Gratefulness

At night, sometimes the man would whisper into her hip, “be something.”

They’d only recently learned that the hip bone was a secret garden where blood was manufactured. It had never mattered before. But now that she had leukemia and needed an immediate bone-marrow transplant, every other occult wisdom or knowledge seemed frivolous, which may not have led a saner person to pray to bones, but that’s what he did, anyways.

“Be something” was a prayer intended to banish deadbeat white blood cells that clogged up her body, but it was also a call to build and repair, an evocation to express and appreciate life, and a reminder to be grateful that they had this time and had been born at the right place and moment to hope for a cure: A transplant.

Throughout the spring, she took chemo that softened her bones in preparation for the transplant, but made her weaker. Because this was the time of Covid – remember the Coronavirus? – they couldn’t meet with people, but she received calls, cards and e-mails from loved ones, friends, and coworkers throughout the country, and they spent most of their days trying to be silly, creating art, or just talking.

In the dog days of summer she went into the hospital for the transplant and he stayed in a nearby town so he could see her each day. As her projected discharge day approached, he went back to their home to mow the lawn and dispel the impression that it had been abandoned.

Pulling into their driveway, he was shocked and surprised to see dozens of boxes in the entryway. At first, he couldn’t put the pieces together (the boxes not quite fitting together like a fast-moving game of Tetris suddenly frozen in time). Then he remembered that they’d posted a blog recently with an Amazon Wish List of items they expected to need post-transplant.
Their dog – an alien mix of lab, basset hound, and pit-bull that could only have been concocted in Central Maine – was with him and began yelping helpfully at the boxes. But all he could do was cry.

It was difficult to imagine sometimes how kind people could be to one another, and our dude had always had a problem with emotional regulation (and was standing on even less solid ground that day). There’s not a place for every emotion in each person.

He brought the boxes inside one or two at a time, constructing something like a pillow fort out of them in the living room, thinking (not for the first time) that while he had spent a lot of his life searching for some hidden tribe, he and his wife had found one in individual people in each town they’d lived. He imagined them being protected behind the wall of Amazon packages, a fortress of good will, love, and tenderness.

Later that week, his elder brother generously created a GoFundMe campaign to help them continue to carry her insurance, meet deductibles and pay for medications and other costs related to her treatment and recovery. A lot of miles and many years separated the brothers, but the man had powerful memories of his brothers protecting him when he was younger, when they seemed like incredibly sturdy and strong trees. He felt that steadiness now.

(The generosity of family and loved ones on this GoFundMe site is, frankly, staggering.)

Even later, he returned again to their home to clean. His sister planned to meet him to help him “wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,” sacrificing her day to help him address the intimate and immediate need to keep the house germ free. His sister had always been the gravity that holds the center together, sharing some intangible and indestructible quality of caring that had come from their mother.

Pulling up the driveway, he saw even more packages. The dog looked more confused than worried this time, but our dude got watery again.

Be something. He remembered writing his wife when she had had to leave suddenly for the first – most brutal and unexpected – round of chemo, “Be that smallest and most vital part of a constellation of love.” In some sense, you are something if you build something, and the most enduring thing you can build is relationships.

The man does not like first person (see: emotional deregulation above. God, can’t he gabber on about ideas and things he’s passionate about — especially conspiracies — but ask him about himself, his feelings or, worse still, put him into the frame and he looks for a place to hide), but would probably say something like: We are human almost only when we act humanely to one another, and we’re so incredibly grateful to have met you, the finest of human critters. Thank you so much.

Now this has to end before I get blubbery again.

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Julie has been lingering in nadir for just about a week now. For the last six days*, she has had a white blood count of zero. Zero is, as we all know, the very best number since the only direction you can go from there is up. Despite this, she has continued to eat, drink, cheat at cards, and do laps around the ward. Her blood pressure, pulse, and oxygen levels have also been very good. You would not know that she is being cured of cancer if you didn’t see the vines of tubes going into her chest or watch her much on her morning pills.

You are allowed to gasp at her undeniable awesomeness. (I know that I’ve gasped hard a time or two, watching her design whole worlds while connected to a cord feeding magnesium into her chest.)

We have co-opted the white board in her room, where nurses plot the daily milestones such as ‘shower,’ ‘walk,’ and ‘eat.’ We start each day with a grid of the following few days (in the style, if not the phonetics, of the nursing staff) and debate the outcomes.

“Ok, we’re at +13 now. Are we talking kickass or chill out?”

“I think I could go for ‘mostly kickass’ or ‘mostly chill out,’ but I’m uncommitted since I might need platelets.”

We are pragmatic and diplomatic, maybe even realistic (depending on how you define your terms). This is not our system, but we more or less understand the game, which is largely some variation of Hungry Hungry Hippo where timing is everything. Miss the window for a shower (and the follow up medicinal goo wipes) and you’re not going anywhere because you’re hooked back into blood products. The cells manifest on their own timetable, and there is a literal chemical bath — drugs to suppress, drugs to encourage, drugs to confuse — running through her body, changing directions and outcomes.    

Put another way: It’s all chill out for a bit, but once the numbers start to climb, she’ll be back on the Camp Kickass time zone.

* Muppet newsflash: Julie’s White Blood Cell count climbed to .10 after this post went to press on 7/20/21!