By NINA
WISE, the Fall 2006 issue of Inquiring Mind
Nina Wise is a theater artist, writer and dharma
teacher. She teaches a class at Spirit Rock for people with life-challenging
illness and caretakers called “Buddhism When It Really Matters.”
Charlene was diagnosed six months after I
was: ductal carcinoma in situ, a collection of abnormal cells that might or
might not aggress into a disease that can kill you. Fingertips cannot feel the
presence of DCIS nor can the cells be seen by radiography. But DCIS leaves a
trace — microcalcifications, which look like tiny stars on mammograms when you
hold the dark film up to the light. Your own private milky way. For years after
your diagnosis, when you look up at a night sky, you see breast disease. The
presence of microcalcifications, however, does not in itself mean you have
DCIS, only that you might if you happen to fall into the unfortunate twenty
percentile. “It’s probably nothing,” your friends reassure you, and they tell
you of women they know who had biopsies for the exact same thing and
turned out to be fine, fine.
The technicians go in with needles, remove
sufficient tissue for the cells to be examined under a microscope, and say,
“Come back, we need more.” You sit on a padded chair in a windowless room with
metal clamps flattening your breast. You stare at a poster of a sunflower in
full bloom. X-rays are shot over and over again, the technicians fleeing the
room to shelter behind lead walls, an eerie beep informing you each time the
deed is done. Long, fat needles you imagine best suited for pachyderms are
inserted deep into your flesh. If you do not have cancer now, you are thinking,
you will surely develop it from the countless blasts of radiation. You follow
your breath: in, out. You tell yourself not to get angry at the technicians,
the doctors, the nurses, the people sitting behind desks, even though they have
all transformed into trolls; this is not their fault. You breathe: in, out. You
try to find the cause: The pesticides sprayed from low-flying airplanes to
eradicate mosquitoes when you were eleven, your heartbreak over a man better
avoided whom you still miss, your mother’s genes, the cigarettes you used to
smoke, the caipirinhas you drank in São Paolo while breathing fouled
air, a past life you’re not sure you believe in? And then you remember you have
no diagnosis yet, you are probably fine, fine. You’ve meditated for years,
you do yoga regularly, you eat organic carrots, seaweed and brown rice, you
hike, take vitamins, write poetry; you are an unlikely candidate for breast
cancer.
Days later, the phone rings. The oncology
surgeon says the findings are not clear, come back for further testing. This
time you are anesthetized and she goes in with a scalpel. Afterwards, you sit
in the recovery room on a big soft chair covered in Naugahyde that leans back
like a La-Z-Boy. You’re woozy but not unhappy; the anesthetic was laced with a
drug that cheers you up. You are in fact quite content until the effect wears
off, and then you are wondering why they didn’t warn you how much it would hurt
afterwards.
When the bruising is nearly over and you’ve
tossed the frozen peas you were using as an ice pack into the compost, you get
the news. You have DCIS, a vague disease known by its initials. The lesion has
been graded and sized.
Charlene’s lesion was small. She chose to have
a mastectomy immediately, not a lumpectomy. She had a five-year-old daughter,
she would take no risks. Wanting to save my breast, I had asked for time. I had
gone to England for therapies not provided here—intravenously delivered extract
of Venus flytrap, ozone pumped into the bloodstream. I had swallowed mountains
of supplements, lain tranquilized under heat lamps until my internal body
temperature spiked into the hundreds, prayed, visualized, refrained from sugar,
wheat and wine. Charlene’s new breast, made from muscle and fat removed from
her back and carried around to her chest wall (the nipple made like a doll’s,
stitched into place) was lopsided. She declined further refinements. I, too,
finally succumbed to the knife. My right breast tissue was removed and the skin
refilled with belly fat, the areola tattooed.
I was making tea one afternoon when
Charlene called. A year had passed since her mastectomy, a year since mine.
“Bad news,” she said.
I sat down on one of the kilim chairs
Charlene had admired when I bought them. Red, her favorite color.
“I found a lump in my other breast. I’ve
had the biopsy, it’s aggressive and in my lymph nodes.”
The teakettle whined on the stove. I did
not get up. I cradled my head in my hand. Her chemotherapy was scheduled to
begin in two days. I insisted on accompanying her. My hands shook as I hung up
the phone. I should examine my breast. The remaining one. I should lift my
arm and with the other hand walk my fingers across the flesh with soft pressure
in a spiral of concentric circles. But my hands hung by my sides, refusing
to conduct the investigation lest they encounter a pea-sized nodule that would
set in motion a future I was unready to pursue. Tomorrow, I promised
myself, when I shower.
I had met Charlene ten years before at a
meditation retreat when, after twenty-one days of sitting and walking in
mausoleum-like silence, we sat in a circle of fifty and introduced ourselves. I
had noticed her across the room on the first day, her dark hair falling to her
shoulders in thick waves, her skin pale and luminous, her aquiline profile
perfect; had noticed the way she slipped her bare feet into red shoes when we
left the hall to walk outside, pacing for an hour back and forth across the
cement quad of the nunnery the Buddhists borrowed for seasonal asylum. I
imagined everyone noticed Charlene because beauty, no matter the intention of
the bearer, attracts attention.
“I am a painter,” she said in the circle,
her voice tinged with an untraceable accent. French? German? “Abstract. When I
meditate, I do not see what I will paint but I see how things are
other than they seem and this informs my art.”
That night we sat side by side in the
dining hall drinking chamomile tea, a stream of words cascading from our mouths
despite the teacher’s advice we return to speech gradually so as not to be
overwhelmed by the complexity of human interaction. We sat with our shoulders
touching and laughed, the words themselves amusing, a kind of miracle.
The chemo lounge was a large room with
plastic high-backed chairs flanked by IV poles and served by a retinue of
soft-shoed attendants. The nurse wrapped a tourniquet above Charlene’s elbow as
he talked about art (having dabbled himself, he knew the way colors change when
next to each other), patted her forearm until a vein swelled (was keen to know
where her show was opening), slid a slender needle with an expert’s ease into
the unsuspecting blood vessel. Unable to witness the pierce of flesh, I averted
my eyes at the last second (the television suspended from the ceiling was tuned
to a soap opera), but Charlene steadied her gaze on the action and watched the
shiny needle enter her vein, noting the red of blood sucked up into the base of
the syringe. Bob adjusted the clamp on a clear tube that hung like a slender
vine from the IV bag and drop by drop, a second of suspension between each, a
cherry-red liquid made its steady way into Charlene’s blue vein. The television
was now broadcasting warnings about rolling blackouts—undisclosed geographical
areas to be turned off one at a time without warning, a checkerboard of
darkness crossing the state. Have matches handy, candles with clean wicks,
flashlights by the door, fresh batteries. We did not know yet that the power
shortage was a fiction, did not predict the front-page photos of CEOs in
handcuffs, the disappearance of nest eggs. We sat back and propped up our feet
on plastic stools and wondered if the blackout would roll by the hospital.
Charlene reached for her purse and handed
me a fat envelope of photos: Her daughter, Emma, black hair in braids, chubby
cheeks and slanted eyes, sitting on the floor in rainbow-striped trousers, legs
akimbo. Emma, running on the beach in a red dress, her hair loose and
flying. Kenneth, his face as round as Emma’s and bespectacled, leaning over his
daughter as she blows out the six flaming candles on her cake. And a photo of
models of Charlene’s new work, an installation for a hospital in Seattle. The
series of filigreed metal works based on the discovery of DNA were to hang from
the eighteen-foot ceiling and reach to the floor of the hospital foyer.
Was it the chemicals, she mused, that make
yellow paint so yellow, red so red, that had caused her cells to mutate? The
fumes? She no longer worked in oil and remembered these days to turn on the fan
in the studio she and Kenneth had just purchased in the Berkeley flats, his
space in the back, hers by the storefront windows covered in rice paper.
I called Charlene the morning after chemo.
Her voice was weak and slurred. The day before she had been lively, free of
symptoms, the cancer in her body discreet, unobtrusive. Now discomfort invaded
every cell. She had spent the entire night on her knees vomiting into the
toilet. A friend had given her a small bag of marijuana to ease the pain and
nausea. Being prone to paranoia, Charlene had not indulged. Kenneth, however,
sitting beside her on the edge of the bathtub in the wee hours of the still
dark morning finally rolled a slender joint and lit up.
For weeks Kenneth had been drawing a future
with Charlene—which school to enroll Emma in, what color to paint the new
building, his show at the University Art Gallery, her retrospective in Walnut
Creek. Charlene had leaned on his optimism like a tree whose heavy limbs grown
weak are propped with wooden staves. The pot made its way swiftly to Kenneth’s
head, the tendrils of smoke unlacing his composure. He swallowed hard to still
himself, but the grief too long refused eluded his control.
“He fell apart,” Charlene told me on the
phone. “We huddled on the floor together, me throwing up and Kenneth weeping.
It was fantastic. We had not let ourselves be so intimate for a very long
time.”
They had given up any attempt to be who
each imagined the other wanted. Neither had the strength. They could only
surrender to what had overtaken them: horror. And there on the bathroom floor,
the grout loose, the room smelling of vomit, diarrhea and marijuana, they
recognized what they had always known resided in the heart of their marriage
but these days had rarely glimpsed—a raw unfettered passion for life, for life
together.
“We fell in love again,” Charlene said.
A few years ago, I attended a retreat with
Tsoknyi Rinpoche. My father had died only weeks before of a sudden heart
attack, and, despite Tsoknyi’s masterful skill at guiding us to rest in
unbounded luminous awareness, I was unable to shake a debilitating sadness and
despair. At the end of the retreat, I finally mustered the strength to ask
Tsoknyi about grief.
“You do not try to overcome grief or
dissolve it into luminosity,” Tsoknyi advised me. “You grieve.” He explained
that the word satvameans “courage” and in the case of a bodhisattva, it
means “the courage to suffer.” “A bodhisattva suffers a lot,” he said, “but
willingly.”
I did not allow myself to fall apart as I
guided Charlene down hospital corridors on her way to one treatment or another
or took notes as doctors rattled off statistics or wrote down the precise
instructions she dictated to me for her funeral as we lounged in the shade of
an old oak tree in her backyard. “Put a red rose petal on every chair,” she
said, staring at the sky mottled with clouds. “Do not buy the flowers since we
only need the petals. Get the ones the florists are throwing away.”
Her belly was distended, her gait weak, her
liver riddled with tumors. I followed her inside to listen to the music she had
chosen for the ceremony—a Spanish ballad, the singer’s voice fluid and sultry.
Perched on the arm of the red leather chairs she had brought back from
Switzerland, I closed my eyes and listened to the lilt of lyrics, the
harmonies, and struggled to hold back the tears that flooded my eyes. I would
remain calm through this, steady, for Charlene. I glanced at her. A tear
glistened as it fell down her cheek.
“I’m crying at my own funeral,” she said
with a sheepish grin, and we both burst into sudden laughter, the tears now
unstoppable.
When I began to practice Buddhism, I
learned that the Buddha presented a methodology for freedom from suffering. I
imagined this meant I could manage life’s myriad challenges in a state of
steady, unmediated bliss. As my practice deepened, I grew to understand that
freedom is not about resting in sublime equanimity despite the suffering of
loved ones and strangers. Freedom is about the willingness to feel deeply.
Freedom is about the willingness to fall apart. Freedom is about holding onto
nothing. And at the heart of that letting go, that dissolution, that surrender,
you discover something sublime and unspeakably, heartbreakingly raw. Call it
love. Call it compassion. Call it kindness. Call it redemption.
“A bodhisattva suffers willingly,” Tsoknyi
had said. “And with the willingness to suffer emerges a profound joy.”
Freedom that embraces what is acceptable
and rejects what is not is not freedom. Freedom is wholly democratic. Freedom
includes everything.
Nina Wise is a theater artist, writer and
dharma teacher. She teaches a class at Spirit Rock for people with
life-challenging illness and caretakers called “Buddhism When It Really
Matters.” Her book, A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life:
Self-Expression and Spiritual Practice for Those Who Have Time for Neither, was
published by Broadway Books in 2002. To reach her, visit www.ninawise.com.
© 2006 Inquiring Mind
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