A monument made of water

ingress.

When I get to the edge and close enough to take a better look, I see that the outline merely mimics hundreds of heads of seals and up close it is a messy composition of seaweed clusters and kelp. I’m on the edge of rocks, and it’s hard to see beyond one hundred feet, but the ocean stretches out for miles. To the end of the world, it would appear. At least three species of birds in flocks fly in different patterns and disappear into the sky. I don’t know all of their names. The fog is heavy again. In this pristine place, I pick up three pieces of trash I spot and think about the nature of things. The confluence of life on life. And life. I read a quote about reading the dictionary and can relate to the words it uses to describe the vastness of meaning and the desire to make meaning of vastness. That’s where I find the water between rocks as the waves push air in and off the face of the ocean. I find the middling of everything to be the center of discomfort and home. I see this while my family crosses from one place to another and back again, but different. Over the phone, Fonz reads the results of his most recent bone marrow biopsy to me. We still await one more analysis, but two of the three look good so far. Because we all live in a life constructed of binaries, we must choose how we feel - good or bad. But I feel confused. Often. I feel good; I suppose that so far, his results show no detectable cancer in his blood or bones. I feel bad because how the fuck did this become a part of our family? I’m still there sometimes. In shock. Grieving. We’ve adopted a being that lives in his body that we must care for in our home, a new member to our little family of four; this is the largeness of cancer. I think of the door again. The one that once opened, you cannot close. I think of the vastness of the dictionary that still holds no correct word to describe this feeling. It’s not a failure, I guess. It’s what writes poetry and makes art. Maybe because buried in its marrow is an ocean so big and wide it can’t be bottled into a word. I go back in time through books. The mystics and the mythological. Gods and Goddesses and seers. The other patients, too. While I sit cross-legged on a bed in the middle of the day because I have been proverbially sent away to tend to my wounds. To rest. Repair myself like a machine. To wonder what to do next. As in this minute, next week, and in a year from now. I think about the roundness of one hundred. Because it’s almost been that amount of days since he received his stem cells. I think about collections and studies, and what if I told a story every day about something I did that touched into the void? The void as another word for the endless connection between nowhere and everywhere. It’s the equinox, and I’m alone beside the beach, and I realize that three months ago, at the solstice, we prepared to usher in another season. The one we say goodbye to today. I’m watching waves crash against the sand, and I’m not thinking of any of it as destruction but of receiving. Of movement. Of wiping away everything so that everything else can arrive. It’s a coincidence that I’m away from my family for a couple of days at this changing of the seasonal guard. I didn’t exactly plan this getaway myself. It was strongly suggested to me, and, honestly, the idea was intriguing, like a decadent meal, but it wasn’t easily digestible. I wondered if I had earned a break. I said this out loud to someone; I suppose in my way, I was searching for either permission or revocation. I was told I had earned it and asked why I needed to feel that way. I keep asking myself that searching for something more nuanced than a bad case of martyrdom. Every time I try to explore this feeling, however, I melt into it. It’s something about being a caregiver and not the patient. It’s a terrible kind of sadness to be adjacent to something unjust that you can’t do much about but soothe, at best, but not always, and never fix. There’s a lack of completion. An ongoingness that I must make room for in everything. I recently started to try to calculate the sadness of this time against other losses. I don’t know where to find myself on the scale or find our family. I don’t know why this is something I try to do. Early on last year, maybe even one year ago to the day, I learned about a phrase, The cancer lottery. I don’t understand it because it’s ridiculous in its way, but what I believe it means is that there are good cancers and bad cancers, and you can win with a diagnosis, one or the other. I think I may know a few people with an educated opinion on where Fonz’s cancer may fall on the scale. I never ask. I still try and add up all the integers myself. Somedays, the quotient is different and unexpected than others depending on the weather or the sunset or how many hugs I get from Luna, how many times Rafi and I share a glance between just us, or talk about anything else but cancer with Fonz. Take a walk together. Laugh. But I go with the plan. I organize my absence. I pack a bag. I feel strange and unsure of what I would do with time. Afraid of the discomfort. And the guilt. That morning, before I eventually leave, I take the girls with me to an outdoor dance class. Early enough that the mist is so low, we can almost dust it off the trees. They meet a dog they love that belongs to another dancer who offers them to take it for a walk. I dance and watch them joyfully running around a parking lot with a big, fluffy dog. Rafi puts her arm around Luna from time to time. They dance with me for a few songs and then walk Theo again. The point is they dance with me. The point is I woke up not feeling well but decided at the last minute to go dance anyway. The point is it was the right decision even though I barely slept the night before, awake with irrational thoughts about something out of my control. Three months ago, I packed us up for Stanford at the crest of the summer solstice. I made trips back and forth to our little rental and eventually brought Fonz there. Eventually, we came back home. And now here we are at the fall equinox and we have crossed into a new threshold. Bookends. Bedfellows. A new beginning. Almost one hundred days. Almost another galaxy. Almost no cancer. Almost another life. It’s colder here than it is at home, where Fonz and Luna get ready to pick up Rafi from circus practice. Earlier today, on the drive down, I pick up listening to a book I start and stop intermittently depending on my mood. She details the landscape of her cancer journey and I recognize many of the places she goes along the way. I don’t recognize these in my body but in Fonz’s as his witness. I wonder if I’m listening to this like a final visit to this world I lived in, held citizenship, and now have left for home again. As some new version of myself that has seen the unseenable and felt the unfeelable still searching for words to describe or understand both or either. I feel committed to bearing witness to her experience as an homage to Fonz’s. And to my own. A caregiver. An occasional deserter. A refugee. The lucky one. Bereft of a life violently thrown off course and the good fortune to survive this figurative loss. Today, she talks about words being a lifesaving discovery. An urgent measure that bears no cure for the future but makes a home out of the moment. It is a beautiful shelter, transparent and woven of the finest vistas into truth. Because the mist sits above the water, there’s no separation between sky, water, or any other element. Not this morning. The birds still know where to go in the fog. I take the stairs down to the sand to escape the garbage truck, moving at about the same pace as me. As soon as I’m on the beach, I can barely hear it trailing off, and it’s just wave after wave. There are no drawings in the sand yet. The tide is too far in. Pelicans dive headfirst into stretches of glassy ocean while it crashes just a bit in front of them. Soon, it will be pulled back to its center. This is what I hope will happen to me. That I will be pulled back into my center. Wood has washed up on the beach. I grab a piece big enough to sit on and pull it underneath me. While the fog burns off above me, it still covers everything before me. That is how I describe the world right now. Hours later, I return to the beach and the tide has risen, and the fog has fallen even lower. The waves are big and loud and also practically invisible. Blank and alive. Raging. Anything could get lost here. It’s dangerous and rhythmic. The waves that keep growing in size and fierceness catch the sun caught behind the clouds, washing the water in gold before everything goes white again. I’ve been quiet for hours, a little uneasy with the amount of space I have to myself. I think about Fonz and what he’s been through - imagining what I can. I think about Luna like a lighthouse. Rafi is the shore. We’ve become entirely new creatures. We must learn to choose who we are now, but before that can happen, we must arrive from where we were. I tell someone that at the time of his diagnosis, it was like a fire swept across all parts of our lives. There wasn’t much we could save from the flames. It’s hard to describe, and it’s lonely. That’s how it felt for a long time. Today, I think of it as something we must carry along with everything else. It makes our steps more intentional because the weight is considerable. It is almost impossible some days. The sun comes out for sunset and washes the entire ocean in light. It makes a column of gold on the water that stretches to shore, almost to my Crocs grinding sand into the path beneath my feet just moments ago. That and the waves are the loudest sounds right now. I’ll look for the green flash that leaves a flame of color as the sun sets beyond view. I’ll tell Luna I saw it, and she will be excited. She will also miss me, and I will miss her. I will think of Rafi’s profile and wonder why it’s her profile that makes my heart want to burst the most. Maybe because it’s when I look at her, I see her considering the world before her. The whole entire world. I talked to Fonz twice today, and in both calls, I could hear us adapting to our new abnormal. How this is something you don’t know to expect. And since I never went to a support group, or looked into a crystal ball, or was told by anyone exactly what happens next when your whole life becomes a stranger, I’ll never know if this is something someone would have told me would happen. How suddenly, one day, without warning or ceremony, it would feel like waking up to a new life. It’s your own. It’s not the nightmare of the past year and a half. It’s something new. It’s not what you thought you wanted or planned for, but it’s something profoundly worth keeping and seeing what it will grow into. It’s something precious. Knowing now, you’re different. You’re broken in ways. You’re sturdier in others. And you’re healing forever, and that’s ok. We all are.