She told me he had just come out, that he was fine, it went well. She described the waiting area, the hospital. She gave me the doctor's report.
I was sitting at my desk in a small windowless office in Pennsylvania, hunched over my phone. That moment happened. But as I read and reread Heather's text, other moments happened too.
All the long minutes in waiting rooms; all the strange, too-bright hospital spaces. The port, biopsies, PET scans, radiation. The waiting. The white/gray palette, the fluorescent lighting. A doctor walking at a clip across the rows of chairs to give his report. Me, suspended in molasses, an odd mix of breathless anxiety and leaden limbs, struggling to find a breath. His manner is particular to certain kinds of specialists and surgeons; it somehow combines excellent eye contact and intensity with a clear message: please allow me to manage this exchange so that we can complete it within about six minutes. Don't ask too many questions. Good? Good.
Oh, how could it be Heather there, and Mike there, and not me? I know that moment. It's in my bones. It's a combination of moments, just beneath the surface, ready to bubble up and break into my right now with a simple glance at my phone.
So friends and family sent us ornaments: beautiful angels, stars, Santas, snowflakes, woodland creatures, elegant glass spheres.
Boy, was that overwhelmingly generous and kind and Christmas-miracley. We opened so many little packages last year. I labeled each ornament with the friend's name who sent it. The children loved it. Our tree was so beautiful.
And those are the ornaments we unwrapped last week. Usually a dig into the box of ornaments is a sweet journey through so many times and places: my second grade class, Frances's preschool, Mike's first Christmas, the year Gabriel was born. But this year we traveled to just one time, one place: a year ago. A gentle, worn-out time. We thought we'd made it through the worst of it. We knew we were laid low; we knew our friends and family were with us. We were looking ahead with full hearts to a time of recovery and healing.
We didn't know what was coming. It's been a hard year.
Those ornaments exacerbate the absurdity of living another cancer Christmas. How has it been an entire year? How can the way we were, the way we are, the way this year has unfolded, all be true? How can we endure it, surrounded by these achingly poignant symbols of hope and love and healing in the living room?
Early in the decorating process, Beatrice pulled out the popsicle stick ornament pictured above and gently unwrapped it, laying it on the rug. She looked up at me.
This ornament makes me cry, she said.
Why? I asked.
Because. It's so beautiful.
Then I kneeled down with her. I turned it over. 'Annie' was written on the back in black marker. She's a teenager at our church in Annapolis. Every Monday night we used to go to church and the kids would practice acolyting or singing and often a craft project would be going on in between activities. We had been the occasion for a craft project last Christmas. Annie and others had made popsicle stick and glitter snowflakes and sent them to us in a big box.
I sat admiring it with Beatrice. Mike sat down in the chair next to me and rested a hand on my back. I leaned my head on his knee and cried. She asked me why I was crying.
Well, duh, Beatrice.
Because it's so beautiful!
So many nows are achingly vivid as my family enters a second turn of the seasons living with a terrifying disease. The children's faces are exceedingly beautiful. Their bickering, too, is unbearable. The shape of branches against the evening sky is so stark. The yellow leaping fire in the fireplace is extra compelling. The Christmas music is more heartrending than ever.
These saturated moments linger, slide together, overlap, and make time into something else. Something more mysterious. How can it be that that was yesterday, a week ago, a year ago? I cannot begin to fathom it.
I finished reading Little House in the Big Woods with Beatrice tonight. We've shared those beloved chapters with various listeners over the past few nights: Frances and Gabriel, Tessa and Annika next door, the dogs, Kate the babysitter. Everything grows still. Part of the magic of the book is the slow, immersive quality that marks Laura's experience of time; reading it aloud is a way to participate in that alert, attuned stillness.
She intuitively understands something about the way time feels sometimes: a moment can be so full of itself. It overflows with realness. That kind of vivid experience can invite you further in, and somehow also make you notice it, linking you to moments like it that have happened before and will happen again.
Laura is inside and outside time. The immersive moment can be so extraordinary that it invites her to stand back and marvel.
The book begins in the fall, and ends in the next fall, just as winter is approaching. Just like now.
Pa plays his fiddle as Laura and Mary fall asleep. In the last passage of the book, he plays Auld Lang Syne. Laura asks him what the days of auld lang syne are, and he tells her they are the days of long ago, and then tells her to go to sleep.
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on his honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
She thought to herself, "This is now."
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
