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By JOYCE WADLER
Published: November 27, 2013 24 Comments
The worst Thanksgiving I had came two days after they sliced me open, belly to pubic line, and the surgeon, coming to see me in recovery said, “We got most of it.”
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“Go to Ken’s,” I tell my friend Herb, trying to send him to the old friend in Brooklyn with whose family we’d spent the holiday for years. They did a great Thanksgiving; crazy newspaper stories; relatives we’d known so long they felt like ours; little tables with antique linens and dishes of chocolates and nuts, chocolates before you even started the meal.
“How could I enjoy anything with you here like this?” Herb says.
Like this: Staples in my belly. A morphine drip. My surgeon from when I had breast cancer, the easy cancer, coming in to visit saying, “They tell me it isn’t as dire as it looks.”
Herb isn’t my husband. At the time this is happening, he has been my best friend for 20 years, a feature writer like me. The first night after surgery, he sleeps in a chair next to my bed. He stays in the room when the nurses change the dressings. He sees the sanitary pads with the blood, the kind you get when they take out your ovaries and your fallopian tubes but cannot remove the uterus because it is stuck to the colon with what the doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering euphemistically call “disease.”
Love does not come as expected in a cancer hospital. I had seen this a few years earlier, sharing a room with a woman who was dying. She looked like what I had once thought cancer looked like: emaciated, skin and bones. Her husband was with her. In the middle of the night the woman moved her bowels. The sharp stink of it pervaded the room. Her husband stayed by her side and murmured comforting things and emptied the bedpan, and I, staying overnight for a minor procedure, thought that this is what real love was and how different it is from what you think love is when you are 22 and what you see in the magazines: the romantic dates, the sexy lingerie, the beautiful young woman, the rich, handsome man helping her out of the expensive car. Love was emptying the bedpan. Love was sleeping in a chair.
Food does not interest me during the bad Thanksgiving, which is good because I cannot eat. I suck on ice cubes and sometimes there is a broth and eventually I work up to Jello. Herb is indifferent to holidays though not to food, but Thanksgiving that year does not interest him either. Thanksgiving evaporates. I seem to remember sending him to the cafeteria Thanksgiving Day and talking about a very bad hamburger, but I am on morphine, I am stoned, so who knows. And when I am not stoned, I think about death. It has a presence as strong as Herb’s, it’s sitting in its own chair, it’s talking to me.
“You dodged me once, kiddo, but I’m back. Refuse to think about me? Yeah, right. How’s that working out?”
When I come home after Thanksgiving there is food. My friends Sybil and Martin send a cooked chicken and mashed potatoes from the Jefferson Market, because they know I do not cook; my college roommate Christie sends a pound of chocolate with a note, “Eat it all”; my friend Carol drops off her spectacular meatloaf through a year of chemotherapy, just leaving it at the door, because she knows what’s going on. When I have chemo every three weeks Herb comes to my house and sleeps on a blow-up bed and when he has to go out of town my friend Cheryl comes down to New York from Boston and fills in.
I try to avoid the stats, but there comes a time I have to decide between protocols, so I go to Sybil’s to do research because her computer is faster. These are the early days of the web, the mid-90s; research is harder. The survival rate we measure everything against is five years, though sometimes the reports deal with two. The numbers are bad: 25 percent of patients lived two years on this trial; 20 percent lasted five years on that one.
“So you think you have time for a cup of coffee?” Sybil asks finally. “If I make it instant?”
I am laughing. I am doubled over, laughing. Here is my big insight: You can have a Stage 3 cancer but when a friend cracks you up, you are as alive as anyone else.
So here we are 18 years later. Not all of us. My friend Heidi Handman, lost to cancer; my friend Vic Ziegel, lost to cancer; my friend Jack Newfield, lost to cancer; my Aunt Shirley Wadler, lost to cancer. The older you get, the more the losses.
On Thursday, Herb and I will get on the train to my niece’s and the family in New Jersey. I will carry two remote-control toy cars, a jeep and a fire engine, so my nephews can smash them into one another. Herb will carry two bottles of red wine. We will tell stories and crack one another up.
It’s Thanksgiving. I am thankful.
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