A few summers ago I was in Maine, looking out from our house at a meadow full of bittersweet when I asked a poet-friend and gardener extraordinaire, “How do you get rid of bittersweet?” The bittersweet was everywhere, strangling ferns and bushes and covering parts of the meadow where blueberries once grew. “It’s best to ignore it,” she said. “Look past it at the sailboats gliding across the bay because you can’t get rid of bittersweet. It’s like a hydra. You cut off one head, and two grow back in its place.” She was right. The more I pulled out the bittersweet, the faster it grew back. Finally, in a moment of frustration, I hired a man with an excavator to dig up the patch of the meadow where the bittersweet had taken over. Gradually, the meadow grew back in to its natural and beautiful self.
Now, when I look out at the meadow where the bittersweet once grew, I think of Maureen Seaton’s title poem, “Sweet World,” from her latest book published by CavanKerry Press, which I have retitled in my mind as “Bittersweet World.” Instead of invasive plants, Seaton writers about cancer with her characteristic wit and honesty and eloquence. When I read her work, I pray, “May the bittersweet leave her with only the sweetness that she is.” I am such a fan of her poetry.
Sweet World
I never had a nemesis before. I kinda like it.
~Felicity Smoak, The Flash
Wonder what I'd be today if I was still married to my Wall Street husband
besides married to a Wall Street husband and puking gin in a silk sheath
at Delmonico's. I might be a blond size 4. I might be a secret Democrat
or a weekend lesbian. This morning five planes flew over the yard in a V
as I was about to dig into a pile of lavender pancakes al fresco. The V
flew low and slow. It flew loud and ominous. It alarmed me, sounding
a lot like the war movies of my fifties' childhood. My cranky Chihuahua
was proverbially biting at flies and I was sitting there not thinking about hate.
Recently, I experienced life with cancer. An intoxicating time, richly infused
with the liquor of death, but good too because no one expected much of me
and I was left to my own mind, which is what I'm missing most these days.
Unless that's it over there, screeching on two wheels around the racetrack.
Today I typed gnos instead of song and I wondered if it was some new app
designed to mess with me. I've never thought to call the world sweet before.
A nemesis can do that for you, make things taste different. Suddenly you're
a hero/ine. All this devastation—and you're still standing in the middle of it.
Seaton’s book, Sweet World, and my friend’s advice to look past the bittersweet and out at the ocean, and to focus on sailboats gliding by instead of invasive plants, reminds me of the sports writer’s, Tim Wendel’s book, Cancer Crossing about his younger brother, Eric, who was diagnosed with leukemia at three years old but survived until he was ten on an ongoing regimen of chemical cocktails. The story goes back and forth between the story of the pioneering doctors who did their best to save Eric, his family life, and his father’s obsession with teaching the family to sail on Lake Ontario.
The sailing serves as both a metaphor for cancer—for being at the mercy of the ever-changing whims of the winds and weather, and as an escape from it, a way of concentrating on something else. In one passage, Wendel describes a day when the family sailed into a squall, and his sister, Susan, chose to remain on deck:
“What were you doing up there?” I whispered, not wanting to get her in trouble with Dad.
“Singing,” she said.
“Singing? But why?”
“It made me laugh,” she grinned. “How the wind swept the words away from me before I could hear them.”
I looked at her as if she was crazy. Yet in the months ahead, I began to understand her tenacity and gallows humor in such conditions. Perhaps she realized that the squall line was somehow an omen for what we would encounter, on and off the water. Sometimes such storms would be on us before we knew it, and the only thing we could do was to hang on and find the courage to sing through it all.” (page 73-74)
The book is a heartwarming account of family life, cancer, medical advances, grief, sailing, life in the 60’s and 70’s, and more. It demonstrates how many stories an author can tell in a memoir, even a memoir specifically about cancer. The mix is where the magic of the book occurs.
I am also reminded of David Lehman’s book about his experience with cancer, aptly titled, One Hundred Autobiographies, a title he credits to the poet, Mark Strand, who died of cancer in 2014. Like Cancer Crossing, Lehman’s book is a collection of interwoven stories in which Lehman displays his unique ability to keep the mind sailing, even when the body is faltering. Like Wendel, he compares cancer to a storm. Chapter 71, “The Sublime Pain of Being,” begins:
Not a day without pain. If not the neuropathy, the problems of adjusting to your prosthetic device, which sometimes malfunctions. The scar where they cut you open and the irritated skin surrounding the stoma. The seemingly interminable indigestion. These are unpleasant but banal. Only on some days do you feel the sublime pain of being alone in the universe. Like the experience of standing on a hotel terrace in Miami during a hurricane watching the wind subdue the royal palms, taking them down, all the way to the point where they are level with the ground; the storm howling in delight at its conquered foes—it puts the fear of the Lord in you. Back in September 2005 I was in Aventura on Florida’s Atlantic coast when Hurricane Katrina made landfall there. The passengers aboard the aircraft two days later were as hushed as the audience hearing a certain four-and-a-half minute John Cage composition.
The book also describes aspects of our Kafka-esque medical system. I was particularly disturbed by this entry from his wife, Stacey’s journal, an entry written at the end of a day of waiting for Lehman to emerge from surgery:
I was alone in the waiting area. Everyone else had gone home. The room was decorated like a cheap chain motel lobby and the garbage bags overflowed with empty fast food containers and coffee cups. Boxes containing scattered slices of cold pizza covered the counter near the coffee machine.
"You can wait for him in his room," the OR receptionist said when I next approached her. "At last," I thought. She gave me the room number, but her counterpart on the urological floor had no record of David. The nurses wanted me to go home. "There’s nothing you can do here," they said. "We’ll let you know when he’s released to his room."
I took the elevator to the recovery suite, but it was crowded, and I seemed to be in the way so I took a seat in the corridor. While watching the nurses tend to David, I did something I rarely do: I burst into tears. "Why is this happening? Why isn’t he in his room yet?"
Ms. Brady, "the patient advocate," went to find out. She returned with a smile on her face, her arms wide, as if she were going to embrace me.
"He’s staying here tonight," she said. "In recovery. Doctor’s orders." She was ebullient. It didn’t make sense. What was there to be happy about? "Now you must absolutely go home," she said. "You can’t stay here all night."
Why not? And why isn’t he in the recovery room?
As one would expect from any book by David Lehman, moments of literary insight and inspiration as well as autobiography, dreams, fantasies, and more, so much more, are woven into the text. In Chapter 30, "What's the Story," he explains his choice of narrative structure:
I don’t know how the ordeal is going to turn out, and the road connecting memory and desires is not a linear path but a series of quick right and left turns dictated by the local authorities somewhat whimsically to regulate the flow of traffic. Glen, my literary agent and boon companion, thinks I should write an anatomy of cancer on the model of An Anatomy of Melancholy. But one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite, and if you have gotten a reprieve and time is still on your side, you must do what you want and only that.
Finally, I want to mention Cati Porter's poems from her book, The Body at a Loss, in which she describes how a diagnosis changes one's world. In her poem, "The Solution," she, too, uses the ocean as a metaphor for her experience.
The Solution
One day you awaken to the sound of waves
And the world has dissolved, as sugar into water—
The sudden shift in being, from solid into liquid,
And your matter no longer matters, and when you rise up
To the surface you find there is no surface,
That all potential universes have in fact melted
Into each other, and that all that could be
Had, said, done, been, true,
Has melded into one, fluid as the sea,
Empty and full at once—because that is the way
Of it, as one day the world seems steady, solid, then
The next, the world is nothing more than a vast unboundedness
Where we drift with currents that are driven
By no moon, no you.
