I love about Montaigne that, despite roving bands of thieves and constant political upheaval, he reportedly never kept his castle guarded. He left all his doors unlocked. He acknowledged the terror that could come. But by considering it and allowing it in, he resolved to live with its presence: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about it or—still less—my unfinished garden.”
My wig smells toxic and makes me feel like a bank robber. But maybe it is just a cloak for riding out into suspicious country.
10. I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)
Freddy is eager to go back to school the day after he is released from the hospital. We show up in the nurse’s office with meters and insulin pens and alcohol swabs and glucagon kits and care plans. He is mostly focused on the silver lining that now he is allowed to eat a seemingly unlimited amount of beef jerky. But I see him moving differently through the world now—like he always has a bag over his shoulder. A bag filled with the words: Injections. Chronic disease. Glycemic index. Ketones. Hospital.
Then I remember this one night in the early 1980s. My dad and I were riding in his old white pickup down Route 128 somewhere north of Boston when it overheated, leaving us stranded on the side of the highway in a thunderstorm.
This was the era when breaking down still meant walking to find a phone. And I was about eight—not really old enough to be left in a truck at night on the side of the highway. So, during a pause in the downpour the two of us set off into the long wet grass toward a smattering of dark houses not far from the exit ramp.
Everyone’s power was out with the storm, and it took a few tries before we found someone with a working phone to let us call my mom, who was certainly starting to worry. Then we trekked back out to the truck to wait until she came to pick us up.
The truck battery was still working, so we cranked up my dad’s favorite cassette at the time—Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book. The windows were all fogged up and I still remember how the cab of that pickup smelled—a mix of sawdust and orange peels and dirt and coffee. Just like my dad.
I dozed a little in and out, my head lolling on the scratchy woven upholstery, with Stevie singing “I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)” over and over again, and then we’d rewind and listen to it again and my dad would get kind of falsetto and harmonize-y on the “I Believe” part and I was the most contented, up-past-my-bedtime, headlights-in-the-dark-counting, adventure-haver there ever was. And then my mom arrived in our little Volkswagen Rabbit and ferried us home safely to bed.
Freddy is about the same age now as I was then. I’m trying to be wide open with him about his disease, my cancer, the treatment, the parts I’m nervous about—to make it less scary. Maybe not the capital F fears, but all the lower-case ones for sure.
I scan him for signs of trauma, distress, anger. I ask him how he’s feeling about a hundred times a day, fending off my own topsy-turvy guilt and uncertainty.
The other day, poking at the latest IV scab on my hand, he said, “Sometimes I miss the hospital so much I could cry.”
The hospital. The beeping machines. The sallow 3 a.m. light of the hallway. The narrow vinyl couch and paper sheet. My matted hair. My jumbled belongings on the chair, the pink breast cancer tote. The pee jug I nervously watched for signs of ketones in Freddy’s urine. My son tangled in his tubes and wires. The four hours and twelve minutes when they thought he also had an undiagnosed heart problem. The endless parade of techs and nurses and doctors. That hospital?
“I loved playing those video games the whole time,” he said. “And remember how you would climb in the bed and cuddle me at night and we would just talk?”
Oh. That hospital. The smell of his sweaty curls tucked under my chin. The way he would squeeze my hand whenever someone new walked into the room. The steady puffs of his breathing I hadn’t lain awake listening to since he was a baby and I was a delirious new mother.
So here is the thing: Is it possible then that my dad wasn’t actually having the time of his life like I was—after driving late at night in the rain, dragging his kid to strangers’ houses, and sitting on the busy shoulder of Route 128 and eventually having to abandon his blown-up truck for the night?
That instead he was worried and exhausted and barely coping? Does “I Believe” conceivably not evoke a shimmery world of adventure for him? Does he not now sing it to himself alone in the car and every time feel happy and loved and excited about whatever might happen next?
A while ago, I asked him if he remembered that trip. “Oh, for sure. I was so wiped out when we got home.”
I burned him a CD of Talking Book to replace his long-ago-busted cassette. The other night he had it on in the kitchen at his house, and it turns out thirty years later he still sings along in the exact same croony way to “I Believe.”
Which makes my thinking go like this: When you fall in love with your kids, you fall in love forever. And that love forms the exact shape in the world of the cab of a beat-up pickup on the side of the dark highway—filled with safety and Stevie Wonder and okay-ness.
Or the exact shape of a single hospital bed with two figures nestled in it. Which of course suggests that no matter what, the kid is going to be all right.
11. Dancing with Myself
Before every chemo appointment Tita and her husband, Drew, text me selfies of themselves making crazy snarl-lipped pirate/Billy Idol–type faces. “Rock n roll, baby,” Tita writes. “You’ve got this.”
One time I am standing in the middle of the exam room trying to hold my blue hospital gown on while taking a selfie to send back to them of me making the same face when a tech opens the door without knocking. “Whoa. Everything okay in here, Ms. Riggs? You look a little off.”
“I’m completely fine,” I say, trying not to laugh. “I was just trying to pretend I was a rock star for my friend.”
“Oh, okay,” says the tech. “Well, I’ll be right back with the nurse just in case. Please take a seat and press the blue button if you need anything.”
12. The Poetry Fox
This one day at Duke, John and I spot a man in a furry fox suit. He’s sitting in the lobby with a typewriter. You give him a word, and he furiously types up a poem based on it, as you wait.
I have a long wait at the crowded breast clinic, and John wanders off to find lunch. He stops by the poetry fox on the way back.
A woman ahead of him gets a rambling prose poem about a childhood memory of Poetry Fox’s. Someone else gets a limerick composed around the word hope: nope, soap, dope. The fox seems a little worn down. When it is his turn, John gives the fox the word nonplussed.
“Nonplussed,” says the fox. “Okay, fine.” And he types out a free-verse poem that, while indicating that Poetry Fox also does not know the true dictionary meaning of nonplussed, is a worthy souvenir.
Stay nonplussed. Make them work to crack you, writes Poetry Fox, among other things.
“You’ll like this,” says John when he shows back up in the breast clinic with the typed poem.