I WAS IN THE RECOVERY room when Dr. Foltz came in and told me that my tumor had been a pilocytic astrocytoma, as he’d been 80 percent sure it was all along. Noncancerous, slow-growing, with a low rate of recurrence. The sun, it seemed, wasn’t going to explode anytime soon. Under the influence of a narcotic that was ten times the strength of morphine, I could only nod. Rand was able to articulate his excitement more eloquently than I. When Dr. Foltz told him everything went well, Rand hugged him. He said he was pretty sure that he caught him by surprise when he did so, but my ever-serious doctor simply smiled.
Sometimes life gives you more than you deserve.
I reacted as you might expect. In the weeks following my surgery, I was ridiculously, stupidly happy, giddy just to be alive. Possessed with a sort of miraculous perspective on things. It didn’t last (miraculous perspectives never do), but for a little while, everything made sense.
I didn’t sweat the small stuff. I didn’t care when strangers were rude, when someone cut me off in traffic. I was just incredibly excited to be awake and breathing and more or less whole, minus one noncancerous tumor and a nickel-sized piece of my skull. It made it very easy to focus on how beautiful and wonderful life is, how absurdly unlikely and magical existence can be.
It was not unlike the first time Rand took me to New York to see the Hayden Sphere at the Museum of Natural History. The sphere is massive—several stories tall, it fills up an entire hall in the planetarium section of the museum. There are little placards all around the giant orb, along with several much smaller spheres, that help you put the universe in perspective. If our sun were represented by the Hayden Sphere, with a diameter of eighty-seven feet, then the earth would be the size of a modest cantaloupe. At this scale, you can hold all of humanity in your hands.
When all of existence is condensed in such a way, the problems don’t stand out. You can only marvel at the fact that there is an Earth filled with things like museums and cantaloupes and groups of screaming schoolchildren, and you feel so, so lucky that you get to be a part of it.
I wish I could say that it lasted and that I continued to understand the cosmos after I left the planetarium, but that wasn’t how it worked. You go on with your life, and your newfound understanding of existence begins to leave you. By the time you hit Columbus Avenue you’re back to worrying about if you can catch a cab and whether you can pull off a neoprene dress (the answer, in either case, is no).
Turns out, the epiphanies offered up by our experiences are temporary. The secrets that are revealed to you by the stars and the hole in your head begin to fade, and the wonder of being alive more or less goes away. I wish that it didn’t. I wish I had remained forever grateful, forever able to keep things in perspective.
But every now and then, I can. I can look at the stars, and for a half second, it all makes sense.
Our first trip after my brain surgery was in early summer of 2012. We headed down to Ashland, the town in which we were married. It was part of an annual pilgrimage, one we took for our anniversary. That year, the staples were fresh out of my skull. I was still sleeping off the anesthesia and had to take a nap to make it through the day.
I don’t remember that trip to Ashland well. Packing was confusing, and by the time I’d closed my suitcase, I’d forgotten what was inside. My face was still round from the steroids, my hair still greasy from whatever gel Dr. Foltz’s assistant had put in it to keep it in place during the operation (several washes later, it still hadn’t come out).
That miraculous perspective on life that surgery had granted me was already starting to fade. As more time passed, I found that I wasn’t able to keep looking at everything from a distance, from so far away that the earth and my problems seemed small. I’d expected everything to change, and it hadn’t. So I expected everything to go back to normal, but it didn’t do that either. Those changes—even the ones I knew were small and likely temporary—loomed large in front of me, as if I were looking in a hotel magnifying mirror where everything is amplified and horrible and you are fairly certain you need a Phantom of the Opera–style mask to cover your acne scars. If I could only step far enough away, I’d know the greasy hair and the moon face and the sleeping for sixteen hours a day didn’t matter. I was alive, and that should have been enough. But that’s the problem with your own life: you are way too close to it to see it clearly.
What memories I do have of that trip to southern Oregon are a confusing patchwork. I know we saw an experimental play—Medea, Macbeth, and Cinderella. All three performances were staged simultaneously. It was sort of a brilliant, elaborately choreographed insanity. Following all the action on stage was impossible, and so you could only fixate on one small, incoherent thing at a time (the ghost of Banquo, for example, dancing with one of the stepsisters at the ball), which suited me just fine.
By the end, everyone was exhausted and confused; I was excited to have company, as this had been my mental state for the last week and a half. I remember our breakfasts at the Peerless Inn, which I devoured in massive bites, still ravenous from the steroids I’d had to take to stop my brain from swelling.
And I remember our trip to Crater Lake.
I don’t know if Rand told me why we were going up there. I think he mentioned stargazing, but at no point did he say to me, “Hey, by the way, you’re about to fulfill a lifelong wish.” And I rather liked it that way.
Because I’ve found amazing things don’t happen when you are trying to cross things off a list. Sometimes they just happen.
The lake is an hour and half from Ashland by car. We stopped only once on the way, when my steroid-induced hunger proved too much to wait for dinner, at Phil’s Frosty, an ice cream stand halfway between Ashland and our destination. I got a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream to tide me over. It was gone by the time we pulled out of the parking lot.
I slept for much of the remainder of the journey, the road sun-dappled with bits of light that managed to sneak through the tall trees. At one point I lifted my head and made a half-hearted offer to drive, even though I could barely keep my eyes open.
Rand didn’t laugh at the absurdity of the offer.
“Just sleep, kitten,” he said. And I did, all the way to the lake.
Rand had taken me there nearly a decade before, on our first trip to southern Oregon, when we’d discovered Ashland for the first time. I remember being amazed when I first saw that lake—how brilliant and clear the water was. That afternoon it looked as blue as I remembered, more saturated and intense than even the cloudless sky above it.
The lake was formed when the top of the volcano Mount Mazama collapsed, leaving behind a large basin that filled with water. It is lined all the way around by the jagged sides of the volcano’s mouth, a raised ridge with a dusting of trees on it, the only demarcation between the water and the sky.
The Crater Lake Lodge sits along this ridge, a stone-and-wood structure that looks at home here, where the forest and rocks and water meet. We had a dinner reservation there, but that was hours away, and so we wandered along the narrow hiking paths out front—flanked on either side by sharp cliffs that led down to the lake or down the side of the mountain.
I was still in the disaster-mode mind-set of my surgery—still not quite used to the fact that this wonderful life of mine was back in my hands—and whenever Rand stepped too close to an edge I’d beg him to move away, to step back onto the path. Occasionally I’d slip my fingers through his belt loops and lean backward, away from the cliffs, a counterbalance to the weight of his curiosity.
“You know that if I fell, doing that would just drag you with me, right?” he asked.
I nodded.
He finally relented and moved back on to the path. We walked, watching our shadows, linked at the hands, grow longer and longer on the dusty ground.
The sun began to set, the water and sky turning a deeper and deeper blue in almost perfectly coordinating shades, the jagged ring of mountain around the lake glowing orange with the fading
light.
We wandered back into the lodge for dinner, another meal that I devoured while barely taking a breath. We chatted with a couple at a neighboring table. They were dark-haired and well-dressed and reminded me of some distant relatives in Italy. We discussed the meal and our lovely surroundings, how the lodge felt trapped in an earlier time. I don’t remember it being entirely pertinent to the conversation, but at one point the gentleman explained that he had just gotten out of jail.
And I looked at him blankly before responding, “I’ve just had brain surgery.” Which was even less pertinent to the conversation than his confession, but I thought we were all sharing.
He stared at me to see if I was joking, and I shrugged gently to assure him that I wasn’t. Then we went back to our meals. When they left, he cast me a glance out of the corner of his eye, and a slight wave.
“That man just got out of prison,” I said to Rand, who nodded gently. And I imagined that somewhere, that gentleman was talking to his dinner date and saying something along the lines of, “That woman just had brain surgery.” And his date would nod, and all four of us would be thinking how strange the other’s life was.
We stretched dinner out as long as we could. Nightfall is never in a hurry during a northwestern summer. And for once, miraculously, my perpetually busy husband was unhurried as well. Together, with nothing else to do, we waited for the sky to grow dark. There was still a bit of blue on the horizon at 10 p.m., and it was another half hour before the stars made their appearance.
Rand and I walked outside. The wind had picked up, and it sounded like crashing waves. It was colder than we’d anticipated. I pressed my palm gently against the hole in my head. The nerves in my scalp had been cut, and now whenever I shivered it felt like a shock of electricity across my head, meeting at the site of my incision.
I was so fixated on this sensation that it wasn’t until I heard Rand whisper a soft word of reverence that I turned my face upward to look at the sky.
It was everything the textbooks had promised.
The sky was crowded with stars so bright and numerous that they blended together in a shimmering haze. Most were concentrated in a wide band across the sky, a bright cloud of stars interspersed with a feathery dark fog that wove through it.
I was looking out onto our arm of the galaxy.
Rand pulled me near him and I stared up, over his shoulder, at the universe. We weren’t out there long. It was cold, and late, and I was so tired that I could barely stand. I fell asleep soon after we climbed into the car for the long and lonely drive back to Ashland. But before I did, I craned my neck and looked up at the passing stars.
“I’d always wanted to see that,” I said.
“I know.”
“How’d you know?” I asked, as though it were some great mystery.
He laughed.
“Because you talk about it all the time.”
On the night I saw the band of stars that I’d always wanted to see, I realized how unimportant that feat was. That it doesn’t matter what we see while we’re here. It makes no difference if there are twenty stamps in our passport, or two, or none.
What matters is that you find the right person with whom to spend your time on this earth. Someone who will take care of you when you are sick. Who will love you and the extra hole in your head. Who will drive for hours while you sleep in the passenger seat. Someone who will show you how immense the universe is and still make you feel that you are the brightest thing in the sky.
That’s why I don’t have a bucket list. Because I can’t imagine asking the universe for more than that.
12
IS THERE A GAELIC WORD FOR “I’M FREAKED OUT ABOUT OUR MARRIAGE”?
I FILED AWAY MY BRAIN surgery—or I tried to. I needed to put the experience somewhere—perhaps a little box labeled “Steve”—it would fit tidily. I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with getting things in the right place. I think it’s because I so rarely was.
I grew up in the 1980s, a sybaritic time before society realized that children needed to not spend their days eating sugar and watching movies in which Arnold Schwarzenegger killed things. There was a game those of my generation may remember called Perfection, which I’m convinced was simply a thinly veiled secret government experiment to see if panic attacks could be induced in six-year-olds.
Nearly all my neuroses may be traced back to this game (though being hepped up on Slurpees and pixie sticks for much of the Reagan administration probably did not help).
The game consisted of a variety of little plastic shapes that were designed to fit perfectly into a large plastic holder. A timer was set, and the goal was to get every piece into the right spot before it went off. If you failed to do so, the timer would screech loudly while all the pieces would violently pop out of the holder and you would simultaneously die of cardiac arrest.
I don’t think I even owned this game. I probably played it only a handful of times at preschool, after which I spent the rest of the day shaking and singing the game’s jingle to myself in a hoarse whisper.
I still remember the tune, which sounded suspiciously like “Pop Goes the Weasel”:
Put the pieces into the slot
Make the right selection
But be quick you’re racing the clock
POP GOES YOUR CAROTID ARTERY!
I may have some of the words wrong. It’s been thirty years. But the warped lesson that the game instilled in me was this: everything has a place. Everything in your life needs to fit neatly into a little slot created just for it, and if it doesn’t, everything will fall apart and your heart will explode.
This becomes a significant problem as you grow older and realize that not everything fits comfortably into one category or another. There are few true villains in our lives and few true heroes. Everyone is remarkably complicated in a way that fairy tales did not prepare us for. It would be so much easier if this weren’t the case. If loved ones were infallible. If we never had to agonize over our own mistakes, because we never made any. If experiences and people and marriages could fit snugly into the “good” and “bad” categories.
Sometimes I wish I could have done that with our Ireland trip—that I could tuck it away in the “miserable” category, label someone the villain and write them and the trip off forever. But things are never that simple. To dismiss all of Ireland as a dark mark on our otherwise pristine travel record—a sacrificial trip to the gods that hold dominion over frequent flyers, necessary in order to keep everything else going smoothly—would be to do it a disservice. Good things happened there. And terrible things happened there. And good things emerged from those terrible things. And now I have a headache.
Besides, if I were to name a villain, there’s a good chance it would be me.
And so the entire trip floats in my mind, with no distinct schema in which to place it. It remains murky and confusing. There is no perfection here. Only the complicated reality of life, of relationships, of two very sad people trying to figure out their unhappiness and occasionally forgetting one another in the process.
It seems fitting that all that should happen in Ireland. That we would find ourselves in turmoil and conflict on an island that has been rocked by those things over the last century. (I don’t mean to make light of Ireland’s past by comparing it to my marital strife. Only to stress that some places have endured so much human suffering they can easily absorb whatever small grief you throw at them.)
Let’s begin with a brief history lesson.
There are two entities that answer to the name of Ireland. Some will argue that this is how it should be. Others will argue that there is only one Ireland, and it’s only a matter of time before the political situation reflects that truth.
They are both found on the same island, the only line of demarcation being an imaginary one decided upon nearly a century ago that remains hotly—and sometimes violently—debated.
Northern Ireland, composed of six counties in the northwest of the
country, is part of the United Kingdom. The Republic of Ireland—an independent country that uses an entirely different currency—comprises the rest of the island.
The Republic of Ireland was established in the 1920s. Prior to that, the entire island was under British rule. It came in the wake of centuries of fighting and culminated in the Easter Rising—an attempt to declare independence from England that ultimately failed, resulting in the imprisonment of more than thirty-five hundred Irishmen and -women and the execution of fifteen revolutionary leaders.
News of their mistreatment and deaths swayed a large portion of the public that had previously not been in support of independence. Seeing that the protests (and the ensuing violence) would likely not end, England offered a treaty that relinquished control of most of Ireland—but withheld the six northern counties where the majority of the population supported unification with Britain.
The problem was that not everyone agreed with the treaty. Many felt that the entire island of Ireland should be its own country, including a number of people who lived in those northern counties that remained under British rule. This created a schism between factions—primarily in Northern Ireland—that still exists, often falling along religious lines. (The majority of people in the Republic of Ireland are Catholic. Those in Northern Ireland are mostly Protestant.) This conflict is the heart of what is known as the Troubles.
The city of Belfast remains so divided that massive “peace walls” run through it—separating Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods that align themselves on opposite sides of the reunification debate. The walls—massive, imposing, and lined with barbed wire at the top—cut through the city, defying their name by their very nature.
Two Irelands, occupying the same island, divided by conflict. That is the setting in which we found ourselves. Beginning in Belfast, a city still haunted by the bombings that tore it apart at the height of the Troubles, we found ourselves there for remarkably happy reasons.
All Over the Place Page 15