A Conversation With Cancer

A Conversation with Cancer 11/05

“Wake up. Pay attention,”
my old friend, the cancer, seems to say.
She silently and stealthily
creeps up into my neck and shoulder
on her slow cat feet.
Imitating some benign muscle inflammation,
fooling us all.
“It is nothing,” I say to myself.
“Cancer doesn’t act like this.”
But she did.

And so we resume the old conversation, she and I.

“I do not want to kill you,” she says.
“If I wanted to kill you, I could slip easily
into your lymph system, and invade
your brain, or your bones.”

“So what DO you want,” I ask.
I already know the answer.

“I just want you to pay attention.
You forgot how fragile your precious life is.
You forgot to pay complete and total attention to me,
to the insistent nature of my invasion.”

I did forget. I pretended as though she were gone for good.
I pretended that I was in charge of my life and my destiny.
How easy I repeatedly fall into that seductive illusion.
She’s her to remind me, once again.
That mine is not to choose the path,
but to surrender to it.

“Remember your fountain?” she asks.
“I was there, you know.
I was those rough pieces of gravel
covering the bottom layer of your fountain.
I absorbed the red liquid you eye-dropper dripped
on to those porous stones,
pretending it was the red poison
that was supposed to kill me.
How you lifted one stone out every
day, threw it from the deck into the creek bed,
asking it to peacefully leave your body.
You were kind and I couldn’t resist your plea.
I even watched with some pleasure
as you replaced each rough, gravelly cell that was me
with a smooth, lovely, polished, healthy river stone.

“I remember the angels that came,
as you sat in the plastic recliner
with the needle in the back of your hand.
How they gently asked me to please leave the area,
and escorted me to the door,
to dissolve and be whooshed out with the blood, the urine.
You were paying attention then.

“You paid careful attention for an entire year.
Sitting on your mountain top,
meditating, visualizing. preparing for a graceful death.
You watched the blazing fire of the sunrise
on those sleepless early mornings,
the mist dissolve in the valley below,
the deer scamper as you came out your door,
the lights come on across the Monterey Bay at dusk.
You were peaceful and kind. How could I not cooperate?

“But then you forgot.
You forgot that each day you have on this earth is a precious gift.
You forgot that you need to watch for me with mindful eyes,
and that I will leave quietly if you ask me nicely.”

Friends and relatives swoop in, expecting to hear my swan song.
“I think I will be singing and flapping for a few more years,”
I tell them. I’m paying attention.