Proximity

On a sunny autumn morning, I walked down a sidewalk far from home, thinking about news my family had received a few days ago.  It was sad news about my dad.  Nearly unbearable.

The Cancer Cloud has dogged me for two years.  My brother in law, my husband, my boss, and now my father each battled cancer during that time.  I’ve pulled out the umbrella and rain gear to protect against the deluge of fear, uncertainty and sadness, but still it’s been tough.

Early in our lives together, my husband and I coined a superstitious credo.  It held that bad things happen in threes.  We developed this belief when financial difficulties were our primary hardship - our generator would blow out, the fuel tank spring a leak, or the water pump seize up.  When something bad happened, we would look at each other and grimace, ready for the second and third hammers to fall thinking, “How much is this set going to cost us?”

At some point, our struggles eased.  We went through a long period of smooth sailing.  We lost count of the months and years since the last significant round of mishaps.  Then, we got a call from my brother in law saying he’d received a diagnosis of late stage cancer.  It was a shock after the placid waters of late.  Just months after his brother’s passing, my husband was diagnosed with the same cancer, sending us to an entirely new level of persistent fear where our future plans and dreams were in peril.  During the next twenty four months, I waited.  I waited in the lobby of the doctor’s office, waited in the hospital’s lounge during surgeries, and waited interminably for test and treatment results.

Self-help practitioners (including my favorite, Oprah) say I should practice being grateful for my fortunes and prevailing tail winds and they suggest that these disciplines improve quality of life and reduce anxiety and depression.  They say these things can help a person weather the storms of life.  During these waits, I tried it and it seemed to work.  I kept a gratitude journal – each day scribing five positive things that had happened the day before and five things I looked forward to today.

Good things began to accumulate in my journal.  Five goods turned into seven and ten.  The things I looked forward to mounted as well and I observed that while “bads” might happen in threes, goods happened in tens.  I became a hoarder of good:  I collected them hungrily - a beautiful day, a delightful row of rain-gear-clad children on their way to the park, a teenager playing his drum set at a roadside pull off, a strong run, a powerful yoga session, a new recipe with deep flavor, a positive interaction with a co-worker, the success of someone I love.  The lists grew and grew and filled notebooks that filled boxes.

My husband eventually made it through his rough water and just as the rapids smoothed out into a peaceful stretch of river, my boss was diagnosed with a different serious form of cancer.  I reeled again from the power of this hit to someone close.

Then, while the impacts of my boss’s diagnosis were still reverberating, my mom and sister took my dad to the emergency room for pain and the doctor there offered a preliminary diagnosis of lung cancer.  It felt like it was just too much sadness to endure.

A week later, I went to a doctor’s appointment with my parents and we heard the full explanation of what dad faced.  I was confounded at the ugliness and hopelessness of it.  The news made me angry, guilty, afraid.  It sank into me and my own lungs felt heavy and ill.  I wrenched myself away from my parents, leaving them in the middle of their third appointment that day, the doctors kind but so matter-of-fact.  I had to catch a flight to Philadelphia for business and I spent the day alternately spilling tears and wracked with guilt about leaving.

The morning after I arrived in Philadelphia, the sun rose.  I wrote that down in my journal.  Sunrise – one good thing.  Dad’s doctors are caring – two.  There is relief for his pain – three goods. I put my journal down and cried.

I set out for a walk to calm myself.  The streets were quiet and, although I tried to look for beautiful things to ease my mind, ugliness appeared instead.  Beneath my feet, the cobblestone buckled where tree roots pushed upwards.  Tar and gum and spittle dotted the concrete and a stench of sewage rose through the grates and caught in my throat.  A homeless man slept in a doorway, his vertebra erupting through his taut skin and scabby wounds shining between his shoulder blades.  A half-eaten pizza slice was thrown onto the ground, fodder for rats.  These ugly things warrant notice, I thought.  They demand attention, deliberate focus.  Sadness, ugliness can’t really be ignored in a quest for good.

Decay

Homelessness

I turned a corner and music drifted toward me from across the street, easy and quiet.  The stained glass windows and front doors of the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church were open wide and a choir inside was singing.  It was a hymn I didn’t recognize and I couldn’t make out the words, but it was lovely.  I sat down on the front steps and listened to the rise and fall of the voices.  A few late parishioners, dressed up in Sunday clothes, hurried past me to join the congregation.

I thought about the ugliness I’d just walked past this morning, noting that the coexistence of beauty and ugly are perpetual, inescapable.  One doesn’t exist without the other. The beauty of this church and music, its structure and its sound, in its proximity to the dirty sidewalks, homelessness, and decay tempered, but didn’t wipe away, the abhorrent.  The ugly was made bearable by the beautiful.

Later, I re-opened my journal and wrote out these things as goods – my fourth and fifth for the day.  The existence of the Mother Bethel Church in a rough part of this big city and the salve of her hymns.

Structure and Song