In 2005 I was twenty-six years old and the youngest person in the chemotherapy room by about forty years.
I can walk through all of it now. The doctor telling me. The surgery. Getting the port put in that they’d run the chemo through. Driving myself to treatment, then to work, then home. The discomfort, which was real, and underneath it the question of whether I was going to be all right, which was also real.
But when I go back there, that isn’t what comes back first.
What comes back first is a Dell laptop.
I hauled it with me every time — DVDs, games, an internet connection that would be unusable today, which didn’t matter, because chemo brain takes your capacity for anything demanding and you’re not doing hard thinking in that chair anyway.
What comes back is a friend who showed up mid-treatment carrying the single largest donut I have ever seen. Dinner-plate sized. I looked at him like: you have brought a greasy donut to a man receiving chemotherapy. I tried. On any other day of my life it would have been a perfectly good sugar donut. That day it did not work at all. Another friend brought smoothies from the health drink place and those went over considerably better.
What comes back is the people-watching. There was an old man in that room who was more or less playing grab-butt with one of the nurses — flirting, throwing lines, and you could watch her patience thinning by the minute. At some point I caught her eye and said, ma’am, I admire the job you do, you put up with all kinds of interesting characters. I got her to smile. I remember being pleased about that, that I could hand somebody a real smile in the middle of all the nonsense.
And what comes back is the singing. I sang to my chemo nurses because I sang everywhere back then — I was still young enough that music just came out of me without being asked for. Partly to stay positive. Mostly because that was who I was.
I don’t remember what I sang the last day. I remember the thought exactly: I made it. My levels were where they were supposed to be. They told me I’d most likely never deal with this again.
They were wrong about that. I’ll get there.
Something struck me going back through it.
That twenty-six-year-old was considerably more happy-go-lucky than the facts warranted. Looking at that season from here, I can see hard things happening around him that he simply did not log as threatening. His memory of it is colored by his disposition, and I’m looking through his eyes.
For a minute I wondered whether that made any of it unreliable.
Then I understood what I was actually seeing. His hope wasn’t sitting on himself. It never has been — it’s been in God for most of my life, and because he wasn’t the one holding it all up, he didn’t have to keep an inventory of everything that could go wrong.
The rose-colored glasses weren’t a distortion. They were the mechanism. Seen clearly, that year might have flattened him. Seen through hope, he sang at the nurses.
Thirteen years later it came back.
- Four rounds, a week in the hospital at a time. Fifty-some pounds gone. No hair, and I’ll tell you plainly I am not a handsome bald man.
Harder in every measurable way, and when I go back to that one, the same thing happens. Friends showing up. My wife — my best friend — taking care of me. Food tasting like food again on the other side of it. God bringing me through it a second time.
I don’t deny a minute of the hard. It was hard. It was hard both times and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.
But I don’t want the hard to die without being useful.
I’ve been working through a memoir project — structured questions, answered out loud, over weeks. What I’ve found is that memory isn’t a filing cabinet. It’s more like architecture. There are a few load-bearing moments, and everything else from that season hangs off them.
Find the pillar and the room reassembles around it. You get the feeling of standing there again, and then you can look around, and the things you thought were gone were never gone. They were living next to the pillar the whole time.
Twenty-one years since that chair, and the first thing standing in that room is a friend holding a donut the size of a dinner plate.
David Willis 