Cauliflower

There are moments when I cough, and the cough turns into something more guttural and choking, and the entire thing turns into less of a diaphragmatic experience, more of a realization.  Something in me is desperate, panicky and choked off.  The tendency is to keep the feelings, and the awareness that goes with them, damped down.  But eventually things get coughed up.  Or they ooze out, particularly late at night.

I have come to distrust the notion of going to sleep.  I accept that Marlou and I go to bed, but the day's anxieties awaken as soon as we sleep, or even before.  Our nightly hug is both tender and telling.  Earlier in the cancer saga, when I put my arm around Marlou to say goodnight, we seemed together but not in sync.  Perhaps she was trying to cheer me, lighten my load or even convince herself that the moment contained only routine worries.  Things to do, people to contact, arrangements to make.  Sometimes she slept well, and I didn't.  Or I slept well, and she didn't.  Or neither or both.  Now, none of this matters.

We've entered an era that has the quality of gentle truth.  Now, I put my arm, my only useful arm, around Marlou, ask how she is, and the truth oozes out.  I can feel her tears rolling down her cheeks, through my shirt and beyond.  She tells me her worst fears.  And in this process my worst fears are soothed as well.  Having a mother who was always churning and seething with unacknowledged emotions, I'm actually reassured by our tearful exchanges.  I only have one arm, but at such moments one seems enough.  The one I have feels strong.  And I seem strong.

Of course, there is the choking cough.  Which is my body choking the truth out of me.  And the truth is that I am scared and deeply feel Marlou's pain, or think I do.  For her tears reach the skin of my chest...and then what?  They get absorbed.  That's what I do.  One close adviser has told me that this is my particular, individual propensity.  To absorb other people's feelings.  Marlou has her own version of this tendency.  It is our mutually sympathetic natures that bind us in a deep way.  And it feels momentous and it feels right that we are acquiring the courage, the mutual courage, to share tears.  It's all hanging out or oozing out, and this feels particularly right.

I can only think of the Queen Mary 2.  The actual ship, not the shipboard frenzy, but the vessel.  Noble was the only word I could apply to it.  The vast steel thing parted the cold waters and moved on and on, unstoppable.  Which is what ships do.  But I'd never seen this before, the actual action of casting free of the landmass, turning toward open water and hoping that the cold vastness really had another side.  That between here and the opposite shore, the ships and icebergs and forgotten, secretly surviving and long-persevering Nazi submarines wouldn't get us.  The ocean is the most limitless thing, devoid of features, lethal after a few seconds of exposure and, in any case, a long way down.

The broccoli rising out of the third plant in my first raised bed provides a focus for these questions.  Things are growing and blooming and photosynthesizing and consuming nitrogen and becoming compost, and what is there to do but park my wheelchair in the path of botanical progress and think?  It's hard to say if life is really sad or really short.  What's certain is that Marlou and I are following a path well trodden.  Others have passed our way, generally much younger.  The normal human lifespan is a recent abnormality.  Still, Marlou and I are just getting cranked up for life, and the prospect of a foreshortening sticks in my throat.  It's enough to make someone cough.  It's enough to make someone, anyone, very angry.

We don't know what's going to happen.  Marlou and I both comprise an odd minority, very small, in terms of personality tests.  We may just be part of an equally odd minority of spinal-cord injury and cancer survivors.  After getting shot, I wasted little time in hoping for the best.  I put my energy into bracing for the worst.  Hope or not, I got the best, the best medicine and, for a bad cervical injury to the spinal cord, the best life.

We have a lot of fear.  We have a lot of tears.  And it's all coming out, and it might just save us.  The hardest thing is to explain the truest thing.  Perhaps it's a mystery, defies explanation, and for the time being only deserves respect.  And the truest thing is that at night when Marlou cries on my chest, talks about her fear of dying, recalls the death of her brother and feels the pain of it all, what I'm doing feels absolutely right.  This is the inexplicable truth.  I am supposed to be here, and we are supposed to be together, and what's happening, pain and all...somehow it's meant to happen to both of us in this way.  And the strangest irony is that I am a middle-age person full of midlife regret -- and yet I don't regret this experience with Marlou at all.  Besides, in the great Laptop of Life the same microprocessor that generates pain also creates to it.  Whatever happens, you can count on both. Go figure.  Go figure it out by the cauliflower.