I sank into a chair and sat still for a few minutes to think about my troubles, and then I got up and went to the barn, catching up on some odds and ends that needed tending to. Unconsciously I held off, for an hour, the deed by which I would officially recognize the collapse of the performance of raising a pig; I wanted no interruption in the regularity of feeding, the steadiness of growth, the even succession of days. I wanted no interruption, wanted no oil, no deviation. I just wanted to keep on raising a pig, full meal after full meal, spring into summer into fall. –EB White, “Death of a Pig”

Yesterday I tried to go to a regular yoga class at noon. It was the kind of hot yoga class that I used to go to every day without much of a second thought, you know, in the BC (Before Cancer) days. I should have expected that the class would be full of beautiful, fit university students. the instructor was like, “Okay, you’re in a plank. Can you raise your left foot? Now can you raise your left hand? Side plank time!” Then there was a sequence that involved going from chair pose to eagle to toppling tree to crescent moon to standing splits. At this point, it’s worth mentioning that I hate crescent moon more than anything, and it took me decades to even attempt it because, even at my most fit, I thought it was a cruel joke. Now I will attempt a standing split with the knowledge that it will never be pretty.

Just the day before I was at the downtown Y doing “chair yoga” in a dim room in the basement, where I was the youngest person by at least 20 years. And I won’t tell you that it was easy. “I think that chair yoga is as intense as the real thing,” Sue, my bright-eyed fellow-cancer sufferer told me chipperly in the Y locker room, “I love it!” So I went to chair yoga, and got to take a load off of my left foot, which is sprained for reasons that I need not go into here, but gives me a new appreciation for all the work that is done by the tiny muscles and bones in your foot.

It’s probably a good measurement of where my body is at. I go to acupuncture twice a week, as per one of my New Year’s resolutions, to deal with the peripheral neuropathy and the nerve pain in my right hip. I used to be a regular at adult fitness classes – yoga, weights, etc. – and now I’m looking forward to Tai Chi at the local community school tomorrow night. I used to climb 5.10s at the rock-climbing gym and hope (unsuccessfully) to pass the lead climb test. Now I take the kids to the climbing gym and cheer them from the sidelines. Sure, cancer takes its toll, but I’m aging at the same time, so maybe this is the season of life when I’m supposed to call it quits?

Or maybe I was too fit to begin with. I spent decades getting to be able to hold a tree pose, and now I’m just too wobbly. So today I went back to chair yoga, where I can still do tree pose but get to grab onto a chair if I wobble. But Sue was not there to cheer me on. In fact, I learned that Sue died unexpectedly on Saturday. The last time that we talked, we said a quick and partial good-bye in the Y locker room. “I’m sure I’ll see you again before your surgery next week!” and she quickly agreed. She was deep in conversation with someone else when I left because she knew everyone in that room. I was grateful to her for knowing just when to seek me out and share her experiences, as she always had her little walker to keep her mobile, her baggy lululemon pants and her leg wraps so that she could work out. “I wasn’t feeling great this morning, but then I realized that if I don’t come here, then my day will get even worse!” she reported. And then we made plans to go to chair yoga.

The news of the death of my pig traveled fast and far, and I received many expressions of sympathy from friends and neighbors, for no one took the event lightly and the premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar, a sorrow in which it feels fully involved. I have written this account in penitence and in grief, as a man who failed to raise his pig, and to explain my deviation from the classic course of so many raised pigs. The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it, singly and together, in seasons of reflection and despair, on flagless memorial days of our own choosing.  –EB White, “Death of a Pig”

As culture, we don’t talk about menopause very much. It must be as important as puberty, motherhood, or any other major biological turning point, but I have yet to learn much about it. Some of my older female friends have been kind enough to offer a little wisdom, like: “Menopause changes everything,” “I don’t think I slept well for over a decade,” “Your body’s going to do what it’s going to do,” and, “Thank goodness that’s over.”  When I learned that menopause would start immediately upon having my ovaries removed tomorrow around noon, that was possibly the scariest part. That and the part about it being irreversible.  Keep ’em coming, ladies!

I’ve been reading Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection. I have a confession to make: I’ve never read or seen The Vagina Monologues.  But I know enough to know that it is highly ironic that Eve Ensler would develop cancer in her uterus and vagina. Her writing about it is wonderfully expressive and unabashedly political. It won’t replace The Bright Hour as my favorite memoir of the cancer experience, but it is way up there on my list.  If you read her work as earnest, it is insufferable, but if you read it as ironic, then it makes more sense. Here’s one thing she wrote:

HOW’D I GET IT?

Was it tofu?

Was it failing at marriage twice?

Was it never having babies?

Was it having an abortion and a miscarriage?

Was it talking too much about vaginas?

Was it worry every day for fifty-seven years that I wasn’t good enough?

Was uit the pressure to fill Madison Square Garden with eighteen thousand or the Superdome with forty thousand?

Was it the exhaustion of trying to change?

Was it the city?

Was it the line of two hundred women repeated in hundreds of small towns for many years after each performance, after each speech, women lined up to show me their scars, wounds, warrior tattoos?

Was it suburban lawn pesticides?

Was it Chernobyl?

Three Mile Island?

Was it my father smoking Lucky Strikes and my mother smoking Marlboros?

Was it my father dying slowly and never calling to say good-bye?

Was it my mother’s thinness and frailty?

Was it bad reviews?

Or good reviews?

Was it being reviewed?

Was it sleeping with men who were married?

Was it always being third?

Was it my first husband sleeping with my close friend?

Was it shopping and needing to shop?

Was it being a vegetarian for thirty years?

Was it Froot Loops?

Massive chorine in swimming pools?

Was it Tab? I drank a lot of Tab after I got sober.

Was it Lilt (the tosic-smelling substance my mother used to perm my hair)?

Was it Tame (the solution she used to get the tangles out)?

Was it crinoline (the abusive and starchy material I used to have to wear under all my dresses)?

Was it Shirley Temples? Ginger ale with red dye number two juice and a red dye number two cherry on top–a favorite of the sophisticated country club alcoholic father.

Was it drinking water out of plastic bottles?

Not being breast fed?

Canned chop suey?

TV dinners?

Was it turquoise popsickles?

Was it Epstein Barr?

Was it in my blood?

Was it already decided?

Was it deet?

Was it that I didn’t cry enough?

Or cried too much?

Was it promiscuous sex?

All those arrests at nuclear power plants?

Sleeping in radioactive dust?

Was it my IUD?

Was it birth control pills?

Was it not enough boundaries?

Was it too many walls?

Damn, I forgot to get arrested at nuclear power plants. But I did use Tame and drink the occasional Shirley Temple, so we have that much in common. I am grateful for those who can articulate what the illness experience involves, and Ensler has been an important voice for women’s experiences.

So it’s the holidays. I’m pretty sure that last night’s latkes are still slowly being digested in my stomach, which is at it should be on Hanukkah. As many recent articles and posts have noted, there’s not a lot, materially that we NEED over the holidays, other than the time and the experience of being together, so gifts are really not the point. However, your time, which has really come to be a stand-in for your life, is certainly valuable. It occurred to me that one of the nicest gifts that I have gotten is the people who have taken the time to read The Bright Hour or another cancer memoir that shares the experience of living with cancer on a day-to-day basis, so thank you to those who have done this, and if you are thinking of doing it, realize that this is something that you have done for yourself and for people who benefit from having their experiences voiced, shared, and heard.