I am currently reading a book about cancer, Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber. It includes both the author’s personal and emotional experience in dealing with it as well as scientific data and political commentary on the environmental causes of cancer in the US. Jeff gave it to me a while ago, when I started volunteering at a clinic for cancer patients. I really hadn’t been able to emotionally handle reading much about cancer until now.
The 3-year date from my friend’s death is approaching. I find myself no less reminded of her and no less reflective about her life and death and how it has impacted me. I do find myself less intensely sad and angry about it.
Living Downstream discusses the work and death of Rachel Carson (the author of Silent Spring), who was a pioneer in cancer awareness and ultimately died from it. Her perserverance, directness and values all remind me of Jenn. Steingraber discusses her unwillingness to admit that she has cancer and her fight to live and to work until her end. While the times are very different now, and it was never an issue for Jenn to pretend that she didn’t have cancer, her acceptance that it was terminal came late and she clung to life so strongly. I don’t ever feel that she was in denial around having cancer, but she chose to be a living person rather than a dying one…those were her terms of life.
At her memorial service, one of the women in her cancer support group said that she would always remember Jenn as a model of what living with cancer could look like. The parts of her life that never wavered were wanting to spend time in nature and with her many friends. A month before she died, we were on a hike and she told me this. She was bright yellow from jaundice at the time, but still active. This is one of the last hikes that she went on and it was the last time that I spent with her away from the hospital or her home.
Even before Jenn was very sick, she could really fill up a group with her energy. She was one of the most outspoken and chatty people that I knew. When I lived with her, I often had to go to my room and close the door in order to not get sucked into a political argument with her. Although I think she became less argumentative as she got more sick, I felt like she talked more and took up more attention in the groups that she was in.
Reflecting back now, it seems as though she were trying to fit in as much into her remaining life as possible…say everything that needed to be said while there was still time…before she got too tired. She went ice camping, river rafting and was in a Ulysses reading group. At the end she could only really listen. She would tiredly sigh as she tried to collect her thoughts and and ask the right questions and try to stay focused on what I was saying. What was happening in the world outside of her home from which she would now be forever closed off from?
I imagine there to be a continuum of things that one wants to do in their lives and things that one knows one will never do. Earlier in life, of course, more things lie towards the former end of the scale. Part of the acceptance of death is having more things lie on the latter end. I think that it was the last few weeks of Jenn’s life on which things started to shift on this scale. Sometimes things hovered in between as a question mark….will I ever be well enough to do these things? And quickly, they became absolutes…these things would not be a part of her life.
I don’t know if Jenn felt satisfied with her life. I doubt it. She was the kind of person for which satisfaction was not neccessarily a positive thing. She wanted to fight for more. What I do feel optimistic about is that she died with the peace of mind that she was satisfied with the way that she lived. She fulfilled many of her most important dreams and her last food was a strawberry from her house’s garden (how many strawberries are around in March?) which to me, symbolizes so much about the beautiful place that she had gotten herself in her life.
Being a part of Jenn’s death was life-changing for me. A week after our hike, I had a day “free” to do errands. I had a list of things that I wanted to do. I was borrowing my brother’s car and could do some things that I had been putting off that would be much easier with a vehicle. I can’t remember if I got a message from Jenn or if I spoke to a mutual friend to find out that she was in the hospital doing another round of chemo. I knew how much she appreciated having someone with her when she got treatments, even if she was just sleeping and I decided to head over there, as I had done before. The environment is odd, the area has a corridor that has sliding glass doors on all the rooms, so that as you walk through or sit in another room, you can see many people getting chemo treatments. When I was here, seeing people who are very sick with cancer felt like a punch in the gut. Each time that I made eye contact with someone that looked very ill, I wanted to do the right thing…make the right eye contact, give the right expression. But what is right? What isn’t condescending or assuming?
She was asleep and as I sat there, I wondered when she would wake up, how long her treatment would be…how long should I stay. I think back and shake my head at the fact that my to do list never really fully left my thoughts. When she woke up, I discovered that she actually wasn’t getting chemo…she was too weak for that…she was getting IV nutrition and also getting nutritional supplements and dietary consultations. Jenn’s cancer was no longer treatable, although she had hope that once her blood levels were up, she could resume it. Jenn needed a ride to have her abdomen drained, which had a buildup of fluid, I believe from the liver failure that she was experiencing. Since I had my brother’s car, I offered to wait.
At about 3:30, with deep sadness, I sat on a park bench outside of the next hospital. As if in a movie, there were young children playing with their nannies and parents supervising. An appropriate and ironic backdrop while I came to the realization of what was happening to my friend. Awash with guilt and shame for my previous list of priorities for my day, I thought of how nothing could be more important to me now than to be available for Jenn. It is now one of my highest priorities to be with people and support them in times of great life changes. My confrontation of cancer has also been triggered.
For months after her death I reflected on and was inspired by her choices, both individually and when hanging out with mutual friends. Although I had missed out on training for a big bicycle trip planned, partly due to her turn in health, I knew that it was not an option to not do the ride and I thought of her every single day while appreciating some of the most beautiful roads in the bay area. On a memorial backpacking trip on which we spread some of her ashes, we came into conflict about how far we could get that day and where her ashes would be. As soon as her name came up, we realized the ridiculousness of our disagreement and found the next beautiful spot on our route to let them go.
It is not that I make the same choices as Jenn, it is that participating in the death of a peer has forced my own priorities to my consciousness. And now these reflections don’t happen as frequently because, I hope, they are now deeply embedded in my life choices.
