Margotlog: Friends with Cancer

Margotlog: Friends with Cancer

     We are not supposed to be brought low by our friends' illnesses, or that was the message I received as a kid. Maybe I was simply a hedonistic type, skipping rope and running up and down the enormous block from King Street to Meeting Street along the bulk of what we called "The Old Citadel." This was Charleston, South Carolina in the days before home airconditioning. During the summer, our parents often took us to the movies, within walking distance, since we lived at the King Street end of The Old Citadel, and the movie theaters were maybe five blocks down King Street -- the Gloria Theater being the one I remember most. Glimmering stars shone down from a large replica of dark sky above our heads.

     Entering the air-conditioned cool and walking the dark sloping ramp to find seats, we settled in to be transported to other realms, other eras. There was a bio-pic of Chopin, played by a pale though not haggard young man, with a mess of curly, dark hair. Several times the camera focused on his hands traversing the piano keys. Finally, the keys were splashed with red blood. Our mother explained that he had tuberculosis, and was hemmoraghing, or spitting up blood. The music he played even as his blood stained the white keys was so delicious, so rampant with fury and passion that I was completely mesmerized.

     After that, for weeks, months, maybe years, my sister and I played at romantic dying in our parents' big bed. She was Violetta from Verdi's "La Traviata." Then I was Mimi from "La Boheme." Snuggling in our mother's fleecy pink bed jacket, we sang lustily as the maid, (aka the healthy sister) brought us glasses of lemonade and a cookie or two to assauge the illness. There was something remarkably lifelike about this play-acting, especially for me. I had periodic bouts with tonsillitus--high fevers and very sore throats, which sent me to bed while penicillin worked its cure. 

     Dying in almost all 19th-century opera occurs not so much to young men, but to beautiful young women. Sometimes like Mimi, the dying damsel is simply pathetic; other times as with Violetta, her illness is a kind of plague brought on by her all too "free and easy" lifestyle, depriving her of a chance to redeem herself except through dying. I have no doubt that enough beautiful young women died of TB during the 19th century to make these scenarios all too realistic. I also sometimes include the great poet Keats in these remembered scenarios, though my sister and I had never heard of him. But now, his poem "Bright Star/ would I were steadfast as thou art," says so much about the 19th-century's scourge of TB and the need to make it poetic.

     Now, the plague is cancer. We live longer, giving those mutations that cause cancer (along with environmental plagues) time to do their horrible work. Right now, I have three friends with cancer, one for the first time. For another, the scourge has recurred. This will be her fourth bout with cancer. And for the third, a man, the cancer occurred perhaps eight years ago, and he has been very lucky to have extremely good care at Boston's Mass General as part of a study, which I believe involves a new concoction of drugs as well as blood transfusions.

     I bow my head to their courage. Sometimes after talking to them, I am so subdued that I need to be quiet, drifting up and down stairs, a bit like walking a prayer. Prayer offers up a supplication to the great powers of faith, hope, and charity which the weakness of my soul, and the absolute incomprehensibility of their suffering require that I petition. Now, outside my window, it is a beautiful morning. I am happy to report that many houses along our block no longer use herbicides and pesticides on their lawns. Yes, our climate is warming, but so, perhaps are our hearts, transformed by awareness of how depredations to our environment bring on slow-or-fast moving catastrophe.

     This, in itself, is worth a prayer of thanksgiving and for me, at least, a determination to continue to support the work to free our world from cancinogens with which we have polluted our air, water, and soil. In the names of my friends, and of the increased number of birds in my backyard--I offer my sorrow and my attempts to do what I can. Yesterday, I saw for the second time this spring, a humming bird at my sweet water feeder. For their lives, and those of my friends, for myself, my neighbors, my family--I offer up a prayer of muted hope.