destiny

A long while away from this space after a day last week that began easily enough in our kitchen with my daughter and transpired into another Dartmouth ER visit and a prolonged stay. Days and nights chopped into mosaic pieces. MDs and RNs, the revolving cast of the Dartmouth surgical team, my daughters, pain meds, ice chips, me sitting up and begging for a patch-up to get me to my next chemo appointment… Get me out of this chronic patient repeat.

Now, five of the six chemo treatments completed, I am in the final haul. While my in-box filled up (thank you for your patience), and I was moved from room to room by kind people, I kept thinking of this cancer in a narrative arc. I had hit the section of story where the impossible commences. Before, things looked grim. But now, as protagonist in my own story, the arc swerves sharply, the longed-for light-at-the-end of the tunnel snuffs out, the path is hidden.

I’m not a writer for naught, for make-believe or play. I’m a writer because I know our lives tread meaningful albeit sometimes horribly hard paths. Lean in, I counseled myself, my shoulders far skinnier now but just as fierce. Use math. Get to the fifth infusion. Get to the sixth. Count down the finite days to the end of this treatment, which is, thankfully, eradicating the cancer. In the mosaic: my two daughters, the plastic IV tubing, the doctors in their masks, the ER nurse who stayed long past his shift in the middle of the night, holding my hand and assuring me that, yes, indeed, I would endure.

This is my story, but also the human story, in all our infinite variations of human desire, choice, the immutability of fate.

Sunny morning in our kitchen, birdsong, the fierce thrust towards spring.

A rare epiphany today. Sitting in on a grade school math class, I listened to children figure strategies to determine the precise number between 28 and 43.

Like that, I saw in the sunny classroom the mistaken path I’d taken in my novel’s rough draft. So intent was I on constructing the whole that I’d overlooked the necessity of knowing each particular piece – the unknown that will carry me from 28 to 43. Is it merely that I feared to lose sight of the whole? In each of my characters – as in every one of us – there’s an empty place, a yearning of trembling hunger.

After school, sprawled on the dim staircase while the kids practiced basketball, I wrote my own variation of strategies for those missing pieces – about the teenage boy who lost the lucky rabbit’s foot he had stolen from a corner store years before, while his uncle argued with the cashier about a lottery ticket. As stolen contraband (and girly pink), the boy had kept the rabbit’s foot hidden. Through coincidence, a woman finds the broken thing ground into an icy road….

In the handful of those classroom moments, I realized these pieces might form the schematic of this novel yet-in-the-writing, and while amorphous destiny hides from us, the coincidences winding us unwittingly together are a misplaced rabbit’s foot or a sweater left on someone’s chair.

… over time, we stop perceiving familiar things – words, friends, apartments – as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

— Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

After an absence, return.

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