Wild and Precious Life by Deborah Ziegler

Author:Deborah Ziegler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

17

No Cake for You

March—May 2014, Ten to Sixteen Weeks Postsurgery

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

—Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Edward MacCurdy

I texted my sister Sarah, who’d sent us the Eddie Izzard CD.

We asked for cake, but the MRI said no cake for you! Death within a year—the sonofabitch has grown 20 percent in 10 weeks—it ain’t stage 2 no more! I am so very afraid, and sad hardly captures the pain. I am indulging in why . . . why us . . . right now.

We fly Britt to Oregon to meet with Death with Dignity doctors on April 8. Will know more after that trip if we need to go to Switzerland.

Every cell in my body hurts, every bone and joint screams at me, I think I’m getting stomach ulcers. What lies ahead—I must pull enormous reserves of strength from some deep reserve that I haven’t even tapped yet.

She typed back at 12:35 p.m.:

Let me know if you want someone else to go with you to any of this.

My sister Sarah, who worked with counselors and psychiatrists, had asked her colleagues what could help us wrap our heads around what was happening. She sent a CD called When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

Gary and I sat in our family room, our two Cavapoo pups at our feet, and listened. Pema Chödrön’s voice crawled under our skin. It was all I could do to sit still. Gary actually stood up and said he couldn’t listen.

“We need to listen,” I answered, looking up at him and locking eyes. “I need you to listen with me.”

My husband, his expression perturbed, sat down again.

Pema said provocative things. She suggested that we may feel like shit, but we had to take a long hard look at things. She submitted that sometimes things fall apart and we must accept that. She advised us to accept not knowing, told us we couldn’t run from fear, and claimed it was helpful to lean toward what made us anxious.

It was the phrase “leaning toward” that burrowed deep in my mind.

We listened to the entire CD. “Let’s think about it,” I said. I left my husband in the family room. His body language told me that nothing about this type of thinking sat well with him.

I thought about Brittany being the beautiful sand castle that Pema described, a glistening creation of sand turrets, shell, and colored glass. I thought of how the tide inevitably came in, and no matter how attached we were to the castle, we watched it melt back into the sea. Was my child going to be a part of something bigger than her life? Was she struggling to stop us from clinging and clawing at her in her last moments of regal, palacelike glory?

I thought about the panic that gripped my heart each morning when I woke up and realized again that the nightmare was true. Pema said something about fear being close to truth.

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