The Gravy-Like Nature of Existence

I’m home in bed, resting after a doctor’s appointment, my son cooking supper in the kitchen, bikini-clad Canadian women playing Olympic beach volleyball for Gold on the new TV at the foot of my bed, when I receive a call. It’s my radiation oncologist telling me my back is not broken. Such good news, I say, or words to that effect, and I realize that I am indeed in a new world if I can muster no greater enthusiasm than that.

Some context: I don't have a broken back but I still have stage four cancer of at least one vertebra and both lungs and the jury’s still out on my bladder and the rest of my body. Since I had a kidney removed in March I know it can’t be that. Could be the other one though. News of the not-broken back, fracture being a side effect of the cancer, is, therefore, a tender mercy. Small. I am grateful and even mildly overjoyed but in a one-less-thing kind of way; one less thing with which to contend.

Three weeks earlier I’d been to my regular doctor for an in-person post-op check-in and mentioned my sore back. The results of my latest CT scan arrived while I was there. The abdomen and pelvis, home of past and present kidneys, look good, she said, but there are spots on your lungs. Say what? The lower hanging bits of each lobe had managed to photo-bomb the scan. 

Four days later I went to the ER, my back pain insisting its way to the head of an increasingly sharp-elbowed queue. I blamed the pain on a bladder immunotherapy treatment I’d received a few days earlier, an infection maybe. Your blood and urine look good, the ER doctor said, but the Xray revealed a tumour on your spine. L2. Such a shame that I’d just experienced the shortest ER wait time of my life, 30 minutes, only to discover that it looked like my life might end even sooner than it had threatened to do on Monday.

Serves me right. When the kids were young I used to try to jolly them out of school morning illnesses—colds, sore throats, head and belly aches, and fevers—by telling them they probably had cancer. Get dressed and eat your breakfast and we’ll talk about your imminent demise on the way to school, I’d say, and now here I was with my very own school morning illness, a sore back, and it was exactly that: cancer. And who, may I ask, comes out of ER with an even worse diagnosis than the one with which they presented? Wasn’t I supposed to be the one overdoing things?  I’m the one with a love of hyperbole.

The day after my family doctor had told me that the cancer had spread we spoke again. How do you feel, she asked. I knew better than to provide a laundry list of physical symptoms and did not yet have the benefit of the ER’s insights. She wanted to know how I felt felt. I don’t have a bucket list, I said, my life is the bucket, I live life in the bucket. I do the things I want to do, I’m not saving them. If I had such a list there’d be only one thing on it and it would never come off because I’d never get enough of it: my kids; my kids and their now respective and collective loves. They’ll be on it, they’ll be it, no matter when I die because I’ll never have had my fill.

Nothing owes me anything. Life owes me nothing. I have made a point of using everything I have received as I’ve received it including a retirement I may no longer need but which has given me enormous pleasure in the planning of. I am prepared.

I wrote the manuscript I always wanted to write when finally possessed of the capacity to write it, when finally able to say what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it, my family’s life story and my appreciation for the lesson it taught, four of my five siblings dead by the time I was twelve, and seeing how my parents chose joy over grief for what remained each time there was a new reckoning. The manuscript owes me nothing, it need never be published, I’ve said what I needed to say and it turns out I was the only audience in whose opinion I was ever really interested and luckily I’ve had my own attention all along. Done.

I’ve known true love, twice, even though less than ideal choices practically speaking, I loved them both, first one and then the other. I know and have the love of an actual sister and sisters figurative. Friends. My plasma.

I have a mental Tupperware-container-Swiss-Army-knife combo that facilitates my understanding of everything I need to know, everything that comes under my inspection day to day in tight and twisty life turns, its brand name, Buddhism. My body has had a mind of its own about the things to which I’ve subjected it in this life and we’ve mostly been mutually supportive. Each of my four labours and deliveries, however, verged on precipitous, babies rushing to meet the day, my body hyper efficient, and unless I’m mistaken it now brings that same verve to instigating cataclysmic failure. Perverse. I think I’ll have that cigarette now.

I’ve enjoyed a work life inflected more and more with tasks for which I had an affinity and while not things that might be viewed objectively as intrinsically meaningful have nonetheless contributed to undertakings that held meaning and purpose for me. I’ve been a happy cog in bigger wheels. As well, I put myself up for elected office with the audacity to think I could represent and speak for total strangers. And I did.

I embraced and devoured and revelled in my desire to be a mother despite a childhood spent seeing that motherhood was a mug’s game, kids dying willy nilly and at the drops of hats with little or no provocation and certainly no apology. Bastards.

I have enjoyed a very good life, a very gravy life, and I look forward to more of the same until it chooses to congeal. And for the time being my back’s not broken and for that I am genuinely grateful.