body, just as the winds and rains from a hurricane are forces of nature that act on the earth. We are so small, insignificant, and powerless in the face of those unleashed forces in spite of the marvels of shelter and modern medicine. There comes a time when one must admit that powerlessness and evacuate ahead of the deadly hurricane, rather than remain behind and make some kind of empty symbolic gesture of “fuck you.” Similarly, there comes a time when one must recognize the futility of continuing the personal physical fight against cancer, when chemo is no longer a desirable option, when one should begin the process of saying goodbye and understand that death is not the enemy, but merely the next part of life. Determining that time is a deliberation that each of us must make with her own heart and soul. This is what Kathryn has done; she respects the force of nature acting on her body and has no delusions about somehow still overcoming; she made the cogent decision to evacuate ahead of the hurricane. To me, she has won her war against cancer so valiantly fought in the nonphysical realm.
Yet another dying friend, C, just posted on Four Corners (a subgroup of Colontown that is exclusively for those of us with Stage IV colorectal cancer, where we can freely and safely say the things that would terrify those who live with a lower-stage cancer) about what it was like for her—as per the family therapist’s suggestion—to sit in the next room as her husband and sister-in-law told her children that treatment was no longer working and that their mother was going to die from this disease. What it was like to hear her children’s cries and not be able to comfort them, for that heartbreaking task had to be left to their future caregivers.
These are the times in life when we feel almost more than we are capable of feeling. These are the moments when—paradoxically, as we are closest to death—we are most painfully and vividly alive.
13
The Crossroads of the World
A crossroads is a place where multiple roads converge, and is a point at which a decision needs to be made about what road to take as one continues on the journey. Which way to go? When my final day of chemo arrived, on January 13, it certainly felt like a crossroads, a decision point where scans would soon follow and Josh, my doctor, and I would have to decide what to do next. So somehow it felt right that I should end up at Times Square, known as it is (ostentatiously) as the Crossroads of the World.
January 13 felt like a momentous day—Cousin N, who is like a sister to me, had flown from Los Angeles the day before to be with me for the last session and to spend the week; Cousin C, who is also like a sister to me and who lives in Connecticut, left her young children for twenty-four hours (something she hadn’t done in four years) to sleep over the night before so she could come with me to chemo as well. My actual sister, Lyna (who lives in New York City), also came to spend the night—Lyna and Cousin N slept on the full-size air mattress, and Cousin C took the couch.
As we like to remind each other often in a half-joking way (especially when one seems to have become spoiled by her soft life), no matter how Americanized we have become, we can never forget that we came to this country on a sinking boat from Vietnam and should have no problems sleeping on couches, air mattresses, and floors; a carpeted floor covered by a flat cotton sheet was where we slept often as children, with not even the padding of a sleeping bag—what did a bunch of Vietnamese refugees know about sleeping bags?
That night, Josh stayed home with Mia and Belle, and we four Yip girls went out to a dinner of fancy Asian fusion fare at a restaurant in the South Slope, opened by a Top Chef winner, laughing and gossiping just as we used to when we were little girls, except now we gossiped and complained about our aging Chinese parents, husbands, children, money, careers (or the sudden disappearance thereof), and all the stuff of ever-impending middle-aged adulthood. It felt so comfortable and yet poignant; how sad that it took something like my last session of chemotherapy for advanced colon cancer to bring