As A Reader

            Sometime after 6:00 p.m. Wednesday evening, I ordered The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs.  At midnight, I finished reading it.  Today, I am still thinking about it.

            Having written a breast cancer memoir via my blog, thinking about searching for a publisher, and knowing that I should become familiar with such books already on the market, I found The Bright Hour on Amazon.com.  The cover’s cheery splashes of color, its title, and its June 6, 2017 publication date intrigued me.  I read the sample pages and was immediately hooked.  I could not wait for a physical copy of the book to be mailed to me, so I hit the one-click button for immediate electronic delivery to my Kindle.

            Nina Riggs had the power of words and immediacy.  Her brief narrative chapters kept me spellbound as I raced through the reading, broken only by occasional pit stops.  Her many allusions to Ralph Waldo Emerson and her direct descendance from him delighted me.  (I have enjoyed Emerson since I was a teenager, even though I have rarely understood him and sometimes disagreed with him.  His portrait, his words, and the fact that both of my grandparents closely read his essays make him seem like a distant and kindly great uncle.)  Riggs’ equally frequent allusions to Montaigne made me determined to add him to my reading plans.

            Besides the brilliance of her writing, I was captured, of course, by the shared territory of triple negative breast cancer.  Breast cancer patients and survivors understand breast cancer patients and survivors.  Though each of us has a unique experience with the disease and the treatments, there is a fundamental connection. 

            Added to that shared territory was the setting of Riggs’ memoir, bittersweet to me because of the two months I spent with my sister as she was dying from ovarian cancer in 2009.  I remember Highway 54 and Graham, North Carolina—Anne lived in Saxapahaw but had a Graham post office box.  She was treated at UNC instead of Duke, but still it is the same general territory.  She spent the last month of her life in a horrid skilled nursing facility in Greensboro, dying two days before she was finally to be transferred to the Greensboro hospice.

            With those memories of my sister and the more recent memories of my breast cancer treatment, I read The Bright Hour, enthralled by every page and grieving all the way through for Riggs’ family members who are still in the throes of loss. 

            And still I’m gripped by her memoir.  As a writer, I see that my own story fits a different and specific market niche:  the Christian reader.  As a human being, I am amazed at Nina Riggs’ resilience.  And as a Christian, I am hopeful that at the end she found herself ushered into the love and glory of God’s presence.

Landscape Times Two

            On a hot, bright Wednesday in June, the undulating hills of southeast Kansas spread out before me.  Turning west from 75 to 166, I was on the familiar stretch that used to start my journey to Colby, Kansas from Bartlesville, Oklahoma.  Prairie tallgrasses bent and swayed in the wind.  Hawks swooped above the highway.  Wooded hills outlined the horizon.  I drove in silence except for the occasional praise song that burst from my lips.  God’s creation, this mix of wild and tamed land, always sends my heart soaring. 

            Excitement built when I turned north on Highway 15, a road previously untraveled by me.  Dexter, Kansas was only a few miles distant, and the prospect of seeing Lori for the first time in ten years and meeting her husband of two years propelled me forward.

            Lori and I go back to the fall of 1989 when we both started teaching at Colby Community College.  That year there was an unprecedented nineteen new faculty.  What I did not know at the time was that she would become my closest friend in Colby, though we only saw each other sporadically.  We rarely ran into each other on campus due to different schedules and different departments:  she taught in the Veterinary Technician program, and I taught in the English Department.  Our friendship by phone, which for many years meant daily conversations, kept me going during lonely, lean years of single parenting.  In 2007, she left Colby for a new career in Topeka.  In 2008, I left Colby to become my mother’s caregiver in Greenbank, Washington.

            I overshot my turn and thus got to see all of downtown Dexter, population 300.  Main Street took me straight through town, and it wasn’t long before I saw a lone house surrounded by fields.  I had arrived.

            What do you do when you meet up with a friend after ten years of life-changing  events?  Well, you catch up, and the years disappear as the catching-up begins.  It hardly took a moment for me to recognize a new settled peace in Lori’s life, a deep gratitude, and a profound joy.  When her husband came in from the fields for lunch, I understood what she had been telling me.  Bob is one of those rare people whose goodness simply shines from his face:  no pretense, all authentic goodwill.  I loved the ease of conversation with no subtexts to hint of stress or unforgiveness or dissatisfaction.  Instead, there was an abundance of mutuality, respect, and kindness.  In a word, love.

            Late in the afternoon as I drove home, my heart was filled with gratitude and joy for Lori and Bob.  The peaceful rolling hills of dazzling green set against the bright blue sky somehow summed up the beauty of their life together.  God is good.  All the time.

            

Orbits

            I did not mean to drop out of the entire blogosphere, but I did.  I intended to keep blogging, just not about breast cancer.  (You didn’t really want to follow me through the next two years of quarterly port flushes, blood tests, and check-ups with my oncologist, did you?  Or biannual mammograms, ultrasounds, and check-ups with my surgeon?)  I had to find an end to orbiting around cancer, so April was it:  one year since I found the lump.

            Thus begins my cancer survivor life, which is still evolving, but my energy has returned to pre-cancer levels thanks to the passage of time, many naps, and the twice-weekly exercise group I attend.  It’s called Fall Proof, a class to better one’s balance and improve fitness, and it’s fun.  I’m down to a nap a day.  I still have a wide swath of dark tan left behind by radiation treatments, and stretching my right arm above my head is painful.  But my hair continues to grow thick and curly, and my fingernails are strong for the first time in my life.  The hair and nails, I believe, are my body’s late response to the chemotherapy months.  Those keratin cells seem to be in overdrive.

            But life is more than exercise, a one-sided tan, hair, and fingernails, is it not?  I choose to be amused at my never-ending chemo brain.  Just this afternoon I was refilling my ice water and making a glass of iced coffee.  I added ice, poured coffee concentrate and half-and-half, and added water.  I was surprised to see white, foamy bubbles appear.  “What’s wrong with my water dispenser?” I wondered.  And then I realized I had added the half-and-half to the water tumbler instead of to the coffee glass.

            “Earth to Janis.  Time to stop writing about cancer-related topics.”

            “Oops.  Switching to new orbit.” 

My summer orbit should involve a late spring cleaning, but it does not.  Old non-cleaning habits die hard.  Last week I read three books and did dishes a few times.  There is also the matter of three sermons to prepare for the last three weeks of July when I’m preaching during our pastor’s vacation.  

Several weeks ago, I began spending a lot more time with my grandchildren, despite their runny noses, and promptly caught the cold they were sharing.  But it was worth it, of course.  There is nothing quite like Benjamin’s welcoming happy dance, Joelle’s pretend play in which I am always named “Bus Driver,” and Josiah’s “Ga-ga” greeting.  Joelle and I sit on the loveseat while she tells me where to drive, Benjamin grabs my hands to request another round of “Wheels on the Bus,” and Josiah wants up on my lap so we can laugh at each other. 

On the less-than-happy side has been my son’s worsening struggle with mental illness and homelessness.  But he is in treatment for the first time in a dozen years, and the mental health system is working the way it should with hospitalizations as necessary and closely monitored follow-up care. 

Isn’t that the way our personal orbits work?  Our lives revolve around what is truly important to us, whether it is happy or heartbreaking.  Here is my hope:

“The Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in his wings . . .” (Malachi 4:2)