SEA-LAX-ABQ

You sit waiting for the plane to taxi out, staring through the small window at the rain bouncing off the people and equipment moving steadily about in their pre-flight choreography. A single thought precipitates a cascade of memories:

Things change. One day you’re having dinner at a friend’s house, and your wife squeezes your hand and smiles to let you know that the tests are positive and you’re now on the road to becoming a family. A month later, you’re trudging slowly through waist-deep grief in the aftermath of a miscarriage and the passing of your father. At a point further down a trying, circuitous route back towards  normality, there are more tests, and more bad news: Your wife has cancer. In the space of that single word, all that you know and value is now potentially forfeit. Your only recourse is to step in and fight, although the fight itself is not yours. You do what you can, but mostly you sit beside her as she endures the seemingly endless procession of doctors and still more tests. You watch over her through the surgeries, the chemo, the meds, and the radiation. Healing and recovery seem like welcome and comparatively simple next steps, but you find them elusive and difficult. The grief draws chest-high and clings to you like a living thing, threatening to engulf you.

You watch the next few years of your life like a movie, fearing each new test and follow-up visit, until that same compulsion tells you again to step in, but nothing is the same in the vaporous post-treatment limbo. You stumble along looking for answers and meaning in what were the familiar contortions of work and distractions of play. Normal becomes an abstract and generally
forgotten notion.

Things change, but often they change along familiar patterns. The phone rings, and it’s your mother. It’s only in the lungs this time she says. She’s been through this before and knows
the drill. She and her sister have both gone several rounds with this demon. No big deal she says – she may have the cancer gene, but she’s also got the survivor gene. Step in. While the weight of your wife’s convalescence still sits heavy within you, you get on a plane and go. You learn that nothing – no book, no class, no training – nothing adequately prepares you for changing surgical dressings on your own mother.

The succession of follow-ups continues for both women, and mercifully the space between examinations grows slowly larger. As your mother’s own treatment wanes, she relays news to you of
how her sister’s cancer has flared aggressively again and metastasized to her brain and organs. In a matter of weeks your aunt succumbs, a severe and personal reminder of what’s perpetually at stake in this fragile new reality. Such bleak news notwithstanding, with each successive negative test you breathe a bit easier, and look to reclaim another small piece of your former life. You begin to work to replace the pieces that have been lost forever with new visions and new challenges. As the years count up and the statistics swing further and further in your wife’s favor, the grief and the fear slowly start to fade, and a new sense of equilibrium emerges.

Things change. There is a chill in the air that seems to come from something other than the shifting season. The phone rings, and it’s your sister. The latest tests have only confirmed what
she already knows in her heart: that the cancer bus will eventually stop on her street as well. She makes the hard, brave choice to sacrifice ostensibly healthy flesh in return for a better chance of seeing her children grown, and has the further courage to ask for help in the recovery process. Although you commit without hesitation, the prospect stirs the ashes and echoes of semi-forgotten things, and you grow apprehensive. You aren’t sure how exactly you can help – you only know that you must go. Step in.

The mechanical shudder of the plane pulling back from the jetway brings you back to your current undertaking. A book of short stories sits unopened in your lap as you rise through the rain’s delicate drumbeat. The clouds around you thicken and roil, then dissipate, revealing a clear and impossibly vast blue sky. Suspended in this singularly beautiful place, you become only vaguely conscious of motion. Dropping down at last, returning, your aerial panorama is slowly filled by the rolling, blue-gray serenity of the Pacific.

The next airport, like all airports, is a cluttered confusion of motion and intention. No one is there by accident; they are all purposefully en route. They are headed off to vacations, business meetings, weddings, honeymoons, funerals, graduations, and all manner of human events and endeavors. Some running towards; others running away. In the kinship you feel with both groups, you find your state of apprehension has lightened, replaced to some degree by humility. You are humbled by the bond of family, and the call to tend to another’s needs. You are humbled because once again the fight is not yours, and you are awed by the capacity of such powerful and resilient women.

You alternate between reading and watching the crowds move along the airport halls. Finally one story holds your attention: a Jack London piece in which an aging boxer is beginning to realize that he is losing a match to his more youthful opponent. Unable to stop the blows, the veteran reaches out against each swing and hits his opponent on the biceps just before the punch connects. It is the move of a fighter who knows and accepts that he is about to get hit, and makes a conscious choice to do what he can to lessen the impact: “It was true, the blow landed each time; but each time it was robbed of its power by that touch on the biceps”.  You decide that this is your task: to soften the blow.

You rise again, drifting out over the great, brown ocean of the Southwest. From the air, the evening shadows fall long across the bone-dry arroyos, transforming them into dark, jagged streaks of earthbound lightning. You land in darkness, but soon the full moon rises from beyond the Sandia Mountains to the east, sanctifying the cooling desert below.

You awake to a boundless wave of energy from your nephews, who – although they were just born – are now somehow inexplicably three and five. While in some measures it’s apparent that they, like you, harbor the strong desire to return to the old normal, they possess the remarkable innocence and elasticity of youth, and move forward largely undaunted.

The days fill with helping Dad get the boys get off to school and picking them up in the afternoon, with snacks and naps and stories and endless games of Go Fish. You put your hand to meals and dishes and shopping and laundry and the other countless details that make a household run, help a mother heal, and let a father focus his time on being with his wife and children. Oddly, none of it feels like work. Evenings after baths and brushing teeth and yet another recital of Curious George, Dad puts the boys to bed and then the two of you exchange notes on the newly-common experience of being a caregiver. In the quiet pause of the hurricane eye while Dad is at work and the boys are in school, you and your sister pull up Adirondack chairs outside in the still-warm New Mexico sun and talk about life, recovery, and healing as if they were concepts somehow distinct from one another. Each day you watch as she grows stronger.

These are days and hours you will remember forever. You sit on a park bench, watching your nephews run, climb, imagine and create, and begin to fully grasp that your permanent frame of reference will be to see them as younger than they are. You thank whatever version of God in which you believe that your sister’s pathology report came back negative, and offer a simple prayer that her sacrifice will be rewarded in a long life abundant with such moments.

Amidst the absurd collision of the mundane, the perilous, the anguished and the perfectly joyful that is everyday life, you realize that your true usefulness, then as now, was less in your doing this or that, and more in just your being there. Although the land is deep in drought, your thoughts cannot help but return to water, and you know in their own rhythms the rains will come again. The currents will gather and deepen, then take their wild course over the parched, waiting landscape. You see yourself hesitate at the torrent’s edge, and then step in, letting the water break around and over you, shaping you, moving you on to where you need to be.