Living with grace and equanimity in the face of cancer

Walking in faith

Originally uploaded by siennaso

My sister in law Kit was stricken with breast cancer last year. Shortly after being diagnosed at the clinic she and my brother went straight to my parents’ house, where we as a family regularly congregate at any and all times, and she sat on the kitchen table, talked to my sisters and cried. I wasn’t there, my sister Aileen told me what happened later. But I can imagine the scene. She would have been crying but not in a dramatic fashion, the way I usually do it, with much bawling and questioning and analyzing. Kit is very practical, no nonsense, not given to sentimentality but blessed with a good heart, down to earth and sarcastic but never unkind. She is also strong, and quite private. Crying to my family that day was about as much emotion and pain as we have seen her display. She had after all just been diagnosed, and such a reaction was perfectly within the norm (if a situation such as getting diagnosed with cancer can be within the norm.) We have not seen her cry since.

It’s been a year since she was diagnosed. In that year she stopped working, had chemotherapy and radiation, lost all her hair, got double mastectomies, underwent reconstructive surgery to replace her lost breasts, was gifted Albert, a darling of a Yorkshire terrier from a dying friend also stricken with breast cancer, went back to work part time, was rushed to the hospital several times, grew her hair back, fretted over getting fat from the drugs, and in between joked and laughed and shopped and cooked amazing pasta dishes, and cried — privately — yes, and lived. Like a normal person. It sounds simple enough, what else is she to do she says quite matter-of-factly, but go on? And she does it without being precious, with practical grace and equanimity, which can only mean an active abundance of faith and hope working in her life.

When I imagine my life forever changed with the sentence of looming mortality, I cannot fathom how that would wash out the color of my days and alter the shape of my dreams. Not that we all of us aren’t dying anyway…to paraphrase Galway Kinnell, each day we live inexorably towards the end. But who wants reminding? That’s what Kit lost, the distance most of us prefer to keep from death as we live. Though there must be a dubious gift to have this inevitability brought so close to home. I would never choose it, but if I thought there was a chance I would die in five years would I immediately shed all the layers of unnecessary griefs like old clothes that don’t fit me anymore? My closet is jammed full of wishful outfits and onceuponatimes I never will wear again. And yet though I have no space left I still shop too much.

During days when I have trouble seeing a picture of myself in the next year, I think about her thinking, will I see my son become a teenager in five years? IF I do not, she must think, then I mean to live this time, this life, which is all I have, to the best of my ability. No skydiving, no adventuring, this life with my husband and son and work and dailiness is mine to use as normally and as joyfully as I can.

As a family to celebrate her health, we walked and ran the Susan Komen Race for The Cure last June 7, 2008 in Washington DC. I made a pink banner with a picture of her on it, thank God a small one only she joked, lest people think she was dead. (Most of the banners with pictures were of people who had passed on it seemed to us.) It was a blazing hot day, music blaring from speakers played by bands along the National Mall, and thousands of women wearing pink t-shirts, survivors all, walking and running and celebrating amid the sea of white t-shirted loved ones. It was just about as alive and vibrant a day as you can imagine.