howie good
living with death
1 Call for the Dead
I picked up the phone on the first ring. It was Dr. L, the surgeon who had removed the golf ball-sized lump from under my left shoulder blade. He said he had gotten the biopsy report. The tumor was malignant; I had cancer. I stared out the window at the trees in the yard as I tried to absorb the shock. What looked like a strange green mist clung to the branches. After a few seconds, I realized it wasn’t mist at all, but tiny buds, thousands of them. The truth is always revolutionary. Spring had snuck back.
2 A Dozen Donuts
Dr. L stood on the other side of the room, about as far from where I sat on the exam table as he could get, his arms folded protectively across his chest. He was explaining how my form of cancer spreads via the bloodstream, causing murder and mayhem along the way. I listened in terrified silence. My head felt like a crumpled ball of paper. Next thing I knew I was stopped at a drive-through window. A woman, her face shadowed by a visor, peered out. I handed her a ten-dollar bill. She handed me a box of donuts. “Have a nice day, hon,” she said.
3 The Dark
And now death has my shaped face. In fact, we’re practically identical. I was diagnosed less than a month ago with a rare cancer, a liposarcoma, one of the 14,000 cases a year. All of us alive today are dying, but some of us are dying more painfully or obviously than others. Reading on WebMD about the survival rate of sarcoma patients, my mouth goes dry, my heart races, I forget to breathe. You can stare into the dark for only so long before the dark begins staring back.
4 How to Beat Cancer
Online acquaintances – I hesitate to call them “friends” despite being so designated by Facebook – offered unsolicited advice on how to “beat” cancer. One person claimed that the body repairs itself when denied food and recommended that I undertake a series of 72-hour fasts. Another cited a man in Blue Springs who got rid of his Parkinson's on the Keto diet. Meanwhile, a neighbor who once worked as a counselor of some sort in a cancer ward told me that she had been able to predict just by looking at them which patients would survive and which wouldn’t. The ones who made it, she said, exhibited a positive attitude. Then she slipped me a baggie of pot.
5 Holocaust
A Midwest poet, a guy about half my age, lost an eye to cancer over the winter. Another online acquaintance, the poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is suffering from pancreatic cancer. “Chemo week,” he texts me. “No sleep last night. Jabbing cramps today. And I’m still dying.” An old colleague at the university has had his intestines rerouted because of colon cancer. The brother of one of my sisters-in-law is receiving treatment for liver cancer. A first cousin of mine was in his early 40s when he died of esophageal cancer and now some 20 years later his widow has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. As an introvert – or maybe misanthrope – I don’t personally know that many people, but cancer is epidemic among those I do know. It just confirms what I’ve always suspected, that we exist on the sufferance of a hostile universe, and that at any moment and for no justifiable reason we can suddenly be pulled out of line and marched to the showers to be gassed.
6 The View From Here
I asked my younger brother, a cardiologist. “It’s the environment,” he stated flatly. I’m about to start radiation treatment regardless. I’ll lie on my stomach and with my shirt off be required to keep as still as a corpse beneath the burning eye of the machine. The weird part is I don’t feel sick. Last night my wife Barbara dreamed that she was the one receiving radiation. We were halfway to the cancer hospital in Boston when my phone rang. Barbara answered because I was driving. The man on the phone said the machine had broken down. Like now, it was spring in the dream, but the plants were still all underground.
Intermezzo
Time has no shape of its own. It assumes the shape of what we do with it. What I’ve done seems pathetically little. Ever since being struck with cancer, I’ve felt I should be living a more inspired life. But life as a cancer patient will quickly rid you of any notions you may have had that you matter. I’m swept headlong through a worrying present of hospitals and blood tests and radiation treatments toward a desolate future, a country where nobody lives.
7 Waiting
A half-hearted effort had been made to brighten the waiting room of the Radiation Oncology unit by hanging framed floral prints on the walls. But better art or even actual flowers wouldn’t have alleviated the glum atmosphere. Anyone waiting on the hard-backed chairs crammed along three sides of the low-ceilinged basement room – a long reception desk occupied the fourth side – was either a cancer patient or someone who had been guilted into accompanying them to radiation treatment. As a newcomer, I snuck glances at the other patients from under the bent brim of my Red Sox cap. Some dozed. Some nodded and trembled uncontrollably. Some had a book open on their laps while staring blankly into space, their faces leached of color. If they weren’t old when their treatment started, they looked old and shriveled now. Every fifteen minutes or so one would have their name called and disappear with a radiation tech in blue scrubs through a set of double metal doors. Behind the doors was a special X-ray machine called a linear accelerator. It destroyed the cancer cells, but also nearby healthy cells. Our oldest daughter had asked on the phone earlier if I was anxious. No, I lied. I felt like an early Christian martyr about to be burned at the stake.
8 Shit Day
The sun bobbed about like a balloon on a string. It was nearly time for my daily round of radiation. From the moment I noticed her, a haggard woman in her fifties smoking a cigarette outside the busy entrance to the cancer hospital, the Grand Canal from Panama to France was open again. I was reminded of the painter who loved paint so much that he once drank a jar of it. “The infamous pickpockets of Lisbon,” I thought I overheard a man on his phone say as I passed. I pushed through the double glass doors, walking with the quick, confident steps of a person who knows just where they’re going despite the treachery of words.
9 Contagious
Graham, our second oldest, finally went to the dermatologist for a lump that had developed on the back of his left shoulder some time ago. He had ignored it until alarmed by my cancer diagnosis. His doctor didn’t think the lump was anything special, just a harmless lipoma, but given my case, she removed it in her office (or as much of it as she could; it was entangled with the underlying muscle) and sent a tissue sample for biopsy. Yesterday, while I was receiving radiation, Graham phoned Barbara distraught. She’s been crying ever since. Statistically, the chance of more than one member of the immediate family having the same rare form of cancer I have is infinitesimal. You’ve a better chance of being acclaimed “Oz, the Great and Powerful.” And yet the biopsy indicates Graham may also have a sarcoma. Next week is his birthday. He turns 40. Birth is a death sentence.
10 Notes of a Former Person
Crossing the street in front of the hospital after receiving radiation, I stepped on the shadow of an old woman who, bent double over her cane, was creeping along. She looked sharply at me. “What’s s-u-n-n-y spell?” she asked in a raspy voice. All I really wanted was what everyone else seemed to want, more out of life. I hurried on. It would be dark before too long, the city emptying of commuters, leaving only the trapped and the predatory and the whine of sirens. Back in the hotel where I was staying during my weeks of treatment, I had to remind myself again as I prepared for bed to take the stairs in case of fire.
11 Scanxiety
A half-dozen different conversations buzzed around us as we sat at a table in the hospital cafeteria sipping watery coffee from cardboard cups. I was stranded in a kind of purgatory between medical appointments. In the morning I had undergone a CT scan of my chest. Lying on my back, I had been inserted into the tube of the scanner as if I were a giant-sized enema. Now I was waiting to meet with my oncologist, Dr. A, who would review the scan results with me in his coldly clinical way. I go through the same routine every three months, and every time I do I experience a feeling of mounting dread. It is a feeling so widely shared by cancer survivors that it has been given a special name, “scanxiety.” At its root is the dreaded possibility that despite surgery, radiation, chemo, and prayer, the latest scan will reveal a recurrence of cancer. Almost as wrenching is the humiliating helplessness I feel at being unable to prevent my own body from possibly attacking me again. I pushed the putrid cup of coffee away. Barbara was looking down at her phone. Out a window of the cafeteria a plastic bag caught on a tree branch flailed in the wind.
12 The Epoch of Artificial Tears
Everything has changed, and nothing has. It still rains when the forecast says it won’t. Hummingbirds still come to the oriole feeder. The angel of history still hosts orgies of torture and murder. Doors still open from both sides. The abandoned buildings of defunct chain restaurants are still being converted into Hispanic churches. Simone Weil still starved herself to death in a deliberate effort to pay back God for her existence. Girls still hide themselves behind too much makeup. The thought of cancer still makes me cold all over. I still put drops in each eye first thing in the morning as if there’s an afterwards I still have a chance of seeing.
Howie Good's latest book, Frowny Face, is a mix of his prose poems and handmade collages from Redhawk Publications. His previous poetry collections have won a number of poetry awards, including the Press Americana Poetry Prize. He is a professor emeritus in the Digital Media and Journalism Department at SUNY New Paltz. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.
