone;  but  miserable because they are invisible amongst the Olympian and yet  vulnerable youths.
What are we thinking? That we will never be old? What a quotidian moral prescription that I am bringing up here – pay attention to the old people because you might become one some day – if you are lucky  (but that is in the footnotes). I am looking around me and I see the armies of good old people. Old people with canes. Old people that stink. Old people wearing ugly clothes. Old people that buy cheap produce at the grocery stores. Old people in wigs. Old people in hats to cover up their ugly lucid scalps. Old people living alone, without the company to talk to or go out for a decent dinner and have to eat their rotten, stale and overcooked food in their homes. Old people that never go out. Old people walking in pain. I can see that now very often. On a street, in a hospital, in a store. Old people dragging their feet in pain.
I can now tell when people are in pain. Mostly old people. They have a special look inside themselves and they carry themselves very carefully, very slowly, no brisk movements, no flapping hands, no running, jumping, or hurrying up. That is how I feel too after the surgery and after the chemos. Chemos make be bloated for weeks, and I look pregnant, only I am not pregnant just bloated.
I remember how I was before I got sick. I remember how sure I was that we never age like a simple person would age. I would age as yogi, I would preserve my good looks well into my older years. I would do yoga and be youthful and thus not be a subject of ugly aging. I was sure of that. I was living within the moment of my youthful “now”, in the limbo of knowing about my guilt of ignorance in the subject of pain and old people, and yet staying free from exploring the details of pain in my own future, the pain of the old people. I was wearing my aristocratic aloofness as a hot air balloon, visible from afar. I had the foreboding of the eternal “now”.
Now I am with the old people. Now I look at them, the ugly old sufferers ask them and I ask them – how come you live so long? The foreboding of me never changing, never threatened in my core of cores – feeling of my own self being eternal. Not that I have not read about it being inevitable, not that I have never seen a movie about it coming – I read it a million times, I saw it a million times. But still I thought it was not about me. And what? The “I” did not change. I can have pain, I wear the wig, I am miserable in my own physical way, but with this difference: I am still young.  But now I feel closer to the old people -those who are in pain and in wigs and suffering. Inevitably, the sick people, the old people and the soldiers feel closer to the death than the Olympian crowd. Let these be answered, those questions that should be set aside. I just examined myself in the state of sickness and found myself with the old people.

How to Feel – Present Tense

Peace of Death.
April

Look out the window while you are still in bed and watch the late morning air.

See the tree branches brushing against the sky in the background.  Feel lazy. The air in the bedroom is lazy and still. Am I a bad person? Why am I not jumping out of bed?

Why would you? What are you trying to achieve? What is this morning laziness about – death or peace?

I remember the very lazy mornings of my summer vacations. I did not have to do anything. There was not much to do. The day would come and go and there would  not be much to do in it. I would then stay in bed for a long, long time – and watch the bright summer air thought the open window, and not even moving. I would lie in my bed and watch the day unraveling – through the open window.

I was feeling lazy that winter, extremely lazy, and it had the ending of me getting the cancer. Which  was  first, my laziness or my disease? Or did they mutually feed each other, resulting in the grim and devastating possibility that  I am now  facing?  I don’t know. I now wake up and feel both death and peace. Death because when you have to do nothing or cannot do anything  because you just don’t do much anymore, and at the same time the final peace of freedom from all the frantic activities of the day. Old people must have this. They must be spending their days like this. They must also watch the world from their beds and not be  in a hurry to do anything anymore.

I am now battling with the question of how to stop dying – how to stop lying in bed for so long, watching trees in the bright spring sun. Shaking and moving tree branches. Lying in bed and watching the tree branches move is the biggest deal. Because it is both deadly and peaceful. I want to jump out of bed.

I want to just jump out of bed and stop being lazy.  I know it may just be that I am  tired, not lazy.  The boundaries are already smudged in my mind, so I don’t know which comes first. But I want to want to do things. This tastes like life. Maybe I am tired of being tired and want out, out in the bright spring air under the shaking tree branches that I see from my bedroom window as I lie in bed for so long every morning.

I agree, I have  given myself up to sadness.  How I used to brag about the endless depths of my endurance, didn’t I?  How I used to brag about my family tradition is endurance itself. I did, I did – I bragged about how my family survived wars and revolutions and lowly people and unfaithful lovers and illnesses and hunger and killed parents and suffered fears of jail and being jail and lonely childhoods and being Jewish and goodness knows what. I thought I was invincible and protected by their survival stories and their good karma. And yet, I succumbed to the sadness. I succumbed like a fool to this self-created feeling of sadness. I should have gone to India. I never should have celebrated my loss of a doomed love.  And now I don’t know if I will even survive this cancer.

Now I am lying in my bed later every morning and don’t know  how this blessing of a leisurely life can be transformed back to living again.

Leisure Life.
June

Just being as an obligation. This is when leisure is free of guilt. Just be and this is your task, child. Leisure. What a wonderful time of life. No obligations, just being. You are suddenly a child with only one obligation – to be you. Child to your parents, child to your children. Because child is the synonym of treasure. They treasure you, so you should be.
They treasure you so that you are suddenly liberated of their demands. Of their impudent desires to see you better than you are.
Suddenly liberated. You let go of all their demands and your own – but one. This one demand is the hope. Nobody is sure. That’s why it is called hope. You can only hope. So can they.
So you get scared in the middle of your sudden joyful liberation from your usual tiring worries. Being scared bears hope. Because when you are scared you will start moving and doing something for yourself. That’s the hope. Hope and leisure don’t go together.
Nobody is sure but they are hoping. You are hoping too. But now the load of worries is on them so much more, twice of a load suddenly on them now, when you got sick. Not just your own stupid load of everyday existence worries that you used to have and that brought you to your disease. Now this load is off you. But all your parents and all your children and those who love you now carry much heavier stuff with them.
I am sorry. I caused this trouble to all of them really.
Here comes the end of leisure.
Because now I have to run around and make sure I will get well in the end.
Desperately run around and find out how to get well in the end.
Friends are the best source.
Nothing is hidden from them. They know everyone in the world. They want to cry first and then want to help. And since all know so many things collectively, nothing good is hidden from me. I want to thank you all. You pushed your knowledge on me, thank you. And nothing is hidden, right?
So I do what they say and then I run around and take care of myself the many ways they told me. I get really busy with this running around. Appointments, phone calls, conversation, clarifications, keeping the doctors accountable, arguing with the nurses and the doctors, all the successions of things that I have to do – then suddenly a gap appears.
The leisure is back. Oh, this is the best time. I can just drive in my car and just listen to the music. The music is hip. I was given it by a friend a as gift for all my sufferings. Best times. Really. Have to just be.
Then the next appointment or a phone call or a need to force myself to find new ways of getting better comes again. To force myself to follow up with the nurses and the doctors and ask around what else can be done and ask for the questions to ask – from everywhere I can: doctors in Russia, friends-who-have-been-there, genius researcher F., my brother, my brother asking his colleagues. So then I rush again.
Then there may be the gap again. And I don’t have to do anything. Anything at all. I ride in my car and listen to the music. Female voices. About love that can’t be undone. I ride from Philadelphia to my suburb. It takes less than an hour. Freedom time. Freedom from worries, from burdens of things that can be done, but are undone. I never had this leisure before in my whole life as far as I remember myself as a person-who-was-supposed-to-have-aspirations. And did a lot of them, they always felt like a burden of something that had to be done. Always something that was unlearnt, undone, unknown, un, un, un.
My father unknowingly imposed on me the burden of the German language. All my adolescence I was suffering because I did not speak German, unlike my father. It did not matter that I did not have it at school – it did not matter that I spoke English – no. The burden of the German language has stayed with me thorough most of my adult life. I kept buying German Language text books but never got past chapter 5. I knew I should have been at the point of reading Hegel with my German already, but…
There was always a burden of success. The heaviest of all I think.
A couple of notes on burdens. Let me suggest that people are defined by them. People are defined by their burdens. Right? Also, one can never get through the burden if he still carries it. “Drop the load”?
You cannot be successful if the success is something that you must do, a burden. Right? Right? I am dropping the load of success. I promise. Like an alcoholic anonymous. I am dropping my alcohol of success.
This is how during these times of my temporary freedom from the contritions caused by self-imposed burdens, I see the gist of self.

Vita
Vita dear have been there, now I know am there too, and I apologize for not suggesting you my help when Leona was sick. I could have offered at least a word, but I was shy to offer it. You pushed and pushed and pushed so that I made phone calls and went to see F. Thank you for being so persistent with F’s connections. Thank you for asking questions from your boss – I know that was not easy.

Annette
I don’t know where I would have been without your tremendous help. I am following in your wise steps and I admire your ability to get knowledge about things, to find the best doctors, the best naturopaths, the best dieticians, your judgments are always sharp and true, you always advice me tom stand up for myself NOW, always stand up for myself. You are giving and smart friend. And you are the first one with whom I shared my cancer diagnosis. And you are from THERE.

Brother Sasha
You are wrote a hundred emails to my strange doctors, to my others doctor, to my resilient doctors, to my nurses, to your colleagues, to your friends, you tirelessly worked with me for so many hours and days. You were the first one to notice that my scans are not that innocent. You kept you watchful eye on my every move.

Glenn
Compassionate closing the gaze at one’s needs
With your head on fire
Awakened to life of others
You started this salvation effort
I am truly fortunate

Iden
Listening to people
You love them friends
Grasp the glimpses of niceness
A gift of a child’s eye
Still growing

Connie
Superior loyalty through all of this that’s been happening
Never blinked
Never said “no” to helping out
Joyful giving
Love

Mark
With little words
The sense is in the job
Of doing, always did
This web site is the work of love
And humble doing

Curt
Laughing, hiding in the shadow of a tree
Laughing at the world under the bright sun
The laughter can cure
Enlightened

Greg
The job of naming things
You took it
Hence “Anna and the Beast”
The name creator

Richard
Understated
Feeling other people’s pains
Wise and calm
Feeling my pain too

Lena
Friend’s shepherd
You understand a lot about needs
No fear

Lynn
You are always such a sturdy, reliable, cold-minded, helping and doing, cool friend. Your presence is so dear.

Alex
You took a role of the editor of my blog- gentle understanding and yet critical.

Vicky
Thank you for delving into the helping effort. For all your research and time.

June
16 kilos of herbal remedy for my cure
Bought in China by dear your friend for me
Could not get it through the customs
Your love is still heavy
As 1 million kilos

Glenn’s meditation group
Connected to the world
Feeling passionate about my pain too
Giving without hesitation
The world is turning

Naomi, Simon, Sasha
You the most faithful