How do you say goodbye to a beloved person that you were pretty sure was immortal?

My aunt Vita, zichrona livracha, died this past Sunday at 5:50 pm. She was 83, and had fought off stage 4 pancreatic cancer for over six years. Yes. You read that right. This is a diagnosis where most patients are advised to get their affairs in order because they will not live longer than three months. Someone I knew who received this diagnosis was gone in three weeks.

And yes, you read that right. I said she fought a battle. Until Vita died, I was firmly convinced that no one should say this about a cancer patient, ever. Because it can only lead to saying someone “lost their battle,” which is unconscionable to me. So, in speaking about my own journey and that of other people, I have used more neutral terminology. I say that I “dealt with” cancer.

But neutrality will only get you so far when you are dealing with a truly pernicious adversary. What I faced completely pales in comparison to what Vita faced — and here I am reminded of something my dad liked to remember with humor: my mom’s (and Vita’s) godmothers, sitting around comparing their swollen ankles, competing to see who had it worse. So Vita, although we never had a conversation about this, hands down, you win. What I went through only qualifies me for amateur status.

Vita was one of my favorite people, and I strongly suspect everyone in the room at her funeral will feel the same way.  She was brash and bold, she asked probing questions, and she had a different idea of boundaries than other people. She was brilliant and brainy. I spoke to her in Spanish, and unlike the rest of her family, who kindly and quietly keep their opinions of my language skills to themselves, I could not utter a sentence or send a whatsapp message without having my Spanish corrected. I don’t know what I will do now. Continue making a fool of myself, and imagining I am not making any mistakes, I guess. Vita was a translator, so I also appreciated the times we connected on a professional level.

Vita was a terrific cook. I am already worried about facing Thanksgiving this year without her signature caramelized apple cake on the dessert table. She kept careful mental notes on who didn’t like what in their empanadas. I never had to eat a single one with hard-boiled eggs or olives in it — even long after I had decided the egg was acceptable to me.

Vita, like her son Pablo, me and Young J, my cousin Aileen, and our beloved grandmother Lía, had a December birthday, so this year the birthday season will be less bright, compounded by the fact that we lost a family friend two weeks ago, at age 99.9, who was also a December baby.

I am writing this on the morning of Vita’s funeral, so I will wrap this up by saying that Vita most certainly did not “lose” her battle with pancreatic cancer. She decided when it would end. I will never forget her bravery. Rest in power, Tía Vita.

PS Vita also liked to comment on my posts here, so the silence will be deafening. Please send some love.

PPS I am sorry it has been a while since I posted. My health is fine.

For some reason, a Spanish expression comes to mind which may end up being the only funny thing in this post. “Eramos muchos, y parió mi abuela.” There were a lot of us already, then Grandma had a baby. You say it when things go from bad to worse.

Things had been as bad as they could possibly be, and then the news came today that four corpses will return to Israel tomorrow. These four:

These bodies have been held in Gaza for over 500 days and return home tomorrow, in exchange for convicted murderers who are alive and well, because apparently this is what we’ve come to.

I hope that these souls flew free long before now, because the state of the living October 7 hostages who are just returning home now is beyond frightening. I hope these beautiful babies, whose names and faces are forever seared into my soul, did not suffer the way the adults did — underground in airless tunnels with scarce rotten food, with seawater to drink, enduring constant torture and psychological torment. I hope their beautiful mother died at the same time they did, and did not have to witness her babies being murdered. What a monstrous thought to have. I hope their husband and father, who returned alive from hell recently, is somehow able to find a will to live.

Oded was known to his grandkids as “Super Saba” (Super Grandpa). He helped found Kibbutz Nir Oz, and he drove Gazans for medical treatment in Israel. He was committed to peace. He was murdered by his neighbors.

I have had posters of these faces up in my office since November 2023, when I first became aware that there were people in America who could see a poster of a kidnapped infant and decide to rip it down because it highlighted an inconvenient truth which challenged their diseased worldview. I knew I needed to take a stand, so I printed posters and hung as many in my office as I could find space for, because I knew no one would rip them down. This means that I have stared at these faces for nearly 500 days. They are a part of my life. Every news article that appeared about the hostages, I would look over the faces and update accordingly. My grim daily task has been to account for the innocent people dragged to hell, to print new flyers to replace the ones I take down when I hear a hostage has been killed, or, on rare occasions, rescued.

My workplace grief has been alienating. One of my officemates is someone I can confide in, and when I was leaving the office today, we hugged and I cried. I know there are other supportive people in my workplace, but at this point I am not seeking them out. They are silently supportive, because that’s their privilege, but that isn’t something that carries me all that far.

Recently at work we had a quarterly DEI meeting where we shared the stories of our names. I decided to talk about my last name instead of my first name. I wrote about my family and looked back at the family tree my father had painstakingly compiled, which went back to 1791. And in doing so, I noticed something that I’d never noticed before. For six generations — SIX GENERATIONS — my family lived in the same small town in Poland. My grandfather deserted the Polish army and went to Argentina in 1928 (and much of his family were murdered by the Nazis), and from then on, we have wandered. My parents were born in Argentina, my brothers in Israel, me in Brazil. The thinking had been, when we got to the United States, that this would be our new home. Then the 2016 election happened. And then, against all reason, the 2024 election happened. And now this place that has been home is being rapidly dismantled by racist, hateful, antisemitic kleptocrats, who have not forgotten to meddle in the arts this time around. So I have returned to wondering, Where is home?

This post is sort of all over the place, because I am too, right now. Today I finished the third of five courses in the certificate program I’m doing this year. The latest fallout from my cancer journey was needing to get injections of steroids into my eyes, and the latest indignity of aging was throwing my back out last Thursday, merely because I bent down to pick something up in the shower. I planned a short solo vacation to Tucson, which I’m leaving for tomorrow. Now I’m more worried about traveling and back pain and heartbreaking news updates coming at regular intervals, all of which make me wonder how much I will manage to make this trip a recharge and a reset. I know it all depends on how much time I spend on my phone, so I am going to try to figure out a good way to stay informed, but also not spend five days feeling outraged against a beautiful desert backdrop. Wish me luck?

Yesterday, J and I reached a milestone: twenty years of marriage. The day was pretty emblematic of our lives, a bit chaotic and unfocused (okay, it was mostly me who was chaotic and unfocused) but ultimately, pleasant. We’ll be celebrating more officially this weekend, with a dinner date and a concert by an artist who will be playing his 2004 album in its entirety, one which was part of the soundtrack to our early marriage. I love you, J.

There’s so much this photo doesn’t say — that we honeymooned in a town in Costa Rica that was undergoing a building boom, so every morning we greeted the day to the sounds of drilling and hammering, not tropical birdsong. That the swim-up bar was closed most of the time, until we finally requested that someone serve us drinks there, mostly so we could say we’d been to the swim-up bar. That there were ants in the syrup every morning at breakfast, but no one on the staff noticed. That we signed up for something we thought was an eco-tour but was actually an extreme sports day which began with a long, bumpy ride on the Pan-American Highway (all potholes), then a horseback ride to a hot springs, where the abrasive mud threatened to scrub my sunburned skin clean off, before it was basically boiled in the hot water of the springs. But that wasn’t all! Then there was lunch, and the zipline with a crew of drunken and unruly British seniors who were complaining that they hadn’t seen any “cappuccino monkeys.” And finally, a terrifying waterslide through the forest that went irresponsibly fast. We also missed our internal flight back to San José for our flight home. We returned home sunburnt and bruised, but highly amused. (There were excellent nature viewing parts of the trip too.) And that’s how this marriage began.

In retrospect it seems fitting that things started out that way, because the past twenty years have certainly been full of thrills (childbirth), chills (multiple bouts of pneumonia, then COVID), and spills (teaching young children how to eat without looking like a kitchen exploded on them). And oh yeah, three bouts of cancer. I lost my dad, we moved states, I tried to make a go of a new career, I finally went back to my old career, but in an entirely different way.

I’m learning to embrace the advantages of aging. I mean, first of all, there’s the simple fact that I get to. But also, I just generally feel more conviction in the things I undertake these days. I’m not tentative. When I actually let myself work on poems, that helps me. But I feel it in other things too. J has also attained this, I think, whether it’s playing music or playing basketball, finding new clients and solving problems for them, or finding delicious new recipes and trying them out. (Because I’m now out of the house three days a week, J has pretty much become the default chef. I’m so grateful for this. I do help out where I can.)

But when I encounter a photo of me from 20 years ago? It’s hard not to judge Present Me, not to mourn my “lost youth.” Leading up to my wedding, I did workouts from a ridiculous book called Buff Brides. While that makes me blush now, look how buff I was! I was still a runner, back then, and the following year I would complete a half marathon. These days, my knees don’t tend to appreciate my attempts to take up running again. I’m not feeling super committed to regular exercise — the most I seem to manage is every so often, I’ll go off on a five mile walk or hike. I guess it’s helpful that I can still do that, although the recovery is pretty grueling. I need to cultivate more respect for the body I live in today. It saw me through two pregnancies and childbirths, multiple bouts of pneumonia, COVID (without leaving me with the devastating and scary long COVID symptoms that friends are continuing to deal with), cancer, recurrent uveitis (currently in remission), cataract surgery, and a Crohn’s diagnosis. Not bad.

Next week is Thanksgiving. Another 10th anniversary, of my recovery from colitis just in time to enjoy the best holiday meal I’d ever had in my life. That’s a pretty high bar for this Thanksgiving to clear, so I’ll just be thankful.

Happy Anniversary, I’ll Live. I’m a few days late, my first post was November 9, 2014. This corner of cyberspace (to use a term that makes me sound ridiculously ancient) has existed for ten years now, which seems like an impossibly long time, in Cancer Years. A decade ago today, I posted three times on the same day, indicating how little I was up to, because I was so sick.

I’ve had plenty of occasions to think about the name I selected for this blog. It wasn’t intended as a prophecy, although maybe secretly I hoped it would be. It was mostly meant to be ironic: “Yeah, you know, it’s just a little Stage 4 cancer… but I’ll live!” [shrug] Little did I know how unlikely my survival would be, what a fluke the durability of my response to treatment — which has yet to be referred to using the C-word by any practitioner who has had me in their care, and might never be(?). “Long-term remission” seems to be the most I can aspire to saying. Whether I am “cured” is the elephant that comes into the exam room with me when I visit my oncologist after every set of scans (my next scans are tomorrow). I spend my time updating my oncologist on details of my personal life he knows to ask me about from seeing notes about it in my EHR — what I’m up to at work, what my kids are up to, etc. It’s more of a social call these days — a social call with a costume change to a gown and some palpation at the end of it. Sometimes I ask what happened at the latest ASCO meeting, to sound like I’m more of an insider. I don’t think there have been any recently, so I might ask Dr. L what conferences he has been to. There are always conferences. He won’t really care what I got up to at the last conference I attended, of course. That’s not his job. His job is more like, “Make sure she gets to attend another conference.”

The last time I went for my social call with Dr. L, I didn’t even get the bloodwork I’ve been getting for a while now, a CTDNA test, which checks for circulating tumor particles in the bloodstream. The reason I’ve stopped getting the test is that they have switched labs, and the new lab needed a tumor sample from me. And there simply are no new samples, just the one from ten years ago now. I have even aged out of being checked for circulating tumor particles. (Yay?)

What Dr. P’s and Nurse Practitioner K’s and Nurse Practitioner R’s jobs were, exactly a decade ago, was, “Do what you can to ensure she will be sitting at a computer ten years from now writing a reflective blog post, instead of where she is today in 2014, working hard to recover from the colitis her cancer treatment brought on, sleepless due to Prednisone, cultivating empathy for anyone in the history of the world who has been starved or had to avoid eating because it was causing them terrible pain.” I continue to be so grateful to them, but find it hard to express this in a comprehensive and comprehensible way. They are responsible for my survival, but I haven’t spoken to them in years, at this point.

I suppose I am somehow responsible for my survival, too, but I’ve never figured out where or for what exactly I could take credit. I treated cancer like it was my job, because at the time (at least, ten years ago), I didn’t have another job. So I showed up and took my meds and went to all my scans. I recall one morning when I was in a subway delay on the way to NYU for a scan. There was no way to know when we’d get moving again, there wasn’t phone service underground, and the first thought that sprang into my head was, “This is so unprofessional!” I was a professional cancer patient. But so many other patients have complied with what they were asked to do, and they didn’t make it. It isn’t compliance or professionalism, although of course compliance helps. Ultimately, it’s just luck of the draw.

I haven’t slept well the past couple of nights. Is scanxiety rearing its head? Because it couldn’t possibly be anxiety about the state of the world, hormonal fluctuations, or any one of an endless number of other things. Perhaps tonight, before heading to bed in anticipation of another early wakeup (I try to schedule my scans as early as possible), I’ll try to cultivate some serenity through music.

(I’m just not sure how many times I can listen to this on an endless loop before throwing my phone across the room…)

It’s been such a long time since I wrote here. Since I felt an urgent need to write here. The muscle that I used to flex when I opened this app (which is no longer even named the thing it used to be) has gone slack. I don’t know where to begin anymore. So I stole a page from my blogging practice, and I opened up Flickr to find a Creative Commons licensed photo that would result from a keyword search. I used to choose the less obvious search result, but I don’t have the mental energy for that today. I searched for “reflection,” and you get a photo titled Reflection. How transparent of me. I’m embarrassed.

While I was on Flickr, photos from one of the two people I “friended” there maybe 15 years ago showed up. She is apparently still using Flickr actively. So I quickly caught up on her kids (same ages as mine, so now enormous) and my finger slipped and I wound up “liking” a photo of her partner and a person I assume was his mom, holding a box I assume to be ashes, standing on the bow of a ship. I undid the reaction immediately, but the damage was done, and my friend (whom I’ve not been in active contact with for many years) might see a vestigial sign of my inadvertent enthusiasm for this voyage of dumping the ashes and this is how even in the digital realm, we can still commit cringeworthy faux pas. You might think that when you’re pushing 53, you are no longer susceptible to such cringe. You’d be thinking wrong.

Today I spent more hours at Yom Kippur services than ever before. It isn’t the need to talk to God that kept me there. I don’t actually know if any entity by that name exists, and this joke sort of sums up how I feel vis à vis God and the events of the past year and the past millennia:

For me, the hours I spent in synagogue were more to do with what the humans there would say (the ones who were running things), and even more primally, the need for public singing. We spend a good portion of any holiday singing. Our cantor puts together ensembles of various ages and has them perform throughout the day, but we also sing even if we’re not standing up in front of everyone. I may not believe in God, but I sure believe in my people. It is good to spend a day surrounded by them, singing with them, crying with them.

I went through a whole package of tissues today. There was just so much to cry about. Remembering our departed loved ones. Remembering those brutally murdered a year ago in Israel and all of those murdered since then. Listening to a speaker whose father was murdered on October 7, whose brother was murdered while being held hostage by Hamas, whose mother was held hostage for 49 days before being released and then hospitalized for seven months because her captivity left her in such fragile condition. Listening to her desperate plea for peace despite these things. Feeling hopeless about a resolution to this war, a constant undertone which threatens to bring me down pretty much every day. I’ve spent the day reflecting, and it has made me more sad and wrung out this year.

Also, this year is the first time our family dynamic has changed. Young J is away at school and won’t be back until Thanksgiving. I’m thrilled for him to be building his new life and community, but I feel his absence. I’m still not used to it. Still feel like doing a double take when I pass his room and the bed is still made (something which never, ever comes to pass when he’s home). My relationship with Young A is undergoing changes too, now that he’s the only kid left around here. It was good to have him sitting next to me at services today, even though he and J didn’t stay as long as my mom and I did.

I have been changing too. I’d like to say growing, but it isn’t ever clear to me until much later that I’ve undergone a period of growth. I started school in September, a year-long certificate program connected to my job, which should make me into a more skilled teacher by June. Schoolwork has been an overwhelming thing to contend with, and my ADHD has come into sharp focus, particularly when deadlines are looming.

Luckily, one of my assignments this week was a reflection paper. While some of my classmates were dreading that assignment, I was happy to do something that comes as naturally to me as expressing myself on the page. I wrote a bit more than I was required to, because once I started reflecting, it was hard to stop. I made what sounded like intelligent connections to the readings we did for class, but I also situated those in the context of some truths about my life. In the process, I realized that come December, I will have been a librarian for thirty years. (That blows my mind, especially because in my mind, I’m still only 30 years old.) I wrote about ADHD and in the process, discovered that there is not much known about people with ADHD in academia who are not students. People like professors or instructors… people like me. I also mentioned my cancer experiences and how those contributed to my shifting professional gears to the health sciences.

This week I also ran into a former student, who is in her third year of med school. She saw my yellow ribbon pin, a sign of my support for the hostages in Gaza, and we wound up in an intense conversation for a good 40 minutes. She told me how upsetting the past year has been for her, with classmates turning against her, excluding her because of her support for Israel, and classmates who are spewing vile memes and rhetoric on social media, acting as willing mouthpieces for Iran. It scares me beyond belief that people who plan to be doctors are also totally okay with statements that are hurtful, dishonest, and which display utter disdain for the sanctity of human life. The next day, I met a second-year med student who has been through a similar ordeal. Now that I am wearing my yellow ribbon pin, I will be hearing from more and more of them. While I’m glad to be there as someone they can unburden themselves to, I desperately wish I could do more, effect real change in the university and across academia. There is a sickness in these systems, which fail to acknowledge the minority status of Jews and extend protections to them. Not to mention the utter degradation of civil discourse that this war has brought into sharp focus (but which has its origins in things that began more than a year ago).

Health-wise, I’ve also been changing, in other words, The Change. Perimenopause is long-lasting, and annoying in a way that cancer wasn’t for me (because I was lucky). I started hormone therapy, and that seems to be helping a bit. I’d love to come through on the other side of this and start building the new me, but it will take a bit longer. I’m a month out from my next cancer scans, for those keeping score at home.

Since October 7, I’ve been hearing this prayer sung at gatherings. While I confess it was new to me, because I am not religious enough to attend the services where it is chanted, it is ancient in its origins.

If I could have one wish granted before the gates close tonight, ending Yom Kippur and sealing our fate, it would be for an end to this war. It sure would be helpful for me to have faith in intercessory prayer right now. I don’t, but I will sing along.

It came again, this single day in April with its double whammy of cancerversaries: my initial diagnosis in 2013, brain metastases in 2015 (with lung mets that snuck in around September 2014). Eleven years with malignant melanoma in my life. Nine years with the creeping fear of brain tumors returning. My next scans aren’t for a couple of weeks. I could say I’m in that dodgy in-between phase that starts feeling heavier and heavier as scan day approaches, but to be honest, I don’t lose sleep over scans anymore. Scanxiety is in my rear view. At the risk of tempting fate, I just don’t feel I should worry. But it feels like a more informed nonchalance than the one I adopted in 2014, when I showed up ready to hear I was fine and got bad news.

What have I been up to? Working, mostly. But also, for the past few months, I’ve been taking a poetry workshop. My first one in about twenty years. It has been revelatory, difficult, and affirming to be in class with people from across the country, developing rapport and esprit de corps despite the great differences in our ages and lives, under the guidance of a marvelous poet and teacher (whom I just so happened to go to high school with, also).

I mean, I’m 52. I don’t have any illusions that I’ll make many waves in the poetry world. And the poetry world in the whole has been a pretty challenging and unwelcoming place since October 7. But I have really loved getting back into writing new poems, I feel empowered to revise old ones, and maybe I’ll finally break my unhelpful, longstanding moratorium on sending my work out to journals.

I have a new sense of how to get these things done, and it’s more about plugging away than intense bursts of creative energy. I am letting things marinate, sit around and age in my head a bit, before committing to paper. Hard for me to know if I’m learning something that comes naturally to other people, because what comes most naturally to me is seat-of-the-pants thinking and creating, usually under deadline.

And hey, it just so happens I have to write a ghazal by Thursday (in my defense, I have been thinking quite a bit about it). So enough navel gazing.

Here I stand. Today I turned 52. Seven years ago, this was a milestone that I decided was worthy of a plan. The plan that would last seven years and leave me transformed into a productive artist, an accomplished translator, a well-read and agile and lithe middle-aged woman. I’m still a middle-aged woman, anyhow.

It’s a very good thing that I realized somewhere around Year Three that planning has never been my strong suit. I think my poor skills at planning probably helped me when cancer struck three times in three years, because I didn’t need to spend any time mourning what I had been planning to do with those three years instead. Have another kid? We barely had room for two in our apartment in Brooklyn.

I think the moment I realized the Seven Year Plan wasn’t going to go well was when I began dreading writing a monthly check-in paragraph to let myself know how the plan was proceeding — that reminded me too much of work. Early on, I discovered that striking through text of my plans held some power, so part of the plan became modifying the plan. Still, in a world where nothing seems to go according to plan, my quaint effort met the end it would inevitably have found: obscurity. I think there was a notebook somewhere in which I was writing my plan updates. I have no idea which notebook it might be, in a home office landscape strewn with notebooks.

The impetus for the plan, way back when, was my admiration for a friend who had not only managed to pick up the pieces when a marriage ended, but also returned to a book project at a very propitious time for it. Dr. P was another person who inspired me, as she pursued her Columbia MBA on weekends, leading to where she is now: running the melanoma program she built herself at Weill-Cornell. At the time I thought it was what these women had done leading up to turning 52 which conferred their power.

What did I actually do in the past seven years? I had about 20 CT scans and 20 MRIs of my brain. I went through untold numbers of bottles of eye drops of different types. I moved from NYC to Maryland. I watched my kids grow into the enormous almost-men they are today (nearly 17 and 13) and watch them develop musical chops that far exceed any I ever possessed. I gave building a translation career my best try, ultimately deciding I was never going to earn more than a serious hobby might bring in. I doggedly pursued library work, enduring interview after interview, until at long last I found a library that was willing to accept me even though my resume had gaps, and even though I didn’t walk in the door knowing how to do the work. Now, just a year later, I am feeling more confident and competent in the job.

I can’t pinpoint anything I started doing in the past seven years that has made appreciable change in my life, career, or outlook. But I have begun to feel something like power that stems from deep competence. The way I can get an email at work, map out who and what needs to be done to address it, and suddenly find myself convening a meeting with five other people to start the ball rolling. The way I tend to panic when I’m helping plan a semester of adult education classes for my volunteer job, then sit down to list out the classes we have planned and realize we’re actually in better shape than I thought. I feel like I even cook differently, more confidently, when I get the chance to — being back at work has meant the burden has shifted more heavily onto J., who runs a business and somehow manages to cook dinner many more nights a week than he should.

Maybe I’m finally attaining what I had thought would be the product of seven years of dogged attention to productivity and the external metrics thereof. Maybe what this is all about is the solid feeling I get from doing things I have somehow learned to do by spending time on the planet that we scrape ourselves across every day to make our living, to prevent people from dying or even crying, to gather and to scatter and to dither and to matter. Meeting people and talking to them, making mistakes and more mistakes, ideally learning from some of them.

Signing off, because I’ve fallen asleep writing this about ten times, another benefit of my new 52-ness. Good night and good luck.

(Making Me Understand is an occasional blog feature where I analyze, in brief or at length, what a particular work of art or an artist means to me right now.)

I have been feeling less and less allegiance to this blog, because it has a major flaw: it’s about cancer. And so little of my life is actually about cancer anymore. I guess I should just lean harder into the name of this blog, I’ll Live. Living is what I’ve been doing all this time, after all, though some days it’s harder to really sense that. I don’t have that particular zest for life that someone who is closer to mortal danger has. That seven year plan I crowed about? It is about to end, less than a month to go. I think I abandoned doing anything with it somewhere around year four. I’m going to call it a rousing success, because to do otherwise is antithetical to the plan as I originally conceived of it. I have nearly made it to age 52, and I am apparently still learning not to berate myself for things that don’t work out.

(By the way, I had my scans. They were fine. They are always fine.)

It has been a month and change since our world was turned upside down early in the morning on the very last holiday of the Jewish holiday cycle which starts with Rosh Hashanah and ends with music and dancing and rejoicing as we come to the end of the Torah reading cycle and begin it again. On that joyful holiday this year, Hamas brutally attacked my people, murdering and raping and torturing and beheading them. 240 people were taken as hostages to Gaza, and most remain there, except for the ones who have since been found murdered and a very lucky handful who were rescued or returned. Babies, elderly people, every age in between. I don’t sleep very well at night from worrying about them. They watch over me while I am working.

And then we learned what happens when our people suffer one of the most horrific large-scale attacks since the Shoah. It turns out that much of the world has maybe 3.5 days worth of empathy to give before it starts to forget what happened, before it preemptively starts forecasting the certain war crimes that the Jewish nation will visit on its neighbors, before vocabulary words are bandied about severed from their actual meanings, and before the accepted narrative of the events suddenly is as twisted and tortured and beheaded as the victims of Hamas were. I have lived my entire life watching this cycle play out in the media. I have not gotten used to it, and I have not stopped hoping this might be the time things play out differently.

Social media has been mostly a curse this month. I have shed “friends” right and left who disappointed and depressed me with their absolute certainty in victim blaming, with their acrobatic attempts to seem like they are caring people calling for a ceasefire but not for hostages to be returned, to seem like they are not garden variety antisemites. I work on a college campus, and every day has brought new, shameful ways that undergraduates test out new identities by parroting hate speech and even projecting it onto the walls of a library. Luckily I work in a professional school, where hateful rhetoric has not been openly shared. I have suspicions about some of my students, but I keep them to myself. I have started wearing a Magen David every day, however, because I need them to know where I stand. (I don’t necessarily present as Jewish.) Young J’s college application season has also been tinged by the war, as we examine events on various campuses and try to figure out where he would feel safe. He had been considering a gap year program in Israel before starting college. That is no longer on the table.

In the arts world, which I am tangentially connected to, writers and artists I formerly respected are signatories to hateful open letters. Poets who were formerly friendly have become strident and unyielding, unwilling to accept that their words might permanently damage relationships established over decades. I have tried to do what little I can to support Jewish writers who suddenly find themselves adrift or canceled in their writing communities. I hate that this has happened to them, just as much as I regret that they never saw it coming. (I began to see glimmers of it just after 9/11.)

My friends in Israel who felt fully committed to a peaceful resolution of the conflict were shaken to the core by October 7, one of them telling me that she literally couldn’t believe what she was hearing on the radio that morning. She was so sure it could never happen.

Speaking of the radio, for the first week or more after the attack, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to music. Music is a constant in my life, so I knew there was something wrong. A friend suggested listening to Israel’s army radio station, Galgalatz. This is a music station, and following October 7, it became a sort of memorial in radio, as listeners sent in their tributes to murdered family members and friends. The tributes were excruciating to listen to, but I couldn’t stop, because you never knew just what song you might hear. There was electronic music played in memory of young people killed at the music festival. There were classic Israeli songs. And then you’d hear Led Zeppelin or Guns n’ Roses or Metallica. A full spectrum of music, free-form memorial radio. I won’t soon forget it. Of course, the broadcast is periodically interrupted by rocket alerts, where towns and neighborhoods are announced, meaning people need to run for cover. It happens all day, every day. And then there are constant PSAs with instructions for what to do when there’s a rocket alert and you’re driving.

Gradually, as weeks went by, I started to feel more ready to listen to other music. Some of it was imposed on us: Young J is drumming for his school’s production of Mamma Mia! so we had to go check it out. I will admit not feeling thrilled beforehand about attending the performance. I like to think of myself as a discerning music listener, and ABBA is not a band in any sort of rotation in my life.

The show won us over, of course. The storyline was vapid, but the singers had so much talent and heart, and the band was superb (Young J works hard at the kit). Quite unexpectedly, I found myself in the grip of one song in particular, “SOS.”

No one is more surprised than I am that I haven’t been able to stop listening to this song for a week now. My music streaming app keeps strongly suggesting I listen to The Carpenters play “Please Mr. Postman” afterwards, but I keep insisting on this one track. I’m not ready to move on.

I just found this music video of it, which is hilariously amateur compared to what we’re used to seeing now. The women in the band aren’t perfect: one has a sneer she can’t quite conceal, one has a snaggle tooth. The lyrics are vapid beyond belief.

But their voices call out to me from the dead center of the 1970s. I was three years old when this song was released, and I’m quite sure I never heard it at home, because my parents played no pop music at all. I have come to realize that in the past month, I may have heard the song played on Galgalatz. In fact I’m sure of it.

ABBA never intended this to be a song for wartime. There’s something very International sounding about it, bringing to mind the Eurovision contest, which it turns out ABBA entered and won in 1974. Eurovision is also a contest that Israel, despite worldwide hatred, has managed to win four times. So listening to this track also transports me back in time to a world where Israel was not reviled the way it is in so many quarters today (vociferously and egregiously).

I’ve heard the song enough times to love it and mock it simultaneously. The rhymes are certainly facile. But the synthesizer and the harmonies operate on a level I am unable to explain. It makes me want to do karaoke, but not in a festive way. It makes me sing in the shower again, something I had stopped doing ages ago. When I’m walking into the building where I work, I need to remove my headphones and check myself before belting it out in the hallway.

Because it is a song about a broken heart, and my heart is definitely broken. It is a song crying out for help, and I need help. I am trying to understand how to go on. At work, some colleagues kindly ask whether I’d like to talk about it. I decline, because I’m not ready to break down on a regular basis at the office. It’s already hard enough to wade through the sadness to get my work done. I do, however, a few times a day, put my headphones back on and listen to this song. And I think of the hostages, freezing and starved and terrified in tunnels for over a month, and I think of ABBA, and my brain tries to put together some sort of complex extraction plan via pop music. Then the song ends and I realize that isn’t going to work. And I play it again.

(Making Me Understand is an occasional blog feature where I analyze, in brief or at length, what a particular work of art or an artist means to me right now.)

It doesn’t feel a day later than 5783, though.

Hello. It’s been a while. Maybe it sounds like I’m clearing my throat, but actually, it’s a cough. Also I keep sneezing. It turns out there actually are still ways to feel unwell that don’t respond to nasal swab tests. It’s a cold, or else allergies. It is Late Summer Crud, and Young A has it too.

Yesterday, Young J got home from school. It’s senior year for him, and although he has been at my former high school all of his years of high school, the last one is hitting me harder. He’s taking the same class I took senior year, AP English Literature, and I’m stunned to discover that there are some readings that are still in rotation 35 years later. Like this one:

As soon as Young J said he was reading that, I jumped straight onto YouTube in the hopes of finding this very recording, which my teacher, Mrs. Wilkerson, played for us so long ago. (On a record player, if memory serves.) Imagine hearing something and then, thirty-five years later, suddenly having it playing from a device that sits in your hand. At first I received it as I did back then, ready to ridicule Eliot’s accent. But I soon realized I couldn’t, because I was too busy reciting the lines I still remember to this day. The way it hit my ears and my consciousness back then was entirely different than the way it pierced my soul yesterday, all this time later. Because I had not then, and now have been, “a patient etherized upon a table.” I have spent restless nights, I have experienced the yellow fog. (I have not murdered.) And how much time, exactly, have I spent preparing a face to meet the faces that I have met? Long story short: I GET IT NOW. I was a mess by the time it was over. (My kids are used to the way art undoes me.)

The way the calendar worked out, we spent the weekend celebrating the New Year. That meant insane amounts of cooking, copious eating, then endless dishwashing. Hours spent at services. As we sat listening to prayers, a new prayer rose up from the bimah, one that our rabbi co-wrote with a former synagogue president who has been ill with lung cancer. It was beautiful and sad. I was impressed at the gratitude with which he addressed God, something I haven’t quite managed to express, ever since the year I spent Yom Kippur not at services, but at home, reflecting on the luck that had landed me in the province of the unwell for the second time. (That was the day this blog was born.)

Today, this same congregant announced he has entered hospice care, which is devastating and sad. At the same time, the number of people I need to keep tabs on and mention in my prayers for healing (I do still pray — for others) is getting so numerous I may need to make a written list. At least once a day I run through my mental roster of who to check in on, who is pre-op, who is post-op, what I might possibly say to them, who might be in the right place to take a joke. (I’m good at jokes.)

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons… / … So how should I presume?

What can I safely say to anyone? I’ve struggled mightily with this of late. My cancer survival comes bundled with a healthy helping of survivor guilt. Friends are quick to point out that there is no way I should feel guilty. But it’s hard to feel lucky when randomness reigns. There is no objective reason that I get to live and others afflicted with cancer do not enjoy the same privilege. Yes, my quality of life is slightly diminished by the eye problems that my medication caused, but I wouldn’t say it’s even remotely comparable. I’m not in fear for my life. It has been eight years since that was my state of being.

I have had conversations with the newly diagnosed and their loved ones which make me sick to think about now. I feel I was spreading false hope by the mere fact of testifying my reality, when my reality is that I’m an outlier, not any sort of yardstick. I feel I must measure my words now, attach disclaimers, be attorney-like in my language.

“That is not it at all, /  That is not what I meant, at all.”

This line from “Prufrock” isn’t a bad thing to return to, at this time of year, when we need to undo any vows or oaths we have made (literally the opposite of New Year’s resolutions that we make on January 1). We are disentangling ourselves from messes we’ve made in the past year.

Where I may have spread false hope, I apologize. Where my survival reminds you that someone you loved didn’t survive, I don’t know that I apologize — because that in turn undoes my gratitude for surviving. It’s complicated.

What isn’t complicated: That you know that I also hurt for their absence or impending absence from your life. And that cancer is unfair. Come, we can be angry about it together.

Because now I can blog about melanoma in more than one place: https://blogs.gwu.edu/himmelfarb/2023/05/03/may-is-melanoma-and-skin-cancer-awareness-month/

Scans coming up on Friday. Scanxiety has arrived right on schedule. This morning on my way to work I reimmersed in the glorious gloom of “Spleen,” by Baudelaire (and its many translations). The weather hasn’t been very helpful this past week. But the forecast points towards sun, the hope is for another set of clear scans, and then Saturday is my 5K. Please contribute if you are able! Many thanks.

(Belatedly: my scans were fine.)