by Debra Jarvis
“Your tea, madam.” She loved it and it became our little ritual to have tea together.
“Yes, most definitely, I loved having nails again because it had been so painful to handle things, to type, to dial the telephone. But sadly my allergies came back once the effects of chemotherapy receded. And my family became less respectful of me and began to argue and behave poorly again. They actually told me they didn’t want to hear any more about my cancer.”
“Families—you gotta love ’em,” I said facetiously.
“On the contrary. My wellness has meant that I make choices toward my friends and away from my immediate family because I simply will not tolerate bad treatment any longer. Cancer has taught me it’s quite all right to avoid predictably stressful situations. I spent Thanksgiving with friends instead of family.”
A lymphoma patient, who was an infectious disease doctor, told me he was obsessed with a fear of infection. So he didn’t ride public transit, and even though swimming was his favorite activity, he wouldn’t go in a swimming pool.
“I knew I survived,” he said, “when I got back in the pool and cranked out my first half-mile. I hadn’t been in the pool for over a year, and that first swim was my equivalent of crossing the English Channel.”
Lots of people talk about being able to drink wine again, eat spicy food without reflux, play with their kids, walk up a hill without getting out of breath, go all day without a nap, and read serious literature, not just magazines. Things are getting back to normal when people ask,“How are you?” as a passing remark. For many women the sign things were on the upswing came through initiating sex.
“I knew I was better when I was the one to say, ‘Hey, I’m interested,’” Sarah said.“Trust me, this was a change from life during six months of chemo! We were on the phone with each other, and my husband was so surprised he rushed home, went running around the house, and had all of his clothes off by the time he ran into the bedroom! It was fantastic! I felt sexy and alive! This was about three weeks after my mastectomy.”
But for some people it takes longer to feel they have their lives back. Marie was eight months out of chemo, and had bi-lateral mastectomies and radiation when I talked with her.
“I don’t feel like I do have my life back,” she said. “But I went out for dinner recently and was in the bathroom applying lip gloss when a woman said something about how she liked my hair. I told her it was the most expensive cut of my life. Then I told her about chemo and how the hardest part of losing my hair was my eyelashes and eyebrows. I told her I felt like I had been erased.
“The woman looked at me and said she could see eyelashes. I was ecstatic! I looked in the mirror and sure enough there they were. I felt so glamorous just knowing they were on their way back. My eyelashes and I waltzed out of that bathroom.”
Recovering from chemo is really a “both/and” situation.You both celebrate your returning health and you grieve your losses. So you may get your taste buds, hair, and fingernails back. But maybe you’ve lost some body parts and now have hot flashes and osteoporosis.
The losses aren’t just physical.You may have lost your career, your confidence, or a relationship. For sure you’ve lost a certain naiveté, an innocence about your own life. For me it was as if the pendulum swung the other way, and not only did I know that bad things could happen to me, I started to expect it. I found myself wondering what was going to smite us next? Was Wes going to be hit by a car on his bike? Would our house burn down? Would a gang of root weevils take down my rhododendrons?
The Port Authority
I wanted some time to myself to look over what I had just crossed. In September the Hawaii Cancer Center in Honolulu called to ask if I would give a talk in March on death, dying, and spirituality. After cleaning my slobber off the phone, I said, “I’d love to.”
A few days later the mail brought one of those offers for five nights and six days on Maui for a ridiculously low price. These offers are so obnoxious because you usually can never go on the dates specified. It’s like holding out a piece of pizza to a starving man and saying, “You can have this if in the next six seconds you can tell me the square root of 8,427.”
The number of people that can do that in their heads is the same number that could actually go to Hawaii on the dates offered. And who knew we could do square roots in our heads? I looked at the dates and realized it the same week I was speaking in Honolulu. “We can do this!” I said. So we made our reservations.
I was telling Lynie about this. “A week in Hawaii in March will be so great. Now, to make my dream come true, I need to find a house-sitting gig.” Because what I really wanted was a big stretch of time to sort things out.
A week later Lynie called back and said,“My in-laws in Kailua need someone to house-sit for them in March. They’ll be going to New Zealand for two weeks. And they need someone to take care of Puna.”
A house-sitting gig and a dog? In the meantime, Wes was invited to speak at a conference in Tokyo. This meant he would be staying only one night with me in the house in Kailua. So I would be all by myself in a house on the beach with a dog for two weeks. I was ecstatic.
I did not exactly pray for this. But I did put it out there to the Universe. The Universe/Mr. Martha Miyagi responded. It was a mystery, and I was content with that. Of course if we were going to be cavorting in swimsuits, then I really wanted to get my port out.
I scheduled the port removal a couple weeks before we left. So there I was lying on the table with Wes standing next to me, my port site filled with three gallons of local anesthetic. Gowned, gloved, and scalpel in hand, Our Friend The Surgeon paused before slicing me open and asked, “So are you and Wes going to do anything fun after this?”
“We’re going to Hawaii!” I said grabbing his arm. His perfectly sterile arm. The moment I touched him I realized my mistake. I snatched my hand away hoping no one noticed but already everyone was groaning.
“Well, I guess we’re doing this again,” Our Friend said taking off his gown. I was so mortified, so embarrassed that it triggered the mother of all hot flashes. I fanned my neck, which oddly enough is attached to my chest, which is where my port was.
“Stop! That’s sterile!” he shouted. “Somebody hold her arms down!”
Wes and the nurse grabbed my arms, and by then I was having an atomic hot flash. I could feel the paper beneath me getting soggy with sweat. Perspiration was running down my face and into my ears.
And I prayed, “Oh, God, take me now!”
No, Cockroach, you must endure.
I thought, “Okay, maybe this is the price of going to Hawaii.” Perhaps I needed to learn to control my enthusiasm. Whatever it was, I felt like an idiot. But I was to have the last laugh that day. Just as Our Friend was pulling out the port, I said, “I want to save the port!”
“What? You want to keep it? What will you do with it?”
He was holding it up, all bloody with bits of tissue sticking to it. I looked at it and said, “I think I’ll boil it and make soup!”
He screwed up his face. “E-e-w-w, that’s so disgusting! Geez.”
Victory! I had grossed out a surgeon! It was a big moment for me.
Plenty Papayas
Maui has always been a special place for me. My mother was born there in Lahaina, and my grandfather worked in the pineapple and sugarcane fields. My sister and I have vacationed there. I learned to snorkel there. It was to become even more special because it was on Maui that my new boob made its swimsuit debut.
When it came to breasts, I became like a teenage boy. I saw breasts everywhere and noticed their size and shape. I hoped I would get over this. The beach on Maui was a regular breast bonanza and I couldn’t help pointing them out to Wes.
I never made any kind of judgment call, but just said under my breath, “Breasts.”
He responded, “Time bombs.” And that was the end of it.
I saw all sizes of breasts, some real and some unreal.
Here’s the thin
g about breast implants: If you see breasts that look perfectly round like cantaloupes, chances are they are implants. I had one breast that was perfectly round and the other that was not. So here’s what happened when I walked out on the beach in my swimsuit: nothing.
Nothing had ever happened before.
We stayed at an incredibly fancy hotel for dirt cheap. What we failed to notice in our vacation package was that we were required to listen to an agent give a talk about buying a condo. We innocently sat down at our “orientation” where a nice girl in an aloha-print uniform told us about the pools and the yoga classes and the restaurants. Then she said, “Now, what time would you like to schedule your presentation and tour?”
Wes and I looked at each other. “We don’t want a presentation,” he said.
She looked aghast. “Well, it’s part of the package and it will take only a couple hours.”
A couple of hours? Two hours doing something that I thought was stupid and uninteresting? When I could be snorkeling? I didn’t come through cancer treatment for this. I started laughing.
“Oh, no,” I said, “thanks, but I really can’t take two hours out of my precious life for that.” Wes and I grinned and stood up. “Good luck to you!” I said merrily and we headed to the beach.
Prayer is about losing yourself in the moment, joyful focus, and exhilarating concentration. Snorkeling is prayer. I think it’s a miracle to be able to see underwater and breath at the same time. Unless there are whales or dolphins around, all you can hear is your breath. In-breath. Out-breath.
I love snorkeling along the coral reefs, where all the sea creatures hang out. But I don’t mind being in the middle of the sea, just moving through the silky water facedown, sun reflecting on the sand below, and breathing in an expanse of blue. Or just floating and being gently rocked by the waves—an aquatic retreat of voluntary under-stimulation.
I’ve never been able to dive deeply while wearing a snorkel. For one thing, my ears hurt and for another, it’s as if there is some invisible wall that keeps me from going down. But Wes is a master at it. So there we were swimming along and he was diving down and looking at things when he suddenly shot back up.
“There a gigantic sea turtle down there!” he said. I put my face down and sure enough, what I had thought was a big, flat rock was a turtle.Wes dove down to look at him, not getting too close. The turtle raised his head and looked up at me. A shiver of recognition went through me. We kept looking at one another, and the feeling I had was just like the one you get when you go to a twenty-five-year class reunion and you recognize someone, but you can’t remember the person’s name or if they were in your math class or homemaking or even if you liked them.
Then my mind got involved and said, “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t know this turtle from somewhere.” At that moment he put his head down.
Wes came back up and said, “I saw his face and he looks so wise.”
“Yes. I think he was in my English class.”
I thought about this all day. Could it be it was the Presence in me recognizing the Presence in the turtle? I sat with that for a long time and realized, yes, that was exactly it—a namaste experience.
Namaste is not just a yoga class sign-off like,“See you later, alligator!” The Hindi greeting namaste, means the Divine in me honors the Divine in you. I sometimes do it before I leave my desk to go see a patient. I place my hands together over my heart, close my eyes, and bow my head. It helps me to remember to turn down my mind and turn up my heart—listen for the voice of the Friend.
It was with this namaste awareness that I left Maui and flew to Honolulu to give the workshop “Mortality: Fact or Fiction?” I talked about death and dying. I told them about Addie Brown and her grandchildren. And I told them about one of my hospice patients, Cindy.
Cindy was twenty-one years old and had a brain tumor. She was an artist, which also meant she was a barista. For a while her boss and coworkers thought she was just a spacey artist because she mixed up the drinks and gave the wrong change. But then, after passing out one day, her doctors discovered she had a brain tumor.
They operated, but they couldn’t get all the tumor, and at the time, there was no effective chemo. She had to move in with her mother because she could no longer work. She did pretty well for a while because she took steroids that kept her tumor in check. But it got to a point where even the massive doses of steroids were not working.
Fear of death was not an issue with her because she believed in reincarnation. The first time I met her she said, “I’ve died before. I used to live on the Olympic Peninsula, and that is the death I remember. It was no big deal. I fell into a hole, and then I came out on this side.”
Because of the steroids, she gained a lot weight and lost mobility on one side. She hated hobbling around her mom’s apartment. The last straw was when she got stuck in the bathtub and couldn’t get out. At this point she weighed about 220 pounds. Her mom had to call 911 and as she said, “These cute guys had to heave my naked ass out of that tub.” It was humiliating for her.
So she said, “Debra, I’m tired of this. I want to stop taking my meds, and I figure I’ll be dead in six days.”
And because I had promised to officiate at her funeral, I got out my calendar and said, “Well, okay, let’s see. I’m going on vacation in two weeks.”
I’d known her for six months now and we were pretty close, so we could talk like this. I said, “Don’t stop your steroids until the fifteenth. That’ll make you dead by Tuesday. We’ll have your service on Friday, and then Wes and I will leave for vacation on Saturday.”
She loved this plan. Her family agreed because they could see how miserable she was. I saw her a few days later, and she held out this list and said, “Is there anybody you want to put on the list? This is a list of people I’m supposed to talk to after I’m dead.”
I looked at the list and there was John Lennon, John F. Kennedy, Cousin Karen, Elvis, and Uncle Stevie. I just answered, “No, that’s okay. My dead friends come to me in my dreams when they have something to say.”
And she said, “Oh, okay, I’ll do that.”
Everything went according to plan: She stopped her meds and died six days later. I officiated at her memorial, and then we left for our camping vacation in Glacier National Park. We found a beautiful campsite and set up our tent.The very first night Cindy came to me in a dream.
We were on a beach together and Cindy looked fabulous. She was a healthy weight and was wearing one of those multicolored broomstick skirts. And she danced and twirled and said,“Oh, Debra, it’s great, it’s just great. I’m fine.” I was delighted to see her looking so well.Then she stopped twirling and looked at me and said, “And thank you for helping me.”
I said, “Oh, thank you for thanking me, nobody ever thanks me.” Even in the dream I realized that was an idiotic thing to say. You know, I was having some kind of visitation and it’s all about me. Then she put her hands on my shoulders and said,“And I have a message for my mother.”
And I thought, “Oh, no,” because her mom could get really cranky at times. So Cindy said,“Tell my mother she needs to spend more time on her spiritual life.” Of course I said, “Okay,” because how could I turn down a dead person, especially one who looked so good?
I awoke at sunrise euphoric. I don’t mean happy, I mean euphoric as if I’d been smoking some killer bud. Or so I’ve heard. And I felt that euphoria the entire day. It was extraordinary.
So of course when we got home I called her mom and gave her the message. And as I feared, she was very annoyed and said, “Well, why did she tell you? Why didn’t she tell me herself?”
I realized I had gotten myself into a dysfunctional supernatural triangle. So I said, “Well, if she shows up again, I’ll tell her to stop in on your dream.”
It was because of this experience with Cindy that I knew it was possible for the dead to communicate. It was really more than just a dream because it was too vivid. I smelled the ocean, hea
rd the waves crashing, and felt her hands gripping my shoulders.
As I told this story I could see lots of people nodding their heads. This was great because now we were coming to the small group sharing experience. People are often squirrelly about this because they don’t know the other people in their group, they’re shy, they have gas pains, whatever. Predictably there was a little grumbling going on around the room as I split them up into groups. A couple people left. It didn’t bother me, because I have never seen this part of a workshop fail.
I explained the ground rules: Speak from the heart and listen from the heart. Treat everyone and their stories/beliefs with respect. We used the Way of Council, which means one person speaks at time, whoever is holding the talking stick. The beauty of this is it helps you listen because you are not busy crafting what you are going to say. And it’s great for people who sometimes need a moment to find the right word, or pause to think. No one can jump in and take over.