Any Place Less Beautiful

This morning I feel like the UP is doing its best SLC-inversion-day imitation—heavy hanging sky swallowing all possibility from the day. It’s the sort to spend in bed, reading or sleeping or holding someone else.

Last night a friend called me to tell me about some struggles he’s having and also noted that he’s trying to learn to be a self-soother—someone who leans less on his friends because there’s likely no need to pull them into his drama.

Drama—a play for theatre radio or television; an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances. Read—life.

Maybe I’ve never known how to be a self-soother. Maybe I don’t believe in that. I’ve spent the better part of this year alone in a cabin that was, in my mind, going to be a reprieve, a writing space, a lovely place in the loveliest place where I could refuel and recalibrate. I knew the quietude of such a place would force me to grapple with a decade of difficulty and loss—my mother’s death, broken love, single motherhood—but I welcomed the challenge and the chance. This gray morning I think maybe I couldn’t have handled this year any place less beautiful.  

Let’s forget for a moment the plethora of ways this house has either tried to kill us or quit itself this winter—carbon monoxide leaks, frozen water pipes, broken washer, broken dryer, broken wood stove, garage door closing on my car, snowfall ripping the deck from the house, a tree (a fucking tree!) falling on my head, and on and on—because none of this matters at all.

160 miles from here, in the city and house where I was born, my father props himself up each day in a kitchen chair, where he watches television and bides his time. By his time, I mean the remaining days of breathing he has here on earth, and by breathing I mean struggle. Lung cancer. 160 miles. A distance just far enough that, with a son in school here, I can’t be there everyday but just close enough that I should be there everyday.

I remind myself that nothing is about me now, but this ache is certainly about me, surrounding me, inside me growing like it feeds on every cell, every tissue, every muscle. Ache. Cancer.

A tumor the size of his thumb stoppers one of his bronchi. No air in, no air out. One whole lung of two lungs already damaged from 50 years of smoking and working with hazardous material. For some time, walking and cooking and generally caring for himself has become next to impossible. They say that with aggressive chemo and radiation, he has a 25-35% cure rate. Without treatment, 3-6 months.

I keep hearing my mentor tell me that at any job interview or campus visit, my job is to make the committee comfortable. Set them at ease. Make it easy to be around me.

Last week I used a scissors to hack through Dad’s two-month beard—the pink stain where he’d been spitting blood into white hair. It took me two days to get down to the smooth of his face again. It was one of the saddest and most intimate things I’ve ever done.

How do I make my father comfortable? How do I make it easy for him to be, to let go (should he choose to do so)? How do I lift the lid from this day that hangs over all of his days going forward or just going? How do I make my friend believe grief is something we bear and carry alone, but that living is leaning on others in moments when we’re reduced to survival?

I once loved a man who told me he didn’t believe in sharing his personal grief with the world and he didn’t appreciate anyone sharing theirs with him. He didn’t need to be pulled into their lives, their drama. I guess I understood that insofar as it pertained to strangers who seemed to be needy but maybe didn’t appear to be in grave need, but who am I to gauge the weight of anyone else’s struggle. How can I know the woman driving toward me with her bright lights shining in my eyes hasn’t forgotten not because she’s fiddling with her iphone but because her mind is somewhere else entirely, struggling with something real?

I feel weird writing any of this. I feel even more weird thinking of posting it. But I feel too much to be alone in this cabin, removed from all the friends who would hug me if they could, estranged from much of my family, and staring at such a dense and heavy sky.

I think maybe I need words now, and if anyone is reading this, and if anyone has any words to share—links to poems, songs, whatever—please feel free to share them.

While I was pulling the coarse hair away from Dad’s face, in order to try to not cut him, I told him (knowing he probably won’t be here to see my book published next year) that I recently wrote the acknowledgements for the book, in which I thanked him for instilling in me a love of music, always making me tell him what songs meant or making me pull back the needle to hear again what a singer said, etc. For the wholly complicated nature of our relationship and the sadness and anger we both hold, I’m grateful.

One of his favorite songs: