The Road
Recently I got my bike out of the attic after 2 years. My youngest son got his first ride in the child seat and I started looking for excuses to take a bike ride. Library books to return? Photocopies to make for work? Like a gleeful 8 year old, I hopped right on.
The streets of Berkeley look so different on a bike. I notice the bumps and smooth spots of the road, the width and the depth of fellow vehicles. I hear more birds. I feel the sun directly. On my bike, I’m embedded in the air.
This is also how it feels to be nearly one year past brain surgery.
I suppose any experience through which you contemplate your end could have the same results. Realizing how soon my story could be over lit a fire under me. I leaned hard into life this year. I started writing a book. I channeled my election depression into organizing women-empowered events. When my husband woke me at 2am in December to say he wanted to quit his job and build his own product, I rubbed my sleepy eyes and said “Do it,” thus becoming the breadwinner.
These actions feel like being embedded in life.
The first month of recovery was so pristine and powerful. I cried every day. I cried looking at flowers, at ladybugs, at the way strollers are made and when holding my kids’ hands. I was alive. Everything else was gravy.
Then one day my older son wanted me to play trains and I thought “ugh, not again with the trains.” I WAS BACK! I had achieved another level of normal, the ability to see that my kids weren’t always perfect and parenting was sometimes annoying. I was able to be sarcastic again, to raise an eyebrow at certain situations. (This coincided nicely with the time when I got feeling and movement back in most of my forehead.) I felt relatable again to other people, like I could genuinely complain and commiserate about the price of milk at the boutique market.
I reconnected with friends, made new friends, stopped talking about the tumor all the time, signed work and have now taught at companies whose employees have never heard about this part of my life.
It’s been a heck of a year.
I had a conversation the other day with a client preparing to celebrate her 40th birthday. I generally find that the events Hallmark deems important enough to plan cards around end up being the most complicated of all. It’s like society is underlining the event with expectations, a barometer of who celebrated it best, did you do all you could to really turn 40? How over the hill are you?
As we get closer to the one year anniversary of surgery, I’ve felt pressure to find an appropriate way to celebrate. What about that promise I made on Facebook to take my mom to Hawaii? What about the reality that she travels a lot for work and our schedules are nutso and the Darys are a one-income family these days? Could I trade Hawaii for a hot air balloon ride in Napa or an ice cream date with the kids?
What is the appropriate way of celebrating one year after facing down The End?
On Monday I’ll have one answer. I’ll go in for my annual MRI check-up to make sure the tumor isn’t growing back. Do I think it is? No. But did I think I had a brain tumor last April at this time? Also, no.
I’ve blocked off my afternoon to bring gifts to the neuro floor nurses, drop off a package for my neurosurgeon and spend some time in the UCSF meditation room before I head upstairs to radiology. I don’t know what else to do. Maybe I’ll weep all over everyone, but it’s also possible that they’re all too busy to talk and I’ll end up getting a chai latte and taking a walk alone.
None of it feels right. All of it feels right. Hallmark, do you copy?
Early last summer, when my head was still shaved and it was still obvious that something Big had happened to me, a guy approached me in a coffee shop. “Excuse me, did you have a craniotomy?” he asked.
“I did… did you?” His hair was pretty short too.
He’d had one a few months earlier; we learned we had the same neurosurgeon and laughed about it.
“Wait, who’s your oncologist?” he continued.
Right. I explained that I was really lucky and that my tumor was benign, that I hadn’t needed an oncologist. That explained why he hadn’t seen me at support group too, since my brain tumor wasn’t cancerous.
Levi rolled with it and we met up for coffee a few weeks later with his fiancee. They talked about his new meal plan, how he was handling treatment and what he was hoping for the future surgeries he’d need. I walked home that day entirely torn up. If guilt and gratitude and anger had a baby, that would have been me.
Months later, I was preparing a big birthday party for myself to celebrate life and 36. Three days ahead of it, I learned that Levi had passed away, 32 years young.
Some days I am frustrated at the world, at my country, at the HOA that rules our neighborhood.
But I am still fucking alive. I think about Levi — a guy I met twice in my life — and remember him. And it pushes me to get out of bed, to call my senators, to write my book, to earn money so my husband can live his dreams too.
Why are we alive? I don’t know. But if you’re reading this, I guess you are. So for all the people who are not and for all the people who wanted to still be, I have one message for you:
Go do something about it. Roll down your windows or get on a bike and take a breath. That is possibility you smell… and I hope you get to smell it for a very long time.
I hope I do too.
This piece is dedicated to Levi Felix, a thoughtful and brave guy who lived.
Update 4/5/17: Results back, MRI shows no reoccurrence this year :)
