“You will get sick,” my wife often says to me.
My wife is a Hidatsa/Ho-Chunk/Potawatomi Indian. The daughter of a Bureau of Indian Affairs administrator, she lived on five different reservations before her high school and college years in the relatively big city of Riverside, California. Therefore, she is wise and wise-ass.
“I know I will get cancer,” I say to her.
“You have to be vigilant,” she says.
“I know, I know,” I say.
But how do I kill the cancer cells that probably infiltrated my body decades ago? Aren’t those microscopic and domestic terrorists just waiting to strike? How do I stop the process that probably started when I took my first breath on the Spokane Indian Reservation?
I cannot defeat cancer. Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving.
There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.
12.
Terminal Velocity
Fuck you, Small-Cell Cancer. Fuck you, Fission, For splitting cells, for birthing the tumors That killed my mother. Diagnosed and dead
In a few weeks, my mother was evacuated
From this world like it was on fire.
Fuck you, Small-Cell Cancer, for invading
My mother’s lungs. She was not a smoker!
I want to choke you to death, Small-Cell Cancer, And suffocate you, suffocate you, suffocate you
Like you suffocated my mother. Fuck you,
Small-Cell Cancer, I want to shoot you in the heart And mount you on the hood of my truck.
I want to trophy you like you trophied my mother.
Fuck you, Cancer, fuck you, Cemetery Dancer, I’m going to learn or invent a war anthem—
A song that will obliterate you when you attack.
Note by note, my song will kill you, atom by atom.
My song will protect cousins, nieces, nephews, sisters
And brothers. My song will protect everybody’s fathers And mothers. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Cancer, For making me wish that I could write a song
Powerful enough to banish you. Fuck you, God Of Cancer, for killing my mother, for splitting her Into many halves, for turning her blood and body
Into host. Fuck you, Small-Cell Cancer. Fuck you, Mr. Death, for making me so grateful to be alive— For making me count and write odes to each breath.
Fuck you, Cancer, for being as constant as gravity— For being as necessary as food, shelter, and warmth.
Fuck you, fuck you, Cancer, fuck you for your immortality.
13.
Who Died on the First of July?
Great American actor turned recluse
Marlon Brando died of respiratory
failure. After twenty years in exile, Juan Perón died of a heart attack
One year into his return to power.
Wilhelm Bach, composer and eldest son Of Johann Sebastian Bach, never
Lived up to his father’s fame and genius
And died in poverty. Wolfman Jack,
Disc jockey and rock ’n’ roll pioneer, Died only moments after he returned
Home from work and kissed his wife.
Oliver Plunkett, Irish saint, was hanged, Drawn and quartered because of his faith.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist
And author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
The novel that, according to some,
Was the first shot fired in the Civil War, Died of natural causes. Nostradamus, A doctor who believed that he could see
The future. Though I don’t know if he predicted His own death. Luther Vandross, the Tenor Of the Gods, was only fifty-four years old When he died of diabetes and heart failure.
Lillian Alexie, my mother, died
Of small-cell cancer in a hospital bed At her reservation home. She’d wanted To die on the living room couch where she’d slept
For nearly forty years. It wasn’t the same couch All that time. Five previous couches died Before my mother did. She is survived By the living and the ghosts of her tribe.
To honor her legacy, light a fire
So that you smell like powwow campground smoke.
In lieu of flowers, please donate your time To quilt work, basketball, and dirty jokes.
14.
Drive, She Said
Traveling 296 miles to my mother’s wake and funeral, My wife and sons and I drive past
Five roadkill deer, two squashed coyotes, and a porcupine Roughly ripped in half. In another time,
If my mother had been a passenger, she’d have insisted That we pull over the car and park
So she could carefully collect that porcupine And take it home to harvest the sharp quills
For war-dance regalia. But my mother is dead, And my wife and sons and I don’t war-dance,
So we drive past that dead porcupine And abandon its ceremonial possibilities.
But I know, for the rest of my life, I will think of my mother and her knife
And the dozens of times
She gave extraordinary meaning
To ordinary porcupines and their quills.
Ah, listen closely
When you drive along a two-lane highway Between the pines
And you’ll hear a hundred war-dancers Rattling their now-human quills
And thanking my mother, thanking My mother, thanking my mother
For her beauty and will.
15.
The Viewing
As the story goes, my beautiful cousin was born With deer legs, dropped from the womb, and sprinted
Out of the clinic and made it halfway home Before the tribal cops pulled her over for speeding.
In kindergarten, she was faster than every adult.
I watched her, three feet tall, outrace my father up
A sand hill while dodging rattlesnakes at Blue Creek.
In sixth grade, racing in her first organized meet,
She looked back near the finish line
And was so far ahead that she burst into tears
Because she’d hurt her opponents’ feelings.
And then she never raced again.
In 2015, a few days after my mother’s death, My quick cousin stood next to me as I stared
At my dead mother lying in her plain pine coffin At the funeral home in Spokane.
The undertakers were white men
But they’d buried generation of local Indians
So they knew how to culturally comfort us, And better, they knew how to leave us alone.
That was the private family-and-friends viewing, So that meant thirty loud Indians had gathered
In the otherwise quiet funeral home.
“Lillian looks beautiful,” my cousin said.
And I had to agree. My mother wore her favorite Turquoise business suit and a multicolored
Beaded medallion that could have eclipsed The sun or moon. My cousin took my hand,
Bumped me with her hip, and said, “Hey,
You and I used to be the skinny and pretty cousins.
And now we’re old and fat and homely.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m still pretty from the neck up.”
My cousin laughed and said, “My soul’s spirit animal is The butterfly, but my ass’s spirit animal is the buffalo.”
And I said, “I eat food like my father used to drink booze.
I binge and binge.” And my cousin said, “Oh, man! Me, too!”
And then my cousin began to weep. I didn’t cry with her.