Aloft

For a long time I have had a recurring scene pass in front of my eyes, a flickering black and white clip of a man with artificial wings affixed to his arms, running dead set for the edge of a cliff. He runs, flapping like hell, only to pull up short just feet from the edge, not trusting his homemade contraption to hold him against gravity.
He is Icarus, Daedalus' son, anxious against the bright sunlight, worried about his own weight on the wings, worried moreso about his undescribed and hidden desire to fly to the highest heights with abandon.  What that will mean and what that will make, his desire to fly is thwarted by last minute doubt and worry.

But tonight, Joseph Campbell's recording of ancient wisdom rang true:
“A bit of advice
given to a young Native American
at the time of his initiation:
'As you go the way of life,
you will see a great chasm.
Jump.
It is not as wide as you think.' "
--from A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Today I bought a house, cementing my decision to move to a city long considered a future home, under different conditions and for different reasons, but an idea set in motion long ago. And I'm here, now, and happy and excited, this bittersweet taste in my mouth not crowding out my delight at new discoveries, but also not salving pretty profound feelings of loss and change.

It's like coming back to something and knowing it for the first time, like T.S. Eliot talked about, but not really. It's holding the space of what was with the space of what might be. It's being unsure about how to marry what has already happened (the people you love(d), things you've experience(d)) with an unchartered course.

My girl, Bridget (who is truly a gifted spiritual advisor) noted that this is a time to accept & be, explaining that if things could be different, they would be. And so I move forward, buying a house on a familiar street under radically different circumstances, celebrating a new life in environments that hold many memories, stitching together what is new and old without being totally clear on the design that will unfold. More crazy quilt than the careful block pattern that has governed the stitching of my life for so many years. Stepping into it, breath deep in my lungs, stomach tight, arms strengthened and ready to hold these heavy wings aloft, trusting in my own ingenuity, ready to take flight. 

Light as air, it's not as wide as you think.

Grasping

My chest felt tight and unusually heavy as we swung out of Panera, coffees in hand, to make the 40 minute drive from Oklahoma City to my childhood home. This was the trip home that ended things, most things left being sold, my mother's house contracted for sale, the end of my time of having a place to land should I need it. This all ended long ago with my mother's death and our inevitable dividing of things and the eventual acknowledgement that our childhood home would be bundled up for someone else to own.

But it's been a tender couple of days. I walk past all of the tables in my mother's house that are laden with memories in the form of glass and silver and ceramic and oil paint and I feel a tug, a grasping for these items that remind me of my grandmother's home or of some piece of family history that I'm not quite ready to let go. I suddenly think that I haven't taken enough, that my parsimonious view when we were dividing things was short-sighted, that now I need these things to fill up a certain void left by dividing and new space and the time when my own children might want something of their own. I have a moment when I believe that I have bankrupted their future with a few fickle objects, which is total bullshit because these things mean nothing to them now and will mean nothing to them in the future because they don't know the people for whom these pieces had value. Still, I feel the tug and want and I sit in these feelings for a moment just letting them come and go, come and go.

The most interesting feeling that I am having is the feeling of grasping at something, fine threads of memory that are silken to the touch but so fine that they are hard to feel between the calloused fingers of my memory. I pick up my grandmother's wrecked suitcase, I take my dad's toy monkey, I find an electric razor that may contain DNA that would help me unlock who I am through where my dad came from. This all lands for me at a remarkable juncture in my life. I am losing the emotional security of my childhood home just as I have moved into a new place of my own to live. I am packing up a lifetime of memories just as I am launching into a new sphere of work. Never have I been in such a transitional space in my life, all by choice, all completely without a concrete plan or emotional safety net.

A strong vision or the predictive power of decision trees have been my family's way of managing through some of the shittier events in life. Have a vision, you'll know what to aim for. Map out the predictable outcomes, you won't be surprised when the worst outcome arrives at your door. There is comfort in knowing what is going to happen and in a family that has had such wildly unpredictable loss, it's been a saving grace.

But wrapping up pieces of your life and closing the door on spaces that house your memories is terrifying. It means closing off the one thing that you knew you could come back to, no matter what. It also means that sometimes you just have to sit without a vision for the future, that sometimes you have to just be in it. And you think back across those people whose things you touch: remembering what a kind woman your grandmother was, or what a fiercely strong woman your mother was, or what a generous and loving man your dad was, or how you look back over your family history and realize that you come from perserverant and courageous stock.

And the grasping slowly subsides and is replaced by appreciation. And you muster your own courage and think about working without much of a net. And you can let go, slowly, and move forward, slowly. And so be it. Amen.

circuitous routes

Steering through the small streets, squinting to remember the color and shape of houses I had seen just a week before, I used the Force to find my way back to the little white bungalow, perched in tree-lined shade on streets ordinal in number and alphabetical in line.

Ten days earlier I had arrived in Portland, skinny as an abandoned cat, grief-stricken, bereft and sad, newly repatriated after a dismal end of a romance over 9,500 miles away. I had come to take shelter in the warm home and friendship of my best friend and her husband, to stay a few days and renew, be with people that knew me best. Now with as much as I could cram into my car, I was heading back to start a new life.

I could fill up a page with words describe my friend: hilarious, brilliant, daring, feisty, creative, sharp as a whip, mischievous, unpredicatable, predictable. Equal parts beguiler and revolutionary, she had a personality that drew you in and held you fascinated. And, damn, was she funny.

We had a history of weaving in and out of each other's lives, taking long pauses after angry words, always reconnecting to be thick as thieves once again. Our friendship spanned decades, growing from the tumult of high school, through moves and loves and heartache and distance to new marriages, children and the fine crackling of expectations that accompanies a newly minted life. The many things that have shaped my life since that fateful decision to move to Portland (my husband, my career, Seattle) all hold her mark.

In short, I loved this friend. She was my constant, a phone call twice a day habit that I had grown both to depend on and to appreciate. Ours was one of the most important relationships of my life, not a girl crush but a deep and connected friendship. She was a taproot that held me fast in who I knew myself to be. I can hardly think back across my life without the best stories coming from our time together.

Five years have passed since this friendship ended abruptly and without obvious (to me) reason. For a time, I figured that we'd just run aground of something, that we would circle back into our relationship once again whenever what ever it was worked itself out. A year passed, then two, then my mother got sick and died, then I got cancer, and now I am here on another shore of living, the phantom feeling of someone missing popping up at moments when I feel most unguarded.

Because losing this friendship has been unmooring, disorienting, anxiety-provoking in ways that I'm just staring to unpack, I have decided to reach out to her, just to say hello and tell her that I am sorry if I did something wrong. I've decided to put up or to be prepared to just let it go. Thinking about this gives me a tightness in my chest that reminds of my six year old self trying to swim the length of the pool in a single, long-held, under-water breath. I feel my lungs burning and know that this is a surfacing that has to happen even though I want to continue to kick against it. But it's time to tidy things up, know where they stand, let things come full circle once and for all.

Vignettes

The Meaning of Cake:

The new nanny candidate Stephanie was due any minute. Between the day's bustle of karate, swimming, shopping and running around, Ava and I stood in the kitchen catching our breath and talking about chocolate cake.

DING DONG!

All crazy curls and 5 year old drama, Ava yelled "I'll get it!", rushed to the door and flung it open to reveal not Stephanie, but a well-dressed man of Indian heritage whose puzzled look equaled that of Ava.

"Um, Mom?"

I walked to the door and the man looked at me, dashing in my neon-orange do-rag and obviously bald head, and asked "Are you Fran Loosen?"

"Well, yes I am."

"Then this is for you," he said as he handed me a brown craft paper cake box. "Best wishes and ENJOY!" His smile lit up and he turned and walked away.

I looked down to this:

I walked in the house carrying my box, a little dumbstruck. Ally sent me cake. Ally lives in Seattle. I was wanting cake right at that moment and Ally sent me cake and it came like magic in the middle of a day when I really needed a it. And then I started to cry.

Ava looked at me like I was insane, not so much because I was crying but because

"HOW DID SHE KNOW YOU WANTED CAKE RIGHT NOW, MAMA? HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!"

And I laughed and looked at her through my tears and just said "Sometimes your friends know what you need, babygirl. And sometimes, like magic, things just happen."

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Detailing of Stuff:

Sometimes the things I write here I write because I hope if there is ever anyone out on the web trawling around looking at blogs related to the experience of breast cancer, they will pick up something about my medical treatment and experience that will help them on their journey. The problem with any illness is that information is weird, unpredictable, oftentimes not accurate or difficult to decode. It's really unclear how it's going to map to your life and your own experience, which makes you crazy as you work your way through symptoms and situations.

Starting on Sunday, I once again had difficulty with heaviness in my chest, the same as the last round of chemo. Combined with the freaky feeling of the new port (yes, you can feel the port in the neck...gross) and a dull ache re-occurring in my blood-clot arm, by Wednesday I was pretty freaked out. What if this was something bigger that we didn't catch last time? I had read a little bit about shortness of breath on the cancer boards, but nothing substantial so on Thursday morning I called the oncology office. The nurse sent me to triage who then sent me...yep, to the ER. The ER? Really? So we trundle in, me in my depressed white count state, to sit for 8 hours and go through countless tests to find out that I don't have a pulmonary embolism, no new blood clots (old have not totally resolved), no heart attack, no this, no that... which was all great. But the damn thing was at the end (very nice experience at the UM emergency room), the doc says "Yes, I talked to your oncologist and he said that in fact the Neulasta that you took on Saturday often causes feelings of heaviness in the chest."

Um, WHAT?

I just spent 8 hours and thousands of dollars in the ER for you to tell me that it's likely from my Neulasta shot?

Sure enough, I google "Neulasta chest tightness" sitting right there in the ER and it pops up on multiple sites. Ok, so why isn't this something that you could have told me last time? Or, maybe before I came in today? Because if you'd said "Hey, Neulasta causes these same sensations for folks" I would have saved the trip and felt a lot better about everything. Sigh.

That and it seems that I had a really tremendous bout of reflux that I didn't handle properly ('cause, um, I didn't know I had it), so my low white count self is trying to heal the etched away bit of my esophagus at the base of my neck. It's felt like someone has had their pointy finger drilling into the hollow of my neck for the past 5 days. For those of you that suffer from acid reflux or who have kids with GERD, I don't know how you do it. I feel like someone is trying to choke me every minute of the day. It's horrible.

Not sure where I am going with this other than to basically report out that things are fine, I am hanging in there adjusting meds, figuring out how it's working, trying to make sense of it all. Another chemo next Friday so keep me in your thoughts.

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The Freaks in the Hood:

Finally, a bit of humor. I have taken to startling the neighborhood with my bald head. It's just too damn hot to sit with a scarf on all of the time, so often I just go without. And I am BALD these days. Which the regulars handle just fine, actually, and the kids in the neighborhood have gotten used to it and it's no big deal. Nick shaved his head last week, which was great and now we look like a pair of total freaks. The good news is that I suspect it would be very hard for us to have a real argument looking like this because it would just be too damn comical.

The best part was that on the day that he shaved his head we were standing outside with our friend Dave (who also shaves his head) just having a chat. Three totally bald people hanging out in the front yard shooting the breeze as a group of people (not from our neighborhood) came by walking their dogs. And, man, did we get the looks! Not until later did I realize that we must have looked like some sort of new Burns Park version of the Heaven's Gate cult.  Two people is a coincidence, three...that's a group!

Unfortunately, Nick's head has had more practice being bald than mine has, so he doesn't have the same tan lines that I am sporting, which gives me a particularly bizarre look. Welcome to the neighborhood! We haven't gotten Ava and David to follow suit on the head shaving bit, but I may buy them the little fake bald head coverings just to get a picture. Ava's slightly horrified, but we all think it's pretty much in good fun.

Nothing much more to share from here. Thank you all for your continued love, thoughts, energy, prayers and support. Two down, six (seriously? shit!) to go. I am learning more and more each time. I feel enveloped in love even though the going is rough and there are many days I cannot believe that I am going to work through all of this. What will come, will come. I am just happy to have you with me on this journey.


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