We’ve returned to that five-month period of the annual calendar in which it is acceptably convenient to spell out the names of months in full. Watch for confetti.
What can I say? There has been a lot of stress over the last few days, with the birthday party on Friday and my girlfriend moving in to my already-cramped apartment, and under duress herself.
But there was also the uncommonly good, nearly miraculous news of the 24th, which arrived in an email from a doctor friend. In fact it arrived around the time I was writing the last post.
“It (the tumor) has vanished,” he wrote. These are the words I’d longed to hear, but that seemed so remote in September when, despite a glorious renewal of hope and resolve and effort, an MRI revealed that the tumor had grown to the point where I would need Temodar and radiation treatment again.
He did not, would not (and, I suppose, should not) call it a miracle. He called it an “excellent response to Avastin,” the monoclonal antibody that drips into my veins at $5,000 a bag every couple of weeks. I suppose I don’t care whether it’s a miracle or Avastin or, somehow, miraculously Avastin or just my body healing itself as I knew it could. Does it matter?
Just as it is all of those things which contributed to the positive results, so it is all the other things in my life which signal the transience of the celebratory mood. Death is an exceptionally calm stalker of souls. Again I’m reminded that the final triumph over this cancer will be to die of something else.
But all of that time to live (which very early in my cancer-altered life I referred to as something like “the months I’m living for”) is the same kind of time as any life is made of, day to day. It could be months, it could be years, it could be decades. Death did not seem imminent in a physical sense last week as I struggled to solemnize my will. But it did seem nearby in that unfathomable dimension of the soul.
That’s why, while I celebrated the news, I suffered no illusion of stopping time. More and more deeply I believe that experiencing these kinds of events as meaningfully discrete cuts the heart right out of them. There is nothing but now, yet somehow there is nothing to it. Step soundly, fall through the illusion, and die laughing.