More Books, More Thoughts

 A few weeks ago, I blogged about reading Truck by John Jerome, learning that I had read a later work of his, Stone Work, and then my connecting the dots across the years. As I commented, I like Jerome's style and his approaches to life and writing. I then checked out his On Turning Sixty-Five. Subtitled Notes From the Field, it contains Jerome's reflections on hitting that milestone, on looking ahead to the next decade or so, on aging, and on enjoying life. His older brother had died at age 64 several years earlier, and Jerome juxtaposed his brother's early death against his own hope of attaining 80 or older. 

Early in the work, he writes of making plans with his wife for canoe trips to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary and to explore northern Canada, noting that they "began thinking harder about how we were spending our days...The truth was, we could begin to see an end to larks like that, and figured we'd better stock up on them." 

Jerome was anticipating the physical hurdles in such trips as he and his wife aged. But I, the reader, knew what he did not know. He was not going to make it to 70, dying at age 69 of aggressive lung cancer. But he doesn't know that. In my commonplace book (saving the quote), I wrote "reading this book is heartbreaking at times because I know what is coming but he doesn't."

Picking up the pieces of my heart from Jerome, I reread Underland by the peerless Robert Macfarlane. I had first read it when it came out in 2019 and had captured several pieces of it for my commonplace book at the time. On rereading it, I went back and marked the pages in my commonplace book to compare what moved me then versus now. As I reread, when I found a passage that moved me, I would look back to 2019. And guess what? Yes, I had captured them then too. All of them. Many of those quotes had to do with how humans have used the ground under the surface of the earth: to bury treasure, to store relics, to bury one another. 

Yesterday was my treatment day with Tim, my oncologist of almost 18 years. My cancer stays stable, but persistent, meaning that the medical world cannot get it into remission. That means that the amyloidosis, my concurrent disease, continues to flourish. As we talked about how I feel physically and mentally and emotionally, Tim for the first time ever used his "truck rolling downhill" analogy with me. 

The analogy is simple enough. With a progressive, incurable cancer, the disease is comparable to a truck parked at the top of a slope, but in neutral and with no brake set. The truck rocks a little and then starts down the slope, gaining speed as it goes. From a doctor/patient standpoint, all we can do is slow but not stop it.

I knew the truck analogy well from friendships with two other patients of his, both now dead; each of them reached that point with their respective cancers that Tim talked about the truck. But for me this was a first. It was one of those moments where I realized that while I knew that the day would come when the truck would appear, I did not really know it until Tim said it out loud.

Which brought to mind quotes from two books, one that I shared, voice breaking, with Warren, and one that I used last fall in a talk about death and dying. The one I read out loud to Warren came from The End of Your Life Book Club, Will Schwalbe's memoir about the books he and his mother read and shared together in the last months of her life as she dealt with the cancer that was killing her. Schwabe writes of her oncologist, at the next to the last appointment, knowing the death was not far away, asking his mother if she could hug her. "It's not a very hopeful sign when your oncologist gives you a goodbye hug." He softens that with writing that the hug was "two people comforting each other...before one left on a long trip to a distant land."

I have not had a farewell hug from Tim yet, but that day is out there.

The other quote, which washed over me as I sit here typing this draft at way too early an hour of the day, was from When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalinithi's memoir about dying: "Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely."

I have known since that long ago diagnosis that I am dying, not metaphorically, not philosophically, but actually and in real time. Tim saying out loud the truck analogy yesterday (and it does not escape my sense of humor at the universe that this post started with a book titled Truck) was just an acute reminder.

As I sift through these emotions, as I read these books, I am reminded of yet another quote (yes, also in one of my commonplace books): "Books can break your heart, but they will never leave you." (The Lost Chapters: Reclaiming My Life One Book at a Time" by Leslie Schwartz.)

Books, books, books. How grateful I am for them for never leaving me.