Writing Samples
750 Words About Cancer
The ceiling creaks with every step. My family moves in clandestine patterns while I type at the computer in my red-room below. The room is red for a reason, not just because I enjoy the color, though I do. The red is for passion, the kind of passion that can take a person to the extremes of joy and pain. I’ve been marked by both, and so paint my writing room red, to remind me.
I seek the shrouded truth of Vedanta, the light of God in Christianity, the sechel, or reason, in Judaism, and the compassionate wisdom of Buddhism. All keys to the universe, just not mine. As a cancer patient, there is no single key. How can there be? The universe is a large, complex place with many white-coated gods in sterile hospitals. Mine is a polytheistic world.
I have survived three cancer diagnoses in the last fifteen years, two brain tumors and melanoma. I’m thirty-three. Is there sense in sensibility? Is there brevity in wit? And what about the soul? Lots of questions, very few answers—that’s something you get used to. You have to.
There are a great many “have-to’s” when you face cancer. You don’t want to have your skull drilled full of holes, then, listen to doctors play connect-the-dots with a surgical saw, and lift out your skull, exposing the fragile gray matter beneath. You don’t want to be awake with a valium drip for the seventeen-hour surgery. You don’t want to recognize in hour-ten that you cannot move the left side of your body in panic and fear, and have an anesthesiologist named Surriel tell you to not be upset because you are going to sleep now. You don’t want any of those things, but it doesn’t matter what you want. You have to.
You have to face weeks in a rehabilitation hospital with nurses who disguise bullying with care. You have to go on to endure nine months of intensive chemotherapy where you lose ninety-pounds, your balance, and your feelings…about everything. You have to consider the unthinkable: What will happen to my family if I die? What will happen to the $60,000 in student loans? Will my husband have to repay that, if I die? Will my son grow up to be a good man? Will my husband find a new wife? Will anyone remember that I used to sit in a red room and write? Lots of questions. No answers.
I’ve made a discovery though, now being an expert on questions without answers. The question of why is always irrelevant. The only true question is why not. Why not? Why not die? Why not get sick? Why not get well? Why not travel to Australia? Why not live every moment to the very fullest? Why not. Not why.
The language is important. You predict the future with your words. Coelho’s conspiring universe will help, too. You’re like an alchemist trying to turn lapis exillis into gold. But there is no holy grail—it’s a stone called Moldavite, found in Moldavia.
The words you avoid are statistics and numbers. They deal in absolutes, and the universe is nothing more than string. Wave-like particles entangling with stationary particles…and then, anything is possible, at least at the sub-atomic level. But isn’t that where cancer starts?
There are one-hundred and twenty varieties of brain tumors. Brain cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death. If you live in Australia, melanoma is the number one cause of cancer death. Over 190,000 people will be diagnosed with brain tumors in the United States in 2006. One-third of the female population of New York State is diagnosed with cancer each year. It’s good to avoid this kind of language. Better to use the more fluid language of creativity.
We are not diagnosed with a deadly disease, we are merely interrupted, as if in the middle of an engaging phone conversation, and then, a child tugs at the hem of your blouse to ask an absurd question that has no answer; the question is being asked purely to distract you from the current call so you may pay more attention to the child. That is it. That is cancer.
You don’t believe my words, my language? Maybe you don’t want to believe. Belief can be suspended to let truth peek in under your skull and into your gray matter, the surgical saw still buzzing in your ear. Why? No, no…it’s why not.
©Rebecca A. Housel; first printing: Brevity, September 2006; second printing: Survivor’s Review, January 2007
The Fox
The growing discomfort continued. I drove down the two-lane street trying to ignore my uneasiness. Maybe someone, some unknown person, will have picked it up. I was relieved as I imagined the possibility. Unfortunately, my imagination was, once again, too comforting to be real.
As I approached the old barn, passing what was once a vast cornfield (now a posh suburban sprawl of neat vinyl-clapboard homes too big for practical use), I looked at the roadside while still keeping an all-important eye on the car ahead of me. There was a red splotch spread on the darkened tar where a deer was earlier. The body was now gone, maybe my best hopes will come true after all. The fact that there was a body at all disturbed me; I knew it was a hypocritical disturbance, though. I was driving a car, too. I was burning precious fuel, emitting toxins into the environment, perpetuating a need for roads that cut across wooded areas, through hillsides, forests, and what was once open meadows, like this road surely used to be. Through my silent participation, I was as guilty as a reluctant SS officer paying off a Judenracht to betray fellow Jews.
I knew the road had once been a meadow because the areas on either side, left wild by a non-caring Department of Transportation (that is, until that space is needed by people—and it surely will be—as surely as the road I’m travelling), were these lush beautiful fields of tall grass, now tawny for fall. In the mornings, I would drive down this road on my way to work and watch for deer feeding near the tree line. The road cut right down the middle of the once-meadow. Deer and other animals have to cross it to seek shelter and other food sources. Courageous, isn’t it? It’s no problem for a human to cross the street, though even sometimes humans get struck and killed by cars. But humans have more than a fighting chance, speaking the same language, understanding the same contexts, having “superior” intellects…it’s like walking across the street on two healthy legs as opposed to walking anywhere with only one. Suddenly, walking across the street becomes almost Olympic, but even a one-legged human has better odds than a deer or a fox.
Animals like deer and fox have large territories, larger than most humans who typically don’t leave a three-mile radius from their home for things like food and companionship. For work, of course, the almighty dollar, people are always willing to travel great distances—including me. But when it comes to things like doctors, dentists, groceries, church, even friends, the twenty-first century human’s territory is rather small.
Now, deer and fox can have territories that span anywhere from nineteen to twenty-five square miles, though they typically get penned in by unnatural boundaries created by humans, like the New York State Thruway running from the western-most point in New York State all the way to Massachusetts with off-shoots to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, even Canada. The interesting part about the New York State Thruway is that the majority of it cuts through rural areas and mountainous zones; populated areas seem to be built around the Thruway, or, away from it. When hearing “New York” an immediate image of New York City comes to mind with bustling streets full of yellow cabs, mobs of people crossing in packs at the change of a light, and tall towers of steel and cement swaying in their height against an almost overshadowed sky barely able to peek through the grayish scrapes of buildings. Funny thing is, most of New York State is nothing like New York City, with more open space, farmland, and mountains than most Americans understand. The deer and the fox know better though.
Last summer I got to know the fox living along the old trolley trail. She had a litter; three pups wrestling amongst the wheat shafts of the adjacent meadow. That’s when I first saw them. Before that moment, I’d only ever seen fox in cages at places like the Blue Hills in Boston. Mother-fox would greet me on the path sometimes. We had a silent pact to respect one another. I’d tell her when others were coming and it was time to hide. But she showed herself to too many. When the town cut down the wheat field to discourage coyote prowling for small pets let loose by oblivious owners, Mother-fox was exposed. The humans living behind the meadow began to explore what was once a well-hidden terrain. Cruel teenagers drove monster four-wheelers without regard over her den. Her territory was shrinking. Once the pups left, it wasn’t long before she left as well, abandoning her territory to pervasive humans.
The trail hasn’t been the same since. I carve an ancient Sanskrit symbol of unity into the dirt all along the trail, for miles, and still, nothing.
In winter, I tramped up into the meadow, miles from the trail entrance, with my one human leg, like an Olympian of old. The snow, up to my waist; the ice, an unexpected reminder of my humanity. During the spring thaw, I made similar treks, hoping to discover tell-tale footprints. Footprints were numerous, human. Especially around her den. It has been a year now.
The first fox I saw this year was crushed on the side of the road I travel now. Crushed to death by a two-ton vehicle’s wheels, careless, cocky, quiet, and quick. Too quick for a clever fox to understand.
I grieved, singing aloud the Mourner’s Kaddish in an ancient tongue. Today, I hoped the body, now rotting on the roadside for three weeks, would be gone. It wasn’t.
The next morning, at five o’clock, now dark after daylight savings, I went to the spot where the fox lay. I took old gardening gloves, a shovel, and some left over cotton cloth I had from a wedding quilt I sewed while too sick to walk, or run, or produce my own blood. I saw her, laying there, her head flattened by multiple tires now, despite being on the very edge of the road, inches from the sheltering meadow. I carefully lifted her body with the shovel, placing it gently in the spread of cotton piqued fabric with whimsy flowers decorating the edges, like the meadow that was surely her home. I carried her in the cloth, gloves still on, down the side of the hill. Still Olympic on one leg, still grieving, using the shovel as a cane. Thankfully, it was too cold for flies. Other than the humans and some crows feeding on her as carrion, she was undisturbed. I dug a shallow grave, like Antigone, covering the body with dust. Last rites. It was important. How was I different from her, the fox? Both mammals, both trying to survive. We both ate, both breathed. Each of us danced by the light of the moon, sang joyfully at the rising sun. She was undoubtedly a mother, like me. Monogamous, like me.
Volpus volpus, a canid, first introduced in North America by a British man, Robert Brooke, Sr., a pious twice-married minister and once-Governor of Maryland, who took at least 24 Red Fox across the ocean in 1649. Those who survived the journey were then hunted. Luckily, a few persevered. There are no longer any wild canids living in Britain, hunted to extinction by those who thought themselves aristocrats, an undeserved title for people who sought amusement by killing innocent creatures for sport. No better than barbarians. Worse perhaps. Even Neanderthal man didn’t kill for sport. For food, yes, but not for sport.
Did she know her history? Was there a generational exchange among her kind?
I may never know. All I do know is that now, her spirit can rest in the meadow she called home. Her voice will be heard once again in the whistling wheat shafts, tawny in fall, after a green summer, a playground for the wanton wind.
Yitgadal V’yitkaddash sha’ may rabbah b’alma dee’vrah chee’rutay v’amlich malchutay.
Glorified and sanctified is God’s great name throughout the world God created according to Her will.
©Rebecca Housel 2009
The ceiling creaks with every step. My family moves in clandestine patterns while I type at the computer in my red-room below. The room is red for a reason, not just because I enjoy the color, though I do. The red is for passion, the kind of passion that can take a person to the extremes of joy and pain. I’ve been marked by both, and so paint my writing room red, to remind me.
I seek the shrouded truth of Vedanta, the light of God in Christianity, the sechel, or reason, in Judaism, and the compassionate wisdom of Buddhism. All keys to the universe, just not mine. As a cancer patient, there is no single key. How can there be? The universe is a large, complex place with many white-coated gods in sterile hospitals. Mine is a polytheistic world.
I have survived three cancer diagnoses in the last fifteen years, two brain tumors and melanoma. I’m thirty-three. Is there sense in sensibility? Is there brevity in wit? And what about the soul? Lots of questions, very few answers—that’s something you get used to. You have to.
There are a great many “have-to’s” when you face cancer. You don’t want to have your skull drilled full of holes, then, listen to doctors play connect-the-dots with a surgical saw, and lift out your skull, exposing the fragile gray matter beneath. You don’t want to be awake with a valium drip for the seventeen-hour surgery. You don’t want to recognize in hour-ten that you cannot move the left side of your body in panic and fear, and have an anesthesiologist named Surriel tell you to not be upset because you are going to sleep now. You don’t want any of those things, but it doesn’t matter what you want. You have to.
You have to face weeks in a rehabilitation hospital with nurses who disguise bullying with care. You have to go on to endure nine months of intensive chemotherapy where you lose ninety-pounds, your balance, and your feelings…about everything. You have to consider the unthinkable: What will happen to my family if I die? What will happen to the $60,000 in student loans? Will my husband have to repay that, if I die? Will my son grow up to be a good man? Will my husband find a new wife? Will anyone remember that I used to sit in a red room and write? Lots of questions. No answers.
I’ve made a discovery though, now being an expert on questions without answers. The question of why is always irrelevant. The only true question is why not. Why not? Why not die? Why not get sick? Why not get well? Why not travel to Australia? Why not live every moment to the very fullest? Why not. Not why.
The language is important. You predict the future with your words. Coelho’s conspiring universe will help, too. You’re like an alchemist trying to turn lapis exillis into gold. But there is no holy grail—it’s a stone called Moldavite, found in Moldavia.
The words you avoid are statistics and numbers. They deal in absolutes, and the universe is nothing more than string. Wave-like particles entangling with stationary particles…and then, anything is possible, at least at the sub-atomic level. But isn’t that where cancer starts?
There are one-hundred and twenty varieties of brain tumors. Brain cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death. If you live in Australia, melanoma is the number one cause of cancer death. Over 190,000 people will be diagnosed with brain tumors in the United States in 2006. One-third of the female population of New York State is diagnosed with cancer each year. It’s good to avoid this kind of language. Better to use the more fluid language of creativity.
We are not diagnosed with a deadly disease, we are merely interrupted, as if in the middle of an engaging phone conversation, and then, a child tugs at the hem of your blouse to ask an absurd question that has no answer; the question is being asked purely to distract you from the current call so you may pay more attention to the child. That is it. That is cancer.
You don’t believe my words, my language? Maybe you don’t want to believe. Belief can be suspended to let truth peek in under your skull and into your gray matter, the surgical saw still buzzing in your ear. Why? No, no…it’s why not.
©Rebecca A. Housel; first printing: Brevity, September 2006; second printing: Survivor’s Review, January 2007
The Fox
The growing discomfort continued. I drove down the two-lane street trying to ignore my uneasiness. Maybe someone, some unknown person, will have picked it up. I was relieved as I imagined the possibility. Unfortunately, my imagination was, once again, too comforting to be real.
As I approached the old barn, passing what was once a vast cornfield (now a posh suburban sprawl of neat vinyl-clapboard homes too big for practical use), I looked at the roadside while still keeping an all-important eye on the car ahead of me. There was a red splotch spread on the darkened tar where a deer was earlier. The body was now gone, maybe my best hopes will come true after all. The fact that there was a body at all disturbed me; I knew it was a hypocritical disturbance, though. I was driving a car, too. I was burning precious fuel, emitting toxins into the environment, perpetuating a need for roads that cut across wooded areas, through hillsides, forests, and what was once open meadows, like this road surely used to be. Through my silent participation, I was as guilty as a reluctant SS officer paying off a Judenracht to betray fellow Jews.
I knew the road had once been a meadow because the areas on either side, left wild by a non-caring Department of Transportation (that is, until that space is needed by people—and it surely will be—as surely as the road I’m travelling), were these lush beautiful fields of tall grass, now tawny for fall. In the mornings, I would drive down this road on my way to work and watch for deer feeding near the tree line. The road cut right down the middle of the once-meadow. Deer and other animals have to cross it to seek shelter and other food sources. Courageous, isn’t it? It’s no problem for a human to cross the street, though even sometimes humans get struck and killed by cars. But humans have more than a fighting chance, speaking the same language, understanding the same contexts, having “superior” intellects…it’s like walking across the street on two healthy legs as opposed to walking anywhere with only one. Suddenly, walking across the street becomes almost Olympic, but even a one-legged human has better odds than a deer or a fox.
Animals like deer and fox have large territories, larger than most humans who typically don’t leave a three-mile radius from their home for things like food and companionship. For work, of course, the almighty dollar, people are always willing to travel great distances—including me. But when it comes to things like doctors, dentists, groceries, church, even friends, the twenty-first century human’s territory is rather small.
Now, deer and fox can have territories that span anywhere from nineteen to twenty-five square miles, though they typically get penned in by unnatural boundaries created by humans, like the New York State Thruway running from the western-most point in New York State all the way to Massachusetts with off-shoots to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Vermont, even Canada. The interesting part about the New York State Thruway is that the majority of it cuts through rural areas and mountainous zones; populated areas seem to be built around the Thruway, or, away from it. When hearing “New York” an immediate image of New York City comes to mind with bustling streets full of yellow cabs, mobs of people crossing in packs at the change of a light, and tall towers of steel and cement swaying in their height against an almost overshadowed sky barely able to peek through the grayish scrapes of buildings. Funny thing is, most of New York State is nothing like New York City, with more open space, farmland, and mountains than most Americans understand. The deer and the fox know better though.
Last summer I got to know the fox living along the old trolley trail. She had a litter; three pups wrestling amongst the wheat shafts of the adjacent meadow. That’s when I first saw them. Before that moment, I’d only ever seen fox in cages at places like the Blue Hills in Boston. Mother-fox would greet me on the path sometimes. We had a silent pact to respect one another. I’d tell her when others were coming and it was time to hide. But she showed herself to too many. When the town cut down the wheat field to discourage coyote prowling for small pets let loose by oblivious owners, Mother-fox was exposed. The humans living behind the meadow began to explore what was once a well-hidden terrain. Cruel teenagers drove monster four-wheelers without regard over her den. Her territory was shrinking. Once the pups left, it wasn’t long before she left as well, abandoning her territory to pervasive humans.
The trail hasn’t been the same since. I carve an ancient Sanskrit symbol of unity into the dirt all along the trail, for miles, and still, nothing.
In winter, I tramped up into the meadow, miles from the trail entrance, with my one human leg, like an Olympian of old. The snow, up to my waist; the ice, an unexpected reminder of my humanity. During the spring thaw, I made similar treks, hoping to discover tell-tale footprints. Footprints were numerous, human. Especially around her den. It has been a year now.
The first fox I saw this year was crushed on the side of the road I travel now. Crushed to death by a two-ton vehicle’s wheels, careless, cocky, quiet, and quick. Too quick for a clever fox to understand.
I grieved, singing aloud the Mourner’s Kaddish in an ancient tongue. Today, I hoped the body, now rotting on the roadside for three weeks, would be gone. It wasn’t.
The next morning, at five o’clock, now dark after daylight savings, I went to the spot where the fox lay. I took old gardening gloves, a shovel, and some left over cotton cloth I had from a wedding quilt I sewed while too sick to walk, or run, or produce my own blood. I saw her, laying there, her head flattened by multiple tires now, despite being on the very edge of the road, inches from the sheltering meadow. I carefully lifted her body with the shovel, placing it gently in the spread of cotton piqued fabric with whimsy flowers decorating the edges, like the meadow that was surely her home. I carried her in the cloth, gloves still on, down the side of the hill. Still Olympic on one leg, still grieving, using the shovel as a cane. Thankfully, it was too cold for flies. Other than the humans and some crows feeding on her as carrion, she was undisturbed. I dug a shallow grave, like Antigone, covering the body with dust. Last rites. It was important. How was I different from her, the fox? Both mammals, both trying to survive. We both ate, both breathed. Each of us danced by the light of the moon, sang joyfully at the rising sun. She was undoubtedly a mother, like me. Monogamous, like me.
Volpus volpus, a canid, first introduced in North America by a British man, Robert Brooke, Sr., a pious twice-married minister and once-Governor of Maryland, who took at least 24 Red Fox across the ocean in 1649. Those who survived the journey were then hunted. Luckily, a few persevered. There are no longer any wild canids living in Britain, hunted to extinction by those who thought themselves aristocrats, an undeserved title for people who sought amusement by killing innocent creatures for sport. No better than barbarians. Worse perhaps. Even Neanderthal man didn’t kill for sport. For food, yes, but not for sport.
Did she know her history? Was there a generational exchange among her kind?
I may never know. All I do know is that now, her spirit can rest in the meadow she called home. Her voice will be heard once again in the whistling wheat shafts, tawny in fall, after a green summer, a playground for the wanton wind.
Yitgadal V’yitkaddash sha’ may rabbah b’alma dee’vrah chee’rutay v’amlich malchutay.
Glorified and sanctified is God’s great name throughout the world God created according to Her will.
©Rebecca Housel 2009
