The Inflammatory Pumpkin Issue

 To many people, a passionate discussion about canned pumpkin would seem insane.  Or boring.  Who cares what it really is?

But to my friend Kim and I it was an inflammatory issue.

"I swear," I said, "I read that it was actually butternut squash.  And that makes sense, really.  The texture-"

"Naw."said Kim,"Where, exactly, did you read that?"  Kim used to work at a respected local newspaper called The Rocky Mountain News.  She was an educator for thirty years, has a master's degree, is world traveled, and wants sources.

"It was a while ago," I admitted, "And I could be making it up.   But I think it was Reader's Digest."

"That was a long time ago!"

"Really long!"

We both cracked up for a while, thinking about how old we were.

"But why would they even do that?" Kim demanded.

  "Who knows?"I said, "But I've never grown a Halloween pumpkin that baked better than a butternut."

"I just-I don't think they can-that they would do that."

https://www.rd.com/article/is-canned-pumpkin-really-squash/

This remained a troublesome mystery for months until late October, when I hijacked a normal conversation with, "Oh my god!  I saw an article online about Libby's canned pumpkin!"

Kim grabbed onto it."What?"

"They have their own variety they grow especially for the canned product!"

"They what?!"

"There's pictures!  So," (I heard my voice go soto voce, black-and-white detective style)it's the shape of a butternut, but the skin is brown.  And they grow it just for the canned pumpkin product.  Turns out that botanically, there is no difference between a pumpkin and a squash."

Kim's voice matched mine with a fascinated hush, "Really!"

"So we were both right!  It is a pumpkin but it looks like a butternut!  it's both!  Holy shit!"

"Holy shit!"

"Are we total dweebs or what?"

Kim and I laughed at ourselves for a good three minutes, wave after wave of laughter.  It's how we laugh.  It dies off and then starts up again, gaining over time, until we wear ourselves out. Occasionally one of us would say, "Garden dweebs!  or, "Food dweebs!"And we'd keep laughing through it.

I wish more inflammatory issues were resolved that way.

My Grief is an Animal Mother

 This simile came to me as I was waking, in a twilight dream.

When a vixen or mother wolf or feral cat queen moves her young she takes them in her teeth by the scruff of the neck and, if they make too much of a fuss that could attract attention, gives them a good shake or several to quiet them down.

She can then get them to the new, or next, den safely.

When my grief comes for me it seizes me by the scruff of the neck and gives me a bone-shaking session, sending me to the restroom or, if I'm at home, to my bedroom for a good fingernails-embedded-in-palms, face-screwed-up ugly cry that will leave me trembling, red-eyed and relieved, and ready for a major nap.

Over time, these sessions have also culminated to push me over the line into true radical acceptance of my new situation; I couldn't have done it without them.  I needed to grieve my old life in order to truly accept my new one, suck though it does.    And once I truly began to radically accept it, it was much easier to live with every day.

Talk about hope all you want.  Hope is still resistance to the present reality, and as such, it's a state of pain.  Plus, it has a dark side.  The dark side of hope is fear.  And fear is the worst state of all.  The most blissful state of all, in my opinion, is a life free of fear.  Living in acceptance comes pretty close.

That's where the animal mother in my soul has taken such good care of me.

When You've Just Found Out You Have Cancer

 Maybe your heart is pounding.

Maybe your hands are shaking.

Mayby you're crying.

Maybe you're ashamed of all these things, thinking you're supposed to be tougher than that.  Well, if you are, you're tougher than I was.

But if you just found out that you have cancer then I, who have had terminal brain cancer for two years now, (going on three, actually), have two things I need you to know:

1.:  YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

2.  YOU WILL NOT ALWAYS FEEL LIKE THIS.

Oh, wait.  I need you to know more things:

Mainly, that YOU CAN'T IMAGINE HOW MUCH HELP IS WAITING FOR YOU.  Literally WAITING.  Because there are so many people who WANT to help you with your cancer, including oncologists, radiologists, therapists, palliative care workers, social workers, and others, lining the corrodors and leaning out past each other HOPING FOR A CHANCE TO HELP YOU.  It's what they love and need to do.  You are about to find yourself falling into the arms of angelic people, at least for the most part.  Compassion fatigue happens to the best of us, and experiences vary.  But just scratch the surface of your resources and you'll find them pretty plentiful.  Cancer sucks, we all know it, and the cavallry stands ready.  But you have to do your bit:  you have to reach out, and you have to  show up.  It also helps to be nice.  It sucks to have cancer, but nobody in scrubs gave it to you; so  treat them with kindness.  They deserve a lot more respect and gentleness than they get, in general.  Also you will get a much better experience if you are pleasant, patient and appreciative with medical people.  They don't get a whole lot of that.  You may need to stand up for yourself at times as well, and I'll write plenty of posts about that, too.  But generally people will treat you the way you treat them.

And the adjustment will happen.  Right now you feel like you'll never be yourself again, and in a way that's a little bit true.  You will never be the person who never had cancer again, who didn't know what it felt like to have THAT shadow over your shoulder.  That innocence is gone, and it's definitely a loss, and a loss worth grieving.  If you are feeling that sadness, it's no wonder.  And it's perfectly proper to grieve it, in my book. It's well worth a crying session, or several. But you will readjust to the new reality and get your feet back under you.  I can't tell you when.  We're all different.  It took me over six months and vigorous work with a kick-ass therapist doing integration work once a week every week, plus plenty of journaling, mindfulness work on my own, and meeting with an independent mental wellness group I joined with some friends, also once a week.  But I finally reached the point where I no longer had PTSD, not ony from the shock of the diagnosis, but from the trauma of the brain surgery.  I could finally call myself very deeply healed, though I am still healing.  But I am myself now as much as was before diagnosis.  As I did say, it took work.  

I need to recognize my good fortune here.  I've had the time to do this work, to rest and recoup.  Not all cancers allow that.  Mine happened to back off for a time.  But some cancers attack viciously right away and give no quarter, taking the patient down with horriffic cruelty and speed.  If this happens to you, I am deeply sorry and all I can say is, you didn't lose a battle.  Nobody loses a battle against a tsunami or a volcano.  Cancer is Nature.  It's built into the mathmatical model of the universe, the way I see it.  You did nothing to incur it or to "lose" against it.  Cancer is horrible.  You were brave.  You were loved.  Even if the people in your life deserted and betrayed you, you were loved in ways you never knew about and you are still loved.  May you come to know how loved and wonderful you are.

If you have the blessing and grace of time to contemplate life and death, may you have thiese gifts, too.

Shielding

 Other people's shielding can hurt.  And they have no self-awareness of it.  To make them aware, to turn their own shields to face them, could injure them, so we hesitate to do it, but I'm nearly past that civility.

I swallow my truth a lot, and always have.  Self-abandonment is a survival method for those of us brought up by narcissists in violent, alcoholic households where truth-telling was a very dangerous proposition.  We learned to eat our feelings (for me this was literal.  I developed an overeating habit that resulted in an on-again, off-again flirtation with obesity and a dance with self-hatred lasting most of my life because of that).

But I am so tired of this habit of swallowing truth that I am nearly ready to let people have my truth even when I know they are unaware of the hurt they are inflicting and that the knowledge will hurt them.  Truth hurts.  But those of us with cancer are hurting enough already.

This came into focus for me when a cancer free friend, B,  was driving another friend and I home (Roz and I, who live down the street from one another, coincidentally both have glio blastomas). Roz remarked that one of the most stressful things about cancer, particularly ours, is the fact that the tumor could not only change direction on a dime but that it could grow very quickly into any area of the brain, taking speech, eyesight, memories, the ability to walk, and many other executive functions, so the bulk of the stress comes from not knowing what your life could look like even next week (will you be running your ass off to keep up with a clinical trial schedule?  Will you be having a port installed to gwt Avastin infusions?  *shudder*). B was contemplating the fact that she herself had had" many situations in her own life when she did not know what to expect next, and, well, she had adjusted!" (this last was said in a cheery, sunny tone)

The implication here is, "Just be like me!"

To which I always want to reply, "Oh, really?  Well, get cancer first, and then we'll see!"  

The whole speech would be more like, "Did you wake up in a new reality where you suddenly have twenty years chopped off your life expectancy and you have a very highly increased chance of waking up tomorrow with no peripheral vision or are completely blind, or no longer able to walk, have no memory of the people who love you, aren't able to speak or understand language or read?  Because unless you live in that reality suddenly overnight, it is not the same.  And you don't get to tell anybody else "they will adjust" to that unless you have done it,  or that "they will adjust" to the knowledge that they have a foreign invader growing in their brain that is definitely 100% going to kill them.  If you don't live with that, you do not get to tell people "they will adjust to it".  To be in cancer club and tell people how to deal with it you have to HAVE CANCER.  Otherwise, sorry, it's just condescension and it's meaningless and it's rude.  I know you are a loving person so I want you to know how it sounds to us."

B was not trying to be rude or condescending, I know.  She was just unconsciously shielding.  When people have simple solutions or begin sentences with the word "Just" as in, "Well, you just have hope, that's all!" or, "I just believe God never gives you more than you are ready for!"  (OMG, THIS one, the very definition of trauma.  Another entry on this one later...)  When people want you to cheer up and "just " carry on, look out.  That's their shiny plastic shielding.  It's jagged, and it hurts.  Keep your distance.

The First Evil

Re-bingeing Buffy recently, I was reminded of one of my favorite articles about cancer:  The Most Powerful Carcinogen is Entropy, which is another way of saying what I always say: "That's what happens when you stay alive."

Keeping in mind that I am not a scientist and don't play one on TV, it seems to me that cancer is practically built into the biological model.  It's a consequence of numbers.  Some cells are bound to fail and when they do they will become cancerous.  Then, cancer, the next in succession, will take over and grow.   Cancer is practically built into the gene code of life on earth.  There are exceptions, like elephants.  But elephants should be the exception because they are so awesome (I  did say NON-scientist).

At this point I want to issue a warning:  DO NOT LISTEN TO ANTI-CANCER EVANGELISTS.  They are selling something, even if it's just their own fear.  "Staying active" will not defeat cancer.  I've always been very active.  "Staying away from sugar" is not a magic solution, either, although it will give you prettier teeth.  Staying in tree pose and eating bundles of kale will not cure or prevent cancer, although it could give you a wicked case of the runs.  People are afraid and want simple solutions.  Scientists know better.  And cancer doesn't come from plastic.  Dinosaurs had cancer.

In this way, cancer is like Buffy's First Evil.  It's as old as life itself, it works against life, and especially like mine, glio blastoma, with a 100% recurrence rate, it always comes back.  Thing is, that's not important.  It's not important how you fight the First Evil.  The important thing is to not let it steal the good from life.

(spoiler ahead, if you've been "saving" Buffy's finale...)

Buffy gets to this conclusion in a brilliant way: creating community through the sharing of power.  In this way, she essentially becomes immortal, being the only Slayer to think of sharing her power with all the world's potential Slayers, and thus changing the rules forever(side note: she  does this with her best friend, sending Willow the witch on a journey where, Gandalf-like, she becomes Willow the White rather than Dark Willow, and they together break all the rules in a magical-power move).

Anyone who gets a horrible diagnosis and refuses to let it steal their joy is changing the rules.  It's the true "battle" people talk about.  I admonish people who say, "She lost her battle with cancer", because you don't lose  battle with a tsunami.  As much as any other natural disaster, cancer is just nature doing what nature does.  It's indefatigable, it's eternal, and it never goes away.  You can kick its ass now and then, send it scurrying back to the shadows, but it will amass its forces and return-that you can count on.  But again, that doesn't matter.  

What matters is life.  The real "battle" is about keeping your joy.

And it's tricky.  For me, it's a balance of radical acceptance and a radical renegotiation with life on my own terms.  I accept that my life expectancy is reduced, but I also now have very stringent boundaries about my time.  I do not spend too much time doing bureaucrat's paperwork for them, for instance.  If a doctor's office tells me to call someone, I find a polite way to tell them to do it.  There are few people I won't listen to, but the ones I won't lend an ear to I escape from promptly even if I try to be polite about it. But I have unlimited time for beloved friends.    

I've found I need a balance of courage and realism combined with a kind of cavalier attitude toward what other people consider serious concerns that used to oppress me; I carry a secret ambition to free other people from their own unrelenting standards in the gentlest possible way..  I have had to release myself from the clock(now that I don't have to work, I refuse to work) and the spreadsheet and the grim standards of the fashion/lifestyle  magazines.  I've decided to be willing to dress sometimes clownishly on purpose, to laugh loudly, to eat ice cream when I damn well want it, although I also eat a lot of healthy food because it makes me generally feel better.  I talk to everybody as if they matter, because everyone does, and I love the way that makes me feel.  I have always felt this way, but now I am much more intentional and deliberate about it.  What matters to me is people.  Not money, not standards, not any other bullshit, but people, and of course animals, and the earth, the sky, the water, the sacred world that holds us.

This balance helps me stay mostly within my joy, even if the shadows do move across my day at times, and I still stop to cry at times and grieve my life PT (pre-tumor).  There's a loss of innocence I grieve there, not only in the knowledge of the impending loss of my own mind and freedom and health and self-determination, but the innocence of living without that shadow over my shoulder.  This is absolutely worth grieving.  

I faulted myself for this at first, had shame for my weeping.  I never will again..  It's a grievous loss, and I no longer need anyone else to help me justify that. I truly understand the scope of it now, and I can truly lay a compassionate hand on my own shoulder without any embarrassment.

Buffy wouldn't be embarrassed.

If Theres A Memorial

 I keep seeing scenes of people at memorials reading things written by the people being memorialized.  This reeks of Trumpian narcissism to me, BUT it doesn't seem fair to just dump the content into the left-behind laps either(here, kid, YOU do it!  Good luck, we're all counting on you!)

So....here's something, anyway...I think, at the end of the life, the onlt thimg besides general usage of the English language that I was ever any good at ( I think I had a pretty solid grasp of that) was making a collosal ass out of myself.  It's genetic, too.  Me Dad's family were a vaudeville family, playing music and performing on the road.  My Dad and his brothers even released a 45.  

But anyway, making a huge jackass out of myself on the radio went well-so well that the run went for over three decades.  I kept showing up, they kept paying me, until the MRI that showed the golfball sized critter growing in my head.  That changed everything overnight, pretty literally, and events following went much more smoothly than expected.  I was incredibly lucky and surrounded by loving friends and literally supported in every sense by my amazing boyfriend Jim..  I also had great insurance and my employer  and my boss stood by me.  CRAZY luck.  

I'm grateful to my writer's group for helping me finish my first crappy novella.  I'm not downing myself here.  Your first novel isn't necessarily supposed to be a work of heartbreaking genius.  It's like the first pancake-quite often, the first pancake sucks.  The first panake is the one you're supposed to eat when nobody's looking.  If only novels worked like that, but it's online and on line is for fuckin EVER.  

But I want to talk about Paradise.  The great Paradise that nobody talks about in our Industrial Animal Farm of a Plutocracy is living without working.  It's of course looked down upon, but retired friends and non-working friends of many ilk have all told me the same thing:  It's the Secret to True Happiness.  The sign above Auchewitz was a Big Lie, as is the work ethic I was raised on.  The lesson in the book Animal Farm hit me like a punch when I read it at fifteen.  I cried in my room for a half hour over poor Boxer, dead in a muddy ditch.  He had been my hero, and I rather brainlessly continued to emulate that Yankee work ethic throughout my chequered work history as though working HARD could make up for not being able to add or subtract (numbers never stayed in place for me-they JUMP), not being able to tell right from left most days, especially when looking at a map, (wait, which left? The real one or the one if you're facing down?)  and not being able to decipher the simplest workings of a computer platform.  I've always been bafflingly stupid concerning the simplest things, but I can explain some pretty complex themes from literature and even hold forth at some length on the virtues of certain authors, composers or even the occasional philosopher, if that's your thing.  I'm also a damn good listener, and I can make you feel truly heard, if that's your thing. If  not, you'll find me pretty useless, as most people have.  And for the most part in most of my life, I felt useless.  Because I was.  I can carry a cocktail to a table.   I can tell you stories about the name and the origin of the beverage. But as for how much to charge you for it and how to give you your change back, I never was any use.  

I found in the last two years that the life-changing magic of not working did more for me than anything else ever has.  It's thee most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.  "What are you doing with your time?" the wife of a friend asked me.  Well, the hooks of the Work Ethic have not completely released me.  I finished twoa novellas and an o[p-ed piece.  That's a product, proof of labor.  But to answer the question, I spend most days in pretty close texting/calling/Duo contact with friends, keeping up with my medicines and MRIs and other treatments like PT and trying to up my blue light time on my Optune machine to hopefully shrink my brain tumor, I journal, I do things around the house, I manage my disability money carefully, I manage my medications and, mostly,  I consume stories in written and spoken and television and movie form.

Mainly, I am enjoying my time.  Because I don't have to work.  I have no dread of the near future in terms of "Oh, damn, I have to go to a place where I won't measure up and I'll get fired soon and then I'll be completely without income again and I'll have to go through this whole horrible thing again." or, "I have to go face that guy who hates me because I lived past 25 and dared to stay in radio and who wants me out of the building and is trying to figure out how to get me to quit."  or "I have to go back to that toxic atmosphere where I'm hated on general principal and I'm about to be fired any minute and just thinking about the place gives me a panic attack and makes me nauseous."

But even when I LOVED my gig and looked forward to going to work every day, there was a creeping subtext of, "This won't last.  At some point I'll be too old and they'll kick me out, and it won't be long now."

From there, the future was grim.  Because social Security kicks in LATE...in your mid-70s, if you want to get enough to live on.  So you have to keep working, in my case, menial, entry-level gruelling jobs into your mid-70s, doing jobs you have no ability to do.  That's a hellscape of a life, at best. 

But I was saved from all that.  I was rescued!  

By Cancer!

At the tender age of fifty-nine Cancer scooped me up and flew me away to the magical land of Disability.  Where you get a check every month thats just about enough to live on-if in fact you've also been rescued by a magical boyfriend who doesn't charge you rent and is your loving caregiver.  

So the truth is, you've got to have both...the generous magical boyfriend and the magical curse of terminal cancer, which will put you quickly on the Disability list, where you can claim the funds back that you spent your Work Harder life paying IN.

So my fairy-tale ending depended on a disease to rescue me.  While it may well have truncated my life span, I've often said that I wouldn't mind skipping "the drooling years".   

It's a fair trade: fifteen years of struggling drugery for a couple (as I write this it's already two years of survival) of the relative luxury of living without working.  And it IS luxurious.  To live, simply live, without working is a simple paradise.  You don't have to live on a tropical island to enjoy it.  You don't need gadgets, although a phone and a tablet are very nice, so you can text friends at will and keep up with what everyone is binging, but that's hardly luxurious by common first-world standards.  To get up when you want and nap when you want, to live how you want, to only talk to whomever you want, all of these are great luxuries of living As Yourself, living in your truth.  That's what we all really want, and that is so often what work really robs us of.  The Plutocracy's biggest crime is to rob us of ourselves, not just through exhaustion and skinflinting, but through a myriad of other insidious mechanisms that separate us from our essential nature.

I am so grateful for my astonishing luck.  I wish you the best of luck, too.

If you want to celebrate that, very cool.  If you want to do a tribute, donate to the wild animal sanctuary in my name or something.   Or adopt a bear.  Everybody wants to be a lion king or a tiger king so they have very low bear adoption. That's my jam.

If you feel inspired to sing, Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, that's the tribute I would like.

But if it's a drunken chorus, make it a safe one, fuck nuggets.

I love you.

What I Should Have Said 2

 The last full-time local radio gig I had, they fired the PD and suddenly I had a shiny new 30-something who hated me on sight, and greeted me his first day with this diatribe:

"You’ve been here a loooong time, haven’t you, Robbie?” he said, leaning on the word long, and scanning me up and down with a disgusted frown that read, to me, (“You frumpy old lady, I’ll get you off my staff no matter how much passive-aggressive nastiness it takes”)he continued in a cheery, the-more-you-know tone,, “You know, some people are burned out in this business after only five years!”

I was striken silent.  I knew exactly what he was doing, but I was not armed to deal with it.

Here’s what I would say today:

“Age discrimination is illegal, and worse than that, it’s shitty.” (at that point I didn't KNOW it was illegal)

If he started to deny this, I would interrupt him with, “I’m not SAYING you’re ageist, like you’re not openly saying I’m too old for the job.  But the fact that you’re passive-aggressively creating a hostile work atmosphere that will make me feel like shit, DURING MY RADIO SHOW, which will affect the sound of the station, and you’re willing to do that means your ego is more important to you than the station, which is a bad sign.  You also clearly are fine with making me feel like shit to try to make me quit, which is also terrible.  Until you are ready to just fucking fire me, leave me the fuck alone and let me do my job.  The signal matters more than both of us.  So get out of my studio and take your old-woman-hating bullshit elsewhere.  I bet HR would be interested in hearing about it.”

I would have risked being fired on the spot and I was not financially prepared by a long shot, but it would have been a great way to handle him.Instead I spluttered helplessly ewhile he smiled in satisfaction, and kept the job for several more miserable weeks while I squirreled away as much as I could.