The Staircase Letters

by Arthur Motyer

  By late autumn, however, Elma’s situation had worsened. Hopes were raised by one set of tests, dashed by another, and debilitating radiation treatments and chemotherapy sessions were ordered. The lung cancer, diagnosed that September, was beginning to spread to the brain.

  Her next letter, in November, was addressed specifically to Carol, though I was co-recipient. Responding to what Carol must have said privately about her own treatments, Elma wanted to know more. Her rational scientific mind managed always to surprise me, for she could talk about and analyze her own distresses as though they were someone else’s, even when I was aware of the pain and fear she was feeling.

  Dear Carol,

  I’m always thinking of you, and what’s been happening. I wonder if you have been on a chemo treatment called Etoposide (also called VP-16 and Vepesid)? This one makes me so susceptible to infection the whole time I am on it, which will be to the end of January, at least, if I live that long. I take it by IV at the hospital for almost a whole day, three days in a row in a month, and it has to be “flushed” constantly, day and night for three days, and I’m lucky if I can doze for even ten minutes before it’s “up again, girl!” Not only does this deprive me of three days, I am often too tired to want to see anybody for a couple more. So there goes almost a week out of each month.

  I still have to be very careful of balance, since that was the really big part of my brain affected. There are possible emergency treatments for this spot, but in general they avoid messing with the brain again for at least a year. Sooo—given the six months prognosis, and the brain’s involvement, I’m working to a tight schedule right now. Martin says he’ll kill me if I use “window of opportunity” or something similar one more time. He thinks I’m into enough windows on the computer!

  Would you be willing to tell me something about the chemo you’ve had/are regularly having? I’ve always been fascinated by medicine and would, I think, have been a doctor myself if I hadn’t wanted kids. Besides, I was lacking in the necessary stamina, and those were different times, eh?

  There’s an anecdote I’d like to share with you and A. I have always believed in something, if only that “good” and “god” are basically interchangeable terms, and have zero to do with a god who has any involvement in this world, even an impersonal one. Definitely I think there is “a power greater than myself” as they say in AA (and even there you can use alcohol as the power, if that’s all you can manage).

  But do I love arguing both sides of anything! Well, my grandson Andrew had asked his parents about cancer, dying, etc. I later got him alone, with dad John off to one side, and asked if he had any more questions for me. “Yes, actually I do.”

  First he asked about the effects of radiation. Second he asked, “What gender are your doctors?” Even John’s eyebrows went up at that one. I said so far one male and the rest female, and he said, “That’s about what I figured.” This is a kid who had to be rushed to emergency with asthma from infancy, so a medical interest is natural.

  But he had one more question: “Do you believe God always existed?”

  I said, “Basically, yes,” not feeling either of us was really ready at that point for a debate on the meanings of God, existence, or the nature of the space-time continuum.

  But he went on: “So you are a believer?” (No further specification.)

  I said, “Yes.”

  He said, “Well, that’s what really matters,” to which I replied, “You are bang on, it is indeed.”

  My minister brother later remarked that Andrew had accomplished the feat of pushing me off my fence-sitting (and onto the unexpected side of the fence) after five hundred people had spent over fifty years trying to do just that!

  But I find that I do have indeed a newfound faith in a God, which I still have to fight to hold to, of course. It’s all bound up with the patterns within patterns, and designs within designs, I see and delight in—from the inconceivably cosmic to the tiniest grain. And it has been a great comfort and a help— in many ways. For example, it has made it so much easier to tell those with a religious belief about my dying.

  And that is way more than enough for now, guys!

  Carol, I love you.

  A.

  —ever … ever … ever …

  E.

  P.S. Carol, I want to read your new novel. A., I want to read yours. And I’d like to read Alice Munro’s latest. People naturally think “Elma + free time = reading.” (Even without the free time, that’s always been true.) And with the kindest intentions, I am being snowed under. I don’t want more books. I want contact with old friends (and some new) right now, and that means, when I do feel like reading, it’s old book-friends I choose. What so many people don’t realize is that it takes energy to read—sheer eye energy, too, and my vision is very unpredictable. A couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t begin to follow a plot line. People who have been sick in hospital understand this best. I’m improving a lot, thank God, but it still varies, and I have enough books to last me 99 years as it is.

  To all of this Carol responded:

  Dear Elma and A.,

  I agree with you about reading—it is a great comfort, but often hard work. Being with friends or family is more and more what satisfies. Novels do get me out of my own consciousness, a good thing, and the best thing about novels is knowing how other people think—this means that only certain novels work.

  You asked about my treatment. I am officially in palliative care, though I’m having a small dinner party tonight—hard to imagine. Among our guests is Marsha Hanen, who used to be president of the University of Winnipeg: you may know her. She suffered from lymphoma four years ago which was treated by stem cell implants, and has done well. Her friendship has been a gift. She is a thoroughly good woman. So I’m off to put the chicken in the oven, my daughter Anne’s recipe. Marsha is bringing dessert. A retired engineering prof (a neighbour) from Waterloo is coming with his “girl” friend. This is called LIFE GOING ON.

  What do you do in the middle of the night? Is there anything to watch on TV? I don’t find TV much use at any time, though I love CBC radio. Dear Elma—I’m thinking of you every day. carol

  (In e-mails Carol never signed her own name with a capital c.)

  I noticed it was All Saints Day when Elma and Carol wrote these letters, and I remembered that my mother had been buried on All Saints Day, some ten years earlier and just four years short of her one-hundredth birthday. “Why did Daddy have to die so young?” was her question after my father’s death. “Well, Mother,” I replied, “you must remember he was ninety-two.”

  I am left to wonder if life is always too long or never long enough.

  Would we view life and death differently if we believed that all we simply are is music, a collection of vibrating strings? The friend and former student, Stephen Haff, who had reminded me about Jane Austen told me of another belief, founded on quantum physics and known as string theory, which is that everything in the universe is music. “Take one of these little strings,” he told me, “flatten it with a rolling pin, keep on flattening it until you get a vast and very thin membrane. That membrane is the surface on which our universe sits, like tomato sauce on a great lasagna noodle. So the tiniest particle, the angel’s hair noodle, when severely attenuated, is also the thing that contains everything.”

  What Elma and Carol were to write to each other and to me in the months that lay ahead would be, according to my friend, like a vast sheet of lasagna, embodying a dazzling cosmic truth. They would have appreciated such a homely analogy.

  “Patterns within patterns, and designs within designs, I see and delight in—from the inconceivably cosmic to the tiniest grain,” Elma had written, perceiving one of the fundamentals in creation. It’s an insight ignored by right-wing religious fundamentalists and any limited scientists who aim to reduce all to a flat oneness and sameness. Famed though it is, Cleopatra’s “infinite variety,” as Shakespeare described the range of that Egyptian queen’s seductive powers,
can be thought limited only when measured against that found in plants and insects and animals and creatures that fly. Consider the complex patterns in the wings of hummingbirds, the colours in a peacock, the precise and detailed petals of any flower seen under a microscope, nothing ever exactly duplicated throughout creation. In a world of such staggering variety and abundance, Elma had also made it clear to me, in a letter written years earlier, that sexual diversity was part of the design. To her it was an obvious and accepted truth, and her earlier remark (never elaborated on) that “nature” probably “intended” her to be bisexual is best understood in such a context. God’s capacity is greater than man’s understanding.

  And there is Carol herself, in her reply to Elma, saying almost casually that “the best thing about novels is knowing how other people think.” Yes, of course, though it took her to put it that way. Plot, dialogue, arresting language, characters beyond those we might meet in everyday life, these are elements in a novel, but the key ingredient is thought. What did Daisy Goodwill think in The Stone Diaries? And Reta Winters in Unless, what did she think? Carol has told us. And if she had ever put Elma in a novel, we would know, in this instance, what Elma thought about patterns within patterns and designs within designs.

  Dear Carol,

  I have been mentally composing long letters to you—sorry ESP doesn’t work better. Usually I can write, but not always—I’ve had a lot of sleep deprivation recently. Flushing out the kidneys when on chemo is necessary, I guess, but a damn nuisance!

  I had my rad. marks put on yesterday, and my first session today. (Took ten minutes—no immediate side effects, except some fatigue for the rest of the day.) Last week, I had chemo Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 8:30 a.m. to around 3 p.m. And I AM NOT A MORNING PERSON!

  My bladder has never been that big! I don’t have incontinence, but having kids has its effects, as you well know, and I’ve actually had four of them. One was stillborn—rubella, they said, though from what I know now I could have killed it—him, “Joseph Paul”—myself with a few drinks too many, though I was able to control my alcoholism during pregnancy. It’s about time I started grieving for him, instead of denying his existence.

  Wording her sentence precisely, in this letter to Carol she named the fetus, almost accusing herself of murder, a further torment. Shades of Hopkins again:

  With this tormented mind tormenting ye

  I cast for comfort I can no more ge

  By groping round my comfortless, than blin

  Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find

  Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

  It was only much later and after Elma’s own death that Martin told me the doctor had been “absolutely furious” when she had refused an abortion in the second month of her pregnancy, when she knew she had rubella (German measles). Despite learning that the baby, if ever born, would be almost certainly deaf or blind or have serious heart damage, she insisted that life was important and she would try to carry the fetus to term. It was in the sixth month that the baby was stillborn, and the doctors thought seriously brain damaged. Although rubella was really the cause, Elma blamed herself. She had cut down on her drinking during pregnancy, but she now returned to alcohol in a yet more serious way and went spinning out of control. It was, however—so Martin told me later—because she recognized her own desperate situation that she started going to AA, and that led to her subsequent recovery. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” True enough, even when Milton gave the words to Satan. It’s the transforming mind that counts, and Elma’s mind was still capable of working, still transforming.

  So sleep really has been my major concern. But perhaps I should be less interested in being unconscious! I am now beginning to realize that, in my case, that “miraculous 1%” (inexplicable cure) translates into a very slim chance of living more than about six months. And with no way of knowing at all when which or all of my mental faculties will go during that time frame, I must try to develop at least one new thing a day, rather than being concerned about sleep.

  I am a very happy woman, Carol, and bless you and all my incredibly supportive friends.

  Talking is usually much easier for me, but I don’t want to interrupt your work.

  Read about Unless. Great title. That story was the first I read in Dressing Up for the Carnival, and remains one of my favourites. I’m delighted you’re picking up that one— hope to get to read the book. All love,

  Elma

  P.S. I meant this week I had chemo Monday, etc., so I’ve had five straight days of chemo and then rad. stuff. See what I mean about sleep?

  The next day I responded to Elma’s letter to Carol.

  Dear E.,

  Last night I got what you had addressed to Carol and perfectly well understood. How sensible you are becoming! Save your energies! Write only what you want and when you want to write it.

  Who was it who said—Arthur Koestler got it from someone else, I think—something about the best inspirations coming from the bus, the bath, and the bed? I hope that’s true, because in my morning bath a few minutes ago, I thought I should try, after all, to turn my Salvation Army novel into a play, which is what you suggested, and I even thought of an opening scene. The challenge would be to find a different way of telling the same story and not be reluctant to let go great chunks of the novel that won’t fit a format for the stage. If I ever do that, I’ll dedicate it to you—“For Elma, the brightest and best.”

  Ever … ever … ever …

  A.

  A few days later, I wrote again to Elma, knowing that she had been suffering regularly from insomnia and had asked Carol what her remedy was for getting to sleep at night. Carol’s answer was unfortunately lost in a later computer glitch, but it was so vivid and imaginative that I recall it clearly.

  Carol wrote that she would imagine herself standing at the top of a staircase, with as many stairs on it as there were years in her life. Sometimes it was a grand staircase, made of Italian marble, with banisters stylishly shaped and decorated with pieces of glass from Murano; sometimes it was humbler and made of wood or polished ebony; sometimes it was built of concrete, hard, durable. And, lying in bed with her eyes closed, she would start on the top step, a beginning that was also an ending.

  She would descend that staircase very slowly, each step a review of her life, stopping to feel each stair with her foot, appreciating its smoothness, its colour, and looking to see if it reflected light or not, if it had been created by an obviously loving craftsman. Down, down, down, always slowly down. Sometimes she would pretend that the steps she walked on were encrusted with jewels and highly polished. Sometimes they would be of silver or gold. And as she stepped down, one by one, she would marvel at the work, its design, its symmetry, its sheer beauty, its honesty of purpose. She would continue down the staircase of her years, the journey of her life, until she found herself regressing into young adulthood by stair thirty-one, then childhood by stair twelve, but losing track of whatever number it was in infancy, where sleep never failed to arrive.

  Dear E. and C.,

  I have just returned from a concert in Antigonish—that name, by the way, according to guide books, is a Mi’kmaq word meaning “The place where bears gather in the winter and eat beech nuts,” demonstrating an economy of language unrivalled by anything in English.

  Thank you for all you have both sent. My heart is in the right place, I hope, but what the two of you are experiencing leaves me feeling helpless on the outside, even when I’m not.

  I like the idea of feeling one’s way down a flight of stairs in order to find sleep, and must try it sometime without falling. Do you remember, Elma, your own fall down the stairs in my Lennoxville house long years ago? You had brought Martin, your new husband, whom I had not met, to stay with my wife and me in our rented campus house, only to have me take you to the hospital later that evening, when you tried to stumble up the stairs to bed but fell so
badly to the bottom. More and more, however, I feel like a doctor out of Chekhov, amazed at all he once knew and no longer remembers in detail. Lucky for you, maybe!

  I was sorting through some of my old poems the other day, prior to reading a few at a gathering here in Sackville, and thought you both might like the one I will now copy out for you, especially since it is short. (It would be even shorter, of course, if I had a complete vocabulary of Mi’kmaq words.) You might have to read between the lines a bit to see that the Old and the New Testaments are there, as well as all those of us who search for love, everything from one bite of apple! It was published once in a small literary journal out of Halifax, called The Pottersfield Portfolio. Its title is “Eden”:

  Love came from chaos at the first, the Word transforming dark to light, and Eve was flashed into knowing Genesis was no myth.

  One bite and the world sang its pain, its paean of lost and found and lost again, and Mary’s flesh discovered the tree was no myth.

  But who would put the apple back? Not I, standing at last with you, my world held now in shining hands, my love no myth.

  Ever … ever … ever …

  A.

  I have to admit to feelings of inadequacy, as I struggled to say anything even remotely helpful to two women who were dying of cancer when I was perfectly healthy and enjoying my life. Forty years earlier, in any parallel situation, I would have felt even more inadequate. To an outsider, I would have appeared a happy man, married with two beautiful children, a son and a daughter, enjoying my work, enjoying much of my life. But I was leading parts of my life secretly, forever fearful that a disapproving world would break in and try to destroy what was there. If any two friends had told me in those bigoted, uncertain days that they were living with cancer and writing to each other about it and would I join in, I would have been at even more of a loss to say anything helpful about living and loving and dying, when so much of my own emotional energy was spent in a search to discover myself and to understand a little of what I think I understand better now.