What Cancer has Taught me

What cancer has taught me

That’s a tough one.  Because cancer is a terrible teacher, a mean Mutha Superior with a meaner left hook and a bloodstained yardstick.  She’s more like the bully in the schoolyard who knocks you to the ground and holds your face in the cement until you cry  “uncle.”  (I went to Catholic school.)  All you really learn from cancer is that she has you by the balls and is twistin’ the night away.  You aint goin’ nowhere.

But in the calm, with her black boot on my neck,  between each horrific episode,  I would skulk back into bed and pray – beg :  “Please,  God,  keep me warm and dry and free from pain for just a little while longer.  I mean, or Christ’s sake!  You’re killin’ me here!”  And in those moments I would gather up my pillows, try to find a comfortable position and stare out the window.

It was summer, so the window was open onto my back yard, and I would watch the world outside, or a small chunk of it anyway, framed like one of Monet’s paintings of his garden, the wind playing with the trees, the stars, pinpricks in the night sky. 

I liked it best when it was raining, the sights enhanced by sounds and smells, wonderful, fresh smells of honeysuckle and ozone – me and Marcel Proust remembering things past: a little boy stomping in puddles, flippin’ off Thor and his lightning bolts.  “Swan in Love”.  And if I was really lucky, I just might drift off on those memories.

To me, sleeping was always just a nuisance, something I had to do.  I would reluctantly crawl under the covers and wait for it to happen.  “Okay!  Let’s do this thing!  I don’t have all night!”  My mind would race.  My legs would race.  Like everything in the rat race, even sleep had become a race.  But as I lay there on those warm summer nights, looking out the window, I wasn’t thinking about sleeping.  I was watching the nothingness happen outside, listening to the monotonous patter of a gentle rain on the garage roof, breathing in as much of the outside as I could.  I was warm and dry and reveling in those twenty, glorious minutes between the pain.  For the first time in my life I found myself in the moment, and when you find yourself in the moment, sleep can find you.

A sailor crossing the ocean has water, and wind, and stars.  Water he can drink, and water he can ride.  Wind that churns up the water, and wind he can harness.  Stars so brilliant they blind him even in the darkest of night, and stars he can use to guide him through that night.

Cancer didn’t mean to teach me anything.  Cancer’s a jerk.   But like every bully, it thinks it’s doing one thing while actually doing just the opposite.  Who would have thought that a bully would have taught me to go gentle into that good night.  

Good night.