This Song of Mine…

This weekend I went home to Marin for my half-aunt Allison’s baby shower. (You might be wondering how I have a half-aunt — my grandfather got remarried and had kids in the 1980s and the result is that I have an uncle and aunt that are younger than me.) My father, sister, and I are quite excited about Allison’s baby because it’s the first positive thing to happen to our family since my mother’s death. The baby is especially optimism-inspiring because Allison was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma four years ago and though she is now cancer free, we weren’t sure she would be able to conceive despite the shot she’d gotten to shut down her ovaries during her chemo treatments.

The evening before the shower, my sister arrived at my father’s house with her friends who had driven her home from the airport. When she came to greet me in the living room she handed me a small card with a drawing of a teapot on it. “I found this card mom gave me when I was going through things. You should read it. It will totally make you cry. It’s so beautiful.”

I opened the card…

                                                                         12/11/03

Dearest Vanessa,
As I sat tonight looking at the beautiful book you gave me for my birthday, I realized that I didn’t tell you much I LOVE the LOVE book. I am reading it each day as part of my meditation. There is one poem I love:

This song of mine will wind its music 
around
you, my child like the fond arms of love.

Sadness gushed up inside my chest and I closed the card. Beneath the grief was a nagging jealousy that my mother had written a card like this to Vanessa and not to me. I remembered the LOVE book Vanessa had given my mother — hardcover, expensive, about 700 glossy pages. I had cynically never opened it. I went in the other room to join the others.

The trip home lingered on. I took my grandmother to dim sum in San Francisco. I watched Django Unchained with my father. I went for a hike at China Camp and saw a large king snake on the trail. Then one evening at 1 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep, I remembered the card. I assumed my sister had gone home with it.

I went into her bedroom and turned on the light. And there it was — on her nightstand, leaning against the lamp! I picked it up and took it to my bedroom.

                                                                          12/11/03

Dearest Vanessa,
As I sat tonight looking at the beautiful book you gave me for my birthday, I realized that I didn’t tell you much I LOVE the LOVE book. I am reading it each day as part of my meditation. There is one poem I love:

This song of mine will wind its music
around
you, my child like the fond arms of love.

This song of mine will touch your forehead
like a kiss of a blessing

When you are alone it will sit by your side
and whisper in your ear, when you are
in a crowd it will fence you
about with aloofness.

My song will be like a pair of wings
to your dreams, it will transport your
heart to the verge of the unknown.

It will be like the faithful star overhead.
When dark night is over your road.

            ~Rabindranath Tagore 
             The Crescent Moon.

That is the way I feel about you and about Nicole –
you’ll know when you have children of your own.

                                                                              I love you!

                                                                                          Mom

I’d been wrong to believe this card was written only to my sister. This was a love letter to both of us, written at a time when my mother was fighting her second bout of cancer. Like a song, we could replay the words in this card when we needed a reminder that her love was still with us, guiding us at times even when we felt forgotten.

Some days, it doesn’t take much

My black leather purse died the other day. After seven years of use, it had grown tired of my shoulder but since it’s hard for me to find purses that aren’t too bulky or girly, I’d kept it by my side for far too long. And it rewarded me by falling apart. The metal that had held the strap in place had just grown loose and despite attempted fixes with rubber bands I finally admitted our time together was through.

I dug through my closet for my mother’s old Longchamp bag — also patent leather, also not too girly. It was functional, roomy and nicer than anything I’d buy for myself. I had avoided using it because it reminded me of my mother.  I reached inside, assuming I had cleaned it out long ago.

I found two pairs of her sunglasses, a half eaten packet of ricolas, a pen from her bank and the Carmex she had always used as chapstick. I hadn’t been expecting to find this. A moment frozen in time with her things just as she had left them. So few items like this remain. Untouched by time, waiting patiently for her. I started to cry, thinking about my mom going about her day, rubbing some Carmex on her lips, taking a Ricola for a sore throat. But that would never happen again. These items had sat in her purse for the last four years. Something about the glasses struck me as particularly sad. There’s something so personal about glasses. I remember my grandmother’s glasses, sitting on her dresser after her death and how attached I’d felt to them, how upset I was when my mother donated them without asking. When I’d looked at them, I saw her looking at me.

I placed the sunglasses on my face, knowing I would never wear them yet I’d be unable to give them away. They would go in the closet with her sandals she wore when I was a kid, her denim shirt she rolled up over her arms while doing ceramics, the old sundress she gave me when I was 18 because I am unable to let go of these objects, though looking at them makes me sad. I want to stay connected to my mother, to her physical form, to her presence in this life. I want to remember those moments when she went about her day in a flurry from errand to errand or class to class as she grocery shopped or taught college students.

I unwrapped a Ricola and placed it on my tongue. I’d woken up with a sore throat today. And in her own way, my mom had inadvertently taken care of that, taken care of me. Again.

Creating Grief

Sometimes the hardest grief to overcome is the grief that we create in our own lives. The revisiting of past relationships that caused us pain. The insanity of doing the same thing and expecting different results. The losses we create ourselves — in love, in a career. The inaction that leads to inertia. The pulling back when we feel overwhelmed and the missing out that results.

How can we escape this never-ending repeating pattern of behavior? How can we implement moments of change and stop past actions from informing future actions?

What is our story arc? We ride along happily (or unhappily) in our own lives thinking we know what problems are, then someone dies and we realize those former problems really weren’t problems?

And what does that mean for us moving forward with the decisions we make in life? Does it mean those other problems no longer bother us? That an insensitive comment or a failed job interview don’t matter as much as they did in the past because it’s all been put in perspective? Or does it mean we are more vulnerable to hurts and disappointments and need to protect ourselves more viciously?

These answers, I do not yet have.

Sometimes People Don’t Have Cancer

Another one of my friends had a breast cancer scare, a bad mammogram, a shadow, a fear, and found out — it was nothing. Sometimes it’s nothing.

Good reminder. Wishing you a long string of nothings.

Not Her

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like cancer’s following you around. Or sitting on your shoulder, waiting. Like a gargoyle or a crow. During the last 16 years, I’ve only had two consecutive years without worrying about someone I love dying of cancer. That streak ended with the discovery of Tara’s brain tumor last spring and continued a month ago when my best friend Cheryl was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Cheryl’s not an online friend. We’ve known each other since 2000 when we were co-workers at a fledgling online publication called Zap2It and navigating the L.A. lesbian bar scene ineffectively: “Should I go up and talk to her?” “I don’t know. If it were me, I wouldn’t have the guts to go talk to her.” “Maybe I’ll have another drink and then go talk to her.” “Yeah, another drink then maybe… talk to her?”

I wanted Cheryl to be bisexual like me so when she said she was a lesbian I was like, “Are you sure?” Then I tried to help her. I forced Cheryl to sit next to a gay girl I knew in The Good Luck Bar and soon she was in a relationship with someone as dominant as me.

Cheryl was passive. I was aggressive. I thought her new girlfriend was walking all over her. She didn’t. We decided to go on a friendship break, which accidentally lasted four years.

When I saw her on Friendster and noticed her status was “single” I wrote her an apologetic email about judging her former girlfriend and she thanked me for being her first queer friend. When we met for drinks, I learned I had missed more than Cheryl’s failed relationship — I had missed her mother’s death.  I was horrified.

Despite my absence during her time of need, when my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer Cheryl sent emails, made phone calls and dropped by with the consistency of a family member. When I told her I was afraid of what the cancer would bring, she told me insightful things like, “You’re scared your mom will no longer resemble your mom anymore but she’ll still be your mom.”

Cheryl and her partner came to visit me at my dad’s house after my mom died. She helped me transition back into living in L.A. when I returned jobless and struggling. I had to rebuild almost everything in my life, except my friendship with Cheryl. It was always a consistent, unwavering arm of support.

Nowadays, I see Cheryl at least once a week. We go for hikes. We get drinks. But mainly we eat dinner in my apartment and talk about life — what it’s like not to have moms, dating and relationship troubles, and our fears. Both of our mothers died of cancer in their 50s – hers of complications surrounding ovarian cancer, mine of breast cancer. Like most women, we have a hard time distinguishing our mothers’ paths from our own. We worry dying young is more probability than possibility.

When Cheryl’s doctor told her she didn’t like the looks of two lumps in her breast, I knew what to say. This wasn’t my first time at the cancer scare rodeo. “Consolation mode” was like slipping into a comfortable suit, using a familiar skill set that had gone dormant for awhile: I told her it wasn’t cancer. That she was too young. That her mother’s journey wasn’t destined to be hers. I Googled and emailed her statistics and stories of false alarms but the resounding thought in my head was not her.

There’s a kind of grief that starts when you sense an impending battle, one that you’ve seen people lose before. Your sadness is anchored in a knowledge of what they will lose in order to win  — a pair of breasts, a head of hair. And then there are the parts of their soul that will never be the same — their sense of safety within their bodies, a mortality that will suddenly feel forever closer, their fears once deemed irrational permanently cemented. You try to remind yourself that just because some people die fighting this enemy it doesn’t mean they all die. But it’s hard to find comfort in that when you know cancer survivors always have to sacrifice major parts of themselves to win.

I went to Cheryl’s apartment over the long weekend while awaiting her results. We watched “Jennifer’s Body” and then talked about whether or not it was ominous that her doctor’s office gave her a card. “They don’t even know I have cancer yet, and they’re giving me a card. That’s gotta be bad, right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just preemptive sympathy.”

It was not.

I got a text message at work Monday morning from Cheryl: It’s cancer. Waiting to learn more. I love you.

And then we waited some more — a week to find out what stage the cancer was. Another week to find out if the cancer was estrogen-positive or aggressive. Another to find out whether the MRI showed it had spread. Doctors don’t care about the emotional damage that the waiting inflicts. Doctors talk about wrapping muscles around implants to salvage them from radiation with the same tone they use to place their lunch order. They set surgery dates weeks from diagnoses, not caring that patients have to live with something slowly killing them in their lady parts through Thanksgiving and most of December. They don’t care that it makes some aggressive friends scream and shout for second opinions to hurry things along.

By the end of the month we knew that Cheryl’s prognosis was already better than my mother’s — her cancer was Stage II with an 80% survival rate. It was estrogen-positive, not HER2+, which my mother had. Apparently there were things I didn’t know — like that estrogen-positive cancer, unlike HER2+, is slow growing. That you can take drugs for it for years to control your hormones and prevent recurrence. That Cheryl’s journey was not my mother’s journey.

But it’s hard to believe facts. Once you know that someone so important can be taken from you, everyone’s up for grabs. And each time Cheryl asks whether she will be OK, the only answer I hear in my head is You’ll be OK…because you have to be.

Overwhelmed…but in a good way

Wow… Who knew so many people had experienced a loss on Facebook? Thank you for sharing your stories of grief that you experienced both on and off-line, for your encouragement and support. I am blown away by each and every comment and all of the new followers, and if I had time I would respond to each and every one of you.  I am sorry for all of your losses, for your battles with cancer, for your friends and family members who are no longer with us.

You know, I created grieftastic as a sort of secret blog to privately deal with my grief. I didn’t even tell my family about it. Then somehow, someone at WordPress noticed and now I don’t feel like I have to keep my grief so private.  Your outpouring of response inspired me to tell my family about the blog. I also posted my last piece — where else — on Facebook (surprisingly, it didn’t garner very many likes or comments. I think it was too “heavy” and people wanted to hear about my dog taking a nap or something).

When we hide our grief, we empower it to grow. When we are brave enough to grieve in groups or publicly, we can find support and understanding that would not otherwise be possible. I hope all of you who are experiencing loss and grief, who are battling cancer, who are just having a fuck of a hard time know that I am thinking about you and enjoyed discovering your blogs over the past few weeks. Much love to you all!

Watching a Friend Die on Facebook

Tara and I hadn’t spoken for 16 years but when she friended me on Facebook in 2009, clicking “accept” was a no brainer. I messaged her immediately.

Ms. Mitchell!

Do you ever age? Bitch.

p.s. Hi Tara!
p.p.s. You look lovely!

She responded…

I am timeless.

p.s. Hello Nicole!
p.p.s. Wish you were next door…

Tara was my next door neighbor in the dorms my freshman year of college. She liked Cat Stevens and the Violent Femmes. She smoked clove cigarettes out of her window and played the flute. She was 6 feet tall (or 5’12″ as she liked to put it) and was asked so frequently about her height that she posted it on her nametag at a waitressing job because she got tired of people asking.

Tara had taken me to my first “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and taught me when to throw the bread. She introduced me to my first pot dealer, though Tara never smoked weed. She once had driven me to hunt for Benadryl during an ice storm because I was allergic to her family’s cat. I had only good memories associated with Tara.

After accepting her friend request, I lost track of her, seeing pictures here and there on Facebook, noticing one of Tara in a hospital bed and assuming a torn ligament or minor surgery because of our age. Then one day I clicked on a photo and learned she wasn’t in for minor surgery. Tara was in for a brain tumor. From there I found a blog she’d been writing since her diagnosis in 2009 shortly after my mom passed away. She’d been fighting a life-threatening tumor for three years, and I hadn’t even noticed. I don’t even think Tara was in my News Feed.

If this had happened in another decade, Tara would have remained out of my social circle. And maybe years later I would have heard about her condition while reconnecting with an old college friend. But now I was personally connected through a few mouse clicks, watching this woman, now 34, go through chemotherapy, brain surgery, and physical therapy, wearing the brave smile that people facing their own mortalities sport so you won’t worry about them or their positive “gonna beat this” attitude.

I wrote Tara a snail mail letter (it seemed more personal) apologizing for not realizing what she was going through for so long, blaming Facebook but at the same time knowing it was the only thing that had enabled me to learn of her condition. Pictures of her with a cane digressed into photos of her strapped in a wheelchair, her left side paralyzed, a smile on her face, puffy from steroids.

As I watched her body deteriorate, I witnessed the misguided bright-sided Facebook wall posts from Tara’s friends who had never experienced cancer. Comments like, “Boy, I wish I could get out of going to work like you” and “Wow, rehab looks fun. Is it like the dorms?” I wrote Tara asking her how she handled all this asinine commentary. She understood the intent but admitted, yeah, she’d love to be well enough to go to work — and no, struggling to learn how to walk again was nothing like college.

I mailed her a “Fuck Cancer” hat similar to the one I’d purchased for my mother. She posted an Instagram photo of it with a “This gave me a laugh, thanks Nicole!” to her Facebook wall. During a late night Facebook IM session, Tara admitted that as an only child,  she was aching for alone time but couldn’t get it — her parents were her caregivers 24/7. She couldn’t go to the bathroom by herself because of her mobility issues and the only time her folks left her with a friend she had a life-threatening seizure that “really freaked everyone out.” Tara joked that she was now on lockdown and as an “HSP” (highly sensitive person) this change in lifestyle had been even more unnerving.

Her HSP reference reminded me that in college, Tara and I had bonded over the “Highly Sensitive Person,” a book by a therapist named Elaine Aron who knew my mother. I wrote Aron for advice about what Tara could do to achieve alone time. Elaine advised Tara to use silence to achieve solitude. Tara said she’d try it.

I sent Tara a mix of folk music that made me think of college. My music choices reflected what I thought her music taste would be now. I learned on Facebook that she had a fondness for Justin Timberlake. I lamented making her CD so unhip and Grateful Dead laden. She sent me a postcard with familiar handwriting that I remembered from notes she left on my door in the dorms. She asked me to visit.

I was afraid that seeing Tara in person would bring up all of my memories of watching my mother die, memories that after three years I had finally been able to relegate to the background of my thoughts. I learned that a short film I wrote and produced would be screening in Seattle four months into the future. I told Tara I would visit her for a weekend then but told her to warn me if her health rapidly declined I’d find a way to visit earlier, knowing full well that I couldn’t get days off my television production job. Though Tara must have known she probably wouldn’t be healthy enough to see me by then (she was on Hospice) she emailed me that she was excited about the visit and said we could have a dorm reunion.

I’d had drama with almost all of the girls from my freshman dorm and the thought of seeing them made me feel nauseous. One had sent me an email that started, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you…” when I didn’t make time to visit her in L.A. 10 years ago. Another had been my roommate who went back and forth between our apartment and her boyfriend’s leaving messes in both locations then trading them out before cleaning either up. Another was a straight girl I had slept with Spring Trimester who broke my heart.

Worrying about myself in awkward social situations while Tara was dying made me feel selfish and petty. I went for a hike with my friend Cheryl and told her about the situation, that Tara wanted me to visit, that I had reservations about seeing her so ill, from seeing people from my past and revisiting the Pacific Northwest for the first time since college — a place I’d intentionally never returned to because college was such a hard time for me. But I had to somehow overlook these bad associations, I told her. Who was I to deny a dying friend’s wish? Cheryl asked, “Would you even have reconnected with this person if it hadn’t been for Facebook?” I admitted I probably wouldn’t have. Tara hadn’t been a close friend through most of college. We lost touch after our softmore year and before that we’d been mostly acquaintances. I had completely lost track of Tara after graduation and only lamented that fact after I realized she was sick.

Part of why we’d never been closer was that Tara was an extrovert who loved hanging out in groups, while I was more of a one-on-one person. Small talk with people tossing cigarette butts in rain-filled glasses was the only way I ever was around Tara, and even then I always felt like I never saw enough of her. “Not to discount your relationship to this person,” Cheryl said, “but there are probably a lot more people who are much closer to Tara vying for her attention right now.” Cheryl was right. I was seeing myself as the center of Tara’s universe, overrating my importance in her life like people are bound to do when someone they know is dying. I had watched this happen with my mother as acquaintance after acquaintance showed up at our door, preventing her from getting much needed rest. I knew the visits were more about their guilt, their feelings of helplessness than about them giving my mother what she needed.

I was going to visit Tara and yet in all of this time we hadn’t even talked on the phone. I emailed her to see if I could get her phone number but she didn’t respond. In our last correspondence, I suggested we Skype so we could see each other. In an email laden with spelling and typos so severe I could barely decipher it, Tara said it was a great idea but had no idea how to set it up. It was clear from her writing that she had gotten much sicker. Then she grew silent. I sent a few emails saying I hoped she was getting the alone time she needed and that she was in my thoughts, but received no response. Her Facebook account had gone silent as well. People posted photo after photo of Tara when she was healthy at parties, dinners, outdoor fairs. I didn’t have any photos of Tara to share.

I felt helpless and guilty, like I should have done more, like I should have gotten over my differences with those girls from the dorm and reconnected with them. If I had, I would have been able to stay connected to Tara in some human way off-line.

Then out of the blue I got an email from one of them — the girl who had broken my heart. She said she realized that Tara and I had reconnected in recent months and wanted to let me know Tara was now bed-ridden and losing her vision from the tumor. She could no longer swallow. It wouldn’t be long now. She said she was going to visit her that weekend and said she’d give Tara my love.

I was so grateful. A few days later, I heard back from my friend that she’d given Tara my sentiments and that Tara had said, “Tell Nicole I love her. She’s coming to Seattle soon, you know.” She had never received my email saying I had canceled my trip because I couldn’t get the days off work. I was relieved that disappointment wouldn’t be my last gift to Tara. The panic that had overtaken me while waiting for news had abated. I had gotten some form of a goodbye, some form of closure.

The girl who broke my heart promised to email me when Tara died, but she didn’t. I learned about Tara’s death on Facebook from a Community Page that had been created to keep people in the loop about Tara’s condition.

For weeks after her death, Tara was still listed as online on Facebook, the symbol of her mobile phone next to her photo and name in my IM contacts. I visited her page frequently to see her friends’ comments about how much they missed her, about the little things that made them think of her. I had nothing to contribute, no memories to recount, because Tara hadn’t existed in real-time for me since 1995 when we both were 18 and considered our foreign language requirements and the Japanese exchange student’s cardboard box of hard liquor going dry “real problems.”

Last week, the icon of Tara’s cell phone disappeared from my online contacts. The relief of no longer seeing her name evaporates each time she shows up in my list of Facebook friends or when Facebook recommends pages she liked before she died. Whether she wants to or not, Tara no longer has a say as to whether she will exist on Facebook. Those disturbing photos of her when she was sick could be online for the next 30 years. Whether her continued online presence haunts us or comforts us, Facebook is indifferent. The social network has always functioned as a double-edged sword, bringing us closer together while accenting how far apart we really are. To the Facebook logorithm, Tara and I are just as close as she is to her other friends and she’s just as alive as when I accepted her friend request four years ago. The only difference now is she’s in my News Feed.