Out of the Woods

by Lynn Darling

  It won’t flower because it hates me, I said, and a tear trickled down—whether from exhaustion or from the Taxotere that kept my left eye watering constantly was unclear.

  It won’t flower because it’s ugly and horrible and keeping it around isn’t going to make you into the kind of person who keeps a beautiful garden or recites poetry by heart or opens her house to the public on the gracious home tour and it isn’t even going to turn you into the person who wants to be that person, said Augustus.

  You’re right, I said, and got the machete.

  I whacked away at the wisteria for a couple of hours. The machete’s silvery sheen and keen edge, which I had so carefully honed in the beginning, were duller now, but the gleam of the metal against the matte green of the thick stems was still cruel and beautiful to look at, and the increased resistance of the stalks and the heaviness of the handle and the immediate ache in my arms turned each swing into a howl of anger and rebellion and joy and pleasure. It started to rain and still I whacked away. My hands were bloody from the thorns that had grown up around the vine and my feet were muddy and Henry danced in and out, trying to help, growling and pulling at whatever piece he could get ahold of. The wisteria grew on a trellis that had originally been a white fan-shaped structure, but which had weathered to a shabby gray and buckled under the weight of the monstrous vine, and so I got out the hatchet and hacked down the trellis as well. At the end the trellis was an ugly splintered mess and the vine was a stumpy ruin of its former self and everywhere was mayhem. The tangled vines I’d torn away from the porch railing lay in great heaps, threatening to suffocate the budding daylilies. I saved the daylilies but left the rest where it lay, and went into the house content.

  Catastrophes provide a pair of parentheses in which to live apart from real life, depositing you rather abruptly on the sidelines for a bit while normal life continues to eddy downstream. And, like Dr. Johnson’s hangman, it does serve to concentrate the mind wonderfully. I thought a lot about the disorientation that had brought me to this peculiar place while I drifted in the chemical fog and set the rhythm of my days to the timing of the next infusion, the rounds of white counts and blood tests, the progress of the tumor toward extinction.

  Eventually the treatment would be over, and whatever the long-term outcome, I would return to real life. The current crisis forced a necessary optimism, a cheery determinism to get through this mess with as much courage as possible and back to life as it used to be. But did I want that life back? A brain beset by chemicals may not be the sunniest plateau from which to review the past—the bleak, scoured emptiness in which I lived shone an uncompromising light on what had come before, unmediated by softer memories. But I welcomed the harshness.

  Looking back, I could see only failure and loss, and heard only the voice that asked, with increasing insistence, that age-old midlife question: Is the best of it over? The chemo had made me look my age (or, as Dr. Ruden had put it when he saw me during that time: You look great! All that weight you’ve put on has gotten rid of the wrinkles on your face!). And while the chemo may have paralyzed my brain, how long had it honestly been since I had taken any real interest in my work before I got sick? What was I living for, apart from blind instinct, apart from Zoë? I wasn’t thinking about these things in anguished, apocalyptic terms, but in the cool dry logic that Augustus Egg favored—to him it merely seemed like an interesting question. He asked a lot of them: How do you judge if your life is a failure? I had often told myself mine was, but how did one define failure? Is it only about whether you have hit all the marks, the ones the others hit, and when did you decide that they were your marks as well?

  When I was young and insufferable, I wrote a fair number of newspaper stories about cultural phenomena who had faded from the headlines but still had the temerity to ply their craft, what one editor called the surprise-he’s-not-dead profiles. I liked working on these stories; the has-beens were invariably more interesting than the ones who were still floating along like those Japanese puffer fish, engorged on the attention and oblivious to the notion that they could lose it all. But I always felt a little sorry for the subjects who insisted they were happy with the way life had turned out, that they had found a richness or a source of satisfaction that more than made up for what they had failed to achieve or thrown away due to their own weakness, or excess, or bad luck. I didn’t believe them, that’s all.

  But now I wondered at my youthful condescension (and the fear that fueled it): Wasn’t it just a reflex, an echo of the sort of assumptions and received wisdom that we accept until we decide for ourselves which of them are weeds and which wisteria? I wasn’t sure then that I had ever made that choice. Or had it always been the expectations of others that drove me forward, the desire to please, the shame when I failed to do so? And did being a failure—if that was what I was—make my life any less valuable? Less pleasurable, for that matter?

  The questions never stopped; they followed me down the highway in the car, they kept me up at night in the dark dead silence, they cackled at me from the rafters. One afternoon while driving down my favorite road, Church Hill, the voices were more brutal than I could bear, drowning out even Mr. Egg, so loud, so merciless, that I had to pull over. I tried to do a meditation I had learned from The Places That Scare You, by the American-born Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, but which is common, I believe, to most Buddhist philosophy. It is a simple exercise in compassion, wishing that all who suffer may find peace. When breast cancer scared me, the act of wishing that all the women who were as scared as I was would feel better always calmed me down. So I tried it there, on Church Hill Road, parked next to a tumbledown barn looking over the green frosted hills that were just coming alive with bright yellow wildflowers. May all those who feel as lost as I do find their way, I said. Yes, said the voices, all of them but you.

  As I started the car I wondered if it was possible to truly forgive yourself for your sins, real or imagined, whether I would ever escape the regret in which I steeped my version of the past. I knew by then that I had not left New York because I was ready for something new. No: I had run away from my old life out of a shame so large I hadn’t even seen it for what it was.

  All things fall and are built again …

  And that, I finally realized as I headed toward home, was the giddy liberating glory of it: all things fall, even the hand that holds the scourge, done in by the incontrovertible insistence of the present. I drove on in the cool blue shadow of the hills, into the gathering dusk of the evening, as the diamond points of the first of the night’s stars pricked the sky. Maybe they were all true, the crimes and shortcomings of which I convicted myself, and maybe, just maybe, it didn’t matter, because at that moment, when I crested the last hill and turned into the driveway and stepped out of the car into the lilac-scented night, I was nearly knocked over by the beauty of a world in which my part mattered not one whit. All I could feel then was a surge of happiness and gratitude; I was that glad to be alive.

  Go figure.

  Cancer is a good teacher. It forces you to understand what you should have known when you were healthy: there is little time left and none at all for regret. I might not know what I wanted but I was beginning to know what I didn’t. There were a lot of vines to be uprooted, most of them snaking through places in which a machete would be of no use. But I suspected that underneath them might lie a path to equanimity.

  The rage began, as cataclysms often do, suddenly, like the first drops of rain that touch your cheek as you walk down a busy street. You blink, and look to the sky, and there is not even time to register the idea that a storm is coming before you are drenched to the bone.

  For me, the moment came one morning in late October as I lay alone in a large dimly lit room, on the other side of heavy double doors emblazoned in yellow: DANGER! RADIATION. I was naked to the waist. My feet were strapped together with a large rubber band, my arms raised above my head, slightly bent at the elbow, my hands in stirrups just above my head. On the c
eiling, backlit by fluorescent lights, was a lurid photograph of an island cove at sunset, mountains rising majestically in the background, all of it bathed in a kind of acid purple. The sound system came alive with some bouncy, banal 1970s song—it probably wasn’t “Afternoon Delight,” the irony would have been too perfect, but it might as well have been.

  It was my first of thirty-seven radiation treatments.

  A few moments earlier, I had walked, more nervous than I knew, into the dark room, which was nearly empty except for a high, padded table and an enormous white machine that loomed over it, consisting, from my limited perspective, of a giant arm, at the end of which was a large lens that opened and shut at regular intervals, like a slowly blinking black eye. It was made of a shiny dead white plastic and looked evil and menacing, like a weapon that might defend Darth Vader’s storm troopers in Star Wars.

  I had climbed up onto the table and lain down, tense and expectant, until one of the technicians reminded me that I had forgotten to remove the pink wraparound hospital gown I had been given to wear over my jeans. “You forgot to take off your johnny,” she said.

  That was when I had felt the first tickle of irritation that was only the fanfare for what was to follow. It was that word—johnny. It was such a stupidly cute word to designate the thing I wore, the thing that was an emblem of what was happening to me, one that erased everything distinctive and individual about the women who wore it, the increasing number of women, who waited their turn each day out in the pleasant waiting room strewn with sofas and easy chairs and small tables covered with magazines and half-done jigsaw puzzles, the women who were sitting there now, their bald heads hidden by turbans and baseball caps, and wool hats and scarves, the women with complexions grayed by chemotherapy and insurance worries and fatigue and pain. Women sentenced to wonder for the rest of their lives if what was happening to them was for the only time or only the first time. It wasn’t a “johnny” we were wearing. It was the uniform of the prisoner.

  What was wrong with me? I wondered, puzzled by my reaction to such a dumb little detail. I was not the shell-shocked neophyte of eight months earlier, reeling from the diagnosis. I was a veteran, of eighteen weeks of chemotherapy, of surgery and recovery, of countless waiting rooms and blood tests and bone scans. I was accustomed to hospital procedures and the emotional ups and downs. I thought I had learned to take it all in stride.

  Besides, everyone, even the doctors, had said radiation was a cakewalk compared with the other treatments. “We like to think of radiation as chemo’s kinder, gentler cousin,” a radiologist had told me. Veterans of breast cancer treatment agreed. Radiation made you tired by the end and it was a great gobbler of time, five days a week for seven and a half weeks, especially if you lived forty-five minutes away from the hospital, as I did. But that was it.

  And so I had breezed through the initial, pretreatment preparatory session, when the technicians had mapped and measured the tumor site and then tattooed my chest with tiny permanent blue freckles that would serve as markers for the radiation beams. I joked about being transformed into a medieval map, the ones where the dangerous and unknown places were marked with the warning HIC SVNT DRACONES, this way there be monsters. And cancer was a monster, against which we had only these starkly primitive options: to burn, to poison, to slice away. With that thought in mind, radiation had reduced itself in my imagination to a mere inconvenience, one that entailed daily visits to the hospital, a minor sunburn, and possibly fatigue. But nothing like the nightmare of chemo. A nuisance, yes, but nothing more.

  The three radiation technicians spent a great deal of time getting me into exactly the right position to ensure the accuracy of the rays, shifting me about on a sheet while I lay passively on the table, because misdirected radiation could permanently damage heart and lungs. Finally they were satisfied with the position—they would take some X-rays, they said, and then administer the radiation, which in itself would last only a few minutes. They left the room, closing the door behind them.

  A whirring sound and then the enormous white arm swiveled around, its great black eye trained on my left breast. I shut my eyes tight and tried to breathe, but all I could think about was the position I was in and why it seemed so familiar. Of course: it was the position of erotic welcome, of a woman lying in bed, smiling at her lover. A wave of humiliation surged through me. I lost all perspective; it didn’t matter anymore that I was lying on this table in this room of my own free will, and to receive a potentially life-saving treatment, that I was lucky to have such an option, that I had made a choice. All I knew in the place where I lived that has nothing to do with logic was that I was naked and exposed, that my privacy, the memories of the pleasure my body had both given and received, had been violated, mocked, and debased. The fact that I was not forcibly restrained, that I could have walked out of there at any point, only made it worse. I was a willing participant in my own humiliation.

  Dissonant images clashed in my head—Goya’s naked maja, the black-and-white photographs of French women who had slept with Nazis during the war and who, at liberation, had their heads shaved and their clothes stripped off, and were branded with the word collaboratrice. I thought of my own bald head and I fell apart.

  My rib cage heaved and the tears ran down. I tried to remain still, but it was no use—finally the door opened, admitting the three now worried-looking young women and one very brisk doctor, who told me, with all the compassion of a codfish, to sit up and get ahold of myself, because I was ruining the X-rays. It worked, sort of. I hated her instantly, and hate is a much colder emotion. I lay back down, every muscle turned to marble. The technicians and the doctor left the room. I shut my eyes tight against the lurid violet photograph and the cold black eye that moved and whirred and blinked and finally it was over.

  I stumbled out of the room in a blaze of tears, having shaken off the abashed young woman who had tried to help me off the table. Then anger temporarily gave way to mortification. I had always prided myself on my stoicism, at least in public, and now I was scaring twenty-year-olds. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye.

  During the drive back to Castle Dismal, there was a small, still-sane part of my brain that watched in wonder as I screamed myself hoarse, consumed by a rage I’d never felt before. It was October and Woodstock was filled with elderly tourists out to see the foliage. Normally the leaf peepers struck me as rather sweet and a little sad, dressed as they were—as we all seemed to be now—in their play clothes, old shanks protruding from baggy shorts, sagging breasts in shapeless T-shirts. That day I wanted to shoot them all.

  Back at the house I went straight to the breast cancer discussion boards on the Web, and found some comfort there: other women reported reacting as I did, and for a little while I was tremendously relieved—I wasn’t a lunatic, or at least not the only one. Then I got angry all over again and nothing—not my impressive collection of psychological and Buddhist self-help books, not the Chopin Nocturnes, not even the Rock himself—could make a dent in my rage until the double dose of Xanax kicked in.

  The next day was slightly better. There was an older technician that day, a woman about my age, whose compassionate smile had a soothing effect. She told me that I didn’t need to wear the “johnny” if it bothered me; I could simply remove my top on the table. I got through the session without crying. But as soon as I left the room the anger hit again, and I was blind with it. I sat in the parking lot, the special one for cancer patients, and did a crossword puzzle until I was calm enough to drive.

  In retrospect, I can see that my anger was simply one tentacle of an overwhelming emotional fatigue that was almost inevitable after eight months of treatment. I had let myself think that the worst part of having cancer was over, and had felt the first quickening of a relief, which of course was premature. I was like a marathon runner who thinks she sees the finish line, only to find out she has five miles more to go. I had nothing left. It makes sense now, but back then my anger terrified me: it came from now
here and I couldn’t seem to control it. I needed help.

  A few days later, I knocked on the door of a neat white frame house that sheltered under the hill behind it with the proprietary air of a cat occupying its rightful place in your favorite armchair. I was met at the door by a small, softly smiling woman who was to be my Reiki therapist. Joanne’s white hair was tucked back in a bun and her blue eyes reflected a tranquility that could have calmed a cobra.

  Joanne led me into a dimly lit room with the low ceiling and close proportions characteristic of very old New England houses. I took off my shoes, climbed onto a high narrow bed, and was soon cocooned under a heavy handmade blanket. There was no sound except for the creaking of old wood and the occasional scrabble of small creatures looking for shelter from the cold.

  Reiki is supposed to work even if you’re asleep. Advanced practitioners can supposedly do it over the phone. I closed my eyes and tried to meditate while Joanne gently placed her hands on my eyes, ears, and head, working her way down to my toes.

  The session lasted ninety minutes. At first I felt only the warmth of Joanne’s hands, and the impending hyperventilation I always feel when I try to concentrate on my breathing as one is meant to in meditation. But as I relaxed, I sank deeper into a state that was somewhere between sleeping and waking, what scientists studying touch healing call a liminal state, which is said to resemble spiritual trances or self-hypnosis.

  Gradually all the emotion that had been roiling around and through me came to Technicolor life, assuming shapes that twisted and transformed themselves. The rage was a roaring, pounding wave, slamming into a rocky jagged beach. The anxiety was a rain of needles falling all around me. Then the scene changed. I was inside a dark warm cave, but glaring at me from the darkness was a weasel with sharp, bared teeth, poised to attack. I was afraid of the weasel, and my mind cartwheeled away from the cave through a jumble of other images until I finally felt safe enough to return. The weasel, much to my astonishment, was asleep. I wanted to touch him as he lay there, curled up, sleek and soft, but I knew that if I did, he would return to his saw-toothed snarling ways. Still, he did look pretty peaceful.