I can do it with a broken heart

eras.

"I got cancer, cancer don't got me."

This is what a man called out after leaving his treatment and heading off to work. I never saw him again, and I never had to write down what I heard - it's been turning around and around in my mind for over a year now like a record. At the time, his words might have well been in another language - one I had never heard. One I thought I'd never know how to translate into my own. I watched him walk out of hematology with the swagger of someone who had made a choice about their fate or at least walked hand in hand with it.

For a while now, I've declared myself not a Swiftie. But things have changed. I'm changing.

A few days before I left for Vancouver to witness the final show of Taylor Swift's Eras tour, Fonz sat me down. The first conversation started over the phone. I was upset about something. About everything. That's how I've been for a while. An uncharacteristic version of me has risen to the surface. The grief spills everywhere into everything all the time. I have been raising the dead. Stories and traumas from my childhood have gathered in the pit, along with the smoldering traumas of the last two years. I was stuck in the swamp of it all. I think of the poem from British poet Stevie Smith, "Not Waving but Drowning," a lot. I knew someone once, decades ago, who had the title tattooed on her arm, right where you might see it if her arms were waving because she was drowning.

Sometimes, I, too, look like I'm waving, but I've been drowning. In life. In the unknown. In the death of my life. In cancer. In my own sorrows. Shortcomings. Regrets. And fear. So much fear.

Meanwhile, Fonz has been pulling himself up from the swamp. He's been exercising every day. Fostering connections, new ones. He's been juicing beets and carrots. Making enormous salads for lunch. He's been playing King of the Bed with the girls which he couldn't do for two whole years even when they begged him to. He's been taking an online course to work in a new field. He's been doing it all and also participating in a clinical trial for his cancer.

For a while now, where I've been contracting, he's been expanding.

This is what a marriage can look like - a seesaw. Except our seesaw has been balancing in a storm in the middle of the night in an ocean for two whole years. My body is waterlogged.

He started the conversation we began on the phone again after I got home. I had been waking up with a pit in my stomach since the weekend. It's hard to raise the day this way. While trying to get through the routine that morning, I stood at the counter shaking. I wasn't sure if it was a panic attack or a full breakdown; indeed, neither of those thoughts helped. I wanted so badly to pull myself together before either of the girls noticed, but naturally, Luna, with her catlike sensibilities, tuned into me right away.

"Mama, you ok?"

"I'm ok, Luna. I've just been feeling sad lately."

She gets up from the table, throws her arms so tightly around my waist, and says, "It's ok, Mama, we all get sad."

The truth is, the convergence of perimenopause, puberty, and cancer under one roof has turned our family into a life-sized pinball game. I know this all the time, but I also want to transcend it, and it's in that tension where I fall apart. I haven't known how to transcend anything. The buoyancy by which I could define myself for most of my life had become an anchor.

I do drop-offs and can't remember what else, but he's home when I arrive. We're in the living room, and after we wade through the pique overwhelm of the season layered on top of the dailiness of familiness, Fonz says to me, "I'm in remission, and we don't know more than that right now. We don't know for how long or what it looks like beyond this point, this treatment, and I'm trying to be there with it, and I want you to be there with me. With all of us."

For over a year, I've been giving sermons. I've preached about mountain climbing and summiting and walking through fire and rebirth. But not that day. And all of a sudden, it was almost as though I could feel my arms lowering from waving and drowning into reaching.

Receiving.

This was an invitation.

Accepted. I board a plane with my stepsisters – my sisters – a few days later. We meet their mom and stepdad in Vancouver that night. This plan, this wild and unexpected plan appeared from the ether only a month earlier. An invitation, and as it turns out, not just to bear witness to a cultural phenomenon but to join in hope. In love. In connection. In healing. In possibility.

Accepted.

In yoga, the Star pose is an opportunity to stretch your arms up toward the cosmos, capture the magic, and bring it down to earth. I've been trying to do this, but I've been afraid to turn my back on what I've seen. What I've learned. I've been unwilling to abandon any of it in the face of forgetting or pretending it never happened or who we once were. But now, I am reminded of what happens to the dry ground when it rains; tiny, fierce, and fluorescent blades of grass emerge almost instantly, ready to live.

And so this, my mantra: I was there. I was there. It was rare. A sacred prayer.

I was there. I am here.