(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.