All Over the Place

by Geraldine DeRuiter

  Unfortunately, there’s no way to definitively figure out what Steve is without a biopsy—which wouldn’t be such a big deal except for the fact that Steve’s clinging to my hypothalamus like a bride-to-be clutching a Vera Wang gown at Filene’s Basement.

  So they’re going to drill a hole in my head, poke some tools through my non-dominant frontal lobe, and pull off a piece of Steve. Then they’re going to seal up my head with a titanium plate (sadly, adamantium is unavailable).

  Talk about shit I never thought I’d say: “I’m having brain surgery tomorrow” definitely belongs on that list.

  Regardless of the outcome—whether he’s cancer or not—they’ll likely never need to do more brain surgery.

  And if it is cancer… well, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Like I said, my tumor’s small (only 1 cm), and he hasn’t ventured into any other parts of my brain.

  Still, we’ve been slightly on edge in my house about the whole brain tumor/brain surgery/brain cancer thing:

  Me: What if they botch my surgery?

  Rand: They aren’t going to botch your surgery.

  Me: But what if they do. What if they accidentally hit the part of my brain that controls sarcasm. Or what if I wake up and I’m vapid?

  Rand: You aren’t going to wake up vapid.

  Me: BUT WHAT IF I DO? What if I suddenly decide that Katherine Heigl is the greatest comedic genius to have ever lived, and I spend all my waking hours watching her movies? What if I start a fansite dedicated exclusively to her work?

  Rand: Okay, that would actually be kind of amazing. I sort of want to see that happen.

  We’ve actually started taking turns freaking out. I mostly freak out about the surgery. Rand freaks out about the possibility of cancer:

  Me: Stop it. You’re giving me that look.

  Rand: What look?

  Me: That oh-my-god-what-if-it’s-brain-cancer look. It’s sort of sad and weirdly probing. It’s the look that everyone’s been giving me lately.

  Rand: I’m not giving you that look.

  Me: Yes, you are. It’s like you’re trying to memorize my face. And then your chin starts getting all quivery. JUST LIKE IT IS NOW.

  Rand: Well… what if it’s brain cancer?

  Me: It’s not brain cancer. I’m not awesome enough to be diagnosed with something that dramatic.

  Rand: That’s the problem. You are precisely that awesome.

  Me: Aww. That’s sweet. I’d totally make out with you if you’d stop giving me that look.

  Rand: I’m not giving you that look.

  Me: YES YOU ARE.

  I was right: after the post went up, emails flooded in, as did comments. It was All About Steve. I read them at the kitchen table the day before my surgery, counting down the hours until the following morning. That night, I followed all the instructions Dr. Foltz gave me. I changed the sheets on the bed. I washed my hair with the runny pink soap. And the next morning, a little before 6 a.m., we headed to the hospital.

  Rand drove me. Our friend Sarah—reassuring, logical, cracking the occasional joke—met us at the hospital. And my mother met us there, calm and smiling. All those years she’d spent worrying and instilling that worry in me had an unexpected upside: when shit actually does hit the fan, my mother is the picture of serenity. She is the one person you want in a crisis, because she’s been preparing for it her entire life. She will make you food and clean your entire house and help you wash your hair with no discernable sign of stress on her face.

  In times like this, my mother is perfect.

  “I’m not nervous at all, sweetie, are you?” she asked. It had been more than ten years since that Florida trip, but my mother does not learn lessons. She was wearing half a dozen necklaces, several of them tangled in her long hair.

  “I am,” I said.

  “It’s going to be fine,” she said, and the way she smiled at me, I believed every word.

  One at a time, she and Rand and Sarah came in to see me as I got hooked up to an IV and changed into a gown. And then the nurse said it was time to go into surgery.

  They wheeled me down a hall, where Dr. Foltz met us and chatted with me for a little bit. He asked how I was doing. Nervous, I told him. He said there was nothing to worry about.

  “I’ll see you in just a little while,” he said, patting me on my shoulder.

  As he walked away, I called out to him.

  “Hey, Dr. Foltz,” I shouted, and he turned around. I pointed to my head.

  “Just a little off the top.”

  That would be the first and only time I ever got him to laugh. But he did, a soft little chuckle, more a shaking of his shoulders than anything else. It felt like a triumph, and that moment comes to mind every time I think about him. In exactly 364 days, on the eve of my first-year anniversary of brain surgery, my dear, stoic surgeon would succumb to a different cancer than the one he’d spent his career fighting.

  I was wheeled into another room, large, sterile, and windowless. A handful of people lay in beds, waiting to be rolled into different operating rooms. Someone checked my IV. An old high school fling of mine (a young man I affectionately refer to as “the best sex I never had”) had a friend who worked in the hospital who stopped by to say hello. Eventually, my anesthesiologist arrived and walked alongside my bed as we rolled toward the operating room.

  “Am I going to be awake for much longer? Because I’m getting kind of nervous.”

  “I’ll give you something for that right now,” he said, and quickly injected a liquid into my IV. It took only a few seconds to work. When it did, the tiles on the floor started to change shape, growing smaller and bigger in front of my eyes.

  Normally, I’m not down with visual hallucinations, but in this instance, I was rather okay with it. My fear felt small and distant; it didn’t matter that the ground was now undulating.

  Given the amount of drugs already in my system, I can’t tell you for sure if my impression of the operating room itself was accurate. I remember it being massive, filled with all kinds of machinery—tubes and devices that would have scared me under normal circumstances.

  “Is this all for me?” I asked, feeling bad that they had gone through all this trouble. Still wondering if it was at all necessary.

  “Yup,” someone responded. “All for you.”

  And then I closed my eyes.

  IN THE YEARS BEFORE RAND and I were married, he was on the road a lot. This would eventually become the impetus for my blog—I was traveling so I could see him. I loved seeing him. I loved the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled and I loved his forearms when he rolled up his sleeves and I loved the way the mood of a room changed when he was around. It was like putting the final piece of a puzzle in place every time he walked in the door. When he was present, nothing was missing.

  And when he was gone, it was like even the air and the trees and the sky knew that something was amiss.

  Time on the road passed quickly for him, as it often does for overly busy people. He was trying to get the family business out of debt, attending and speaking at numerous conferences, running from meetings to industry events and darting from hotel to hotel. At home, working at a job I would soon lose, I spent a lifetime waiting for him to return. It always felt like something out of a science fiction novel—what had felt like only a few days for him was actually decades for me.

  We started to have silly rituals before he was set to leave. Because the only thing worse than being madly in love with someone is being madly in love with someone who wasn’t presently smothering you with affection. Sometimes, I’d fail to corral my tears and a few would escape from the corners of my eyes. I’d shake my head and smile at the ridiculousness of it all. And as if the utter nausea of our love story wasn’t enough, sometimes he’d sing John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” right before he was set to depart.

  I wish I could say that no part of it was earnest—we rolled our eyes at it, at this over-the-top melodrama at his own departure. It was
just a few days, after all. I would pantomime barfing, much as I would on our wedding day. But if I am truly honest with myself, I know that all this posturing belied the sincerity at the heart of it. I meant every tear. He meant every word.

  I’ve heard that after enough time, we can become accustomed to separation. That eventually, you cease to miss the person acutely. That never happened with Rand. I missed him constantly. With my job loss came a charmed opportunity to no longer be apart, and his company had experienced a blissful turn of fortune that meant we could afford to do it. I knew nothing about how to travel, I just knew that I wanted to be near him. He made the entire world feel like home.

  I never went anywhere without him. Except when I had to.

  My surgery became just another trip, but this time I was the one leaving. That was the easy part. It was always worse for the people you leave behind, the ones waiting for you to return. I just hoped I wouldn’t be gone for very long.

  11

  BUCKET LISTS ARE JUST PLAIN GREEDY

  I’VE NEVER REALLY BEEN A fan of bucket lists. They’ve always struck me as the height of entitlement. Admittedly, this is an odd perspective for me to have, as I have no problem placing demands on life. I think that dessert should be a daily occurrence, and I am absolutely convinced that there is someone out there for everyone, and that it’s our mission on this earth to find them.

  But for some reason demanding to see Angkor Wat before you died was too much for me. Too demanding. Too morbid. I figured you got what you got. It might be thirty-three years on this earth. It might be fifteen. It might be eighty-eight. Why couldn’t we just enjoy them? Why did we feel the need to check things off as if existence was a to-do list?

  Besides, there weren’t things that I necessarily wanted to see. There were simply ways in which I wanted to live. Happily ever after, mostly, and without having to share too much of the aforementioned daily dessert.

  So I rather proudly went through life without a bucket list.

  Except for one nagging little thing. I’d first seen it in my middle school science book, in one of the chapters in the astronomy unit. It was a photo of the night sky with a thick, cloudy band of stars cutting across the middle of it, like a high-altitude bejeweled fog. The caption said that if you managed to escape light pollution you could see the arm of the Milky Way in which our solar system was located.

  That photo, taken from Earth, gave an idea of where we sat in our galaxy.

  Naturally, it blew my little middle-school-aged brain. For years, I thought about it, and it always remained in the back of my mind as something I’d love to see, but I wasn’t going to write out my demands for the cosmos. I got a little paranoid thinking about what happened after they’d been met.

  But as the years went by, I couldn’t quite get the band of stars out of my head.

  In college, I took an astronomy class at the University of Washington. The professor was a bespectacled blonde, pretty in that sort of hippie, earthy way women in the Pacific Northwest often are. Her name was Ana Larson.

  Sometimes I’d play with the spacing of her name on my papers.

  Ana L arson

  Ana L Arson

  I never actually got up the nerve to type “Anal Arson,” but this exercise gave me a good giggle and an idea for what I suspect would have been the best-selling Nancy Drew mystery to date.

  I should note, though, that this subtle defiling of her name did not mean she was a rotten teacher. She was wonderful. She conducted the stars like a concerto; I listened to every note. But she pronounced her name A-nuh, and when that sort of thing falls in your lap, you have to seize the moment even if it makes you an asshole.

  Ana’s class was at night, which was advantageous because that meant I was no longer hungover, but also problematic because it was at nighttime in fall in Seattle. For those uninitiated into the weather of my beloved hometown, imagine doing the Ice Bucket Challenge in pitch darkness. For nine months. And all the money raised goes to Satan.

  Sometimes, when I was curled up in my tiny little studio apartment under a heap of blankets watching an episode of Conan that I’d taped the night before, not even her brilliance and passion could move me. Other times I’d drag myself out, trekking across a dark campus in the pouring rain, whispering to myself that there were far easier ways for a journalism major to earn the prerequisite science credits. But then I’d arrive in Ana’s lecture hall, regretting nothing.

  She showed us the heavens and the little corner of the universe that we occupied.

  I was a passionate and nerdy student, or at least I was when I made it to class. I don’t think Ana knew what to make of me. There were at least a hundred students enrolled, but I’d managed to single myself out as a target of both her praise and exasperation. She’d write notes on the board about upcoming classes and add in parenthesis, “EVERYONE must attend. Geraldine—this means YOU,” and she’d give me sideways glances when I walked into the room half asleep in plaid pajamas.

  But I aced every test, and I got a 4.0 in the class, and I think she realized that I loved the night sky almost as much as she did.

  The class met in a massive auditorium, and every now and then, Ana would dim the lights and show us photos of the universe projected onto a giant screen behind her. I think part of the reason she always knew when I cut class and when I didn’t was that I would Oooh and Aaah a little too loudly when a particularly captivating photo would go up. If the room was too quiet, she knew I was off-campus (usually eating microwave popcorn and marveling at the size of Conan’s head).

  Sure enough, one day she showed us one of those images, taken from some magical spot on Earth where you could see the arm of the Milky Way stretching across the sky.

  My appreciation of the scene was perhaps a bit too loud. As I said: when I was in class, Ana knew.

  During one lecture, she explained what would happen when our sun finally died out. How it would start to collapse on itself and would then swell, devouring the inner planets in the process. If the earth was not consumed, it would be charred to the point at which it couldn’t sustain life.

  “I know it’s billions of years away,” she said, “but it still makes me sad to think about it.”

  I would remember those words, would call on them when trying to articulate the reason why I hate bucket lists so much. I’m going to die. So are you, unless you’re a vampire, or a zombie, or Keanu Reeves, whom age cannot wither. It’s inevitable, and it’s probably a good thing, because immortality would lead to all sorts of complications and I bet divorce rates would be even higher than they are.

  If I’m lucky, it’s a long way off. But it still makes me sad to think about it. And that’s precisely what bucket lists do. They force you to look at wonderful experiences in the context of the end of your life, and not as a component of your life.

  So I’d rather talk about the heyday—both the planet’s and mine—of the time we get to spend basking in the sun’s glow.

  But in the week prior to my brain surgery, it seemed like all Rand and I could think about were things in this context. At one point, while my doctors were still discussing what the thing in my head might be (giving it a 10–20 percent chance of being brain cancer—numbers that are all at once strangely arbitrary and oddly specific), Rand sat down next to me and, with a far too serious look on his face, asked me what I wanted to do.

  “I mean if it’s cancer,” he said. “What… do you want to do?”

  “I am going to stop working out,” I said. “And I’m going to eat cake every day.”

  He nodded gently. I’d been saying this for years. It had been a life goal long before I knew about my tumor.

  “No, I mean, if it’s cancer… is there stuff you want to see?”

  He stopped there—no need to elaborate. My husband was asking me about my bucket list. Not in the abstract, not as a hypothetical, but in a very real, my-personal-sun-might-explode kind of way.

  Over the years, the truth had leaked out about my astr
onomical passions. I was not spatially aware, but I loved space. I had no sense of direction, but I could pick out Polaris in the night sky.

  When Rand learned of my celestial inclinations, he indulged them. He took me to the Hayden Planetarium in New York, to countless science centers and IMAX shows, to dark and distant spots far from city lights, all so I could see the stars.

  There was always too much light pollution to see the band of the Milky Way, but that didn’t really matter. I still had all those moments, and countless others. He’d ridden with me through the canals of Venice, had gotten lost on rainy streets in London looking for a well-hidden restaurant. We’d huddled together in a chilly cemetery in the Scottish highlands, and we’d scampered across Machu Picchu in the rain.

  More things than I’d ever hoped to see. Far more than anyone could expect from their time on Earth.

  And so, when Rand asked me what I wanted to do, assuming that the time I had might be less than we’d anticipated, I didn’t think about it in terms of what I hadn’t seen. I thought about all the things I had been lucky enough to witness.

  And I answered him honestly.

  “There’s nothing left that I need to see.”

  There really wasn’t.

  I should clarify because that makes me sound like I was a lot braver than I was: I was petrified. I may have been blissfully content with my life, but that didn’t mean I was okay with it being over.

  There was still plenty more to see. The Northern Lights. The face of my nephew, who wouldn’t be born for another month. A spread in Vogue magazine touting big noses as the next hot fashion trend for women. These were things I wanted to see.

  But to demand them? To put them on a list? I couldn’t do any of that. Because looking back on things, it was impossible not to be satisfied. I’d been to some amazing places. I’d seen some wonderful sights. And I’d done it with one hell of a travel partner. It’s hard to ask for more than that.