Resilience (9 page)

We came to understand doubt expressed rawly or expressed in searches for answers elsewhere as but a search for meaning, reassurance, hope. We came to understand that religious vehicles that had for millennia encapsulated our spiritual expectations may, nonetheless, be insufficient for some to explain the terrible briefness of the life of one child. We tried to make life and death, and hope, as much a part of our beings as the air we breathed at their graves, and until we managed that, the platitudes and parables of others were meaningless. So we read, and we prayed, and, frankly, many of us wandered. And wondered. I still wonder what it was I was looking forward to. I wanted to embrace the image of some eternity, but I could not quite make it form. What was the heaven for which I pined? There, if I longed to touch him, would I feel his cheek? Or would I simply be freed of my longing to feel his cheek?

As I have felt further, less devastating blows in the years after Wade's death, I cannot understand how I merited these blows. What did I do? Even though I think I know better, I still continue to ask and I continue to wonder. And then I remind myself: This is the world we made; its flaws are our flaws; its shortcomings are our shortcomings; and the degree to which there is injustice or unprovoked suffering is just a reflection of our failures. But because, in order to reach this point, I have to accept a God who does not intervene, I have to accept that I cannot expect intervention now. I do not pray for my health. God gave me this world, and He gave me free will. It is my world, and now, if I am able, I have to fix it.

CHAPTER 7
2007

nother city, another town hall, another morning shower. The moments that will change our lives are often not in the monumental events writ large on our calendars. My husband was running for vice president of the United States, and certainly the next monumental moment in our lives would be on November 3, 2004, election day. But sometimes the critical moments are hidden in an ordinary day. My life changed on October 21 as I showered. Standing in a hotel bathroom in Kenosha, Wisconsin, I felt a lump, fat and smooth, like a slice of plum midway between my armpit and nipple. I convinced myself that it was just a cyst. Allowing myself to think that it could be a cyst allowed me to dress that day, to lead the town hall, and then to campaign for another week before a mammogram and ultrasound took away such foolish illusions. Maybe not so foolish: No women in my family had had breast cancer save my father's sister. On my mother's side, the side important for breast cancer, I thought, there was nothing. And this was, I believed, nothing but a cyst. Since it was the size of a generous slice of plum, though, I would have it checked when I could. But it was eleven days before election day, and I had a full schedule. I couldn't get it checked for a few days without canceling events and alerting the press. And I couldn't tell the press because they would say the threat of cancer was a play for sympathy, and I didn't tell John because these days leading up to the election might be the most life-changing days of his life, and my plum shouldn't be on his mind unless it needed to be. So far, it was just a cyst-plum, and it didn't need to be.

A week later, after a secret mammogram and biopsy while I was home in Raleigh to vote early, it was clear it was not just a cyst. Watching the radiologist read the ultrasound monitor, I knew it could not be something benign like a cyst. The plum was likely to be cancer, and I had to tell John. He jumped into action. He arranged for a biopsy in Boston the day after the election, and we barreled through the final days of the campaign as if that sword were not dangling over our heads. In truth, the campaign gave us each a respite from letting ourselves go where we knew we would likely have to go after the biopsy the next week: The test was likely to confirm I had cancer, we were certain. And a week later, the day after the 2004 presidential election that did not alter John's life (or mine) in any significant way, we drove from somber words of the concession speeches at Faneuil Hall in Boston to Massachusetts General Hospital and the somber words we knew were coming.

I cannot tell you whether knowing the words “you have cancer” are coming makes it easier, since I did not get to do it two ways. I did it one way, and although that was bad enough, I suspect that it was easier getting used to the idea of cancer over a period of a couple of weeks, getting a chance to tell my family in little pieces rather than having to hear it one day and having everyone sitting at my knees in tears all at once after that. So my husband, my oldest daughter and I stood erect and took with resignation the words:
You have cancer.
It had been a life-changing day after all. We would have to adjust our lives to the disease.

At first it was not cancer itself to which I adjusted but the idea of cancer. The disease was inside me, but except for that plum, there would be no reason to suspect it was there based on how I felt or how I looked. Even when I started to look like a cancer patient in external ways and to feel in internal ways like I was sick, it was, honestly, the medicine I was taking to stop the cancer, not the plum-sized tumor itself, that was responsible. If the pharmacist who was preparing my chemotherapy infusion happened to drop a bag of my medicine on the floor, he would wear protective gear to clean it up; it was sufficiently toxic to require that degree of precaution. And yet we pumped it directly into my veins for several hours every two weeks. It was no wonder I was feeling lousy.

In those months, that first year when the chief nurse Ann was greeting me at the hospital door, when Dr. Warren was measuring the shrinking tumor, when my infusion nurse Mercedes was making that dreadful medicine seem tolerable, I never believed I would die from this disease. I certainly did not want breast cancer, but as diseases go breast cancer—when contained in my breast—was unlikely to kill me. This would be an obstacle in my story, an obstacle that would be hard to hurdle but one that would not change my course. Even if it was not easy, I could do it, knowing I would not have to accept a whole new life again. And when I had breast cancer in 2004 and 2005, it was just plain physically hard. It does not matter whether it was the idea of the disease or the reality of the medicine that made those months hard. My joints ached, every one of them. Depending on when it was in my chemotherapy cycle, I wouldn't want anything to eat or I would stand in front of the refrigerator famished. I would tire in a morning of meetings. My eyesight worsened. I felt empty-headed; I would look for a word and I could not find it; I would start a sentence and forget where I was headed. All of these limitations were good only for my younger children, then four and six, because child's play was the easiest activity to handle. I could play Chutes and Ladders for hours … as long as I was prone. I could read the large print of children's books. And when I was not sleeping or playing with the children, when I was not trying to write thank-you notes to well-wishers or attending a meeting about what came next for us, it was mostly sports on television. After two years of campaigning that kept me from watching sports, it was now ESPN all the time. I missed the 2004 Olympics, but it was the NFL playoffs and then the college bowl games and, taking me through the end of chemotherapy and recovery from my surgery, it was college basketball and spring baseball in the majors.

So I watched television and read aloud to the children and read an astounding 65,000 e-mails that were sent to me. In the months that followed, I would also read 30,000 pieces of regular mail, some on homemade cards, some with gifts included. It might seem, given the numbers, that I would tire of reading them, but I did not. Each was a personal gift, packaged in a way that reflected the giver, letting me imagine them placing a cap they had knitted into a box or letting the youngest child in the family who had signed a card reach up to the post box to mail their card. For years John and I have played a game with the children in the car. When it is your turn, you choose a house you are passing and you make up a story about the people in the house. A well-kept garden or dead flowers in a window box; clothes hanging on the line; children's toys in the yard; an empty horse-trailer; all the details of life that give us clues about the people for whom that is home. You have to notice as many details as possible in the time it takes to pass the house. You then make up an elaborate story about the house and its inhabitants, filling in the spaces between the details with which you have been provided. A house with a newly constructed ramp was a soldier returning from battle; the now-untended vegetable garden the result of his wife's caring for him instead of it. I was doing that for the cards, e-mails, and gifts and their senders. It made it seem more like they were people I knew than the strangers almost every one of them really was. Sometimes on the cards or letters they would give me an outline to fill in; they would tell me about themselves: They had had breast cancer, they were a Republican, they had lost a child, their father had been in the military too. For quite a while, I was never lonely. My living room was filled with good-hearted strangers.

Ensconced on the couch with prayer quilts they had sent tucked around me and my latest favorite knit cap over my head, I wondered how other women, less comforted, made it through these painful months. Well, for most, of course, the months were not as empty as mine. Many had to go back to work, achy and tired or not. I was lucky—I did not. Single mothers might not be able to rely on their children's father to take care of the children; I was lucky—after the election John was able to devote himself to me and the children. A stranger who had read of another woman's cancer was not sending them a prayer quilt or a get-well card. I was lucky—someone somewhere was thinking of me, praying for me. I sat reading their letters for hours, placing them back into boxes where they are still stored in my house. But I was lucky, too, in a frivolous way—how you simply spend these hours: I had young, resilient children, I had a husband who included me in his work, and I liked sports. So my days were filled with Chutes and Ladders and David Shannon's children's books, with meetings about what John was going to do now that the election was over (it turned out he started a poverty center in North Carolina), with my preliminary drawings of the house we would build when we returned home after my treatment, and with sports on television. Part of my recovery from this debilitating treatment was that I was busy in a fashion and I was not alone. But I cannot overestimate the importance of my belief that I would not die of this disease.

So many times between November 2004 and now I have sat in a hospital room, waiting for the doctor to come in and tell me what the latest scans tell her and what changes there have been in the previous three months. There are some of these potentially life-changing conversations, frankly, that melt together: the same doctor, the same room, the same report—no appreciable change, which meant I would not die of breast cancer. But the ones when the report is not the same? Those I never forget; they never melt into another day or into another season. Those I remember what I was wearing, the weather, the words the doctor used, where John and Cate sat. From that first tiny hospital room, crisp and spartan and white at Massachusetts General, where we first heard the word “cancer” spoken aloud to the basement room with a bed and a sink where John and I sat for hours waiting for the results of the bone scan and the CT, to the latest room in Chapel Hill in the old Gravely Building that has stood there since I was in college, where we heard that it was no longer contained and had spread to a couple of new places, the quiet life-changing moments grow to an imposing size.

There was a time, in 2005, when I was being treated for Stage 2 breast cancer and the news was almost always good. Doctors looking at ultrasound machines and smiling, a happy nurse handing me the gown into which I would change before the doctor came in, and finally the wave good-bye—the cancer was gone. Boy, it sounds so simple when months of basically happy reports fall over one another like that. Of course, the road to the smiles was more than bumpy. Like a Conestoga wagon crossing the far West, the whole of me shook for the entire ride—but now and again there was a beautiful sunset ahead that made it seem worth it and we were headed to good health again. The vision wasn't on the horizon, however; it was in a scan result or on an ultrasound screen or in the clean margins after the surgery. All beautiful, reassuring. I had determined not to let fear in, and it was easier when the reports all confirmed that I should not be afraid. But the reports only looked at my body that day; they could not see tomorrow.

My grandmothers each died in their nineties. I knew one of my great-grandmothers, who must have been nearly a hundred when she died. Until 2004, I believed I might live longer than all of them. I had been hospitalized to have children, but that was all. I took no medicines, prescription or otherwise. I was always dieting, but my blood pressure and my cholesterol were both low. Living to ninety-five seemed entirely possible. I had had children late in life, Emma Claire when I was forty-eight and Jack when I was fifty, so living a long life would mean that I would see them marry and I would live to hold their children. And now, suddenly, seeing even my oldest daughter, Cate, marry seems in jeopardy. In a moment—a “you have cancer” moment—all the genetic aces folded. I was—am—desperately afraid of losing the precious moments of life.

There were times even in those relatively optimistic early days, though, when I felt alone. There is part of this disease that belongs only to me. I never felt comfortable sharing the moments when logic left and the pain of the treatment magnified the risk of dying, when fear did come in. What could the people who love me do, anyway, I figured. It would only make them feel lousy that they could not honestly say anything that would change the reality I was facing. This is the catch-22: We protect them when they want and need to protect us, when they know we want and need protection. With each side protecting the other, neither of us gets what we want or need. But I always figured it was impossible to get what we needed. I had the disease, they could not change that. All I could do was guess what their reaction would be to my expression of my fears—impotence, I guessed—and what was the point of that? I kept from them my greatest fears precisely because they would respond with protestations that this was about tending to me, not about tending to them. And they, though they might keep a stiff upper lip with me, would, I discovered later, fall apart alone in fear and grief. They could not ask me to carry them through this. In our way of being gentle with each other, we never really see it from each other's perspective. I had to decide what I should share. My conclusion? I have shared very little. Maybe not talking about the fear was better anyway, not allowing it to own any more of me than it already did. And if it is not better, well, fortunately, we have more days to get it right.