Living With Cancer: Waking in the Dark
By SUSAN GUBAR
LIVING WITH CANCER
Susan Gubar writes about life with ovarian cancer.
A slant of light bifurcates the bedroom ceiling. Its source, a night light in the bathroom, slices through the ceiling fixture, slivering all the way to the far corner over my side of the bed. Before cancer, I slept through the night. Now, I wake in the dark because of the pull of stitches, the pain of drains or the need to empty some bulb or bag attached to my body.
While I lie gazing at this shaft of light, I am pierced by what the poet Philip Larkin called the “arid interrogation.” When and where will the disease progress? Will I die in pain? Who will be there for me? Regret and remorse crowd in as well: time misused, love not given amply enough, opportunities squandered, acts of good will stalled or aborted. Next swarm the worries about those I hold dear.
No poem better expresses my fear of extinction than Larkin’s “Aubade.”Its title identifies the text as a song about daybreak, but it is the terminal break of “total emptiness forever” that terrifies the poet:
— no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
Like me, Larkin must have found himself waking in the dark, afflicted by the dragging minutes that turn into hours.
Those hours felt interminable during the dark night of the soul lamented so fiercely by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his sonnet about insomnia “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” Hopkins suffered not a physical but a spiritual crisis. He, too, despaired when he woke in the dark. The word “fell,” the past tense of fall, can be read as a verb (to cut down), a noun (a pelt) and an adjective (grim). I wake and feel the fallen, felled fur of the ghastly night, a leaden weight encasing me.
Both poets were healthy at the time they composed these great works. Yet Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, and Larkin, a Protestant-born agnostic, speak to me about the heightened sense of impending mortality that cancer conveys. Both men taste their own bitterness, a sullen or sour resentment that is hard not to feel while lying awake with an incurable disease.
At other times, counting my blessings can dissolve gall; or chatting on the phone, or cooking a meal, or hugging my husband, or listening to music, or reading a novel. But at 3 a.m. all anodynes fail. The historian Tony Judt coped with the immobility and silence imposed by A.L.S. by constructing stories in his head about his past. In my current mood, such stories only tease me with my own inadequacies and failures.
How cramped my existence has become. I am worthless as a mother since it is hard for me to travel and harder still to summon the energy to help out. My scarred body with its various attachments feels alien, wounded, worn out, dysfunctional. Is the new drug working? Did I fill out the proper insurance forms? Where is the will? And there’s no paperwork on my “final resting place.”
Twenty-five percent of people with cancer suffer clinical depression. I don’t want to be one of them. With limited time at my disposal, I don’t want to squander even this witching hour, though I must not get out of bed since I really need to get more sleep. Lack of sleep can cause depression.
A line of verse that I learned in my youth drifts into my mind: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.” Yes, I woke up, but I need to go back to sleep and not wake again too soon. I close my eyes, as well as my Larkin and Hopkins, and open my Roethke.
The repetitions and rhymes of Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Waking”make it sound like music. There is one couplet that I love and perhaps it can dispel anxiety not with a trick but with a tune:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Roethke knew that we think by feeling our way with words. We may not rationally comprehend them, but their rhythms give us a sense of direction and security. I am slowly awakening to the idea of my final sleep, but I’m taking it slow.
Go slow: Roethke feels, but does not fear his fate. Since there is life left, surely it should be led without dread. I need to “learn by going where I have to go,” so why rush? Isn’t it better to be attentive to what is and will be happening? Learning and going, I want to abide with, not blight, my waking to the streak of light at night. During dark times, Roethke reminds himself and me, “the eye begins to see.”
Susan Gubar is a distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University and the author of “Memoir of a Debulked Woman,” which explores her experience with ovarian cancer.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/living-with-cancer-waking-in-the-dark/
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