Gray People

A few years ago, I learned that one of the women who taught at the Quaker school where I worked had a nasty breast cancer. The kind that didn't have a known cure. The kind that would go away and come back, like a bad penny. Janet was destined to have breast cancer for the rest of her life, however long that might be. I couldn't imagine.

Oddly, not long after, another woman at the school -- different division, different subject area -- developed a different cancer. Different in many ways, but the same in one: there was no known cure for Rachel's disease. She, too, would be on chemotherapy for as long as it worked.

Rachel and Jenny banded together and founded a support group for their peers (it turned out there were plenty of them) and a podcast series. No whining, no "why me," just "where do we go from here?" 

Still trying to wrap my head around the notion of a person's knowing what her cause of death was going to be, just not the when or the where, a year or so later came a third. This time, not a teacher in the Quaker school, but my neighbor, another teacher, yes, in the public school. She and her husband are funny, energetic people who are raising a trio of gorgeous daughters. Harriet's doing fine now, but she knows it isn't for ever, and has developed a kind of "seize the day" mentality. When she's doing well, they are off on all manner of adventures.

There must be a lot of these people, I thought. And kind of mentally kept my distance. 

And then came the fourth. Only, this time it wasn't somebody I knew. It was someone I care deeply for.

This summer I read an epistolary novel called Letters from Skye, about a young woman poet and the male college student who wrote her a fan letter. One thing led to another, as they say, and over the course of their correspondence they fell in love. I'm not going to say any more about that because it's that wonderful of a book, the kind where after reading for an hour or so I'd look up and kind of "where am I?" I liked this book enormously. I want you to read it and like it enormously, too. I told my husband about it as I was reading it, installment by installment. We had a good conversation about whether it is possible to fall in love through correspondence. This book is set a century ago, when it took a good fortnight for a letter from the U.S. to reach Scotland, so there's no instant messaging as a possibility, no quick sharing of selfies. In correspondence (and in blogging, too), we share what we want to of ourselves.  

Enough on this digression. But it belongs here. I think it does.

Summer before last a woman we'll call Wren was heading up a service project, massive in scope and territory. I didn't know her, but my niece did, and said niece told me of a particular need that Wren and her project had that she thought I might be able to do something about. Turned out I was. So I met this woman exactly once, when we got together for the hand-off of my supplies, and for a memorable lunch.

We stayed in touch, though, Wren and I. Not often, really. But I read her accounts of her service project and thought about when she might undertake another. Then she became ill. And -- I know you can see where this is going -- ill with one of those not-likely-to-be-cured cancers. With a fairly short turn-around time. 

Somehow we took to instant messaging each other, and to recommending books since this ordinarily very busy woman now had plenty of time to read. Short little bursts of this and that have led to a deeply meaningful connection. Recently she wrote, "Soon I'm going to try to describe what I have been calling myself in this new state of being, 'Dead Woman Walking.' After all, by medical accounts I should have died many, many months ago. It now appears that those of us in this condition are identified by the medical community as 'The Gray People,' we who have terminal illnesses but are kept alive, in a death-defying state, by chemo which must, at some point, either doom our bodies to 'death by chemo,' or stop working. Or, from which the side effects effectively wear our bodies out so we just quit working (i.e. living)."

Last week I was scheduled to meet my niece for lunch out her way. And it turned out that Wren was able to join us! What a wonderful hour we had together, laughing and philosophizing and sharing over borderline healthy entrees. And as some of us -- not all -- were packing up what was left of those lunches, Wren turned serious for a moment: "I'm well past my 'use by' date and I'm still here. I've closed my business. I've given away my jewelry. What am I supposed to be doing?"

Visions of Janet and Rachel and Harriet suddenly appeared. "Wren," I told her. "You're in the Coda, the Epilogue portion. You should be doing whatever you damn well please!"

So we all ordered desserts. And they were spectacular.