A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles

by Mary Elizabeth Williams

  “Thanks,” she says. “You’re very lucky.”

  “That’s what people keep telling me,” I reply.

  I suppose I am. What if I’d put off going to the doctor last summer? What if I had gone and Dr. Silver wasn’t as on the ball as she was? What if she’d been like Debbie’s doctor and blown me off? What if I didn’t have insurance? Incredibly, in all of this, I did luck out. I don’t assume, however, that means my luck is infinite. I usually try not to let myself have such thoughts, but it’s hard not to when you’re wearing a dumb paper dress.

  I’m glad Dr. Silver can acknowledge that my cancer was serious, even as she’s reminding me how fortunate I am. Lately, it’s been downright odd how spectacularly some people I know have been failing at cancer conversation. A common refrain is “How are you doing? You’re all cured now? Right, anyway …” and then a change of subject. I haven’t known what to say in response. I’m not even a year into this. I usually just reply, “I hope I’m well.” Because it’s not my job to make anybody else feel comfortable about my trip to Cancer Town.

  Dr. Silver runs her hands along my flesh. “Have you always had this mole?” she asks, pointing to a freckle on my hand.

  “Yes,” I say, taking a wild guess. I’m Irish. I have a galaxy of freckles on my shoulders alone. I couldn’t possibly catalog all of them. Today I just care about one. “Take a look at this,” I tell her, pointing to a small scab on my collarbone.

  “It looks benign,” she tells me, “but we’ll biopsy it. I want to biopsy that thing on your forehead too.” What thing on my forehead?

  A day later, Dr. Silver calls back. I know not to flip out because this time she doesn’t tell me she’s sorry. “It is skin cancer, but it’s not serious,” she says. Ten months ago, this was my worst scenario version of the conversation we’d have. It is laughable.

  “It’s a superficial basal cell carcinoma. We have two options: We can do a scrape and burn, which is less invasive, or we can surgically cut it out.” Funnily enough, “scrape and burn” doesn’t sound noninvasive to my hearing. “It’s completely unrelated to the melanoma on your head. Just know that you can have more carcinoma and melanomas locally. Don’t get too concerned, hardly anybody ever dies of this.” Then she catches herself. “I hope you don’t mind that I put it that way.”

  “Oh, please,” I tell her. “After what I’ve been through, this will be a piece of cake.”

  A week later I don my peacock print dress, robin’s egg blue high heels, a big hat adorned with a hot pink silk flower, and enormous sunglasses for my procedure. Before I leave in the morning, Bea busts out her toy magic wand. “You will be fine,” she says, waving it authoritatively toward my throat. “You are fiiiine.” It’s not quite a Patronus Charm, but it’ll do.

  “How are the girls?” Dr. Silver asks as she plunges a long needle deep into the place right above my heart. I feel an iciness that, impossibly, seems to shoot right down to my toes as I grit my teeth and look at the ceiling. Her assistant hands her a tool that looks like a coke spoon. As she scrapes off the flesh, I can hear the scritch scritch scritch of instrument on skin, feel the tug of it whittling off layers. Then, zap, begins the burning part. That’s me I smell now, frying up with a wisp of smoke and the unmistakable stinging stink of burnt flesh. “It’ll dissipate in a few seconds,” she says. “Just hold your breath.”

  “I’ve been holding my breath for a year now,” I say. Finally, she pulls the tool away. It’s bright red now, and there’s a lumpy pink-and-white mass of my poisoned skin on it. She taps it into a vial. “See?” she says. “There it is.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I reply. I’m a repulsive, seeping, shedding thing, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

  “All done,” she answers with motherly tenderness as she applies a bandage. “You want the Scarguard?” she asks, and I’m down another $65 for a small bottle of liquid and the small hope of someday having my collarbone look normal.

  I get up, surprisingly woozy for having just had a routine office procedure. When I step out onto Broadway, the noise and the unseasonably scorching June heat assault me, and I’m feeling like tectonic plates are shifting beneath my feet. I totter to a nearby deli for a freshly squeezed orange juice, and the white-haired Italian counter guy regards my big hat and big sunglasses and drawls, “You look like a movie star. A mooooovie staaaar.” I feel like a few miles of unpaved road.

  The newly expanded second section of the High Line has just opened up, so I stroll slowly over and walk along it, sipping my juice and people-watching. In the ladies’ room, an encouraging loop of positive affirmations plays as part of an auditory art installation. “You are in total harmony with the universe,” I hear just before I flush. “Everything is fine,” the bathroom tells me, and as I look in the mirror at my freshly bandaged, semibald body, I cannot suppress a laugh. If you say so, toilet. Everything is fiiiiine.

  “It was no big deal,” I tell Jeff when I call him from a bench overlooking Chelsea afterward. “I just got a Band-Aid.” But that night, there’s a dark look on his face as he hugs me when he comes through the door. “I’m so glad it was just benign. I couldn’t have handled anything happening to you in the same year we lost Dad,” he says.

  I don’t tell him what I’m thinking. That the year is only halfway over.

  CHAPTER 12

  Here It Comes Again

  July 2011

  “Are we going to see Grandpa’s bones?” Bea asks excitedly.

  “Not quite,” Jeff replies.

  We have detoured to the Stop & Shop en route to the cemetery, and the girls are busy bickering over their choices of spindly supermarket bouquets of carnations and roses. “These,” I say, pointing to a bunch of gerbera daises. “He liked these.”

  We’re spending the weekend at Jeff’s mother’s house. It’s still odd not to think of it as his parents’ house. It’s odd that visiting the in-laws now means stopping by the cemetery, but that’s where we’re headed this morning. The family needs a lot of time together lately—Jeff and Mom especially—and Mom wants us to visit the grave.

  It is a beautiful day to stop by where Dad is spending eternity. Dad’s headstone still isn’t there yet, just a small placard and a last name on the side of a twisting path. There is, however, to Mom’s great vexation, a dried-up mixed bouquet encroaching on his space.

  “That woman next to us,” Mom says. “She has no sense of boundaries.”

  We stand together, solemnly gazing at the dirt. “Are we on top of Grandpa right now?” Bea asks.

  “I suppose so,” Jeff says.

  Mom looks at the marker, her face touchingly serene. She’s once again in the company of the man she loved. “When the doctor showed me his scans last summer,” she says, “I could see that the cancer had gone all over. The doctor and I had a private conversation and he said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t have good news. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but it’s terminal.’ We still thought that he’d be stable for longer. We didn’t think it would be so fast. We kept making plans. We talked about having a big party for his 80th birthday. Even near the end, when he’d say, ‘Do you think I’m sick because of the cancer or the chemo?’ I always tried to be encouraging.”

  “It’s the only way to live,” I say. “As long as you’re breathing, what else is there to do but keep going?”

  “I’ll tell you this much,” Mom says. “Tonight, I’m going to watch as many episodes of The Golden Girls as it takes.”

  I take photos of Jeff and Mom, their arms around each other and surrounded by headstones, smiling in the summer sun. Jeff and the girls lovingly place their flowers on top of the dirt. “We love you,” Jeff says, his eyes moist with sorrow. Two days from now I will be looking at those dewy-eyed photos on my phone when Jeff will text me: “Turns out about Dad’s grave: Not where they told us it was.” I guess it’s the thought that counts.

  In the afternoon, we take the girls down to the lake, where they splash around until their lips turn blue an
d their skin is pruney, their sunscreen melting off in the water. “Dad would have loved all of this,” Jeff says. “I know he had a good life. I know he had a full life. He just wanted more.”

  “This mortality stuff is nuts,” I say. “You live in the world, you love people, and then they die. You love the world. Then you die. What’s up with that?”

  “Let’s go get an ice cream,” Jeff says, walking in the direction of the Good Humor truck. “I see a Choco Taco that is totally going to make me forget all about my dead dad.” And we hold hands as we amble in the direction of the brief oblivion of frozen dairy.

  Later, Mom and I set out to go errand running, giving me the suburban thrill of shopping for economy-size jugs of Tide in a car with a roomy trunk. As we head out to drive to the store, Mom looks at Dad’s photo on the sideboard. “We’re going out to dinner at Abatino’s tonight and we’re going to have a good time,” she tells it. “I wish you could be here with us. But if you were, you wouldn’t be able to come anyway, would you? Damn cancer.” I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard her say the word “damn.”

  In the car, Mom and I talk about the changes in both our lives since cancer stomped in. “So many people have been wonderful,” she says, “and I want to accept help when I need it.” Fortunately, the woman who was voted most popular in her high school graduating class is really good at reaching out. “I’ve had family in Kentucky invite me to visit, neighbors ask if I want to go out to dinner. That’s been good for me,” she says. The response has been uneven, though. One of her closest friends hasn’t been in touch since the funeral “Robin?” she says, “Nothing. It’s surprising.”

  Disasters don’t just show you what you’re made of. They show you, with savage clarity, what everybody else is made of too. I learned this for the first time when Jeff and I separated and I no longer fit in among the local Perfect Mom set. I learned it again this year. Not everyone will be there when you’re so broken you’re not sure who you are anymore. The worst part is that they will provide, when you need it least, fresh grief to contend with. They’re the losses within a loss. Olivia was the hardest.

  I met Olivia several years and many hairstyles ago. We traveled together and cried at movies next to each other and endured breakups and always came running when the other had a crisis. Our bond was profound. She was one of the first people I told when I got cancer. She sent a floral arrangement and that, aside from a few superficial emails, has been that. I get that it’s awkward and scary for everybody. When life drags you through illness or trauma, it’s an adjustment for the people around you too. They have to get used to this new person walking around in your old skin—or what’s left of it. And it will turn out that not everybody wants to get to know that person or relates well to her. That post-cancer, post-widowhood, postwar version of yourself may just not be everybody’s cup of tea. Then again, the post-divorce, post–job loss version of them may not be not your cup of tea either. You lose people along the way. But it hurts nonetheless.

  “Maybe Robin assumed that if I needed something, I’d ask,” Mom says.

  “Needing to ask isn’t the point, is it?” I reply, and she nods. It reminds me of my friend Evan, whose boyfriend admiringly told her after she’d had major surgery that she was so good at taking care of herself—and how she knew right then that they were finished. Just because you can take care of yourself doesn’t mean you always ought to. The friends who’ve moved my heart most deeply in all of this have been the ones who didn’t wait for a request. I’m still trying to forgive the ones who let me down. “I’ve learned,” I continue, “that some of the people I trusted most in the world just aren’t good in a crisis. But from here on in, I’m sticking like glue to the ones who are.”

  It’s not yet 8 a.m., and it’s already a sweltering, sticky New York City morning. I am briskly hoofing it across midtown, trying to make it in time for another spin of routine CT scans and tests around Sloan Kettering.

  The receptionist on the eighth floor beams brightly when she sees me. “Good morning, Ms. Williams,” she says. I like her. I know her. It also depresses me that I’m a regular to her now.

  She sends me over to the gentleman on the other side of the desk. “Hello, my name is Sal,” he drones in a monotone. “You’re here today for a CT scan of your chest-abdomen-pelvis. Do you want your drink chilled or room temperature?”

  “Rocks, salt, Patron,” I reply.

  “I’ll put you down for room temperature,” he continues flatly, handing me a jug of what looks and tastes like brightly colored sports drink. This is the beverage that has ruined my distance running experience—I can no longer drink Gatorade without experiencing just a touch of stomach turning, visceral, post-traumatic stress. I know what Sal’s going to explain next, verbatim. “You need to drink down to the line,” he says, and I mouth the words along, like I do when I’m getting the safety demonstration on an airplane. “In about 30 minutes someone will bring you back for your exam. If you have to use the ladies’ room, it’s to your right by the water fountain. Don’t hold it in; it’s not part of your exam,” he mumbles on. “Do you understand?”

  “You bet,” I say, grabbing the bottle and preparing to chug. “I’ve won contests.”

  I settle in and flip through a magazine in the waiting room. There’s an ad for pomegranate juice with the seductive come-on “Change your expiration date.” Bitch, please.

  I drink the nasty stuff, change into a gown, strap in to the IV, and hop on the table. It’s all nauseating but relatively painless. It’s also already crushingly routine.

  It’s also the least nerve-racking thing I’ll do all week, as I plan to spend much of the next few days without any clothes on. Because I must be emitting a bucket list crossing-off kind of vibe these days, a painter friend and photographer friend, independently of each other, have both invited me to pose for them for new art projects they’ve been working on. Naked. I lost all my modesty halfway through the birth of Lucy and kept it off through the breast-feeding of two children, so all my subsequent exposure has simply been a matter of opportunity. I am neither young nor beautiful, but the advantage of that is not caring about being young and beautiful.

  So I spend three afternoons standing on my friend Dylan’s coffee table, wearing only a symbolic wide-brimmed hat and discussing apocalyptic scenarios and how we think we’d fare if New York City overnight became a Cormac McCarthy novel. The hardest part isn’t the exposure; it’s how surprisingly tiring standing still can be. Then I do it all over again at my friend Chris’s photography studio. On a gray summer morning, I take the train to Nyack, where I have a day clad in only a pair of high heels. I’ve endured the better part of the past year undressing for strangers, but this one isn’t brandishing an IV lock or an icy stethoscope. It’s all mostly silly and spirited, a creative collaboration and a blessed reprieve from my usual rigors of disrobing for medical inspection. When you’ve been through an intense medical crisis, it’s nice to have friends around to remind you that being naked can be fun. There’s only one shot I find hard to pose for.

  As Chris changes filters, I blot my lipstick. “Do you want to show me your head?” he asks.

  I don’t. It’s the ugliest part of my body. It’s my damaged goods. And that tells me it’s important.

  “Sure,” I reply.

  I am not only not wearing any clothing, I am about to do the unthinkably unflattering act of bending forward from the hips, thereby revealing my utter and obvious lack of abdominal muscle tone. But I don’t care about that part. Behold a stomach that’s been stretched to the limit by two large babies who both went past their due dates. Whatever. What’s making me want to run out of the room and cry is my head. I take a low bow and pull the hair around the scabby scar away. I hear the click of a shutter. I have never felt more vulnerable. “Got it,” Chris says.

  I love and trust Chris so I know it’s all okay. He’s not thinking, “Oh, uggo.” Yet damned if the hardest thing in the world isn’t just to let y
ourself be seen, in all your devastation. I carry that scar with me every day now, and I no longer make a huge effort to conceal it. But it makes me feel like a freak, and that never goes away. I am daily reminded that it’s hard for people to look at my head. It’s hard for me to look at it, too. This is who I am now. This is what I’ve endured. This is what did not kill me. There is violent exquisiteness there. I just hope someday I can be proud of it.

  A few days after my scans and subsequent festival of nudity, I get a call. It’s Carrie, the radiologist. “I’m looking at your scans,” she says evenly, “and your latest results were troubling.”

  “Troubling,” I think. That’s better than “malignant,” but nowhere near the ballpark of “fine.”

  “Those spots we found on your lung back in October have grown,” she continues. “The lower lobe nodule has grown from four millimeters to six, and the upper one has grown from two millimeters to seven. They’re still very small, and it could mean any number of things. But because they’re getting bigger, what concerns me is that it could mean some melanoma broke away and traveled into your lung.”

  My stomach rapidly hurtles toward my feet. Ohfuc​kohfu​ckohf​uckoh​fuckm​ylife. I am not a hypochondriacal Googler of bad news. I have tried hard to avoid horror stories about melanoma, and to hope that my cancer is in the past tense. I have also been writing and speaking about the disease, so I know a few things. Because I need to. I know, for instance, what happens when melanoma goes into your organs. It’s called metastasis, and you won’t find a lot of happy scenarios related to it, even if the tumors are small. Medline.​com will tell you that “Nearly any cancer can spread to the lungs … A cure is unlikely in most cases. It is rare for someone with metastatic cancer to the lungs to live more than five years.” The American Cancer Society says that the five-year survival rate for someone with Stage 4 melanoma is about 15 percent, but notes cheerfully that the prognosis for melanoma is better if the cancer has spread only to other sites on the skin or lymph nodes and not to other organs. A 2011 report in the Annals of Oncology, using Sloan Kettering’s own patient database, dryly notes that “Outcomes for patients with metastatic malignant melanoma are generally poor; median survival ranges from six to fifteen months.” I cannot escape the implications here. In medical terms, if what’s happening to me is indeed a recurrence, my long-term prognosis sucks out loud.