Interactions at intersections

I’m on a main street, driving straight. You’re on a side street ahead of me, at the intersection with the main street. You want to turn right to go where I’m going, or maybe you want to cross my lanes and turn left, or maybe you want to go straight through, cross the intersection, and stay on the side street.

There’s traffic and a red light coming up. If I stop now, I can let you through. Or I can keep going and block you. 

Maybe I keep going because I don’t realize how little space will be left for you. Maybe I’m just thinking about other things. Maybe I stop far enough in advance to give you space to decide what to do next.

Does the person in the other lane stop? Is there room for you to turn right or left or cross the intersection?

Will you acknowledge any of us before you go? As you go? After you go? What about if I (oops) block you?

Will we smile at each other? Will we raise our hands, display our palms in a “thank you” and “I acknowledge your thank you”? Will we flick each other off? Will we slam our hands on the steering wheel because of the other person’s audacity to ignore our needs, whether or not we were in their line of sight? Will we realize we recognize each other and wave excitedly? Or will we note for the future to beware of drivers with the other person’s… style? 

 

Today, this is what happens:

I stop far enough in advance to give you the space you need to go where you want to go. The person in the next lane stops, too. There’s room for you. You acknowledge us as you pass with a thank you palm, a nod, a small smile. 

Will we see each other again?

Unlikely. 

But this happy little exchange? It makes me grateful for traffic.

And who can ask for more than that?

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Sounds of a beautiful morning

The sun is shining. The birds may be singing, but I can’t hear them. What I can hear is a dog barking. And the highway. So many cars on the highway. Oh, the pleasures of being able to look out the window and check traffic. There’s a drill going now. Here’s my partner chewing on some grapes. Aaaand now he’s chewing slower and giving me the side-eye.* The guy upstairs just dropped something. And always in the background, the un-disable-able clicking of the keyboard on my laptop.

Have a beautiful day.

 

* Reading aloud as I write.

 

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Which person would you rather talk to?

One week last fall, I had two polar opposite customer service-type experiences. 

I went to a doctor at a reputable center—a specialist I was referred to with a specific but not urgent problem—and I spoke with someone in the collections department at the IRS about requesting penalty forgiveness.

One was kind, respectful, and caring enough to make sure I understood exactly what had happened, what would happen, and what I should do. He empathized. He was relaxed, spoke with a sense of humor, and gave me a clear understanding of how this phase in the process works. 

The other was a doctor.

The doctor did the minimum possible and after that shrugged me off, answered my questions obscurely and in brief, and tried to refer me back to the person who’d sent me his way. I resisted—I’d put a lot of time into this already, and thought perhaps there was a legitimate reason I was sent his way in the first place. And when, after repeated questions on my part, I finally understood something, he gave me a condescending, “Oh, you’re smart.” 

(I think you know that this is not the rule. I’ve been to wonderful doctors. And I’ve spoken to IRS representatives who don’t know what they’re talking about. And I’ve come across people who were neither wonderful nor horrible but had the self-awareness and honesty to respond well when probed for more. 

Here’s one story I like that illustrates the last of these:

My mother, years ago, had strange long-standing symptoms that were eventually diagnosed as hypoglycemia. Years before she was finally diagnosed, she had some tests done. The doctor said: “It’s nothing.” My mother (and here you’ll understand where I come from): “If it’s nothing, what is it?” The doctor: “If it’s nothing, then we don’t know.”)

But I think this goes to show that anyone, in any position, however theoretically unpleasant (I repeat: IRS collections) can be lovely to work with. To interact with. And our expectations are so, so low, that if you simply care enough to understand where your customer is coming from and to help her get where she wants to go—you stand out. You’re memorable in the best possible way. And we are ever grateful. 

For having called the IRS.

 

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Dreading the end of chemo

About a month before A’s last chemo infusion, I suddenly realized that all the things we’d been struggling with before cancer—improving our communication, sorting our work situations, figuring out our priorities—all of those problems were waiting for us when treatment ended. They’d be there, whether or not we were ready to handle them, and we’d have to deal with them. And with all the mail that had arrived in the intervening months that we had ignored. With all the trivial and significant things we’d put on the back-burner. At that point, it felt like a lot of things.

I dreaded the end of the treatment. I wasn’t ready to deal with our problems, those lingering, patient yet insistent annoyances and struggles and obstacles and insecurities and inconveniences and irresponsibilities and well-the-math-doesn’t-quite-add-up-there-does-its. I didn’t even have time to process the preceding months—I’m still not quite sure I’ve done that—and I was totally unprepared to deal with real life. 

How strange that this happens. That cancer is so horrible, and cancer treatment potentially even worse—so much physical, emotional, psychological suffering; such a risk of unknown yet incredibly serious side effects; potential death due to any infection, even borne within your own body, during low immunity—and yet, we dread the end of it. 

Cancer puts everything else on hold. Nothing is as important as doing everything we need to, everything we—and family and friends—can do to get ourselves through it. Therapy. Reading. Conversations. With luck, a lot of support. And neglecting normal responsibilities just as much as we can, which often means completely. 

Cancer gives us purpose. There’s a problem, and (if we’re lucky) there’s a plan for how to solve it. We always have the option to go off the beaten path, but as long as the patient is well enough and the doctor has solutions for problems that come up, there’s a prescribed route. Appointments, biopsies, scans, blood tests ad nauseum, chemotherapy, rinse and repeat.

Someone else sets the agenda for us.

And then it ends.

The social worker A spoke with when he got a second opinion said that the couple of months following treatment might be when we’d need the most support (because we would have to actually adjust back to whatever normal life would now look like) and have the least (because we wouldn’t have any unless we made plans for it since people assume you’re done when the treatment’s over). 

In the months after chemo ended, I had occasional overwhelming feelings. Resentment about my small life. I didn’t leave the county for a solid year. Me. Who other people see as a world-traveler, a language-learner, an always-up-for-an-adventurer. The COUNTY. I was only semi-on top of things at home, always dropping some balls (often to do with paperwork and keeping the house fully, actually clean and not just haphazardly vacuumed/swept). A, even with cancer, traveled much more than I did in the year after he was diagnosed: he had work trip after the lymph node biopsy but before the results came in, and three more brief work and personal trips in the months before I also ventured out of town.

And there I was. Home. Running errands. Buying food, making food, cleaning up after food. Doing the bare minimum. Nervous about actually getting a grasp on our finances. Nervous about writing, and about not writing. Nervous about making a career for myself—about succeeding and about failing. About letting other people down. About keeping myself small. About how our relationship would be. About what the new normal would look like and how we would even get there.

The worries I had before, plus the worries triggered by cancer and months of chemo, multiplied by the months they lay dormant.

I don’t think I should have to write that of course we were incredibly relieved, joyous even, when A finished treatment; when his immune system came back; when his follow-up PET scan was clear.

But, as always, real life is a bit more complex. The good—the end of treatment, the clear scans—requires incredible emotional work to enjoy.

And then, of course, there’s all the paperwork.

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You should see the other guy

A sure sign I’m starting to get nervous about this upcoming CT scan is that cancer is gradually taking over my thoughts.

On the upside: material!

 

Last spring, A’s longtime friend visited us with his partner. They got into a–fortunately minor–car accident. His friend broke his wrist but didn’t tell his family, who would be picking them up at the airport when they flew home to take them straight to an Easter celebration. 

A joked that they would be astounded that his wrist broke on such a low-key trip—we weren’t exactly rappelling during their visit.

And then his friend responded. Or, I’ll say: You should see the other guy. He got cancer.

 

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PTS-Cancer

I know. I know.

The abbreviation doesn’t make logical sense.

But it sounds way better than P-Cancer-SD, and PTCSD is a mouthful, and PCSD sounds too much like PTSD, and, besides, PTS-Cancer sounds funny. So here we are.

 

PTS-Cancer is what we call cancer-induced anxiety or depression, though the anxiety is perhaps easier to describe.

For example…

My thought process one day shortly after the end of chemo:

A hasn’t called me back yet. He had a PET scan yesterday. He’s probably waiting to tell me till he gets home, like he did with the cancer. Oh my god, it’s back. I wonder how far along it is. Will it be watch-and-wait or will he need a stem cell transplant? 

and

What A experienced during the month of December:

A‘s talking an old classmate about her cancer diagnosis and treatment decisions. His grandmother is dying [the other one died a month after he was diagnosed last year]. He’s got a cold [a persistent cough originally led to discovering the cancer]. He’s got a CT scan scheduled for next month to see if everything is okay. 

PTS-Cancer is any time that downward-spiraling thoughts about cancer make us feel a need to pull ourselves together and put on a normal face in order to interact with the world.

 

A‘s beloved, sharp-witted, hilarious, somewhat feared grandmother died early this morning. May her memory be a blessing.

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The magic of everyday encounters

When I plan to meet someone sometime, somewhere, we don’t always follow up in the days or night or hours before. And then, as I make my way over to where we’re meeting, I wonder: Is this actually going to happen? Will the other person be there, or did I imagine this? Do we share the same reality?

And then, I arrive, and the other person’s there, or pulling up next to me, or arriving within minutes, and all I can think is,

Wow.

There are so many little things that have to line up for this meeting to take place. We have to commit to something and remember it (or record it and remember to check the record). We have to experience the same time and have the same understanding of place. We have to have a way to arrive and a desire to be there. We have to have nothing more important happen to make us forget this or to require our presence elsewhere. 

I feel the same way about the people I run into regularly in our neighborhood. What an act of faith it is to say, when you really mean it, “See you around.” “See you next week.” Trusting that something will happen because the earth revolves around the sun and the earth rotates on its axis and the moon waxes and wanes and L goes to the park on Tuesdays and J walks with his daughter on Thursdays. And if someone misses a week? There’s the week after. There are chance encounters by the check-out aisles at Trader Joe’s or while shivering in the produce refrigerator at Costco or in whichever aisle is most awkward for you, personally, at Target. 

We will meet. We will meet again.

And if we don’t? That’s the actual baseline. That’s what makes all the times we do see each other magical.

Unless we don’t like each other. Then they’re just annoying coincidences.

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What cancer taught me about our shared humanity

After A. was diagnosed with cancer, I began thinking of our experience as a way to better understand the human condition.

Pre-cancer

Before cancer, we never contemplated our mortality more than the average Joe or Jane.

For instance, soon after we returned from a trip Guatemala, an entire bus full of people fell off the side of a cliff; this led to several… minutes… of alternating shock and sorrow and relief over the next several days. (Is this callous? But how long do we usually spend contemplating events that are in the past and do not directly affect us, however horrifying they may be? How long did most people who found out about A.‘s cancer think about it?).

Our brushes with mortality were never significant enough to take away from our lives, to keep us from functioning. And so, even with our experiences, even with travel and actively seeking out other people’s stories, I was never really able to get, to really internalize, this key element of humanity:

Our existence is *quite* precarious

When A. was diagnosed, he said that we all have this hazard function, this probability of dropping dead on any given day; the difference was that now he was aware of it.

Or, as Nina Riggs tells it in The Bright Hour,

I am reminded of an image that one of my cousins—a woman who lost her husband to a swift and brutal cancer last year—suggested to me recently over email: that living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more—sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.

And now we’re aware. We can see all the way down. We may forget, we may intentionally put blinders on most of the time so we can function, but we’ve seen the abyss and have gotten to know the ridges near the top quite well. I think—I hope—this awareness is permanent, because it sure cost a lot to get it.

For me, focusing on our common humanity is what helps me put one foot in front of the other. Common humanity is about both what I can offer and what I better understand. Realizing, and remembering, that we can use our experience to show other people what this can be like, that we can demystify it a little, that we can generally be open and available so that one day when it happens to someone else our experience can support them a little bit—this, to me, is half of the purpose of this experience.

The other half is this: that through this experience of being a partner and caretaker for someone going through cancer treatment, I’ve learned a lot about mortality. About disease. And about struggles in life in general.

Empathy: An upside to contemplating mortality

I believe there’s a small set of things we want in life. The details vary from culture to culture and from person to person, but on a high level, the set of potential desires is pretty small: We want some level of security—physical, nutritional, financial, emotional, psychological. We want to be healthy, to be able to use and rely on our bodies and our minds. We want some kinds of freedom of choice. We want to have some variety of love and/or companionship. We want some of these things: meaning, purpose, to feel like we’re growing and making progress.  There’s more, of course. I haven’t thought this through enough to claim this is all. The specifics matter, but I believe that for empathy, the circumstances matter more.

And these circumstances: they are complex. They are nuanced. And they, much more than the desires, are often invisible. It’s easy to assume you know all about other people’s lives, but what allows us to empathize with others is realizing that we don’t know, making a point to recognize the potential for all sorts of nuance we can’t actually see.

Getting that, understanding that we all have these super-unique circumstances—that is one of the major, expensive lessons that I learned from cancer.

Could I have learned it another way? Definitely. Sure, this way was effective. The downside is that it comes with lifetime toxicity for my partner and a host of mysterious, to-be-discovered short-, medium-, and long-term side effects. Plus, you know, all the depression and anxiety and life-interruption and still not solving all our problems from beforehand. So I don’t recommend learning this way. Learn by talking to people. Read books. Try method acting. Work or volunteer somewhere. Don’t get cancer, okay? Okay. I’m glad we’re on the same page.

The understanding, the relating to others, is one of the reasons I like to tell people what I can when they ask—because there’s no other way of learning how other people live life and what they face, and of therefore realizing down the road that even if the specifics differ, you’re not alone in struggling. In facing mortality. In wondering how you’ll make it through the day.

The paradox is that the differing specifics bring us together. You can only share your perspective, but it is exactly that story that allows you to reach and teach other people.

What we all have in common is nuance.

Story time

A. went to a sushi restaurant in the spring. It’d been ages since he’d had sushi because the chemo compromised his immune system and raw fish isn’t recommended when you have no way of fighting infections.

He sat at the bar next to an older couple.

They married in the mid-1960s, so they’ve got to be at least in their mid-70s. They looked healthy, fit, young, happy, even joyful, out at one of their favorite restaurants, being treated to free dishes because it was the restaurant’s anniversary and they’re regulars.

They talked. A. mentioned he works at the university. The woman said that’s great, we need as many doctors as we can get.

Oh, but I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a professor… But speaking of doctors, the reason I didn’t eat sushi for a while is because I was going through chemo for a rare type of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 

And guess what? She said she’s had Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma for nearly 20 years.

When the couple left, she grabbed A. by the shoulders and told him to look into the mirror every morning and say to himself, “I am at ease. I do not have this disease.”

Here’s what I like about this story:

First: A., who is normally an incredibly compassionate person, was seeing and sitting next to and talking to this couple. In the midst of struggling to go back to all of his life roles and responsibilities after just completing cancer treatment, he told himself they were happy and healthy and probably never had to face problems like his.

The reality appears to have been the opposite: this particular couple probably knew how to appreciate a good moment when they had it. Which is a reminder that you can never assume you know what other people have experienced in life, and also that it is possible to emerge from the depths of disease and struggle, even if they quite literally accompany you forever, and find ways to enjoy life.

Second: I grew up keeping a lot of things to myself or within my family. I thought it wasn’t appropriate to talk to other people about negative experiences, so I didn’t.

What I have found repeatedly through this experience is that you are often rewarded when you share. You tell someone else about your humanity, your past or present struggle, and amazingly, surprisingly, upliftingly, sadly, shockingly often, way more often than seems statistically probable, you will hear about someone else’s similar struggle. And then you are together for a moment.

Our shared humanity, remembering that we are in this together, that even the bad things bring us closer together, helps us make it through. It doesn’t make the bad things good. It doesn’t make them worth it. But you don’t have a choice about the bad things, certainly not once they’ve happened. So at least this: a reminder that there’s still water in the glass.

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