Life is not Endless

Death and Taxes, that is what they say. I met a lady yesterday who has four months to live.

Cancers are different and some cannot be fought. She is my age almost exactly and had a nice

smile. Secretive, laughing, a bit chagrined. She still drives her car, went skiing yesterday in the mountains near Bend. She wanted to see the sun on the white snow and feel exhilaration, feel alive.

Chemotherapy might extend her death, delay it for two more months. She is weighing the price. Die living verses live dying. Cancer is a card game. You can laugh with a bad hand.

My odds were so much better. If I could win with what I was dealt I could survive and walk away. Mine was more like flipping a coin, or playing "sudden death", just picking one card and hopping for the Ace. Mine was 50-50 and I won.

If you get cancer, (that sounds like a gift), you can't help but think through these scenarios.

I wondered how I got to this game in the first place and went through every step of my life hunting for the cards I threw away. We are in a card game when we would rather be fishing.

What would you do if dealt this bad hand? Knowing that you have only four months to live?

There is the obvious: "get your affairs in order" but after awhile you think, f**k 'em, that will be a job for the living. They have more time. Not to say you would make it inconvenient but with four months this won't be high on your list. Or, maybe it will.

She will die in April or May and she knows this. Spring when the flowers bloom and the Earth

turns forth new life. Eventually we are all at this card table. That is the truth. Even the winners will get dealt bad hands. Some will play blind folded and never know their cards.

When I left her I couldn't say "good Luck", what we often say to each other. I simply said that I was glad she went skiing, felt the warmth of the sun. She offered that slight smile that intrigued me in the first place and began our conversation.

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Bucket List

Other than growing the perfect tomato I discovered I didn't really have a bucket list. My garden has always been a central focus in my life and when I built my studio twenty years ago I located it on the far edge of my lot so I could have full view of its seasonal offerings. Two walls

are mostly glass and I can see the pool, the greenhouse and the garden from where I work.

At any point in life one can contemplate the past, speculate the future or worry about the present. I have done very little worrying about the present in my life. I accept it as a gift. It is sometimes a challenge and I accept that too. I am a list maker, a left over from my school teaching days. I set goals and the ways I intend to achieve them. I have discovered that we are often the destroyer of our own goals. Something interrupts. An allowed intrusion. Our own conflicts within us. We are not one person.

Cancer was never on my list. Pain was never on my list. Getting old was never on my list.

When I was just too tired to exist I did not think about the future. My life became a series of re-runs, the movie running backwards. Disorganized and episodic, a story out of sequence. I remembered details and smells and colors, old school teachers and lost loves. I have mentioned

many of these on this blog, you will just have to hunt for them.

For over eight months my only thought of tomorrow was I knew it would be worse. That is not a concept that I was used to. I am a maker of things and the director of my own play. This

theater is mine and I found myself in the audience, watching. I am screaming. It can't end this way! This is not a one act play. Far too much drama for what surely was meant to be a comedy.

The cancer is gone now and so is that old man that I did not recognize nor wanted to be.

No curtains yet, hold any applause. No tears nor laughter, there is one final act. The preparations are complete, no more rehersals. Encore. I get to do it one more time!

Marti-Marti

The Hat is not the critical part of this story although it hangs in the hall and my wife still wears it on occasion. It is old and dusty like we are and a reminder that silly times, fun and spontaneity can be had at "the drop of a hat"! LOL! I don't think you can find happiness alone. I can be as content as a cow in a spring meadow by myself but "happiness" is shared laughter, dancing always takes two.

I really wanted a good hat, well built and colorful as all of Spain, but practical, something to keep the sun out. I found the marketplace huge, crowded and full of vendors selling anything one could imagine. Isles and isles of food and clothes and radios, live chickens, dead chickens and cooked chickens, everything. I found the hats but they were very simple, very plain, designed to last the season and disappear. I asked everyone who could understand me where could I find a store that sold hats?

Jackelyn Kennedy, the President's wife bought her hats in Spain, in Barcelona in fact, at a

little hat boutique manufacturing shop called "Marti-Marti". I am sure it is still there. It is not

opulence at its worst to see it, maybe an eight foot tall entry door with huge brass handles. On either side of this door was a huge plate glass window maybe twelve feet in length and from the sidewalk to the top of the door in height. Each window displayed only three hats. Leather, fabric, straw, and maybe three other materials, certainly there were six distinct styles.

Remember how I was dressed? Logger's boots, short pants and a shirt, all dirty from hitch-hiking and I hadn't shaved in three days. In my heart I was a King and willing to pay a king's ransom for a hat! Free, illgotten money maybe (see earlier blog! are you following this story?)

and I would happily exchange it for a simple, well built and colorful hat.

This door lead me into a rather wide hallway with three doors on either side and a desk at the end. A receptionist was there eyeing me a bit as I came down the hall. I told her I was looking for a straw hat and she directed me to the marketplace. No, I had just come from there and was directed here. I was told you had the best hats.

She is on the phone in a flash and gibbering in Spanish far too fast for my ability to understand. Soon a man approaches, pauses midstride to gather himself I assume, walks right up to me and asks how he could be of help? This is the Spain I loved, friendly and helpful and smiling. He lead me down the hall into one of the rooms and offered my a brandy!

"We don't sell hats to men but maybe if you could describe the lady?" I am thinking I will see ten hats and choose one off the shelf and he is telling me that they are all custom made to order,

a particular style and color for a particular person, say Mrs Kennedy, for instance!

I am trying not to get his couch dirty. I am sitting on the biggest, softest, blackest leather couch I have even seen with brandy in hand, he offers me a cigar! A Havana, no less. I describe Jane as best as I can. We had only known each other three days. He wanted size, shape, complexion, height and hair color and he wrote all these things down. Next he is on the telephone, again so fast I am not catching a single word. Then six women appear, entering without knocking and each wearing the most beautiful straw hat that I had ever seen, striking colors and each a different style. Wow! I am just a 20 year old kid with a Cuban cigar and a glass of brandy trying my best not to screw this all up.

"Great, I'll take that one!" I said pointing at a girl looking much like Jane and wearing a straw hat slightly pulled down in front of her eyes. They all laughed including the man, at least I was entertaining them. These, it was explained to me, were not really hats. Not finished, not ready to sell, they were mock up models, approximations, an idea of a hat.

"Well, but of course, I knew that!" I said with little authority. How little I was about to find out because this process went on three more times. First they came back, all like runway models, all wearing what appears to be the same hat with subtle variations. Then there was color and I said orange would be beautiful. They returned, all wearing identical hats in six colors of orange. I didn't even know there were six colors of orange!

Finally I got the hat and it was put into a proper hat box, strong eneough to be used as a step stool and tied with a ribbon! He told me I had made an excellent choice and she would be beautiful while shopping along the Ramblas late at night. I told him we were hitching to Malagar tomorrow and she would appreciate the sun filtered from her eyes and keeping the dust out of her hair. He snatched the box right from my hands!

This is when I learned about Mrs Kennnedy and his other clients. You just don't do this to his hats, not "Marti-Marti" hats anyway. He untied the ribbon, removed the hat and gently with a letter opener on his desk, removed the lable from inside the hat! I could have the hat, he said, but I had to promise never to tell anyone where I had bought it.

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The First Chemo

The first chemo session isn't so bad and leaves you with the impression that you are pretty tough, not like the "other" patients , these really old zombie people in the chairs next to you. Ours is a brand new state of the art, over a $100,000,000 dollar Hospital and I am assuming that made me lucky although I really felt lost. The parking garage is five stories with elevators accessable to three of them and then, two different elevators leading to walkways to three different buildings all looking pretty much the same. I felt caught up in a Franz Kafka Novel. I had done something horribly wrong and I had no idea what it was, exactly where I was supposed to go or who to see. Soon enough I would become familiar with it all.
The Chemo waiting room is huge. Huge is such a tiny word for such a large waiting room.
It could hold a hundred people but in all honesty I never saw more than thirty there. Except for me, down to the last one, these were all old people, hairless every single one, thin and frail, even the children were very old. I was in a concentration camp.
You always check in first and I always felt as if I were interrupting something important when I did. Paper work is critical to this process, identities, insurance forms, blood work. Although I wanted it so badly, never was I told that I was in the wrong place! I really wanted to wake up from this dream.
It is all very efficient, ike going through a cafeteria line, "no thank you, I would not like that today." I think I have had my blood checked a thousand times and it is truely painless. The needles are sharp and the nurses are gentle, quick and precise. Modern medicine is pretty amazing, five minutes later they know everything about you. There are no secrets you can keep from these doctors. They knew things about me I couldn't even pronounce.
Next is the doctor's visit and that takes less than fifteen minutes and he is on the computer most of this time, checking statistics adjusting the recipe for this poison you are about to get.
In later sessions, as you hobble in because you are now part of the walking dead, he will tell you that everything is going all right, your good white immune cells, those that fight desease and keep you healthy are almost all destroyed. He is happy with that.
Next you are lead into the chemo room where you will find a very happy, cheerful, positive, and upbeat group of nurses. I am sure they are all on drugs, except for me all their patients are on the edge of life, that frail twilight period. However they do it, my hat is off to the nurses, it would be insufferable without them and they are always so damned happy to see you are still alive!
My chemo sessions took about four hours, some were injected pretty quickly and others were
dripped into me slowly and none of them were painful. Each time the nurses wore their haz-mat suits, this was pretty dangerous stuff. I had twelve of these cocktails, two a month for six months and for the first six I had no symptoms whatsoever! I gained eight pounds and didn't lose a strand of hair, continued working, doing my "art thing" and grew tomatoes in my garden.
I was begining to wonder what the big deal was and thinking deep inside that maybe this wasn't working at all?

The First Doctor's Appointment

That 1st doctor's appointment is the worst after that it is all pretty easy. You have had the biopsies, the blood tests, the cat scans, pet scans and x-rays and god knows what else and now you have come for the verdict! Have you been a good boy/girl? What you want to hear is you have the flu, a bad strain this year, take some aspirin and get some rest. We want that so bad and never get it, never. It is always some kind of cancer crap and you are here to discuss your options and possible treatments. I think I mentioned that my dad died of cancer, well he died of pneumonia, that "friend" to anyone who went through what he did. This was twenty years ago and they were really practitioners in those days, although they still haven't gotten it right and are continuing to practice. He was tortured to death and did it all, chemo and radiation and surgery. You don't get the opportunity to die another way, you choose as you go along and he made desperate choices.

I remember telling all this to my doctor and that I would be willing to try ONE method, so make it his best shot. I was not willing to discover a thousand ways to die.

So, I got even more tests! They wanted to know if my heart could take it and I assured them it had been broken before! and if my lungs were strong enough! The Chemo "cure" causes cancer!!! I so longed for ground up leaves and voodoo dolls, massage oils and midnight chanting around a big fire and naked girls chasing the evil spirits away! Instead, because I don't think these doctors drink, I got god-awful chemicals made from left over Mustard Gas from World War I and because I developed a blood clot, they gave me Rat Poison! What kind of weird surrealistic world did I get myself into? These were not the dreams of my choosing and like Dante, I found myself in the fires of Hell with reoccurring nightmares of getting sicker and sicker! My doctors were trying to kill me!

Clean as a Whistle

For those of you curious I am all pink and clean inside! I watched the whole procedure on television, my fifteen minutes of fame! I am the "one in a week" who chooses to do this without anesthesia, that is about one out of 125! I escaped the '60' without getting too involved with drugs (okay, a little which I may tell you about later!) and I escaped this drug too. I already have crevasses and crannies in my brain that I can explore at will, I don't need any help. I was naked on the bed and "I just left". Except for my eyes glues to the television screen I was not there at all, probably in some warm water snorkeling with the fish! It is not really that I am a tough guy,
it did hurt a couple of times, like cramps, nothing like giving birth I would imagine, not as bad as smashing your hand with a hammer and it only lasts ten seconds or so.

I have just recovered (still in the process really) from Hodgeskin's Lymphoma and if I am to be attacked again by cancer I wanted to see my enemy! You have to be awake to do that.

This Pill or Asperagus?

When a person "gets" (like it is a gift!) cancer people from all over the world will send you remedies. Take lots of vitamin D , mega doses of this or that or go on the asparagus diet!
Probably what I found most helpful was a daily dose of laughter. Several people sent me jokes
and just weird silly stuff that I looked forward to every day. Laughter is the best medicine.
Ralph gave me my daily Taoism, always kind-hearted with a gentle persuasion, an encouragement to do the right thing and others posted their beautiful and talented art. I learned we are all in a struggle of some kind and want to survive, express ouselves and be generous as our hearts allow. All things in moderation is probably best, but always leave room for dancing late at night and a great deal of laughter!