Clinkage

Or, a report from the collision of rest and motion

“And sometimes I can’t wait to come down with cancer/
At least then I’ll get to watch TV all day.” – The Handsome Family, “Drunk by Noon”

My mom came to visit and for ten days I dragged her all over town. We went on the architecture boat tour and to the Art Institute. We went to Edgewater to hear a friend sing opera and to Evanston to hear Nora O’Connor play in another friend’s backyard. We went to see Stop Making Sense, which I first saw in 1984 in the little movie theater below the Pike Place Market, and to see the Handsome Family, who I knew from the 90s when their Milwaukee Avenue loft shared an airshaft with my boyfriend’s.

On the final day of her trip we piled in the car and went to Rockford for a regatta. In a last-minute twist I wound up rowing not once but twice that day, two 5Ks, back to back, first rowing bow for a teammate who couldn’t make it and then “hot seating” into my 6 seat for the second race. For each race we had to first row 5 kilometers upriver, before turning around and racing back toward the finish line, which meant I rowed, really, 20K in one afternoon. Both of our boats placed (OK, there weren’t a lot of other boats) and while by the last few kilometers I really thought I was going to puke, I walked away with two medals bouncing around my neck, achieving what our coach referred to as “clinkage.”

I should be proud, and you know what? I am. This time last year I had just finished 18 weeks of chemo. I was thin and bald, my head wrapped in wool, my jeans sliding off my hips. I was so tired I could not climb the stairs without getting dizzy and I had thus fallen down and broken my ankle, putting a cherry atop the chemo sundae. I was not, in a word, achieving. But one year later I’m busy, so busy, even as my mom has returned to the calm of her home. I’m making lists and taking meetings and grading papers and living my goddamn wild and precious life. Paul has taken to asking me how my “soccer mom” schedule is going – which is perhaps not fair to soccer moms. So why, for weeks, have I had that Handsome Family lyric running through my head?

This is the deep dark secret: that I long, at times, for the forced quiet of illness, for those fall-into-winter months when I was home alone all day for weeks on end, working at my job, napping, and writing, an animal, nothing expected of me beyond survival. Or as the ever-insightful Cameron Steele wrote last week, outing our cancer writing group: 

Sometimes in the hustle and bustle of post-treatment life… there’s a certain, troubled wish for the reprieve of full-fledged illness, when the job was to cease from physical and mental fight, to let the swords sleep in our hands. When the job was just to stay alive through rest, and food, and medicine, and, of course, for us writers, writing. 

A year later those days have taken on the hazy contours of memory, the fear and depression written into clinical fact, but no longer an active feeling. As I re-ignite into the world I’m firing on all cylinders but my engine is uncalibrated, accelerating far beyond capacity one day and then stalling out the next.

I know I’m not alone in this. I hear in the whisper networks of women with far more responsibilities than I the grim shared fantasy of, perhaps, being in a minor car accident or a slip-and-fall. One that is not so dire as to leave lasting trauma or debility, but injurious enough to require hospitalization and bed rest for a week. I do not long for a return to frailty – god forbid. But the yearning hits a deep vein of shame.

At some point last fall, Zoe gifted me a poster whose design is a simple graphic treatment of the word “REST,” over and over. It still hangs over my desk, but its message hits differently now. In part, rest feels an inaccessible privilege, and I can’t deny my envy of those with resources to go to midday yoga, to hire a personal trainer, to go on healing retreats, or buy themselves luxury items as consolations for their mutilated bodies. 

But, and, also, it is such a privilege to be healthy and alive. A privilege not granted so many on any given day since the beginning of days, but one that feels especially vivid in this season of endless war. It would be a privilege to be granted a peaceful death, even in the arms of cancer, and so in the wake of treatment my body screams with purpose. I vibrate to row, dance, fly; I long to write, to teach, and to make things happen. The desire to do everything I was unable to do last year — a denial of opportunity coming hard on the heels of the pandemic’s own deprivations – has produced a manic surge of activity whose goals fly in the face of the hours in a day. There is such urgency to it. Because looming over it all is the omnipresent possibility that I might not get to do it next year either. That the cancer  – the pandemic, sudden violence – might return.

I feel a little nuts. Last week I got stuck in traffic on the way to ballet, and as it became clear that I wasn’t going to make it in time I howled, alone in the car, and then I started to cry. 

What does healing look like, someone asked me recently? In my case it appears that healing happens through action, and an engagement with the world that’s at odds with the imperatives of rest – which is also critical to my mental and physical wellbeing. I can’t quite figure out how to reconcile the two and it’s got my shoulders tensed, my grip on the bar vibrating, ever at risk of falling with one false move. It is a feeling akin to that which writer and friend Sonya Huber dubbed The Great Unraveling:

“It’s a background level of chaos that’s like the recoil from a car accident, the snapping of the neck that jostles the brain and creates whiplash. It creates an injury via a contrecoup impact, from the French for the “opposite side.” … You might have had a certain five things explode, and as a result, ten completely different things broke. I wonder how much we are leaning into denial in order to function.”

 This fall I am achieving clinkage, but at what cost and to what end?

The whole time my mom was here she was fascinated by cicadas, their screeching cries against the waning of the autumn light swelling and crescendoing every evening. This hasn’t even been a very cicada-y summer, but the song was still deafening at times. What are they? She kept asking, of these midwestern insects so foreign to the Pacific Northwest. What do they look like? Why do they scream so?

As we sat sipping cocktails in the yard in the dusky dark that night in Evanston, listening to Nora’s voice swell and soar, soaking in our good fortune to have access to friends, music, community, this leisure, a cicada dropped the tree and landed on Nora’s arm. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed – and then gently, with a little patter about putting it up for adoption, she plucked it from her sleeve and placed it on her music stand, where it remained for the rest of the set. 

When the show was over I pulled my mom up under Nora’s tree. See? Look! The cicada was silent, fading but still alive, and we marveled at its prehistoric carapace, its finely webbed wings. Did I manifest this? I wondered out loud. What is this dark magic? 

Cicadas are often seen as symbols of rebirth and transformation. As they metamorph from ground-dwelling nymphs to sap-sipping flyers, they don’t go through a pupal stage. Like people, they stay awake in the same body as it evolves. Watching the little bug on the music stand, so determined to claim center stage even as its life flickers out, I gave it respect.

All these moments, each once in a lifetime. I long for rest but I can’t bear to miss a single one.

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My pet Substack peeve has to be writers apologizing all over themselves for their lack of writing, but if you can’t tell, I’m a little stressed these days. To release some of the pressure I’m turning off auto-payments for a time, so I’ll feel better about my own erratic posting schedule. Thank you for your support! No apologies! More to come soon.