The other day, A. decided he was curious if he remembered correctly: What had actually happened during chemo?
He opened the app that documents his medical records and scrolled back over a year and a half to the first time he was hospitalized. He’d had a fever that cycled up and down, up and down. He spent over a week in the hospital. It took days for doctors across several specialties to figure out what was happening.
Eventually, he was diagnosed with PCP pneumonia, which affects mainly people with HIV, blood cancers, or otherwise weakened immune systems (the rest of us manage to fight it off).
We remembered that he saw a pulmonologist. An infectious disease specialist. His hematologist.
But what were they thinking, before he was diagnosed?
A. reached the report from that appointment. And then came over to show me.
“Diagnosis: Possible sepsis.”
…
Oh.
The day I write up this story, I realize I’m close to filling up my current morning journal. It’s a 180-page five-subject notebook I started in November 2017. I took an unplanned break from writing for almost a year. Now, there’s room for five more mornings of journaling.
And so, for the first time in over a year, I turn back to the first entries in the notebook. I find documented, day by day, the second of six chemo cycles. And I read.
I read about the insanity of our lives in November 2017, about how many things were happening at the same time, about wanting to figure out rugs and wall decorations for the apartment we’d only moved into the day before the first chemo cycle. I read of trying to focus on the silver lining of having a treatable form of cancer and on the personal growth that came with it, but also of frustration at the cost of that growth, at the physical and mental exhaustion, at the fact that we barely had a chance to process what was happening once treatment started, at the destruction of the body of someone I loved. I read words of gratitude for all the help we received and words acknowledging how difficult it is to receive help. I read of resentment that we were in the position of having to be grateful. I read of attempts to maintain an emotional connection. I read of frustration with others, but also a willingness to engage on the things that mattered, to find a solution that worked well enough for everyone. I read of compassion. I read of fear and anger and a lack of confidence. I read of a compulsion to do rather than think, to get through the day.
As I read, I feel for the person who wrote these words, even as I feel disconnected, often reading with eyes wide in horror.
And yet.
In the school of Hellenistic philosophy called Stoicism, there’s a saying, “Memento mori.” Remember you will die.
The idea, as I understand it, is that being aware of death is liberating. It pushes you to live life, to have purpose and pursuits, because time is finite.
I wonder sometimes if we only say mortality, the passage of time, the changes of the season, motivate us simply because we live in a world subject to these things. If it’s like all other attempts to attribute meaning to something without inherent meaning.
Yes, there are studies that show shorter time spans increase productivity, but they all take place in this world of aging and disease and limited lifespans and changing seasons.
And yet, for myself, I find it’s true.
Looking back, I can recognize: I used to be there, even as my understanding of “there” changes with new discoveries and reflection.
And then: I have today.
This Glass Has Water 