Love Letter to the Apocalypse
Dear Friends,
The cherry blossom tree by my daughter’s school is blooming.
“I’m just really concerned–it’s too early,” says the school administrator.
“It’s the apocalypse,” says Ethan’s dad. “Nothing surprises me anymore.” We talk about the war in Ukraine for a while.
Oh, tree–it’s the wrong time for beauty. We need to suffer right now so things will make sense.
This suspiciously warm January. The news–Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay. Hubbub over classified documents while the world burns.
“And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?” Sally Rooney writes.
It’s hard not to feel undone. In my world, the apocalypse seems to be moving closer. Two of my friends from college, Kaitlin and Jessica, both in their mid-thirties, both moms of young toddlers, are diagnosed with breast cancer.
They both cut their hair short to ease the shock of losing it. They both post photos from wig shopping, from the chemo chair. From home, in pain.
“Everyone has said that work should be the least of my worries,” Kaitlin tells me. “But that’s hard to practice when I don’t have the time off.”
When your job is connected to whether or not your cancer treatment gets paid for, how could it not be a worry?
I schedule an appointment with my OB. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking for little gaps where I’ve done all I can do. Where I can release worry for a moment. The appointment made, I can stop obsessing about whether my sometimes-swollen lymph node is from cancer or the latest toddler germs. It is out of my hands and onto the calendar.
“Everything looks fine,” my doctor says when I see her, “but insurance will cover a mammogram now if you’re worried.”
“Are you going to put PARANOID HYPOCHONDRIAC on the justification?” I ask. She laughs.
“We’ll just keep that between us.”
And yet, and yet. Can I enjoy the pink blossoms if it’s not the right time?
My friend Sarah goes with Jessica to her second chemo appointment. I ask her how that felt.
“In a very real and fucked up way, it was delightful,” she tells me. “The set up is quiet and chill and we just got to chat for 5 hours. We both said it felt weird to be having such a great time.”
But I can see it. When was the last time you spent five hours with your best friend? Especially if you’re a parent. Especially if you work full time. Especially if life is so short and uncertain, and even when the prognosis is good, it’s going to hurt?
I always come back to Kurt Vonnegut, who, in the last speech he wrote, given posthumously by his son, asked, “And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one... I thank you for your attention and I’m outta here.”
My friend Melody was in town last weekend for a live taping of a podcast she produces. (It’s about the Supreme Court, if you’re really feeling the apocalyptic theme.)
Over dinner at Matt & Tony’s, we talk about deciding whether to bring children into this world. Is it responsible? Climate change? Illness? Genetics? This mess we’re in?
“But I think about what you told me the last time we were together,” Melody says. “That there are a limited number of human experiences, and motherhood is one that you wanted to have.”
Freud said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful,” but I find it hard to think about “retrospect” these days.
How much time do we have? None of us actually knows, so I have to live lightly in the now.
“Everything is on warp speed,” Kaitlin tells me, of the testing, the hair loss preparation, the fast-tracked treatment schedule.
“Which has to be so jarring being like, ‘but how long has this just been hanging out in my body?’” I say.
Would you want to know how much time you have?
“I always have the debate internally on whether I’d want them to tell me what time I had left,” Kaitlin says. “On the one hand yes, and the other, really no.”
I don’t think I’d want to know. Because really, we’ve been living in the unknowing all along, all of us.
And in the unknowing, we can create the gaps where we release our worries. Where, for the time we are hooked up in this chair, we might as well laugh with our friend. Where we must choose the experiences we want to claim for ourselves. Where we take the blossoms simply as they are–a spot of life against a bleached, winter sky.
Take good care,
Dot
News & Updates
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