“Would You Be There for Me if I Had Cancer?”
On returning to normal life.
First, I felt a numbness. It was the fear, I knew. What if this wasn’t over? What if I only thought it was over, and then I let myself become relaxed, and then it all came rushing back?
Then I went home and had to accept that maybe, just maybe, it really was over.
I had a routine in the hospital. In the morning, I would make breakfast while my aunt was still sleeping. We would eat together. I cleaned. She watched TV and I would clean some more. We would use the hospital gym for a little bit. She would ride the stationary bike. I would jog on the treadmill or lift weights. And then she went to treatment, and I panicked over whatever needed to be done. Then we showered, ate dinner, watched more TV, went to bed.
I would make sure all her pills were in order. I would write down what she had taken and when. I would nag her to drink more water.
Sometimes, when she didn’t want anything I had cooked, we would order sandwiches from an Italian deli up the road. She would say that it was not my cooking that was the issue, that it was the chemo and radiation affecting her appetite, but I couldn’t help but feel slightly offended. I bought more spices, but nothing seemed to top the chicken parm hero.
Most of the time, I was fine. Sometimes, there was terror. Sometimes, it felt like everyone had cancer, like everyone would get cancer, like there was nothing but a serving of agony, for everyone.
There was that time I felt a pimple on the back of my neck and became convinced that I, too, had cancer. I cried in the shower and made an appointment with the dermatologist. The pimple was gone in two days.
Things like that happened all the time, and I didn’t tell anyone about them. I sounded crazy, I thought.
Maybe I was.
And now it was over. Now we were supposed to go back to our lives like nothing had happened.
The thing with a happy ending is that the unhappiness changes you.
No one gets their happy ending without going through hardships. And no one goes through hardships without changing. In the end, the person you become to get the thing you want will not be the person you were when you started.
And now, we had the things we wanted.
But we were different people.
We both were. My aunt had new views on life, on how it was to be lived. On raising her children. She had once been a hoarder of sentimental items, and now she donated bins and bins of baby clothes with ease. She thought about changing everything. Her job. Her home. Her role in her own life.
Whereas before we had focused on getting back to normal, to business as usual, now we wondered how we could possibly do those things. I was supposed to go back to Costa Rica to visit my family. And what would I tell them, when they asked about what I had been doing the last few months? I couldn’t describe to them the things I had seen and heard in the hospital. Screams. Swollen eyes. Brain infections. Cracked skin. Fevers.
What would I talk about?
So instead, I booked myself a couple of nights on a remote beach. I would hire a car to take me there. It would be expensive, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t care.
I didn’t want to be around groups of people.
I didn’t want to drink. I didn’t want to flirt, or be jealous, or do any of the things young people were supposed to do. And I resented the pressure to do those things. I just wanted to be still. To look at the beach. I wanted to be around people who cared about me, and I didn’t want to have to sort through the rest.
“Would you be there for me if I had cancer?” was all I wanted to ask. “Because, if not, get the fuck out of my face.”
Not a great pickup line, no. I knew I needed to find a way to be more lighthearted.
But I only wanted to share fun times with people who would be willing to share the bad times.