Читать книгу All the Wild Hungers - Karen Babine - Страница 16

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HERE IS WHAT IS not normal in this new world of cancer: I am not afraid. Not yet, at least. I am fully in determination-mode and my anger is not coming from a place of fear. My mother’s oncologist at the Mayo Clinic says, “Disease wants to take tomorrow. Don’t let it have today.” But the truth is that we have not gone through cancer like this with anybody else in our family, which alters my perceptions, sends me to find color in carrots and cast iron because my fingers tingle with the need to do something. My maternal grandfather was diagnosed with leukemia in 1973, on his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, when he bent to brush his teeth and hurt his back. I imagine that the conversations around cancer were much different in 1973. I remember the threat of losing my grandfather being a normal part of my growing up, but maybe because it was normal, we didn’t have these conversations about cancer, about mortality. He died in his sleep in 2006. I’ve come to understand that my lack of fear right now is because my mother’s doctors consistently refer to her as “cancer free,” which gives us a false sense of security. I don’t think about how unfair it is that my mother has cancer, because she doesn’t have cancer—she’s “cancer free” and the threat of losing my mother to cancer simply does not exist in these days—and then I realize how many of my innermost circle of friends have lost parents, how many of my classmates’ parents passed away when we were in school. I will lose my parents eventually, this is obvious, but even now it is not something that penetrates my consciousness. My mother’s uterus fully contained that tumor that brought us to this point and now it is gone, with all the cancer it contained. I don’t know what fear looks like in this context. John Millington Synge wrote in The Aran Islands about fear: “The old man gave me his view of the use of fear. ‘A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned,’ he said, ‘for he will be going out on a day he shouldn’t. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.’”