fiercely. Then I’ll look into her eyes in that single second before she wants to run off, and I’ll ask her, “Is Mommy going to be okay, Belle?”
“Yes,” she always says.
Belle is too young to understand that Mommy is sick, yet I believe that some part of her ageless spirit understands what’s going on. When Belle hugs me now, I feel as if she’s giving of herself to me—her hope, her joy, her life force.
When Belle started seeing ghosts, I remembered a poem I had read in high school, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, in which he expressed the idea that children are born “trailing clouds of glory,” with the innocence, purity, and knowledge from having just come from God. It is the process of growing up, and the corrupting influence of society and life, that strips them of all their innate angelic goodness, what Wordsworth called their “hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.”
And what about us adults, who are long past our moments of trailing clouds of glory and our hours of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower? What of those of us who have been indelibly (and suddenly) scarred by our broken dreams and who might be swallowed by our own bitterness in the face of illness and impending loss? What are we to do? Wordsworth is not without advice for us:
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
Indeed, we will grieve not for what is lost but find strength in what remains behind, through the bonds of human sympathy born of common suffering, and in our faith in something greater than we can conceive of. And no doubt, finding strength in what remains behind includes rediscovering the magic and wonder of our powerful children and letting them help us walk through our darkest hours.
5
The Warfare, and the Weapons
An irony in all this is that before this lousy diagnosis, I was in the best shape of my life, working out five days a week. Exactly three weeks after the surgery, I was running again on the treadmill for twenty minutes. As I ran, I grew angry at the cancer. I started yelling at the cancer cells. “How dare you betray my body! How dare you threaten to take me away from my husband, babies, and all who love and need me! I will seek you out and I will destroy you!” I shrank to the size of the cancer cells and I began strangling them with my bare hands, reaching into their very DNA. Then I envisioned the chemo empowering me with a sword, with which I slashed them to a billion pieces, and then a gun. But nothing was as satisfying as crushing them with my bare hands.
Chemotherapy will start quickly, as there is reason to believe that the sooner the chemo starts the more effective it will be. I will be on a regimen called FOLFOX, which consists of three drugs, one of which—oxaliplatin—is very powerful. Common side effects: neuropathy (numbness and tingling, including extreme sensitivity to cold in the hands and feet), nausea, diarrhea, fatigue, weakened immune system, mouth sores, hair loss. Yes, hair loss. Ugh! So I will be shopping for a wig.
I will go in every two weeks. Oxaliplatin will be infused into me through a port (which will be implanted in my upper chest) during a two-hour period. I will then go home with a pump, through which the other two drugs will be infused into my body during the next two days.
The doctor also highly recommends switching to a plant-based diet and banning refined sugars. He says there isn’t any good science to support the proposition that such a diet will reduce the risk of cancer or recurrence, but I figure it can’t hurt. The most important thing the doctor told us is that there is every reason to be hopeful. My age, physical shape, the fact that all visible signs of cancer have been surgically removed, and advances in chemo are all factors working in my favor. To believe, to have faith in