this and this

Death waits for me, I know it, around
    one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing. - Mary Oliver

Both/and has long been one of my anchor approaches to life. This can be true — beauty, love, light — and that can be true - terror, pain, sorrow — all at once. In the same breath. Anything that is one also holds the other.

This past week was a deep dive in both/and, a jolted reminder to pay attention, just as Mary Oliver instructs.

Since mid-August, I’ve been making nearly daily trips to my friend Sarah’s house. She has lived with Stage IV cancer for more than five years. I chose to accompany her on this journey out of love, yes, but also for a more selfish reason. I knew it would be a master class in living and dying. If I showed up, just as to any class with a great teacher, I would learn things I never otherwise could. So I was there through her chemo treatments, which were long and often dull for her, something that takes time away from living. I was there when she was in a lot of pain but unsure why — once the culprit was a sesame seed lodged in a vital part of her digestive tract. I visited her in many hospital rooms of varying aesthetic quality and differing staffing attention. And we went on many walks talking about choosing life over death. I can’t say that I always would have chosen the former with the same verve and bravery she did. In her choosing, I was schooled in forms of mettle and pluck that don’t come naturally to me.

Earlier this year after she’d had a course of what seemed a miracle cure (CAR-T - if you don’t know about it, read on — fascinating, sci-fi worthy stuff), we walked by the river on a melty winter day. Hundreds of ducks and at least a dozen eagles were fishing in the open waters. “I could die by getting hit by a bus!” she gleefully announced to the waterfowl. “I could die from an infected papercut!” The possibility of dying from something other than cancer delighted her. I sensed that even if she was hit by a truck the next day, while it would suck and be unfortunate, it would nonetheless be a sort of victory.

But the cancer came back. None of us wanted to believe it—she and medicine had outwitted it so many times—but I think she knew sooner and more clearly than any of us, her internal compass refined and ready for the smallest shift. In the last month since she began hospice and stopped eating—not an act of defiance but because she unable to keep anything down—she spent hours on the sofa in the back of her house staring out the big windows into her small yard. On my visits to massage her neuropathy-riddled hands and feet and to work on the knots in her shoulders, she’d point out the crows on the telephone wires behind the house and report on the activity of the groundhog that lives in the garage. We mainly spoke of beauty on those visits. Memories of delicious meals, our handsome sons, the landscape of Japan where she’d lived for a long time. The only things she was glad to leave behind were what might be deemed ugly — Trump, especially.

Parallel to this slow motion journey of dying, I was preparing to birth a project I’ve been working on for years. A publication that is at once small and humble but filled with more of my heart than any of my books. Joy the Zine began as a way for me to find hope against the onslaught of bad news. It’s been a project just out of reach that I wasn’t sure I’d ever pull off. Now, it’s printed. It’s in stores. It’s online. And last Sunday, it was launched with a rocket-worthy boom of happiness as friends gathered to join me in saying yes, this, this joy, this community this possibility is all so worthy of our time.

The one person not there, the person who I wished was there, was Sarah. Two nights after the celebration, she died. I stayed up much of that night, being in the liminal space, sensing her movement between here and not here. The next day, I walked in the woods, and was very much with me. To one side of the expanse, we saw a blue sky and sun.The other direction held slate blue, heavy clouds. We marveled at how both were possible — the same sky; where did one stop and the other begin? Here a field of goldenrod in full sway. There a tree covered in angry thorns. Here a pair of deer standing still and staring at me. There a fly-covered carcas.

The week has continued this way with miracles and sorrow all around, so that I am holding some nut or kernel of both/and or yin/yang energy in my palm. I am holding Sarah’s blue-grey eyes, filled with tenderness and salty wit. This life vibrates, a cicada of truth. And yes, Mary Oliver, I do, I try to pay attention. Because of Sarah, I’ll try harder. Because of Joy, a simple piece of paper filled with heartfelt stories, I’ll try harder.