Giving up the Ghost

When I was 17 a palm reader told me I had a short life line. OK, it was my 20-something-year-old boss Randy at Chess King, where I worked selling shirts with zippers and too many pockets (hey, it was the ‘80s). But he was a palm reader on the side and delighted in studying his employees’ and customers’ palms, and sharing pronouncements about their future lives.

“You’re going to get your girlfriend pregnant, marry her and have five more kids,” he told an astonished muscle head who was purchasing parachute pants and a slim red leather tie. “You’re going to work on Wall Street and make millions,” he predicted to a motorcycle dude browsing the multi-flapped jacket rack. “You’re going to be a pole dancer,” he told our scrawny, mousy-haired assistant manager, who had bad teeth and bad breath.

“You’re going to have a short life,” he said to me one day while I was bored on cash register duty and allowed him to gaze into my hand’s crystal ball. “See how short your life line is?” He traced a crease on my palm that did indeed stop short.

I have no idea what became of the people whose fortunes he read, though one of our co-workers did run a diner for a while, as was foretold. Back then, I thought Randy was hilarious and full of it. But my short life line haunted me. I needed a second opinion.

A few weeks later, my friends and I teased our hair three-feet high set with a can of Aquanet and cruised to the Seaside Heights boardwalk. It took hours of throwing darts and shooting hoops for me to work up the nerve to frequent a palm reader booth.

I sat on a pillow in a dimly-lit space enclosed by heavy, burgundy velvet drapery. A woman with scraggly long hair wearing cutoff shorts and a t-shirt collected my $20 and took my palm in her hand. Everything she said before the words “your life line is kind of short” has escaped me.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“This is the life line,” she said running her index finger along one of the lines on my palm. “A long one extends all the way to the other side of your palm.  Yours fades in the middle.”

That’s all I heard, all I remember. It was confirmed: I was going to die young —before 40 by my rough calculations. Although I’ve always been a cynic, I bought it. I married at 25 and had three children by age 32, just in case.

For my 40^th birthday, my husband Pete flew me to Paris to celebrate a bullet dodged. Two years later, the c-bomb dropped.

There’s nothing like cancer to put the fear of death in you — especially if you’re already a bit sensitive about your deficient life line. But shortly after my diagnosis, I read something about survival odds in Monique Doyle Spencer’s book The Courage Muscle that’s stuck with me.

Spencer, who recovered from stage three breast cancer, looks at it this way: Your chances of living are either 100 percent or zero percent. Because anyone’s chance of living forever is zero, that cancels out the zero chance (remember algebra?). With the zero chance null, the odds of surviving are 100 percent.

I’ll take those odds, thank you very much. They totally beat a short life line.