Going Gently

My chemo swept in the same night as the big snowstorm off the Lake. I bolted up at an ungodly hour feeling mildly poisoned—my hands, why do my hands hurt so much?—and the winds outside were howling crazy, mourning the end of the world and erasing it all under a thick pall of white.

And this taste, this weird little taste in my mouth.

The morning prior it had been just a few dainty flakes not quite sure if they wanted to fall or just hang there in the hesitant wind. No matter, it was enough to win Raechel the bet that we’d get our next snowfall before December, and with it a cup of coffee.

I like losing a bet if the wager is a gift gladly given. And I appreciated the timing of the storm for another reason. We had just gotten back from a trip to see family, loved ones. Had our day for unpacking, cleaning. Then a day for doctor’s appointments. Blood work. The green light for chemo. A very last minute trip to the dentist, now that the government insurance is finally coming through (only took five months tilting windmills), to find out that I’m going to lose a second tooth. But they maybe can’t do anything about it until after the chemo.

And now the heavens are raging, covering up roads, and I am raging along with them, or at least alongside them, mourning the end of winter, the unobserved countdown to the first year without snow. I already experienced the tail end of this in Catalunya, where snowfall is solidly becoming something from memories or something you go to the mountains to see. The abandoned olive trees I tended, the others in the fields around where I lived—all of them multicentennial—carried in their thick bases and thinner, multiple trunks the memory of a deep freeze about sixty years ago. Older humans from that town remember it too, name the year and make a sound reserved by the elderly for recalling particularly rough weather.

Around the shores of the Great Lakes, winters will stay freezing and hearty for a good while yet, at least from a human perspective. But the death of winter is coming for all of us. So I rage. Tell me who I have to kill to save winter, and I will. The Earth responds: winter isn’t going anywhere, as long as I am here. Winter is the hemisphere tilted away from the sun on any planet whose axis of rotation is not perpendicular to its plane of revolution. Winter is here (well, 23 days off, I interject), after that, you do with it what you will.

And I get a fleeting image of absence, all the people I don’t see playing in the snow. A brief image from last winter, two children cavorting in their yard, the hawk-like parent swooping them away, towards the deceptive safety of the front door, as soon as Raechel and I approach on our rambling walk over snowy roads less trafficked. (They, they are the ones, I think, looking at the house—not an apartment—and the purse-clutching parenting, the brand new clothes, who are killing winter.)

Photo by Raechel Anne Jolie

Too much death for feeling anything clearly. Death at all scales. From seasons to a little tooth. One family member I love dearly just lost her partner, a brilliant musician and such a glowing presence. Another relative is 95. She’s happy, but she wants to go. No one should have to live so long, she tells me with a smile. I think how it’s my responsibility to hold onto the memories of her, including the stories from before my time, vibrant with the voices that passed them on to me, vivid as I see them through someone else’s eyes. This is the way to keep her alive, so she can go into that good night unencumbered by guilt, taking leave with joy and gratitude, no regrets. No one should have to live so long.

And also, I have a blessed relationship with that old gal. I love her in a way that’s so easy, I can see her going out as pure as a newborn arrives. But since I love others, who have other relationships with her, I know: there are probably no deaths without regret, without wounds unhealed.

This is how I know there is no ephemeral scale that weighs souls, no judgment awaiting us off stage. There is only the multiple and contradicting memories that remain among those still singing the sun in flight. The best things we do can never erase the worst, nor do the worst discount the best. Our value as people never finds an average.

If we confront our worst in life, we have a chance to heal it. If we refuse that challenge, then we’ve given permission to those we leave behind to turn our years into stories of infamy, of how not to spend a life.

I’ve had to think more about death, lately. Which feels odd to say, since I can’t remember a time when I didn’t.

Is death an increasing presence, that guest at the dinner table who takes up more and more seats with every year you age? I ask a friend in their twenties, another cancer survivor, for perspective. Why philosophize, when you can research?

They say they also know plenty of twenty-somethings with cancer, and the statistics back it up: chronic and fatal diseases are multiplying. And we know this already. We feel it, if we can feel anything. We’re coming to the end of something. A world is dying.

The Dylan Thomas poem I’ve been sprinkling throughout this newsletter strikes to the heart of a contradiction I’ve been grappling with. It is definitely a poem for the living, and not for those who have already lived. It could be an anthem for the meths, the cyborgs, the plutocrats who think they’re entitled to live forever. Though I doubt they’re lyrical enough to be influenced by poetry. And their marketing teams would never allow it anyway. Too many extraneous words in poetry.

Plutocrats Forever

But also.

But also, what will we have lived for, at that moment of turning, what charm against regret will we have enchanted, if we do not spend our lives raging against the dying of beings and of places taken away before their time or in the most grotesque of manners? Who are we, if we don’t stand up for our places of magic and memory? If we let real estate developers and progressive politicians price us out of our neighborhood? If we look the other way when cops kill, if we look the other way when drug companies kill, if we make polite conversation with someone whose job is to push buttons that kill people with missiles from the sky?

(Yes, conservative politicians will also price you out of your home. The only politician who will not support gentrification to increase their tax base is the politician who doesn’t have the “war chest” to get reelected next time around. But in our case, if R and I get pushed out of the neighborhood, progressive politicians will bear the blame.)

Who are we if we do not rage against the dying of winter and the murder of the world that birthed us?

For me the world is a threefold contradiction held in dynamic tension. Accepting that everyone dies and all things end. Fighting against those who make life unbearable, who would kill a whole world for their convenience. Nurturing and healing all things that make life worth living.

It’s just my luck—and I mean that without a scrap of bitterness—that I finally decide to learn about healing, to really practice it, right when the world is dying. I’ve spent too many years alive to not be able to truly take care of the people I care about. I think too much about truth and solidarity to lie to myself or to hurt people I love. And it’s no coincidence I started to really acknowledge this the year after I finally took action to start taking care of myself. (My poor body, the lengths it had to go to to make me open my damn eyes. Sorry, buddy. And all the people I could have been there for, if I’d been there. I’m sorry.)

Dying worlds need healing. They need a funeral pall of snow and rage. And the worlds born after them need healing too. They need to understand why they’re born in a graveyard, why they’re full of poison, why they’re missing teeth. They need to understand that ends are not ends, that they can give up and close their eyes any day they choose, but they can also choose to see that the poison their bodies are born with was put there for them to heal and turn into something good.

If they’re up for it.