I’d almost forgotten that I saved the amber-tinted bottles, but it made sense—I’ve always been a big fan of memento mori: love the gravedigger scene in Hamlet; love all those skulls in Renaissance paintings. There’s nothing like long bony teeth and hollow eye sockets to remind you how inconsequential you are. These little plastic containers—for Oxycontin, Dexamethasone, Zofran, and Compazine—weren’t exactly that. But still, they held memories of a treatment, of a near-death experience, of a time when I had to cut, burn, and poison my body to stay alive.
But that’s not what I wanted to write about. Surely the world has enough of those—I’ve even written a few myself. What interested me was the weird way that I had alchemized the experience so that now, many years after the fact, I viewed it through a gauzy veil of nostalgia. Most of the terror was gone, and what had seemed at the time like a gruesome nightmare had morphed into a sort of fairy tale and become just another thing that happened to me in 2004. Part but not all of me. I even missed the way I was back then—insanely focused, determined, willing to do whatever it took to survive.
These days, it’s a different story. I sit at my desk, my attention scattered, surrounded by a sea of medical claims and explanations of benefits that I can’t bear to read let alone file away. Emails from healthcare providers go unanswered. Days fly by without me doing the five or six basic things that everyone knows are beneficial to your health. Like eating oatmeal.
I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d start the essay, but almost immediately I was thinking of titles – Twenty Years After Cancer (straightforward, retrospective); When I Had Cancer (lyrical, elegiac); A Recipe for Cancer (whimsical, Nora Ephron); I Never Expected to Live This Long (Erich Segal, Love Story). Or Stir-fry Cancer – because that’s what I was doing when I found out.
It was late spring. Already, we had so much produce, and I didn’t want it to go to waste. The doctor called when I was chopping green onions. Said the “ulcer” he’d found when he’d done a recent endoscopy was malignant and I needed to come in and see a surgeon right away. He didn’t say it was advanced. He didn’t say it looked bad. But I could tell from his tone of voice that it was.
When Stan got home from work, he came in the kitchen. I was standing by the stove and told him the news. He put his arms around me. We cried. Then I went back to chopping vegetables because that’s just what you have to do when you’re making a stir-fry, all the little bowls lined up on the counter. That was my last normal moment for the next five years—which, I’d soon learn, was the window for a possible recurrence of my aggressive type of tumor.
The next few days were a blur. At Mount Sinai, I met with the surgeon, who cheerfully told me it was quite possible to live without a stomach. Hand-delivered those reports to Sloan Kettering for a second opinion. Went up to Columbia for an endoscopic ultrasound because that guy was supposed to be the best diagnostician in town.
For the first time—I was only fifty—Stan and I drew up our wills, filled out forms for power of attorney and health care proxy, and completed do-not-resuscitate orders. Then, over the long, wretched weekend when I was trying to decide between hospitals in a city with some of the finest in the world, we went to a matinee of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s scathing critique of the Bush administration. I was dying to see it, thought it would take my mind off my troubles, but minutes after it started, I was obsessing about surgeons.
One thing made it easy for me. After I picked Sloan, I put every ounce of whatever watered down, secular Jewish, rational humanist faith I had into that institution. Believed in the doctors, the nurses, the lab techs, even the billing department. Pledged allegiance to the fire of radiation and the poison of chemo. Trusted the power of Big Pharma to save me. Did whatever the doctors told me, whenever they told me to do it, for as long as I had to, no matter how crappy I felt, because I unquestioningly accepted the fact that they and only they could keep me alive. They were like the T-800 “good” cyborg in Terminator 2: “Come with me if you want to live.” I was like the overachieving Tracy Flick in the movie Election, frantically waving my hand for the teacher to call on me, running for president of the class of Stomach Cancer Patients of New York.
It was all I thought about, day and night. They cut away two-thirds of my stomach and stapled my abdomen back together, thus necessitating the prescription for Oxy—though after the surgery there was rarely pain. Indeed, parts of the treatment were even interesting, including the way my thin, dark, curly hair grew back after chemo—thicker, with red highlights—and also the changes in my sense of smell.
Take the chicken sandwiches, for instance, that were served in the chemo suite at Sloan. Utterly bland and inoffensive, industrial food. But as soon as the nurse came around with a tray, I wanted to gag. Now, with my altered sense of perception, they had a warm, rotting smell like raw meat past its expiration date.
Back home, on medical leave, I spent hours on the phone waiting to talk to doctors. Hours reading about the disease and its prognosis. Hours wrangling with representatives of my employer’s health insurance company. I’m sure those poor clerks in Dallas and Atlanta and Salt Lake—this was before all those jobs were moved offshore—dreaded it when my 212 number popped up on their screens.
The whole time, my goal was 100 percent compliance, a manic insistence on doing everything right that seemed to emanate from somewhere deep inside my brain, independent of me. I remember one of my doctors saying to me, right after I told him the diagnosis, “But you seem so calm.”
That’s what I was missing, that sense of focus and determination, as I gazed at those little pill bottles, those memento mori, while sitting on the edge of my bed—that frenzied desire to do whatever it took, including turning in an A+++ paper and an extra-credit book report, at every step of the process that had been carefully laid out for me in the doctors’ hushed, book-lined offices right after I was diagnosed.
I still remember the day of my next-to-last infusion at the clinic on East 53rd Street. By then, I’d gotten comfortable with the routine: the beige leather reclining chair, the tall metal pole with bags of fluid slowly draining into your arms.
When a nurse came by to see if I was okay, inexplicably I burst into tears. I told her I didn’t want the chemo to end, that I wanted to stay on it forever because it was the only thing that was keeping me alive. It must have alarmed her because the next thing I knew my oncologist, who never came to the chemo suite when patients were getting treatment, suddenly materialized by my side, looking like an overgrown teddy bear in a white lab coat, with his baby face and mess of dark curls, just another boy genius on the Sloan Kettering staff. (There were a lot of girl geniuses too.)
Sobbing, I told him that other people I knew who also had cancer had gotten way more chemo than I had, and that I was scared mine was almost over and was there any way I could have at least a maintenance dose for the rest of my life? Then he patiently explained what he’d told me months before, that this was the strongest, most effective protocol for my particular kind of cancer.
By the time he went back to his office, I was feeling buoyant, even ebullient. When the last bag was empty and all the tubes disconnected, Stan and I walked the whole way home, from midtown to the Upper East Side, stopping on the way to pick up takeout Chinese.
Why did I live when so many others die? Was it because I had absolute faith in my hospital and doctors and did everything they said? Was it because I was a white, middle-class woman with a good job and a health insurance plan that paid for treatment at one of the best cancer facilities in the world? Or was it luck?
Over the years I’ve come to think it was a little bit of each, but mostly the third. That, for whatever reason, the Death Star of radiation and chemo didn’t let a single cancer cell escape and hide out in some remote corner of my body. And simply for that reason—the seemingly random nature of my “cure”—which I still don’t quite believe—I’ve become somewhat superstitious about the whole thing.
If I’m walking up First Avenue toward the old red brick hospital where I had the operation, my eyes still well with tears. If I’m going by in a cab, I force myself to look, as though it would be bad luck – ptu! ptu! ptu! – not to. And I still can’t throw away the yellowing records of my treatment because they’ve become memento mori too.
So, I was all set to write a story about cancer nostalgia when, at the end of January, I went to my primary care provider for my annual physical and she found a lump in my breast. Told me to get a diagnostic mammogram and ultrasound. And suddenly, I was in Faulkner territory. The past wasn’t dead. It wasn’t even past.
…
In the two weeks it took me to schedule the follow-up scans, I catastrophized like it was 2004. My mind hurtled into the future. The inevitable biopsy, surgery, radiation, chemo. The wig store, the wills, all the forms to update, Stan standing by to run interference when I couldn’t bring myself to tell one more person how I was. And their reaction: sympathy from those who’d never had it, empathy from those who had. From everyone else, cards, flowers, baskets of food.
Only this time, I was sure, I wouldn’t be so lucky.
When the day of the tests arrived, I realized that I’d forgotten nothing, I knew the old routines all too well. Shower, avoid using deodorant, powders, lotions, perfume. Take the No. 6 train to midtown. Fill out the forms on the clipboard—the same information you’ve been giving them for thirty years. Get undressed, don a robe, surrender to the machines. Then nervously wait in your overly bright, freezing cubicle until the technician ushers you into the room with the radiologist.
Turns out the mammo was fine. So was the sonogram. The doctor, a short, obviously brilliant, obviously Jewish, woman in a white lab coat with thick, dark, wavy hair—who, I was surprised to discover, was just a few years younger than I—was clearly puzzled and asked me to show her where the PCP felt the lump.
I fumbled around and found something hard, which turned out to be the top of my ribs. Then I rolled and squeezed like I was kneading a challah, trying to find the “smooth, hard stone” described by the other doctor, embarrassed but also starting to get annoyed.
Why did I have to find my own tumors? I, who barely passed high school biology and never took another science class again? By being a member in good standing of a late capitalist society, hadn’t I implicitly outsourced that work to a bunch of science nerds who studied anatomy and physiology an extra four years while I read Victorian novels in a graduate English program?
When she told me she saw absolutely nothing of concern on the scans, we briefly talked about our respective hair—she colored hers, while I let mine go gray—then I got dressed, signed some forms, and was released into the cold bright sunshine of a winter’s day.
As I walked up to the corner of 51st and Madison, I found myself thinking about another sci-fi movie, Blade Runner. That’s the one where an android named Roy returns to earth from outer space to confront the computer scientist who designed him because he was programmed to die in four years and he wanted a longer life. When his creator refuses, Roy kisses him on the mouth, then crushes his skull between his powerful robot hands. Then, as his time ticks down, he delivers the famous “tears in rain” speech.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” he begins, perched on a rooftop, holding a white dove, his perfect shirtless body glistening in the rain. He talks about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and C-beams that glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate—and how all of it will be lost in time like tears in rain. Then he bows his head, says “Time to die,” and the dove flies away.
In contrast to Roy, my life was utterly ordinary and unremarkable. I didn’t even know what a C-beam was. And yet I had seen the cheese counter at Zabar’s, the smoked fish platters at Barney Greengrass, the football field-size banquet hall at the old Jing Fong, where Stan and I used to celebrate Christmas by eating endless amounts of shumai and har gow.
Looking up, I saw the marble spires of St. Patrick’s sparkling in the light, the grime finally gone after years of restoration. Walking east, I passed the blue-and-white Greek food truck still reliably serving souvlaki on the southeast corner of 51st and Park. And the Seagram Building rising proudly from its raised granite plaza, its famous pink slabs now turning brownish gray from years of wear and tear.
At the corner of 51st and Lex, a short flight of stairs led me down to a maze of subterranean tunnels and the roaring, rattling 6 train that whisked me three miles north in eight minutes flat to my own subway stop on this skinny island.
When I got out, I watched the kids chase each other around in delirious circles on the playground behind P.S. 198, named for Isidor and Ida Straus, co-owners of Macy’s, who perished arm in arm on the deck of the Titanic. Then I headed south past the modern Orthodox synagogue toward the Pilates studio on the corner that used to be an animal hospital, where a dog would sit for hours in the window draped in an elegant cape. Then on to our building, where Stan was fixing lunch.
After I took off my shoes, I went into the kitchen to give him a full report. This time I could say that the scans were clean—even though I knew that someday, they wouldn’t be. Or there’d be something else. I might even be back in a hospital, though almost certainly not holding a dove. And then all those moments would be lost in time and as Roy said, his muscles gleaming in the relentless rain, it would be time to die.
Author's Comment
Back in 2004, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I thought I’d never forget the terrifying ordeal. Inevitably, I did. Over the years, even the scariest details took on a sepia tint. Then, when I had another health scare last year, all the memories came flooding back. As a memoirist whose stock in trade is the past, I was drawn to write about this process of forgetting and remembering all over again.
Through her search for newfound purpose in her seventies, author Karen Roberts discovered that voices of encouragement were difficult to find among the popular paradigms of aging: decline, withdrawal, and disengagement, among them.
This workbook presents a remarkable opportunity to unlock a fulfilling and purposeful later life stage.
What’s Included:
- Thought-provoking discussions on aging, gender, and culture
- Interviews with eight inspiring women who overcame challenges and pursued their passions later in life
- Engaging questions to help you reflect and grow on your journey.
- Unique experiences and wisdom that women bring to the later years
Ann Levin is a writer, book reviewer, and former editor at The Associated Press. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Southeast Review, The Coachella Review, Craft Literary, The Inquisitive Eater-New School Food, and many other literary magazines. She has also performed onstage with the New York-based writers group Writers Read.
Marcella Peralta Simon is a retired Latinx grandmother, splitting her time between Cambridge UK and Kissimmee FL. She has been a diplomat, university professor, and instructional designer. She writes poetry and short fiction. Her artwork has been featured in Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Tofu Ink Arts Press, Persimmon Tree, and The Acentos Review.