Wet Earth and Dreams 
 
Wet Earth 
 and Dreams 
 
 A NARRATIVE 
 
 OF GRIEF 
 
 AND RECOVERY 
 
 Jane La^arre 
 
 Duke University Press 
 
 Durham 1998 
 
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 All rights reserved 
 
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 on acid-free paper 00 
 
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 printed page of this book. 
 
 Some of the names in this work 
 have been changed. 
 
FOR L. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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Acknowledgments 
 
 I owe special thanks to Sara Ruddick, Ruth Charney, and 
 Douglas White, who read each chapter as it was being 
 written and gave me courage and faith. 
 
 For their careful editorial responses, I thank Carol 
 Ascher, Jan Clausen, and Jaime Manrique. For her help 
 in many ways, I thank Claire Potter. 
 
 My sons, Adam Lazarre-White and Khary Lazarre- 
 White, are two of my most trusted readers. I can never 
 express the importance to me of their devotion and 
 understanding of my work. 
 
 There are two readers whose support was central to my 
 decision to publish this memoir. For their close readings 
 and confidence in this work, I thank Nancy Barnes and 
 Sarah Lazarre-Bloom. 
 
 Once again, I am grateful to the wonderful people at 
 Duke University Press, especially my editor, Valerie Mill- 
 holland, and Emily Young and Sarah E. Ball Damberg, 
 for their insights, responses, and conversations. 
 
 As always, I thank my friend and agent, Wendy Weil, 
 for her support. 
 
 My family and friends guided and strengthened me 
 through the experience that became this memoir. I thank 
 them all for their notes, gifts, calls, attentions — for their 
 steady love. 
 

 
 
— Hands dripping with wet earth 
 head full ofshocking dreams 
 
 O what have you buried all these years 
 what have you dug up l 
 
 — Adrienne Rich, “Calle Vision, 9,” 
 
 Dark Fields of the Republic, Poems 1991-1995 
 

 
When I awoke in the recovery room after two hours 
 of anesthesia, during which time a cancerous tumor two 
 centimeters large had been removed from my breast and 
 eleven lymph nodes from under my arm, the threat which 
 I felt I had to resist at any cost was unconsciousness. 
 The moment I woke up, despite tubes and nausea and a 
 horrible sense of amnesia — hours and a dramatic experi¬ 
 ence simply gone, erased, as this computer can be made 
 to erase passages, pages, entire files — the very moment 
 I awoke and heard my doctor’s voice, then my husband 
 Douglas’s, eventually my son Khary’s, I wanted to sit up, 
 be told everything, return to the fullest possible awake- 
 ness. But I was being pulled back into sleep, and even 
 though the nurse was my ally, wanting to bring me “out,” 
 telling me to breathe and stay awake, something men¬ 
 acing, I felt, was pulling me “in” or downward, a down¬ 
 ward place where I fully believed death waited for me, 
 or where I would lose my mind. I had no idea at the time 
 why Khary’s hand, more than anyone’s, was the hand I 
 needed, but I clung to it as if I were the child, he the par¬ 
 ent, as if his exquisite devotion could literally save my 
 life. I forced my eyes to remain open with all the will I 
 possessed, and when my friend, Leona, who is a nurse, 
 came into the room and whispered, “Try to stay awake, 
 get up and walk, you have to pee before they will let us 
 go, and we have to get the fuck out of here,” I felt I was in 
 good hands. My surgery was “outpatient,” meaning I was 
 intended to go home the same day, and although I was 
 aware that this new system existed largely to increase the 
 profits of insurance companies, and due to many delays 
 all day it was nearly midnight, I was determined to get 
 home as fast as I could. 
 
 And so, after an hour of vomiting, talking, peeing, and 
 
walking, Leona pushing me from behind so the nurse on 
 duty wouldn’t notice, I was finally in a taxi heading up¬ 
 town to my apartment. 
 
 I woke up several times in the middle of that first night 
 with a sense of joy, the ecstatic feeling of power that 
 comes with escape. I was alive. I was awake. I had spo¬ 
 ken to Adam, my son who lives in Los Angeles; I had 
 held Khary’s hand. I could get up and walk to the bath¬ 
 room alone. I was heavily bandaged, a drainage tube was 
 attached to my side, and I was feeling strange pains up 
 and down my right arm, but I was in my own room. 
 The window was open and the breeze cool. No strangers 
 were in sight. Lying next to Douglas, intent upon re¬ 
 maining awake as long as possible, I could go over and 
 over the past twelve hours in my mind, trying to recap¬ 
 ture as much of my lost reality as I could. 
 
 I relived my arrival at the hospital the previous day 
 where, dressed only in a thin hospital gown, crowded 
 into a room with strangers similarly clad, we all waited 
 for surgery together, yet each alone, our loved ones ban¬ 
 ished for some reason to a far-off waiting room. After 
 three hours, I began to grow anxious and begged the 
 nurse to check on when I could expect my turn to finally 
 come. She flipped on a computer and an operating room 
 appeared on the screen. On the bed in the room, a woman 
 lay on her side in a state of what appeared to be semicon¬ 
 sciousness: her legs crossed vulnerably, her gown barely 
 covering her back and buttocks, which were turned to 
 the camera. Quickly, the nurse switched off the screen 
 and said, “You see, we’re waiting for a place to move her 
 so you can go in, but the recovery room is still full.” 
 
 Another hour would pass before my doctor came to 
 fetch me and we walked, like two girlfriends out for a 
 date, both of us in hospital greens and large paper slip- 
 
3 
 
 pers, down the hall, into the elevator, down another hall, 
 and into the brightly lit operating room where I was in¬ 
 structed to climb onto the table and an anesthesiologist 
 inserted a tube into my arm. The last thing I heard was 
 my doctor’s voice saying, “So, David tells me you have 
 written lots of books. What are their titles?” David has 
 been my doctor for twenty-five years and is also a friend 
 who has taken an authentic interest in my work. But even 
 in the increasing haze, I realized this was just a form of 
 being asked to count backward from ten to one, and so, 
 instead of answering her, I said, ten, nine, eight, and then 
 I lost time. 
 
 I was only vaguely aware of a disturbing familiarity at 
 the very center of my happiness as I lay in my bed, staring 
 at the walls, the curtains, the shadows of my quilt on the 
 ceiling as I moved my knees. I was afraid of sleep, which 
 had for years been a balm for me. If it weren’t that I felt 
 so relieved and even joyous, I’d have been reminded of 
 my childhood when chronic insomnia made every night 
 a nightmare long before any dreams began. 
 
The Self That Self Restrains 
 
 In the spring of 1995, the condition I seem to have been 
 waiting for all my life finally struck me. I was trying to 
 keep afloat after three difficult years full of crises and dis¬ 
 appointments. I knew I had to move to a new stage or 
 phase of things, to unencumber myself of old, tiresomely 
 repeated themes, and especially to liberate myself from 
 the anxieties and fears of disaster that stalked my days, as 
 they had off and on for more than a decade. I thought I 
 could face whatever network of defenses and distortions 
 had held these fears in place so long, but I was losing the 
 battle for a sense of control and becoming increasingly 
 depressed. A surprising characteristic of the depression 
 was my ability to go on functioning in the world at a 
 level of ordinary competence so that only my very best 
 friends, or those who were for some reason interested in 
 being especially observant of me, noticed. I taught my 
 classes, mentored my students, remained extremely in¬ 
 volved with the lives of my grown sons, and was even 
 engrossed in the writing of a book about the dramatic 
 changes in my perspective on myself and my society as 
 a result of living for more than twenty-five years in an 
 African American family, the white Jewish mother of 
 Black sons. Yet there is no question that I was seriously 
 depressed, if that overused word continues to suggest a 
 sense of unalleviated, bleak hopelessness, chronic physi¬ 
 cal fatigue, sadness with seemingly no end, loss of sexual 
 desire, and, at times, the wish to die. 
 
 I felt like two women: the one everyone knew— 
 teacher, writer, mother, provider, attentive wife and 
 friend; and that other one, as I began to call her. The 
 girl/woman who above all was constantly afraid, at least 
 
5 
 
 some part of every day subject to visions of disaster de¬ 
 stroying me or those I loved, especially Adam and Khary, 
 my sons. 
 
 I’d be away on vacation with a close friend, and as I 
 walked home from a lovely day at the beach, a “vision” 
 would come to me that local police were waiting to tell 
 me my family had met with a terrible accident and were 
 all dead. I could see the faces of the police, careful and 
 worried; I could hear their solicitous voices; I could pic¬ 
 ture myself packing, rushing home to identify the bodies. 
 My heart would begin racing as we neared the little cot¬ 
 tage where we lived for a week or two in idyllic peace and 
 remote beauty. Whatever conversation I was having with 
 my friend would fade into the background as I struggled 
 to argue against myself, trying to dismantle the ineluct¬ 
 able reality of my sudden fear. And I could not relax into 
 normality again until I had made a call home, ascertained 
 that all was as I’d left it, not suddenly, irretrievably lost. 
 
 Or, lying in bed in the middle of the night waiting for 
 one of my sons to come home (if they were visiting, or 
 home for vacations during their college years, or living 
 at home for a time while in a transition between college 
 and the next stage of life), I’d be attacked (it felt like an 
 attack from the outside which instantly permeated the 
 deepest recesses of my inner self) by the conviction that 
 they were hurt, either by gun-wielding cops or socio- 
 pathic young muggers, and I’d have to get up and pace 
 the apartment, drink water, sweating and crying, some¬ 
 times for hours, until I heard the key in the door. 
 
 Over the years I tried to convince Douglas of how 
 much I needed reassurance rather than anger during these 
 bouts of hysteria. But anger—because I could spark his 
 own anxieties and because nothing disturbs him so much 
 as people being out of control — was always close to the 
 
6 
 
 surface of his reactions. And it was not until that spring 
 of 1995, when I got breast cancer, and its six-month after- 
 math of painful and frightening treatments, that he came 
 to believe in my inability to control my panic at times, 
 despite honest and strenuous attempts to do so. 
 
 Whenever I was subject to these bouts of fear, and 
 they came more or less often depending on many fac¬ 
 tors, it felt as if all order, design, and predictability were 
 gone from the world and everything in it. Chaos reigned, 
 an evil chaos, like a curse or supernatural punishment, 
 incomprehensible to ordinary consciousness yet making 
 some terrible sense. An explosion might occur suddenly, 
 blowing my or some loved one’s body to fragments of 
 unidentifiable tissue and bone. A car filled with drive-by 
 shooters might murder one of us for no reason, any time, 
 any place. A subway could be derailed and all its passen¬ 
 gers killed. Any and all natural and man-made disasters 
 seemed not only possible, which the nightly assault of 
 local and national news broadcasts assured me they were, 
 but imminent. Even the character of my children could 
 fall into a chaotic world where nothing was known or re¬ 
 liable. They are both stable, strong young men, neither 
 of them at all self-destructive. Yet, I could suddenly have 
 a fear of one of them committing suicide, tortured by 
 some torment or despair utterly hidden from me. 
 
 When I look back now, feeling stronger each day 
 and having been given a very good prognosis, though 
 always frightened of the recurrence of cancer, I under¬ 
 stand that my life is changed forever by the diagnosis, 
 the lumpectomy and removal of lymph nodes that per¬ 
 manently changed the feelings and capacities of my right 
 arm, by six weeks of daily radiation, and five months of 
 chemotherapy. I recall my first visit to the surgeon who 
 would determine the recommendation for treatment. I 
 
7 
 
 was frightened, of course, but steeled myself to a brav¬ 
 ery I knew I couldn’t do without. Hysteria, of the sort I 
 was used to during my nightmare visions, seemed almost 
 as dangerous as the cancer itself. I asked in a fairly con¬ 
 trolled tone of voice, I think, what the long-term effect 
 of surgery on my breast would be. How deep would the 
 cut be? Would it look like half a breast, or just a breast 
 with a hole in it? The young woman surgeon, who was 
 immensely capable and immensely busy, felt around for a 
 few minutes, trying to distinguish the original lump from 
 all the surrounding swellings that were the result of the 
 various biopsies, then stepping away from me she said: 
 “The breast [the medical people always said “the breast” 
 and “your cancer,” a choice of vocabulary that tended 
 to reinforce a sense of guilt for having cancer in the 
 first place] will look somewhat though not dramatically 
 different. But you,” and she pointed at me somewhere 
 between my face and my heart, “will probably never be 
 the same again.” 
 
 And she was completely right about that. The immedi¬ 
 ate result was that I was no longer depressed, absolutely 
 certain that I wanted to live as long as possible. The fears 
 not only remained but became even more intense and 
 with their increasing intensity, my increasing desire to 
 escape them by facing them once and for all. Having a 
 life-threatening illness not only changes perspective, as 
 everyone says, but pattern. The relations between things 
 seem to shift. Previously veiled or disguised connections 
 are suddenly exposed, and as in fiction, it is the connec¬ 
 tion between seemingly disparate experiences that pene¬ 
 trates defenses and promises lucidity. Perhaps, that is 
 why so many writers who undergo such an experience 
 must write about it before they can resume writing any¬ 
 thing else. Just as, despite great inner resistance, I do 
 
now. It seems absolutely necessary to name the change, 
 and to do so, one has to become clear as to what led up 
 to it, what came before. 
 
 Perhaps I had feared breast cancer even more than most 
 women because my mother died of metastasized breast 
 cancer when she was thirty-eight and I seven, and this 
 experience, of witnessing her illness, decline, and death 
 over some years, as well as the particular aftermath of the 
 death constructed by a fairly insane family, had literally 
 determined the structure of much of my life. Although I 
 often felt embarrassed by the recognition that this period 
 of childhood still influenced me forty-five years later, I 
 know for certain now that every important experience I 
 have ever had, everyone I’ve loved or hated, every cen¬ 
 tral choice I’ve made — my marriage, my mothering, my 
 friendships, my worst faults, my steadiest virtues, and 
 certainly my writing—has been affected by this incident 
 at the heart of the narrative of my life. 
 
 Years ago, I came to believe I had resolved old feel¬ 
 ings about my mother through a combination of psycho¬ 
 therapy and writing, that I had transcended the legacy of 
 loss, grief, and the threat of madness I knew as a child. I 
 had written books about mothers, including myself, and 
 books about daughters, all of them, according to Gloria, 
 a therapist I worked with for about twelve years, written 
 in part to bring my mother back to life. All of them, in 
 that sense, were failures to me; yet all of them also were 
 stepping stones away from her influence, each book like 
 a stone across a rushing stream that periodically rises to 
 overflow the banks, but each stone solid in its hard, flat 
 existence. 
 
 After about six years of therapy and two more books, 
 Gloria told me she thought I had finally buried my 
 mother, and she had reason to think so. Strengthened 
 
9 
 
 by Gloria’s kindness, frankness, and the carefully honed 
 intuition of one who has made listening into an art, I 
 had come to understand that I suffered from a sense of 
 guilt for my mother’s death, a guilt constructed of false 
 but apparently typical childish beliefs about the omnipo¬ 
 tence of wishes and the dark attraction of desolation and 
 longing, if those emotions are all that continues to con¬ 
 nect one to what has been lost. Death was a place, I had 
 decided as a child, where my mother still lived, and I 
 had grown into my forties when I understood that my 
 love/hate relation to death, and the need to relive and 
 relive my early powerful emotional ambivalence toward 
 my mother’s memory as well as her absence, had influ¬ 
 enced my entire life story, rubbing it, slowly scraping 
 away at it, polishing it at times to a magnetic and scin¬ 
 tillating shine — just like the rushing stream upon those 
 flat, safe stones. Achieving this understanding, I lived 
 through periods of exhilarating well-being, the strongest 
 sense of confidence and ordinary happiness I have ever 
 known. I had finally buried my mother, in a way. What I 
 did not fully appreciate then, but know for certain now, 
 is the inevitability, with certain bedrock mythologies in 
 a life, of periodic resurrection, or, to sustain the previous 
 metaphor, of storm and flood. 
 
 Stories of our lives often happen by accident, and these 
 stories provide the conditions, if one so chooses, to re¬ 
 examine the past in a new and deeper way. Having breast 
 cancer was such an experience for me. It followed a pe¬ 
 riod during which all my central stories seemed to be 
 about loss. The stories of loss began when Gloria her¬ 
 self died from metastasized breast cancer; continued with 
 the slow dying and eventual death of Douglas’s brother 
 Simeon from aids; with immense work disappointments 
 for both Douglas and me; and with an experience of pro- 
 
10 
 
 longed anxiety during a trip Khary took to Jamaica that 
 included a short but complete breakdown in myself. 
 
 I am sitting in Gloria’s office, in my old chair, only this 
 time I am the only one in the room as Gloria has been 
 dead for some weeks. I have been here for over an hour, 
 thinking and writing, and finally I close my notebook, 
 get up, and for the last time walk out the double doors 
 into the tiny garden that leads up the stairs to the street. I 
 feel no sense of closure or resolution. Quite the opposite. 
 I realize it will be some time before I comprehend what I 
 have lost or even clarify what I may be able to preserve. 
 
 After the funeral, I had called her husband, also a 
 therapist whose office was at the other end of the base¬ 
 ment level of the brownstone they shared, and made an 
 appointment to see him to talk about our mutual loss 
 and get his advice about seeing another therapist, pos¬ 
 sibly someone Gloria herself might have recommended 
 if she’d had the time. He and I decided I would put off 
 the decision about entering therapy with someone else 
 until I had thought about —in his words — what I had 
 accomplished with Gloria. After all, I had “terminated” 
 the first, long cycle of treatment some time ago, and now 
 came back only for periodic epilogues, lasting months or 
 weeks, motivated either by crises I needed help with, or 
 simply by the desire to see her and engage in that special 
 sort of conversation about the self that is possible with 
 a long-known and beloved therapist. Her husband, who 
 was obviously deeply bereaved, made a generous and 
 surprising offer that day. I could, he said, come to sit in 
 her room whenever I wished over the next few weeks. 
 I could just call ahead and let him know I was coming, 
 and no one would disturb me. 
 
I went twice. The first time I sat in her chair, hoping 
 to experience in some immutable material form the idea, 
 which she had voiced on the occasion of various sepa¬ 
 rations, that she would always be with me. I found her 
 glasses on the windowsill near her chair where she always 
 kept them, half-glasses to put on so she could read, and 
 for a few moments, I put them on my own face. Then, 
 her presence became very strong, as if she still inhab¬ 
 ited the room — with her wide skirts, paisley button-up 
 blouses, her flat shoes — as if even now she was shift¬ 
 ing heavily in that chair, beneath me. She would look 
 off into the distance, trying to find words that did not 
 always seem to come easily to her, although insight did, 
 as if she were able, like a painter or a dancer, to know 
 things without language. The first time I began by just 
 looking around the familiar place where I had undergone 
 a transformation in my character, a sea change, Gloria 
 called it, that began with a breakdown in my thirties 
 when I reached my mother’s death age. Twelve years 
 later, sitting in Gloria’s chair trying to comprehend the 
 loss of her, a strange feeling overtook me. First I felt 
 a heavy warmth, a heaviness that suggested an anchor¬ 
 ing, or a sucking down, a hypnotic and familiar fatigue 
 that threatens both consciousness and capacity, making 
 me want to stop, give up, relinquish, retreat, a feeling I 
 had described many times to Gloria of wanting to die. 
 Then, as often happened, anxiety replaced fatigue, and I 
 thought she was in the room and wanted me to get out 
 of her chair. Bereavement. The wish to die to be reunited 
 with the one who has been lost. The dangerous and com¬ 
 pelling retreat from energy. And then the fear that such a 
 wish might be granted. “She,” or what I kept of her, pro¬ 
 tected me. I got up and resumed my old seat, opening a 
 
12 
 
 small black notebook in which I began to record all the 
 feelings I’d had up to that moment. A feeling of calm re¬ 
 turned, a sense of belonging. 
 
 The second time I visited her room, I decided to write 
 a careful description of all its details so that in years to 
 come they would not be lost to me. I sat down immedi¬ 
 ately in “my” chair, in reality the one I shared with many 
 others, and as I had done hundreds of times before, I 
 looked around at the peaceful yet provocative space she 
 had created. 
 
 Each week there would be fresh flowers in a vase on her 
 desk. Now there were dried flowers in the vase, purple 
 roses. Perhaps she had put them there before she left 
 this room for good, and here they remained, drying into 
 another sort of beauty. 
 
 On the polished floor are two warm rugs, one brown 
 tweed, the other green, brown, and yellow patterns of 
 branches and flowers, a pattern I studied for many hours 
 over the years when I regularly visited this room. The yel¬ 
 low couch I never lay down on because I always wanted 
 to face her was behind me as usual, and I got up and 
 lay down on it then, just to feel what might have been. 
 Rising, I felt, like a blow to the chest, the emptiness of 
 her black leather chair, the chair now filled with her ab¬ 
 sence. I recall the same odd, powerful tangibility of ab¬ 
 sence in my father’s chair after his death. For months it 
 did not seem ordinary, but always empty, as if emptiness 
 and absence were things you could touch, be touched by, 
 embrace, and, if you had nothing else, preserve. 
 
 On her chairside table are her old, scratchy notes in two 
 spiral notebooks. I remember her picking them up and 
 beginning to write only when I was reporting dreams, as 
 if she could recall everything else adequately but needed 
 notes to remember the intricate images of the uncon- 
 

 scious. If my dream was short and clear, as some dreams 
 are a perfect distillation of a broad pattern of feeling, she 
 would write only the beginning, then take her glasses off 
 her nose and look at me. This would happen each time I 
 had the recurring dream about the heart in the cave. I was 
 walking down a windswept, desolate but peaceful ocean 
 beach and I would come to a large cave. Inside, I was 
 burying something, packing it down with sand. When I 
 was done I said aloud, I have buried my heart and I will 
 never take it out again. So, what exactly have you buried 
 there? she would ask each time, making a note on her 
 page, then staring into my eyes. 
 
 On the table on the other side of her chair are the 
 objects I have studied so often, whenever I needed to 
 look away from her. A small sculpture I believe I have 
 seen somewhere else, known in some other place, of a 
 woman’s face with a beaded headdress in bronze. A tiny 
 man in coat and hat, head down, running, escaping from 
 something. An ancient Hindu goddess raising her many 
 hands. Over the fireplace, with its magnificent Mexican 
 tiles, an old rabbi with a long white beard and a cap 
 painted black looks eternally into his open book. On the 
 wall, a woman made of white stone swings freely in a 
 hammock — or she is the hammock — her arms raised be¬ 
 hind her, her body a V shape as she swings. And framed 
 in gold, there is a detail of a Reubens, the very same por¬ 
 trait I had on my wall as a child, which still hangs in 
 my study today, reminding me of the inexplicable con¬ 
 nection I felt to this woman whose heart was remarkably 
 open to the stories of mine. Occasionally, we meet people 
 who seem like lost kin or spiritual siblings. Some might 
 say we’d known each other in a past life and were des¬ 
 tined to know each other in successive lives as well. A 
 very comforting story that both recognizes the mysteri- 
 
14 
 
 ousness at the heart of certain unlikely loves and suggests 
 that terrible loss is not irretrievable, that there are future 
 meetings with lost beloveds the nature of which we can¬ 
 not imagine. “What is death like?” I asked another close 
 friend who had recently died and then came to me in a 
 dream. She responded, “near, very near.” 
 
 Gloria’s books and papers are still in place, and remem¬ 
 bering the pain of dismantling my father’s apartment, 
 my old home, after his death when I was twenty-eight 
 years old, I wonder when her husband and children will 
 take this room apart, with its crowds of shadow selves 
 in pain, in moments of reparation and hours of healing 
 under Gloria’s careful, respectful, and pragmatic eye. 
 
 She lied to me twice, but her trustworthiness had taken 
 firm root by the time I knew of the lies, and so I am left 
 with regret and dismay rather than anger. The first was 
 about her illness. I had asked her if she were ill several 
 weeks before she died. She looked weak and gray and 
 something clearly was wrong. She said she was fine, was 
 having some minor blood problem but would be okay. 
 The second lie was about the illness of her child. After 
 she died, I found out from her husband that one of their 
 children had diabetes, as does my older son, and more¬ 
 over, they had contracted the disease about the same 
 time. I suppose in both instances she felt too vulnerable 
 herself to risk my reactions threatening what must have 
 been a precarious balance at the time. If she were here I 
 would say, You should have told me. As she is not, my 
 criticisms are greatly outweighed by my love. 
 
 At her funeral it was said that she loved Bach, a serene 
 and orderly music. We had talked a great deal of our 
 mutual need for order, and although I do not know her 
 history in relation to this appreciation, I know that mine 
 
i5 
 
 came into existence in her room because of what she 
 taught me. When I met her, I was besieged by passions 
 I did not understand and by a belief held in place since 
 childhood that only passion could rule my life authen¬ 
 tically. Over the course of a decade, she helped me to 
 understand that I could control my life, my surround¬ 
 ings, and my emotions. I came to see that I did not have 
 to be a slave to impulse, immersed in chaos in order to 
 distinguish myself from the myth of an orderly, disci¬ 
 plined mother, with her carefully created, elegant out¬ 
 fits and her formal dining room, which I was allowed 
 to enter only when she and the other grown-ups were 
 ready for dessert. It took many years to accomplish it, but 
 under Gloria’s guidance I became not only capable of but 
 fascinated with order, structure, and design in seemingly 
 every aspect of my life. I was reading many biographies 
 of women writers during that period, and in one on the 
 life of George Eliot I found the phrase, used by Eliot in a 
 letter about her own search for control, “the self that self 
 restrains.”* This idea became ideal for me, an aspect of 
 character I was determined either to recover or to create. 
 Compared to my passion in this search, naming the old 
 heart lying buried in that cave seemed an uninteresting 
 task, or at least one that could be put off for an indefi¬ 
 nite time. After I had breast cancer, I would be forced 
 to return to the cold, gray beach where I would have 
 to uncover that beating thing, whatever it was, from its 
 place under the damp ground. But Gloria had returned 
 or given to me the equally important possession of disci¬ 
 pline, and this treasure was rich enough to sustain me 
 with emotional and intellectual work for many years. 
 
 The last time I saw her she was lying in a hospital bed 
 
 * Ruby Virginia Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New 
 York: Knopf, 1975). 
 
in her living room, preparing for death. I lay down next 
 to her and we embraced. I said I loved her and she said, 
 this time directly, with no analytic questions about my 
 need to know her feelings, that she loved me too. She 
 said she was worried about me, losing another “mother” 
 to breast cancer, and I promised her I would be all right. 
 I meant that I would not become a slave to grief, as I 
 had as a child. Yet, because of the multiple losses I was 
 to experience in the next few years, I would break my 
 promise, and when I had breast cancer myself, I would 
 long for her voice, her wise face smiling ruefully at the 
 accidents of life. I would miss her with the physical im¬ 
 mediacy one feels in the early months following a death. 
 I would see her walking down 94th Street. 
 
 She said she did not want to die, but was not afraid 
 to die. I try to imagine myself so centered, focused, and 
 brave and find it impossible. I always fear the end of 
 things. Leaving anything behind, even painful experi¬ 
 ence, is difficult. Several friends have told me I should 
 write something else now, not immerse myself in these 
 griefs again. But this is the only way I know to find the 
 next flat stone that might be wide enough to hold me for 
 awhile. 
 
 Gloria believed without question, as so many do, as 
 I once confidently did, in the importance of personal 
 stories. “Your way of writing,” she used to call my work. 
 When we talked of writing, my resistance and loss of 
 desire to write, the seeming futility of trying to affect an 
 oblivious world, she seemed more than at any other time, 
 confused. And we would go back to our digging—to the 
 older sorrows, my father’s judgments, my mother’s leav¬ 
 ings. I would see my writing as a way to gain their atten¬ 
 tion, to do magic and negate even death. I would swing 
 
between grief and hope, like the white stone woman end¬ 
 lessly swinging on Gloria’s wall. First, I would dream of 
 bearing shabby gifts no one wanted, of dinners poorly 
 prepared, raw chicken, insufficient amounts. Then I’d 
 write something that expressed what I felt or understood 
 about experience, and I would feel worthy again, a giver 
 to the world. 
 
 When I walked into her room that last time, having 
 been met by a nurse in the waiting room who solemnly 
 ushered me upstairs to the part of the house where the 
 family lived, where of course I had never been, I resisted 
 clarity with a terrified vengeance. “Oh, how beautiful,” 
 I virtually sung as I sat down on a chair looking around 
 the spacious room, as if she were not lying in a hospital 
 bed, drawn and pale, obviously nearly unable to move. 
 “I am dying, Jane,” she said to me, and that was when I 
 began to cry, rose from my seat across from her, and lay 
 down next to her on her bed. When I left she told me we 
 would see each other again, have time to say good-bye. 
 But when I reached the stairs and looked back at her, a 
 familiar and awful light filled the room, a light I have 
 seen at other deathbeds and dreamed of many times. It is 
 not a light that clarifies in the ordinary sense. Rather, it 
 illuminates, it glows with a kind of shimmering fog. 
 
 Several days later, her husband called to say she had 
 died. “I felt I would never see her again,” I said. “And 
 now that has come to pass,” he responded. 
 
 I did see her once more, in her coffin, but that is when 
 a face seems closed, a mask, the spirit gone. 
 
 What did you accomplish with Gloria in your work over 
 all those years? I have heard her husband’s question again 
 and again in the past six months since I have begun writ- 
 
i8 
 
 ing this story as part of an effort to recover more fully 
 from a disease that kills by overflowing boundaries and 
 devouring once delineated body parts into itself. 
 
 She taught me I could trust that I knew what was hap¬ 
 pening to me and around me, that I too had what I so 
 loved in her, the gift of clarity. She taught me that con¬ 
 fusion and chaos themselves could be a defense against 
 clarity because of fear of pain or rage. 
 
 Gloria and I were aligned in our efforts to save, love, 
 but also control, a desperate and hungry part of myself. 
 We cradled her, but we took her in hand. Twelve years 
 later the part of me that gained strength and reality in her 
 office feels like myself, not merely some theatrical mask 
 or plastic prosthesis intended to support and protect the 
 damaged stump, scarred and ugly, beneath. Yet I see that 
 in a way I have been talking of masks all along, of famil¬ 
 iar, trusted but still constructed limbs. Burials are never 
 endings. I should have learned that from the many deaths 
 I have known. I have become a woman whose world is 
 not always beyond her control. But now I must retrieve 
 — as Gloria knew but died before she could help me with 
 the hauling — some of what I buried during those years. 
 
 There is a painting on the wall of my new therapist’s 
 office. A sequence of arches seems to lead to various tun¬ 
 nels that become darker and darker as they move back 
 from the surface. Those are the corridors I have become 
 afraid of, the places of extremity I so wanted to leave be¬ 
 hind. For months the sounds were loud but indecipher¬ 
 able, the darkness not opaque enough to block out threat¬ 
 ening shadows. They moved across my vision all day as 
 I rearranged my eating habits toward a diet of fruits and 
 vegetables, rearranged my days to include walking sev¬ 
 eral miles at a brisk pace. And all the while, like some 
 
19 
 
 dedicated farmer gathering crops before the rains, I gar¬ 
 nered my strength for the next treatment. 
 
 Now, the treatments over, I am still in those corridors. 
 The darkness is lifting and it is not so scary all the time. 
 I picture myself walking slowly down the shaded, cool 
 cloisters until I am in a kind of courtyard. The ground is 
 windswept and dusty. The trees are bare, and I am alone. 
 The emotions are so extreme they might engulf me and 
 everyone I know. And so I must sit and stare for some 
 time, allowing the waves of feeling to pass through me. 
 But there is no going back, nor would I want to. Here 
 is the place I have been trying to find since the long de¬ 
 pression began. 
 
 There is a passage in the novel by Jane Hamilton, A 
 Map of the World, which I transcribed into my journal: 
 
 I used to think that bravery involved action. It took courage, 
 I figured, to move forward, to pursue a dream, to get ahead in 
 the world. Just to get where you were supposed to. I thought 
 having desire took courage. Now I realize that none of that 
 requires bravery. The only thing you really need bravery for 
 is standing still. For standing by. 
 
 And this one, from “Telling Stories under Siege,” by 
 Amos Oz: 
 
 His stories might have been every bit as terrifying as the be¬ 
 sieging reality out there. In fact, his stories might even have 
 had more terror in them than the wood or the bush in the 
 dark, his monsters more monstrous, his spirits more evil, his 
 ices more frozen, his fires more blazing. Yet in the stories, the 
 horror was caught in words and the demons were contained 
 by form. 
 
 If my fear is that feelings can grow like cancer — chaotic, 
 devouring, and deadly — and the safety of boundary is 
 
all that can keep me alive, then it must be a good thing 
 that I have begun this narrative: a search in language for 
 some intuited subtext beneath the ordinary disorder of a 
 life. There is a definite chaos in my journals as the pages 
 mount up. 
 
 In my sessions with Aaron, my new therapist, I try to 
 see patterns by listening for the crucial interruptions that 
 may suggest a meaning to experience beyond the par¬ 
 tial vision of my consciousness. I am brave enough to 
 walk the corridors because of the rules of the trade. I am 
 protected by the walls beyond which secrets must not 
 be spoken, and by a relationship whose formal definition 
 is as strict as its capacity to permit intimate revelation 
 hopes to be limitless. More than these, I am brave in 
 reaction to his kindness, capacity for attention, and re¬ 
 spect. In this combination lies the humility I believe to 
 be essential upon entering the terrain of another person’s 
 interior life, however confident the theory that describes 
 and interprets in a general way. 
 
 And here, in these pages, I shape and reshape the struc¬ 
 ture, the language. On the printed draft I design new 
 connections and more precise descriptions with a dark 
 black pen. Frequently, my newest, best insights are made 
 in the margins, between the lines, continuing onto the 
 back of the page. Then, on this computer, I work them 
 into the text as if they had always been there. Something 
 shifts inside me. I am saved by form. 
 
A Sense of Threat 
 
 I am trying to understand one experience by what it 
 shares with another. Patterns come to me, clusters of 
 memories that seem to belong together, and I cannot, 
 simply for the sake of ease or sequence, keep them apart. 
 Old memories of the months preceding and the early 
 years after my mother’s death when I was seven years old. 
 A panic attack I experienced when Khary was attending 
 a semester abroad, months before the cancer cells won 
 their battle with my immune system and hardened into 
 a tumor. And chemotherapy, which so frightened me I 
 could write neither the word nor the name of the doctor 
 in my journal but had to resort to initials, or watch my 
 barely manageable fears escalate out of control. 
 
 I will not perceive the connections among these memo¬ 
 ries until all the cancer treatments are done. But I am 
 dreaming with vague knowledge of being ashamed, and 
 the shame is always for needing something I cannot have, 
 or something that is not what I thought it to be. Some¬ 
 how, I am humiliated, not merely disappointed; exposed, 
 not merely wrong. A little beggar girl I saw long ago in 
 a poverty-stricken street in Naples is in my kitchen. She 
 looks at me with the pathetic eyes of a hungry cat and 
 scratches on my refrigerator door with dirty, bitten nails. 
 A river fills with blood, and long-missing bodies float to 
 the surface while I sit in a boat aloof, even dissociated, 
 wondering at the strangeness of what is happening right 
 before my eyes. A distanced critic, I watch the dramas 
 and keep track of all of the themes. 
 
 Now, I turn back the pages of my journal to the day I 
 found the lump, a surprisingly undifferentiated hardness 
 I wasn’t even sure was a lump at first. I read my brief 
 
22 
 
 entry the day I went for a needle biopsy and received 
 the diagnosis. “You are the fifth person I have diagnosed 
 with breast cancer this morning,” the radiologist said to 
 me, and it was only noon. “It’s an epidemic.” 
 
 But eight months before that, when I was experiencing 
 increasingly intense panic attacks, I had written: I feel as 
 if an actual illness inhabits me. Something at once for¬ 
 eign and part of me devouring myself. 
 
 I appreciate the danger of ascribing facile metaphor to 
 illness, especially to cancer. I can become angry at the 
 many books and acquaintances who advise one to move 
 to northern Maine, where a hypnotic serenity presum¬ 
 ably neutralizes the effect of sorrow and loss, to subsist 
 on brown rice and seaweed, or “eliminate stress” from 
 one’s life (an injunction that only increases stress in me, 
 as I become stressed by the thought of how much stress 
 there is in my life). I am suspicious of alternative heal¬ 
 ing methods that overemphasize the “spiritual” core of 
 physical illness and even counsel an avoidance of West¬ 
 ern medical knowledge. My life has been saved by West¬ 
 ern medicine, an early, relatively small cancerous tumor 
 removed from my breast, followed by harsh chemical 
 treatments that have hopefully destroyed any cancer cells 
 that might have been left behind. 
 
 But there is a sense one gains irrevocably after a life- 
 threatening illness, that the mind, or spirit, and body are 
 indeed one, or at least in intimate communion. I believe 
 in the reality of the spirit and that it can be hurt as well 
 as healed. For me, that healing always involves various 
 forms of storytelling—the kind you recount to a thera¬ 
 pist in that space out of ordinary space and time out 
 of ordinary time called a “session”; the kind you write 
 and rewrite in various formulations, experimenting with 
 various designs; the kind you dream. It is in the percep- 
 
23 
 
 tion of design that I experience healing, and if that word 
 has been rolled around too often by shallow minds seek¬ 
 ing instant and painless transformation so that it has lost 
 its original power to suggest the relief of remedy, the 
 joy of cure, I find that I still remain attached to its old- 
 fashioned, simple promise that what is broken can, at 
 least sometimes, be repaired. 
 
 Between chemotherapy treatments are three weeks dur¬ 
 ing which I try to make myself as strong as possible in 
 body and mind, not only to prepare myself for what is 
 a terrifying encounter each time but to build up my im¬ 
 mune system in the face of attack. Close friends offer 
 love and gifts, and one of the most treasured is the gift of 
 several weeks’ stay in Bellport, Long Island, at the home 
 of my friends, Sally and Bill, who are traveling in China. 
 Reading or sleeping in these large, quiet rooms where 
 all day and into twilight the sun alters the pale off-white 
 colors of the walls, reflecting rosy pink, pale green, a 
 slightly bluish lavender; swimming in the backyard pool, 
 which is surrounded by hedges, maple, pine, and at one 
 end, an old grape arbor; walking the hilly roads to the 
 bay, or biking to the tiny, quiet town, I am at the same 
 time veiled and wide opened, thinking I am perfectly 
 composed, like an elegantly constructed story, then sud¬ 
 denly overwrought, bursting into unfocused tears. I am 
 extremely frightened of cars that, in New York City and 
 here in these quiet streets, seem always about to crash 
 into me, and I leap out of their way as they pass, causing 
 drivers to look at me as if I am slightly mad. My need for 
 love and reassurance is gigantic. I try to keep it on a short 
 leash, afraid I will lose any hope of forbearance. Fear of 
 death races through me like a brush fire, indistinguish¬ 
 able from the hot flashes that have greatly intensified 
 
24 
 
 since I stopped taking estrogen the day of the diagno¬ 
 sis, so that one sets off the other by association and it all 
 comes back, weeks of being trapped in my body, its pain, 
 its disease, the certainty of its inevitable disintegration. 
 The only escape is into the details of management. 
 
 Chemotherapy changes the body in many small and 
 obvious, as well as large and mysterious, ways, and for 
 the first time in my life I have a skin rash due to the chemi¬ 
 cals in sunscreen lotion or to the sun itself. I use #15 to 
 protect myself but spend large amounts of time wonder¬ 
 ing if I should escalate to #45 or return to #8. I plan my 
 meals of spinach, broccoli, brown rice, count off a small 
 pile of vitamins each morning. Despite my undiminished 
 craving for hamburgers, vodka on ice, cigarettes, bread 
 and cheese, I research and create a dozen vegetable dishes 
 and I eat them. I eat them every day and I follow them 
 with glasses of clear, purified water. Despite my desire 
 to sit and stare, read or think or write, I walk, and I walk 
 fast. And despite a lifelong ambivalent love affair with 
 death, I have never been so certain that I want to live as 
 long as I possibly can. During the months of treatment, 
 the clearest reason for living is to see Adam and Khary 
 develop their lives, their children bom, their ambitions 
 fulfilled, not to have to leave them. Only much later will 
 the desire to live include the wish to see my own life de¬ 
 velop. Now, hope is only sought after, not yet reclaimed. 
 
 I buy new sneakers for my daily walks, thick-soled, 
 high-tops. I list the treatment dates, crossing off num¬ 
 bers 1 and 2, beginning the process I will continue for 
 the next four months and beyond, of writing everything 
 down to keep myself from succumbing to panic. But I 
 am frequently in a state of fear. If Douglas is more than 
 fifteen minutes late, I begin to cry with the grief of a 
 child abandoned, incapacitated and alone, and when he 
 
returns from a run, a trip to the store, a little late from 
 work, I sometimes have to turn my back on him, close a 
 door behind me, hide my shame. 
 
 I try to love my body, take care of it, look at it in 
 the mirror despite its ordinary signs of aging and the 
 not so ordinary long indentation on the side of my right 
 breast. But often, it doesn’t feel like mine. It has been cut 
 into, entered, poisoned by strangers. These assaults, I am 
 warned in printed releases I have to sign, may have un¬ 
 predictable consequences to my heart, my liver, although 
 I am assured that “probably” everything will be fine. But 
 I am suddenly aware of my body parts as if they are deli¬ 
 cate infants needing my protection, part of myself and 
 apart from myself at the same time: my liver, my heart. 
 
 One night Douglas and I make love, the first time since 
 the surgery, and just as I knew would happen the mo¬ 
 ment he is inside me I begin to cry. Not so much cry as 
 keen. I sound like a woman in mourning, a low wail to 
 the heavens as she watches a coffin descend. I hear my 
 own voice as if from far away, as I did when I was in the 
 hardest part of labor, giving birth to my sons. In the past 
 months of this lonely journey, I have seen how I cherish 
 beyond measure the old love between Douglas and me. 
 But ordinary vocabulary does not suffice. Old implies 
 worn, or even worn out, but I mean it in the sense of an 
 heirloom, precious, reliable, rich with history. People say 
 I am strong, but he has seen the fear, knows how many 
 nights we have slept with the light on, held me when my 
 sobs seemed bottomless, listened quietly, at times hold¬ 
 ing his head in his hands while he looks at me sadly, to 
 my shouts of rage at the American medical system, at 
 rude nurses and doctors who are afraid of pain and suf¬ 
 fering, at tumors that are over one centimeter and so re¬ 
 quire chemotherapy as a treatment that perhaps, but not 
 
26 
 
 definitely, might stop the spread of what, I am informed 
 repeatedly, is a systemic disease. Otherwise, I would have 
 told them to cut the breast off, take it, I would have said, 
 and leave me be. When he gently lays his fingers against 
 my wounded breast or touches the still partly numb right 
 arm, I think of blood, of vomit, of the terror of losing my 
 hair, which I’ve been assured will not happen with the 
 particular combination of chemicals being injected into 
 me. When he moves inside me I lay my hand on my own 
 hair as if by pressing down I might keep it rooted there, 
 and I am lost somewhere inside my body which is vast, 
 foreign, yet some poor fragile thing. Then in the next 
 moment I fill it again and know the difference between 
 his touching and entering me and all of them touching 
 me, entering me, actually entering the flesh of my breast 
 and cutting away tissue for testing, for saving my life, 
 yes, but cutting parts away, parts I have never seen my¬ 
 self but picture as throbbing, raw, and I am unable to say 
 how hard it has been and how dearly I love him because 
 my need is bottomless, it will swallow us both. And so I 
 surround myself with layers of his silence until I am in¬ 
 side it and can feel the words he might have been able to 
 say at some other time, in some other life. Nor does he cry 
 with me, but tonight I am reconciled to this habitual ab¬ 
 sence of words and in the darkness of the room, against 
 the comforting, damp sheets, after awhile I am able to 
 say it, it has been so hard, and to repeat it and repeat it 
 as if this simple phrase is a baptism, or a burial song. 
 
 The next morning, Ruthie, oldest intimate of my soul, 
 arrives with her dog, Puto. We walk the narrow streets 
 leading toward and away from the bay, talking of our 
 lives, pressing constantly for some deeper knowledge 
 framed in words that will enable us to escape the demons 
 of depression and fear we have so often faced and fled 
 
2 7 
 
 together. I consider her very brave, and often dream of 
 her exploring remote islands I am frightened to visit be¬ 
 cause of dangers lurking in ocean storms, or in the broad 
 deserts she and her daughter are willing to cross in order 
 to swim in some perfect lagoon. She dreams of me and 
 the places I have lived as havens she comes upon when 
 she is lost. Accompanied by her dog, an exceptionally 
 intelligent animal whose only fault is that he barks in¬ 
 cessantly when he’s excited, which he always is on long 
 walks, we wander around roads leading to mansions sur¬ 
 rounded by gardens, expansive lawns and high hedges 
 that make Sally’s spacious and comfortable home seem 
 like a functional cottage. As we walk we talk of love and 
 need, and then she says, after a characteristic silence in 
 which I know she is pondering some thought until she 
 finds the precise words, “You have a great need for love, 
 to receive it and to give it,” and the trapdoor snaps open. 
 I have to stop and catch my breath. I am standing at the 
 edge of the darkness. The way down is steep. I am flushed 
 with hot shame. I am the beggar girl with catlike paws. 
 “No I don’t,” I say to her, a child’s voice, as if I’ve been 
 insulted and have no sensible response. “What’s wrong 
 with it?” she says. We are stopped on the road. Puto is 
 barking at us as if he is a sheepdog and we are his wan¬ 
 dering sheep. “What’s wrong with it?” she repeats. But 
 all I am able to say is, “I don’t know. Something is wrong 
 with it. I know that much.” I am filled with images shoot¬ 
 ing through my brain like some video rewinding, spin¬ 
 ning its pictures backward in time. 
 
 It is eight months earlier, the previous fall, shortly after 
 Khary had gone to live and study in Jamaica for a semes¬ 
 ter abroad. I begin to experience panic attacks when I 
 don’t hear from him every few days. (He cannot get 
 
28 
 
 a phone installed for several months, and so I have to 
 wait for him to communicate with us from pay phones, 
 which are not very numerous in Kingston.) He is reliable 
 and generous about calling me far more frequently than 
 most grown children will call their mothers. Neverthe¬ 
 less, about a day before he is due to call I become ob¬ 
 sessed with disaster fantasies so vivid I sometimes have 
 to ward them off verbally, talking back to old demons, 
 often out loud while walking down the street. 
 
 After several weeks of this, I consult a famous thera¬ 
 pist on the recommendation of a friend who is a therapist 
 herself. Over the course of about four weeks, for reasons 
 I will never fully know, this woman frightens me, hurts 
 me, and weakens me even more than I already am. She 
 interprets my relationships with my sons critically, cast¬ 
 ing me as an overbearing, intrusive, and deeply hostile 
 mother, a very bad mother indeed. Being fairly sophis¬ 
 ticated about psychotherapy, its theory and practice, I 
 twice try to defend myself, questioning her interpreta¬ 
 tions, and twice she acknowledges that she has been too 
 harsh, apologizes, and even wonders out loud if she, a 
 woman who does not have biological children, is too 
 “child-identified” herself. Then she does it again. What is 
 astonishing to me is that I do not leave immediately but 
 remain for a month. I will never again underestimate the 
 power of therapists, the vulnerability of patients, even the 
 least naive. It’s a dangerous business — this putting your 
 life in the hands of a stranger—an action not to be done 
 carelessly, or without restraint. There are ways in which I 
 like her, of course, and keep hoping that with Gloria gone 
 I have found someone new to help me through recurring 
 bouts of depression and anxiety, of which these panic at¬ 
 tacks are the worst symptoms I’ve experienced in years. 
 
 After some weeks, I describe her and the things she is 
 
29 
 
 saying to me to Leona, who is very knowledgeable about 
 therapy herself and who becomes furious in my behalf. 
 As soon as she begins raging at the therapist’s stupidity, 
 callousness, and downright wrongness, insisting that my 
 sons are not only strong but devoted to me, not only 
 “separate” in their own lives (that most overriding proof 
 of “good mothering”) but also profoundly connected to 
 Douglas and to me (which few seem to value much at 
 all), I understand that she is right, that I am being broken 
 down by this strange and in some ways likable woman 
 who for some reason dislikes me or is unbalanced by me, 
 and that I can never return to her. I call her and tell her 
 just this, and when she does not bill me for the sessions, 
 I take it as an acknowledgment that she has been wrong. 
 
 Nevertheless, her accusations take root. My capacity 
 for belief in disaster regarding my children is thoroughly 
 tied to my fear that I have been a “bad mother,” just as 
 my surely once more malleable and ordinary belief in my 
 badness as a child had been hardened, as if with gravel 
 mixed into clay, by my mother’s death and the circum¬ 
 stances surrounding it. 
 
 One day when I was seven years old and my sister four, 
 we were sent away to an aunt’s home, and when we re¬ 
 turned two or three days later, our mother was gone. 
 Gone for good. Her clothing had been cleaned out of 
 the closets and distributed to Goodwill, or to relatives 
 and friends. The suede and leather purses I played with, 
 changing black for blue as she changed her elegant out¬ 
 fits for each day’s work; the collection of artificial roses, 
 violets, and lilies she wore in her lapels; and the stack 
 of flowered embroidered handkerchiefs — all were gone. 
 My father must have snatched one from the clutches of 
 whoever was dispensing with her physical presence with 
 
30 
 
 such efficient dispatch, because I found one among his 
 things when he died, and I still have it, a pattern of pink 
 roses on a background of white, folded among the few 
 mementos I have of her. No doubt they believed her 
 children would be better off not witnessing the awesome 
 dismantling that occurs after a death, as they believed, 
 with such mistaken certainty, that we would be better off 
 not attending the funeral. We returned to a house empty 
 of our mother and much of what she had personally pos¬ 
 sessed. 
 
 The household she had created around her remained, 
 however: the expensive furniture, the pale green china, 
 the cut-crystal inkstand that sat on a graceful silver tray. 
 She was a successful businesswoman, my father a barely 
 paid radical activist, and over the years, with my father in 
 charge of housekeeping and money scarce, possessions 
 grew shabbier. A green velvet armchair that had been 
 her favorite place to sit fell apart and disappeared. We 
 began to use yellow plates bought in the corner hardware 
 store for dinners that now were informal family affairs 
 more suited to my father’s working-class background and 
 tastes than the carefully served meals of several courses, 
 restricted to the two of them, my mother had preferred. 
 The crystal inkstand looked more and more anachronistic 
 on its bookshelf, surrounded by my father’s dusty half- 
 tom books on Marx, Lenin, and Soviet fiction. When my 
 father died, and we were grown, we pulled it out from the 
 back of the grimy shelf and gave it to my cousin, whose 
 house and housekeeping standards would properly show 
 it off. 
 
 But through all those years, I remained haunted by the 
 question — where did she go? I could not comprehend 
 the finality of her absence, and since ours was not a reli¬ 
 gious family, there was no shared mythology to attempt 
 
3i 
 
 an explanation. I developed the idea that if I kept a close 
 enough vigil, thinking of her every minute, I could bring 
 her back. 
 
 At times, it seemed I was successful. A few years later, 
 when I was in the fifth grade and a school monitor, I 
 watched a thin, dark-haired, elegantly dressed woman 
 kiss her child good-bye near my post at an outside door. 
 But then, probably made uncomfortable by my relent¬ 
 less staring and conspiratorial smiles, she began taking 
 leave of her son farther down the block where I could 
 only glimpse her outline in the sun. And so I realized it 
 hadn’t been my mother after all, come back to watch over 
 me, although, for mysterious reasons, having to pretend 
 she was the mother of somebody else. I returned to my 
 more controllable fantasies of her ghostly presence in my 
 room, behind her photograph on my wall, or within my 
 own skin. 
 
 When my vigil failed, if I thought of other things or 
 other loves too long, I was responsible for her remain¬ 
 ing dead, I believed, just as my desperate need of relief 
 from her dying by hoping for her death had hastened her 
 end. I had killed her. I was guilty of this terrible thing. 
 Throughout my life this belief will surface, then descend 
 into a distant shadow again. But the distancing is never 
 remote enough to destroy my sense of culpability, the 
 threat of punishment lurking close behind. 
 
 There were lies that reinforced both guilt and connec¬ 
 tion, the most dangerous being the idea that I looked 
 exactly like her, was exactly like her. For a child it was 
 an easy piece of syntactical magic to edit out the like. 
 I was her, except that, like many mythical heroines, I 
 had to pay a steep price for my power. She was so beau¬ 
 tiful that people stared when she walked into a room, 
 so brilliant she could manage a career as a successful 
 
32 
 
 businesswoman while still doing courageous, clandes¬ 
 tine political work, and she possessed an indefinable and 
 awe-inspiring quality called dignity I could never fully 
 comprehend, although it seemed to have something to 
 do with keeping your feelings under control (mine were 
 notoriously intense, a characterization I responded to 
 with both pride and shame), and not becoming overpow¬ 
 ered by your sexual desires. I developed a life-shaping 
 ambivalence to this identification, wanting to be her and 
 thus somehow with her again, but also wanting to be dif¬ 
 ferent from her in order not to be dead. It was a false 
 mythology. I recently saw an old film of her, made only 
 one or two years before she died, and I was reminded that 
 I didn’t resemble her any more than the average child. If 
 my interests and talents are any sign, I am not like her 
 in temperament or character either. She was an elegant 
 woman, deeply concerned with appearances, whose need 
 for personal success was evidently as great as her need 
 for love. It was my father whose passions were tropical, 
 humid. He sweated when he was thrilled with some piece 
 of music, actually salivated visibly when he was reunited 
 with an old, beloved friend. He longed for my sister and 
 me with unashamed grief when we were growing up and 
 trying to get away from him. He gave us, whenever we 
 asked, and when we did not, anything and everything he 
 had. 
 
 Another sort of lie — more specific, concrete, but 
 equally effective for my self-blaming purposes: she died 
 not of cancer but of a “slipped disc.” This distortion was 
 perpetrated by my father while she was still alive so that 
 I wouldn’t speak the terrible word, cancer, in her pres¬ 
 ence. But several weeks before her last hospitalization, I 
 had called to her in the night after waking from a night¬ 
 mare. I heard her call back to me, shouting my name, not 
 
33 
 
 a comforting, maternal response but a cry of pain of her 
 own and then I heard a crash. She had tried to get out of 
 bed and come to me, it turned out, but her bones were 
 already weakened by disease and when her legs could not 
 hold her, she had fallen onto the floor. For the next ten 
 years I remained convinced that her fall, in response to 
 my need, was the cause of the slipped disc that killed her. 
 This narrative itself was a distillation, of course, a rep¬ 
 resentation of deeper, more complex stories, classic tales 
 of childish rage at the withdrawal, even into illness, of 
 a parent, especially a mother; of the influence of gender 
 and emerging sexuality on such a wish when the father is 
 beloved too, magnetic and powerful; of the wicked wish 
 that the abandoning mother who is too weakened and 
 frail to pay attention to children and their needs would be 
 punished and die. And then there are the particularities 
 of history, less generic, harder to unravel when the time 
 comes. For this was a mother whose leavings began long 
 before the final leaving, so the daughter’s longing was 
 covered over by resentment and anger long before the 
 final anger would become entrenched, veiling the long¬ 
 ing that seemed to form the center, which felt at times 
 like an absence, of her life. 
 
 Easily, comfortably, I slip into the third person. Even 
 old passions fill me with mysterious shame. Yet I believe 
 that I must find the courage to write the story of that 
 short, threatening breakdown as a chapter in this grief 
 narrative, this cancer journal, must say in words again 
 this piece of self-knowledge I learned almost talmudic- 
 ally with Gloria, going over it and over it, layering it 
 with interpretations and associations, yet forgot and for¬ 
 get, again and again. I believe that what I love will be 
 destroyed. I was a bad girl and my mother died. If I am a 
 bad mother (and what mother is not a bad mother in addi- 
 
34 
 
 tioii to whatever and whomever else she is; the evidence 
 can always be found) disaster will take my children. 
 
 On a Wednesday afternoon, there is a call on my 
 telephone machine from the long-distance operator in 
 Kingston, Jamaica, but no one is home and as the call 
 is collect, Khary is not permitted to leave a message: 
 an ordinary event that takes on extraordinary ramifica¬ 
 tions for me as soon as it happens. He was trying to call 
 because of some emergency but couldn’t get through, I 
 decide. It is that simple, the moment that swift. A call 
 that, at another time, might have had no effect. A mo¬ 
 ment that, in ordinary time, would have moved into the 
 past like other moments, instead of exploding into dark 
 smoke that remains in the air, stuck to the walls, perme¬ 
 ating my lungs, literally shortening my breath for days. 
 Ordinary time fractures for me, and I become an inade¬ 
 quate vessel for past and present, dangerously enmeshed. 
 The idea that something is wrong takes hold and I cannot 
 loosen it for the next four days. The only defense I have, 
 besides talking for hours to Leona on the phone, is writ¬ 
 ing. I write a part of a chapter for the book I am working 
 on — an orderly, interpretive piece of nonfiction — and I 
 still don’t know how I managed to accomplish this task 
 except that it suggests the genuine change that has taken 
 place in my years of work with Gloria. The self that self 
 restrains might be fragile at times, but at least she is not 
 entirely illusory. And I write in my journal, where no re¬ 
 straint is required, every hour of every day. 
 
 While I am writing, I begin to feel a slight faith that he 
 is really okay, but the faith is as ungraspable as light. I 
 cannot gather it, or move into it, but only glimpse it as a 
 reality next to me, from which I am somehow excluded. I 
 only know that if I stop writing, even for a moment, I will 
 
35 
 
 be swept away by terror. So over and over I write down 
 reminders of ordinary reality, signposts of ordinary time, 
 as, less than a year later, I will do to mark the passage 
 of weeks through chemotherapy and radiation that feel, 
 also, like a punishment, a permanent hell that, because 
 it is deserved, or at least destined, will never cease. I list 
 all the late nights waiting for my sons when they return, 
 happy and well, all the planes I thought would crash that 
 landed safely, all the viruses that did not become some 
 dread disease. 
 
 By Saturday morning I have cried for so many hours, 
 pacing from one comer of our apartment to the other and 
 back again, that Douglas has run out of sympathy and 
 is becoming desperate and angry. I understand that I am 
 making him feel utterly helpless, and that he is convinced 
 I have the ability to control this madness and am refusing 
 to do so out of some terrible self-indulgent need to over¬ 
 dramatize my life. I try to come out of the terror, and I 
 can’t. Perhaps I am resisting my own best efforts in some 
 banal need for punishment, but it feels like the opposite 
 at the time: I am being punished for the extremity of my 
 needs. 
 
 On Saturday night I call the Kingston, Jamaica, police 
 station to find out if any Americans have been reported 
 missing or murdered that week. The officer on duty is 
 extremely pleasant, much more so than those at the 24th 
 precinct in my neighborhood whom I have sometimes 
 called with similar questions. No violence has been re¬ 
 ported, the charming voice assures me. Nevertheless, I 
 book flights to Jamaica for the coming Monday morning, 
 just in case Khary hasn’t called by Sunday night. In these 
 mad actions and irrational plans I grope for and even find 
 a bit of control. Finally, I call one of his professors, a 
 number I have been given for emergencies, and although 
 
3& 
 
 fearing Khary’s anger if everything is indeed fine, I ask 
 this man when he has last seen my son. He is as gracious 
 as the cop, assuring me he is a parent too and understands 
 my concerns. (But of course I am speaking to him in a 
 normal voice, for the duration of the discussion suspend¬ 
 ing my wild tones.) He has seen him, alive and well, the 
 previous Thursday, and although this fact undermines 
 my theory that something disastrous happened Wednes¬ 
 day night when the phone message was left, it takes only 
 a few minutes after hanging up for my panic to rise again. 
 
 I can hear my father’s voice after my mother’s death, 
 pleading: Stop that crying, crying isn’t going to bring 
 her back, when my sobs and screams made him feel, 
 no doubt, as helpless as Douglas does now. Behind my 
 father’s I hear my husband’s sighs, even his breath, I 
 imagine, furious and desperate. I listen to Leona’s voice, 
 reminding me that many losses are packed into this panic. 
 I try to recall Gloria, literally call her up by reading old 
 journal entries about her, and come across entry after 
 entry describing her efforts to get me to look into the 
 place where loss becomes abandonment and love turns 
 murderous in its power to destroy. From that long-ago 
 time, I try to reenter the present so I can achieve the 
 “clarity of self-respect” she insists I deserve. But I have 
 reached the point of no return. There is nothing between 
 me and my savage terrors, my most vigilant obsessions, 
 my weakest self. 
 
 When I am at the bottom, I realize that the panic itself 
 has turned into grief, as if the worst has already hap¬ 
 pened. When I remind myself that I am frightened but 
 really know nothing for sure, I am a little better for a few 
 minutes, even an hour. But then the anxiety mounts back 
 into terror and terror into grief. The future collapses with 
 the past into the present moment where I sit alone in a 
 
37 
 
 room, conjuring up the image of a face until it is nearly 
 solid flesh, keeping a ruthless vigil in my head. 
 
 Finally, late Sunday afternoon, Khary calls. He sounds 
 normal, and why shouldn’t he? He is normal. His life is 
 normal. He said he would call by Sunday, and on Sun¬ 
 day he calls, so he figures his mother is normal too, and 
 I certainly try to appear to be, instantly casting the tone 
 of my voice into a false but familiar rhythm, as calm and 
 low a cadence as I can manage. 
 
 We talk only a few minutes, and then I hand the phone 
 to Douglas and leave the house to walk. I am exhausted 
 and frightened. Anxiety remains at a low level for weeks, 
 like muddy waters after a murderous flood. The self I 
 re-encountered is ghostly, familiar, and powerful. I do 
 not want to claim her, yet I am scared she is all I have 
 ever really had. When I am diagnosed with breast can¬ 
 cer the following May, that ghostly other, that scratching 
 cat-girl, is the self I fear most of all. During the week 
 before surgery, and the harder weeks afterward, waiting 
 through medical consultations and sleepless nights for a 
 final diagnosis and treatment plan, I can become nearly 
 paralyzed by the thought: What will I do if she gets out? 
 
 During the summer months I am not teaching, and be¬ 
 tween chemotherapy treatments I spend as much time 
 as I can arrange near the water. Ruthie and I climb over 
 huge white dunes striped with wide meadows of tall grass 
 to reach a famously beautiful Wellfleet Bay. The tide is 
 extremely low and large sandbars spotted with watery 
 patches of seaweed and shell are visible. Walking over 
 this damp, flat terrain, you can hardly tell where the land 
 ends and water begins. Both appear to be brown, then 
 blue, then brown again. The waves are tiny and gentle, a 
 thin sheet of sparkling wetness over sand. 
 
In the distance a couple emerges. They undress and 
 walk for yards until the bay is deep enough to swim, 
 and even out there it is so shallow that when they cease 
 swimming and stand up, the water only reaches their 
 thighs. I can see signs of age on their bodies, white hair, 
 a slight roundness in their shoulders, a fleshiness in his 
 chest, a boniness in hers. And then they embrace and kiss 
 for some time — their aging bodies, the calm, shallow 
 water—all of it comforts so deeply my legs feel weight¬ 
 less, my body fluid. I can walk for miles in my sturdy 
 high-tops. I can fall into an easy sleep in the sand. 
 
 But at the ocean I am agitated, unsatisfied, afraid to risk 
 the cold water even at low tide. I don’t know how strict I 
 must be about the sun, as the nurse was so casual and dis¬ 
 interested. “Oh well,” she said over her shoulder while 
 preparing vials and tubes, “best to avoid it altogether.” 
 But when I asked if I could sit in it for short periods, since 
 I so love the beach, she said with equal casualness, “Oh 
 sure, but best to wear a hat.” 
 
 I am covered, forehead to ankle, with #15, a hat, an 
 umbrella, and every tiny pain is a cause of anxiety as 
 the days move inexorably toward Treatment Number 3. 
 When I try to risk the water, the ocean I once adored, I 
 am filled with fear of waves and tides. I cannot go in past 
 my knees. Only months later, when all the treatments are 
 finished and I reenter my ordinary life again, when my 
 days are not marked by a number checked off on a page, 
 will I dream that I am standing on a beautiful wooden 
 dock, watching a brave young boy dive into dark, still 
 water where the ocean meets the bay. 
 
 At times, as if with a poisonous fluid I cannot stop, I 
 fill up with anger: at Ruthie for sudden small distances; 
 at people on the beach for talking too loudly; at Douglas 
 
for remaining at the house and not loving the water as 
 much as I do; at the ocean for being too cold, and the 
 sun merciless. The only thing I don’t feel angry at — but 
 only theorize abstractly that surely there must be anger 
 and it must be related to all these other angers — is the 
 disease of cancer that has threatened my life. The week 
 before, on television, I heard the famous breast surgeon, 
 Susan Love, describe cancer treatments as “cut, poison, 
 and burn.” I have been cut, am in the midst of being poi¬ 
 soned, and have the burning yet to go, and when the cut¬ 
 ting and poisoning and burning are done, I can be given 
 no assurances that I shall not have to go through it all 
 again. As long as I am “in treatment” I feel I “have” can¬ 
 cer, and cannot seem to fully grasp that the tumor has 
 been cut out, the surrounding tissue and lymph nodes 
 found to be free of disease, that the treatment, which I 
 have seen nearly kill two close friends, is “merely preven¬ 
 tative” and, compared to other harsher chemical combi¬ 
 nations, “mild.” Anger fills me and grows into rage all 
 day and into the evening. I try to keep it at bay, but it 
 gathers every small dark rivulet into itself. It swells. I 
 should probably walk out into the hills where no one can 
 hear me or be harmed by me and scream as loudly as I 
 can. But I keep the screams within. I freeze, grow stiff. I 
 snarl for breath. 
 
 At about midnight, in the back bedroom Douglas and 
 I use, with its sheer white curtains, worn flowered wall¬ 
 paper, old wooden chests painted dark maroon, my anger 
 finally dissipates and now here at last is my fear, my plain 
 terror of the real thing. And once again, although I have 
 been sniping at him all day, Douglas takes pity on me and 
 holds me until my shoulders descend, my spine curves 
 out of its tight rigidity, my muscles loosen their grip on 
 
4 ° 
 
 my neck, my fingers, my arches, the cat-girl slinks away, 
 and I begin to fall asleep. 
 
 A heat wave covers the East Coast as it does almost 
 every summer for several weeks, and it combines with 
 my altered body chemistry to make a sickliness chronic, 
 a constant annoyance of nausea like a slimy seaweed 
 clinging to the surface of the sea. Back in the city, I go to 
 see the film, II Postino, partly to take my mind off things. 
 In this story of Pablo Neruda’s friendship with a simple 
 island postman, I am moved by the power of art to influ¬ 
 ence both politics and erotic love, by the links among all 
 three. The politics are communist in the simplest sense, a 
 love of ordinary people, which the film connects to a sen¬ 
 suous passion, to the natural world, and to poetry. I am 
 trying as much as possible to focus on art, my own and 
 that of others, believing, like the postman, in its myste¬ 
 rious erotic power to redeem. 
 
 Four doctors — two oncologists, my surgeon, and my 
 own internist whom I trust as a friend — advised me to 
 undergo chemotherapy, although my case, with a 2-cen- 
 timeter tumor, was right on the borderline. There were 
 estrogen receptors to measure, slow-growing and fast¬ 
 growing tumors to distinguish, implications of being 
 post- or premenopausal: conditions that have been ren¬ 
 dered dangerously ambiguous by the prevalence of estro¬ 
 gen replacement therapy, a regimen of hormones I was on 
 for over ten years. There are various chemicals in different 
 chemotherapies to consider; some cause hair to fall out, 
 some do not. Although the studies are not yet definitive, 
 current practice recommends chemotherapy for everyone 
 of a certain age, except those with the tiniest of tumors, 
 and so I decide to submit to the business of poisoning 
 myself in hopes of killing off dangerous, ravenous cells. 
 
41 
 
 Oncologists seem to feel that in their relations with 
 patients they have to choose between falsely optimistic 
 cheer that amounts to denial, or ruthless verbal attack. 
 The first oncologist I consulted looked me straight in 
 the eye and said: “This is a systemic disease. The treat¬ 
 ment is dangerous and difficult. You will immediately 
 lose all your hair. Don’t let anyone tell you it will be 
 easy.” She then recommended a course of chemotherapy 
 of the harshest kind and followed up by undermining my 
 internist, a man whom she knew well and the only medi¬ 
 cal person in whom I had complete confidence. When I 
 sought a second opinion, at first I liked the seemingly 
 more easygoing doctor and his “chemotherapy specialist” 
 assistant and felt encouraged by their assurances. This 
 doctor recommended a less toxic course of treatment. 
 My blood count would probably remain at low normal, 
 my hair would not fall out (“maybe get a little thin¬ 
 ner, but you have nice, thick hair, you can afford to lose 
 some”), and although I might get “a little sick,” I would 
 probably be fine. Perhaps such reassurances enabled me 
 to wake up one morning and, accompanied by my sister 
 who actually held me in her arms as the subway lurched 
 downtown, go to the oncology unit for the first time. But 
 as the months wore on, I came to see in this attitude a 
 denial of reality, even a deception by the medical people, 
 because to be reassured that one was not in imminent 
 danger of dying seemed to mean that no talk of suffering 
 or fear was acceptable at all. 
 
 Before every treatment, I experienced almost uncon¬ 
 trollable anxiety. Although there was no pain involved 
 in the event itself, and I could sit up in a bright room 
 with the door opened, I felt trapped and imprisoned dur¬ 
 ing the entire hour I was attached to the iv, and the 
 feeling of threatening panic continued until I was back 
 
42 - 
 
 at home. I have often wondered since then why chemo¬ 
 therapy was so much more frightening to me than sur¬ 
 gery or radiation. Perhaps it was the sight of the liquid 
 dripping into my vein, its seeping, nauseating, unstop¬ 
 pable penetration; or the knowledge that this form of 
 treatment is so full of uncertainty and potential dan¬ 
 ger; or the subtle and yet dramatic physical changes one 
 sees and feels in the body and face — the eyes cloud, the 
 skin seems to pale, hair texture alters even if it doesn’t 
 fall out. I know I felt completely out of control of my 
 own physical boundaries, and the experience of nausea 
 opened trapdoors to deeper, more primal feelings of dis¬ 
 gust. The source of the nausea was inside my body, and 
 became entangled with old feelings of shame. During 
 the months of chemotherapy, I was aware of a vague, 
 chronic sense of humiliation. I was reminded of the dead, 
 disintegrating bodies of my dream. 
 
 After the first treatment, I was so relieved to be back 
 home I actually felt joyful despite the weakness and 
 queasiness I experienced for several days. After the sec¬ 
 ond I engaged in a mad rush of physical activity, trying 
 to copy a young Israeli woman who was my “treatment 
 partner,” and whose energy and optimism were both a 
 standard and inspiration to me. 
 
 In the hospital, waiting to be called in for the third 
 treatment, I try not to look closely at the ill-looking, 
 sometimes emaciated, often hairless fellow patients. I 
 want to feel stoical, self-contained, and these capacities 
 require that I also feel distanced and different from them. 
 
 Today when I enter the small treatment room, another 
 woman is already there, attached to her i v. She has dyed 
 blond hair, good long legs, a body that looks about forty 
 beneath a face that looks about sixty-five. Inserted into 
 her chest is a tube that receives the iv through which 
 
43 
 
 her weekly chemotherapy drips, treating her lung can¬ 
 cer. With tears in her eyes and the sudden intimacy I’ve 
 become used to with treatment partners, she tells me 
 how she hates and fears these weekly treatments, how 
 she can’t sleep at night for fear. Just then, the nurse, the 
 “chemotherapy specialist,” enters, a sweet but distracted 
 woman who once inserted the needle into my right arm, 
 the arm that has lost its lymph nodes and is never sup¬ 
 posed to be pricked with a needle, nor even squeezed by 
 a blood pressure monitor. Then, obviously afraid of get¬ 
 ting in trouble, she blamed me because I had held out the 
 wrong arm, and indeed it was my fault as much as hers. 
 I had been advised by doctors and books since the be¬ 
 ginning to take charge of my own illness. I knew I was 
 never supposed to be treated in that arm. But in my anx¬ 
 ious state, I didn’t realize it until I tried to pick up my 
 pen to write in my journal and realized I couldn’t write 
 my way through the threatening forty-five minutes, as I 
 often did, because my right arm was attached to a needle, 
 a long tube, and an I v. 
 
 Now, she tells the other woman that she is bringing in a 
 new patient who will need the same implanted tube, the 
 same weekly chemotherapy. “But we don’t want to scare 
 her,” she whispers like a conspiratorial schoolgirl, “so 
 keep your mouth shut.” The new patient, who is young 
 and frightened and who has recently had a mastectomy, 
 is brought into the room. My partner obeys orders, per¬ 
 haps believing it is kinder to lie than to terrify, and says 
 cheerfully, “Here, have a look. See? It’s nothing really.” 
 Nurse and doctor echo the mood, smiling, patting, and 
 chattering as if we are at a party. My somber expression 
 and tone annoy them more and more as the weeks go by, 
 as do my questions about physical reactions that depart 
 from their predictions. “Well, it shouldn’t happen,” they 
 
44 
 
 will say when I describe days of weakness. “Are you back 
 at work?” — implying that I am sitting around thinking 
 about my illness too much, and that is why I am weak and 
 have stomach pain. “I’m a writer,” I mumble, hoping they 
 will misunderstand or ignore me, because I certainly can’t 
 explain that I am writing about my illness, rushing home 
 after every treatment to make copious notes. “It’s not so 
 bad, is it?” I am asked repeatedly, and I am expected to 
 answer optimistically, cheerfully. Not to do so makes me 
 feel like a failure, purposely complaining, a bad girl, and 
 so, like my partner, I keep my mouth shut, having learned 
 long ago how few people can understand the emotional 
 intensity I live with all the time, which I try to manage 
 but can never deny. If the expression of fear and pain to 
 a receptive, sympathetic ear is an aspect of healing, as I 
 believe is true, these rooms are not the place to engage in 
 such unpleasantness. I learn to wait for visits to my thera¬ 
 pist, or to my internist, a rare doctor who is afraid neither 
 of pain nor of the fact that he cannot always “cure” it, yet 
 might assuage it by listening to the narrative of another’s 
 experience with its often strangely familiar detail. 
 
 In this office, the destruction of possible cancer cells is 
 accomplished with technical efficiency based on statisti¬ 
 cal analysis. I am given computer printouts that indicate 
 the relative normalcy of my white blood count. I am 
 given Tylenol to lessen the headaches caused by the anti¬ 
 nausea drug. When the plastic bag of chemicals is empty 
 and the needle removed from my hand, I am always quite 
 dizzy, but leaning on the arm of Douglas whom, I am 
 scolded by the doctors, I should not really need to ac¬ 
 company me anymore, I can return home. In terms of 
 emotional isolation, I feel very much as I did when I was 
 pregnant and had my first child. In both experiences, all 
 the books, doctors, and even some of the women I tried 
 
45 
 
 to talk to assured me of how easy it all was, and so, be¬ 
 cause it was not only difficult but often overwhelming for 
 me, I felt alone, weaker than they were, a failure in ways 
 as familiar and almost as old as my life. “You’ll adjust,” I 
 was told by numerous people seeking to help me when I 
 was a child and my mother disappeared for good. I did, 
 if adjusting means one doesn’t keep on crying every day. 
 But feelings remain large in me, needing recounting, re¬ 
 phrasing, revising as the years go by. 
 
 My partner raises her eyebrows at me after the new 
 patient leaves the room, her cynical smile belied by the 
 tears filling her eyes. “I didn’t pay attention to the signs 
 of my colon cancer,” she tells me, “so it went to my lung, 
 and now I’m paying the price.” Treacherously, I count off 
 our differences, distancing myself from her with notches 
 of relative well-being. But when I look into her eyes I see 
 what I don’t want to see. I see that this woman knows 
 more of what I am feeling than Douglas, or my children, 
 or my friends. She knows because she has cancer, and so 
 I know that I have had cancer, as my mother had cancer. 
 She, too, is suddenly real to me. I have counted on our 
 differences for too many years to know how to get along 
 without them, that dark definitive line I first tried with 
 all my might to cross, then growing away from her, older 
 and older, was glad to see gathering distance behind me. 
 But I see her now, lying in a dark room — young, in pain, 
 and afraid — her legs too weakened to uphold her body 
 when she gets out of bed to respond to her child’s cry. 
 I see her room, dark and eerie, the white of her sheets 
 glowing slightly in the night. Then I see the room in the 
 light of day, only my father’s room now, her bed, her 
 clothing, her body all gone. I can almost remember her 
 voice, almost hear her actual scream before I back away 
 quickly out the door and into the hall. 
 
46 
 
 In the treatment room, staring at the open doorway, I 
 am still attached to the i v that leaks its final drops into 
 my vein. I turn back to my partner and reach out to touch 
 her hand. 
 
 That night, I dream I am swimming in a dark, warm 
 lake. Although I cannot lift my right arm to swim as 
 well as I once could, I am making progress through the 
 thick waters, and in the slow, effortful movement, I am 
 soothed. 
 
 Three days later, the heat wave breaks. The sky is gray. 
 Wind whips the clean light curtains in and out of the 
 open window in my living room. I walk out onto my 
 small terrace feeling a cool, soft rain on my face and bare 
 feet. Newly planted flowers blow in the wind. I breathe 
 deeply, noting the absence of nausea. A weird agitation 
 I always feel for the first two days after the treatment is 
 gone. I can be still, just feeling the wind, the rain. 
 
 And what of Ruthie’s description of me as being so des¬ 
 perately attached to love? My grief at losing my mother 
 is relived with each separation from my children; the 
 passion I once felt for her has been replaced by an attach¬ 
 ment to them so central to my being I try to hide the ex¬ 
 tremity of my own need and pretend to a freer love, more 
 spacious and pure. The early confluence of extraordinary 
 and even ordinary anger with guilt and punishment will 
 haunt me as long as I live, each time I love deeply and fear 
 abandonment, or am not loved in return. I have under¬ 
 stood the indisputable truth of these sentences for some 
 time. But now I am after another distinction, to unlock 
 in myself a confusion between intensity of feeling and 
 extremity of fear. The second, I hope, can be analyzed 
 and perhaps diminished by retelling and renaming past 
 losses, breaking the tie that reforms repeatedly in me be- 
 
47 
 
 tween old threats and new, opening a wide chasm filled 
 with murky rushing waters of past, never fully evapo¬ 
 rated sorrow. The first, I am trying to see in a new way, 
 to be brave enough to face the notion that the power of 
 my love and need for love is neither crazy nor bad, even 
 when reciprocation is uneven, or return denied. 
 
 Once again, I am about ten years old, a monitor at the 
 school door. I wanted to go down on my knees, crawl on 
 my belly, pound the concrete with my fists and beg that 
 woman to be my mother. But she must have seen the des¬ 
 peration in my eyes, perhaps she was frightened of me, 
 or thought me pitiful, when she began leaving her child 
 farther down the block. When I see myself staring and 
 longing, I feel both shame and anger and I try to mute 
 the sound of my anguish by imagining the replacements I 
 found. I am too far away to see the details of the mother’s 
 embrace, but I begin to whisper to myself about the pre¬ 
 cise way her mouth grazes the boy’s cheek, her fingers 
 moving through his hair, down to his forehead where she 
 smooths his eyebrows with her thumb. I keep watching, 
 turning away from my monitoring duties, even at that 
 distance trying to feel the love, to steal it and let it fill the 
 emptiness inside me with images and words. 
 
Intimacy Itself 
 
 What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one 
 pressed through into those secret chambers? What device 
 for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably 
 the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body 
 achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages 
 of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, 
 make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge 
 but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, noth¬ 
 ing that could be written in any language known to men, but 
 intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, lean¬ 
 ing her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee. 
 
 — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse 
 
 I am sitting in Aaron’s room. Throughout this intense 
 winter, nearly every Friday, the day of my session, there 
 is a storm outside. I hear the wind whipping down the 
 street, rattling the windows as I talk to this man I have 
 known less than a year, yet who has become more inti¬ 
 mately aware of my interior life than anyone I know 
 or love. The afternoon turns dark early because of the 
 storms, the shadowy light gives a gray cast to the muted 
 colors of the room, to his white or light blue shirt and 
 gray pants, to his pale skin and aging face. I love the 
 storms — the sound of them outside and walking through 
 them the ten blocks from my apartment. No mask of 
 anger or anxiety covers the more difficult emotions. My 
 sorrow is sharp and precise. It is not threatening. Like 
 the storm, it is already there. 
 
 I came here for the first time only two weeks after 
 my breast surgery. Within three months I came to trust 
 Aaron, within six months to love him. It is a strange word 
 
49 
 
 to use for someone you hardly know, whose knowledge 
 of you is only of your innermost thoughts, who is not 
 familiar with how you talk about ordinary things, how 
 you cook or walk down the street, or sleep or eat. It is a 
 distillation of love, perhaps, bringing love down to some 
 essential component. Just as, in this narrative, I am try¬ 
 ing to create a distillation of all the raw and chaotic feel¬ 
 ing I have experienced in the past few years; not simply 
 to describe desolation or anger, but to find some essen¬ 
 tial reality beneath them both. 
 
 This winter I enjoy the immense luxury of a sabbati¬ 
 cal from my teaching job. I focus my life on writing this 
 narrative as if it were a heavy porous log I cling to after 
 the ship has long sunk and disappeared beneath dark 
 waves. One or two hours a week I confess the details 
 of my interior life not only to the pages of my journal, 
 but to another human being. I sought help in a kind of 
 panic that life was slipping away from me, that in some 
 mysterious way two years of despair had worn down my 
 immune system and helped give me breast cancer. This 
 may not be true, of course. Nevertheless, I proceed with 
 my three-part effort as if it were. I reread old journals, 
 then rewrite my stories hoping to glimpse meaning or 
 order through an altered perspective. I search for con¬ 
 nections among old and recent sorrows, and for words 
 resonant enough to stand for the many parts that remain 
 untold. Once a week, I tell my stories to Aaron. I fight off 
 shame, reticence, fear, embarrassment, modesty, faint¬ 
 ness of heart, and lack of faith. Thoughts must be caught 
 and faced and said out loud, and they must be said to 
 another person, to him. He stares back at me with enor¬ 
 mous intensity. He speaks of his associations, makes in¬ 
 terpretations, at times reveals emotional reactions of his 
 own. He keeps well within the boundaries of therapeutic 
 
5 o 
 
 dialogue and psychoanalytic practice, but the emotion is 
 real. I am counting on that. It is only in the authenticity 
 of his emotion that I am brave enough to relive the stories 
 I believe I must relive in order to recover my health, to 
 face the loneliness at the center of my life. 
 
 Now, reading back to the daily notes I made during 
 the six weeks of radiation treatments, I come upon a de¬ 
 fining image whose meaning unravels infinitely, it seems. 
 I am lying on the table under the radiation machine, be¬ 
 fore the actual treatment begins. They turn out the lights 
 in order to adjust the rays, which are visible only in the 
 dark. While it is dark, my breast is reflected in the lens 
 above me. I see a silhouette of my breast behind the com¬ 
 puterized red lines moving and jumping across the lens. 
 It is the breast, as the doctors called it, and it, the breast, 
 is reflected in the lens so it can be shot through with per¬ 
 fectly aimed radiation. But it is my breast, and I want to 
 reach out for the reflection, trace the line of the curve — 
 its delicate, singular, unique grace, the curve so familiar 
 to me, like the print of a painting you have had for years 
 on your wall and you come upon it unexpectedly in a 
 museum and you think—what is it doing here? Or, like a 
 beloved piece of music building toward a particular series 
 of notes you wait for and wait for, then soar with as the 
 perfectly known melody is found again. Throughout the 
 weeks of radiation, this view of my breast is so painful 
 I have to close my eyes against the dark reflection until, 
 the point of the machine perfectly in place, my arm raised 
 above my head, my body slightly off center so that my 
 right breast is raised toward the machine, they turn on 
 the lights again, the reflection disappears, and I am sur¬ 
 rounded by bright, stark emptiness. Everyone leaves the 
 room. A loud, screeching noise begins, indicating radi¬ 
 ation is in progress. Then loneliness is a river I am swept 
 
down, rushing into my past, which grows clearer and 
 clearer as I move. Alongside that river is another place 
 that scares me much more than loneliness — my anger, 
 my rage. As long as the two remain parallel, I can keep 
 a safe distance between them, but then they converge, 
 water soaking land, land filling water, until thick mud is 
 all there is. I move through it, my ankles and calves held 
 fast in the dirt, which hardens like clay. Just below my 
 anger, which these weeks can rise instantaneously like a 
 sudden volcano spewing forth ash beyond my control, 
 is always the image of my breast, its graceful silhouette, 
 and the image calms my anger even as it floods me with 
 remembered grief. 
 
 It is a year before, the early spring of 1994 and Douglas’s 
 brother Simeon is dying of a i d s. He has been struggling 
 against an intestinal virus for five months, but he has lost 
 the battle and the virus has gone to his brain. In a hos¬ 
 pital in San Francisco, he lies in a coma from which no 
 one expects him to awaken. His mother, Lois, has been 
 with him for months, and now his remaining brother, his 
 sister, Sherrill, his niece Tiffani, Khary, and I fly to San 
 Francisco where Adam will join us. It is a strange kind of 
 appointment. We are going to accompany Simeon to his 
 death, to obey his clearly stated wish that we all be there 
 when he dies. 
 
 At the airport, we are picked up by Gabriel and Pete, 
 Simeon’s friends with whom we will become temporarily, 
 yet profoundly, intimate over the coming days. They 
 drive us to the hospital where Lois is utterly distraught, 
 walking the halls in her plaid nightshirt, having just re¬ 
 ceived the worst news. Douglas looks more upset than I 
 have seen him in years, and remains a long time in the 
 privacy of the room with Simeon, holding his brother’s 
 
52 
 
 hands, whispering to him on the chance he might be able 
 to hear. And then, we take him home to die. 
 
 Like many others, I had fallen in love with Lois when I 
 met her twenty-five years before. She taught me a great 
 deal about African American life and culture, explain¬ 
 ing generously to her white daughter-in-law the intri¬ 
 cate realities of racism and history most whites fail to 
 understand. She guided me through experiences during 
 Adam’s and Khary’s childhood I could not have managed 
 nearly as well without her. I had written about her in my 
 novels and memoirs, and she was a central support to me 
 in the book I was writing about race. We both grew up as 
 motherless daughters, and this has been a source of many 
 commonalities between us. Dramatic, passionate, beau¬ 
 tiful, even at seventy, she is a magnetic woman of many 
 gifts. But disabling griefs over the past years — the loss of 
 a husband, of her eldest son, now of her youngest — have 
 shifted the balance between her magnetism and powerful 
 love on one hand, her anger at life’s injustice and fearful 
 self-protection on the other. “I hope he knew we’d take 
 care of you,” she had said to me when my father died and 
 I was twenty-seven, she forty-seven years old. She could 
 not have imagined the tragedies ahead of her then, the 
 patterns and intentions grief would revise. When I take 
 her in my arms in the hospital corridor, she remains stiff, 
 her arms at her sides. When I reach down to hold her 
 hands, they remain fists as my fingers enclose them. Dur¬ 
 ing all the days of Simmies dying, my grief and fear will 
 be laced with anger — childish, unjust, selfish, passionate 
 anger — an easier mask, like Lois’s, for longing and love. 
 
 We settle Simeon in his bed in the sunroom, one side 
 lined with beautiful windows looking out on a garden. In 
 the adjoining room, the friends who will help us through 
 the next eight days begin to gather. Anne, who seems like 
 
$3 
 
 a sister during that long week, whose hair is a mixture 
 of blond and gray like my own sister’s hair. Irene, who 
 organizes a system of food delivery from acquaintances 
 and friends. Tom, who was Simeon’s partner for so long 
 he has become like a member of our family. Dan, whose 
 wife, Lee, is expecting a baby any day who will be named 
 Simeon if a boy. Gabriel, one of Simmie’s oldest friends, 
 is a gay man who flaunts his gayness, daring anyone to 
 question his movements, his eye makeup, the mixture of 
 extraordinary courage and grim humor that make up his 
 history; he was a draft resister during the Vietnam War 
 and spent several years in prison; he is a nurse who has 
 helped dozens of his friends as they died of aids; he 
 calls Simmie his sister, and postures around, making us 
 laugh. I wonder how my son Khary will handle this gay 
 male expressiveness, but by the end of the week there will 
 be no question in anyone’s mind. He and Gabriel will be 
 comrades. They will confer about medications and plans. 
 They will embrace at the bedside when Simeon dies. Pete, 
 Simeon’s ex-lover, young and vulnerable, is able to help 
 in intense spurts, then leaves suddenly, as if he has to es¬ 
 cape. Like me, he seems to feel Simeon is angry with him, 
 and indeed, according to Lois, Simmie has been angry, 
 and quite harsh. During one of his semiconscious states, 
 he looks at Pete and says, “I don’t want . . .” Pete re¬ 
 sponds, “You don’t want me here?” and leaves in tears. 
 
 On the second day, I sit on Simeon’s bed and try to talk 
 to him. He raises his hands like a cat’s paws and snarls at 
 me. “Oh it’s just some brain synapse out of whack,” Dan 
 says, trying to comfort me. “He’s just playing, kidding 
 around,” says Lois, and Douglas agrees. But he knew 
 I had grown angry with him over the years, and I am 
 afraid, after that, to get too close to him until the very 
 last day. 
 
54 
 
 By the third day, I begin to experience severe stomach 
 pains. The conflict between my hunger for this family’s 
 love and my self-condemnation for anger as the hunger 
 remains unassuaged will result in an ulcer by the time I 
 return to New York. As I move through the week, this 
 conflict drives me. I am longing for Lois to take me in her 
 arms, for Douglas to cry with me, to feel I am the sister 
 in the family I’ve been part of for nearly three decades. 
 
 As far back as I can remember, the phrase “almost like 
 a daughter” has haunted me. Offered with genuine love 
 by a number of older, maternal women, I nevertheless 
 could focus only on the “almost,” and often withdrew 
 from the relationship, protecting desire with distance, 
 substituting anger for need. Here, in the family closer to 
 me than any other apart from my own, I am “almost” like 
 a daughter again. But I am aware of these echoes going 
 backward in time only with the indefinite consciousness 
 that precedes words. I know I desire something not to 
 be had, something I feel selfish and guilty for desiring. I 
 cannot find the language to describe the feelings because 
 the feelings themselves still make me ashamed. I turn to 
 the sink to wash the many dishes that pile up each day, 
 to the telephone to keep track of the numerous calls, to 
 the broom, the sorting of newspapers, the shopping for 
 food and medical supplies. 
 
 Writing this part of the story, even now, two years later, 
 I back off, fatigued, agitated. My neck is rigid, my shoul¬ 
 ders ache. I see my breast on the dark lens, Simeon’s eyes 
 focused on his mother’s face, my mother’s face becoming 
 less shadowy. Her eyes are closed as she lies on her death¬ 
 bed in a darkened room. A nurse sits by her side. I am 
 peering in from the doorway, wanting to run up to her, 
 leap on her, wake her up, but I remain quiet as I have 
 been told to do a hundred times. Although I intended to 
 
55 
 
 write this in a linear time frame, trying to keep to a cal¬ 
 endar of days, circularity quickly takes over, association 
 rather than chronology demanding expression in words. 
 
 During the eight-day vigil, Lois spends all her time 
 lying next to Simmie on his bed or caring for his physical 
 needs with the help of Douglas, Gabriel, and Anne. I can¬ 
 not manage the physical care — cleaning him, attaching 
 the catheter— and I feel ashamed for this inability. I keep 
 a notebook of information: visitors, nursing schedules, 
 mortuary and hospice information, medications. I keep 
 up my determined, useful housework. I talk to the friends 
 about Simmie’s wishes to be “helped toward death,” try¬ 
 ing to decide when we should begin to increase the mor¬ 
 phine as the doctors have taught us to do “when the time 
 comes.” I try to spare Lois and Douglas the specifics of 
 that decision, feeling it is the least I can do. 
 
 Every day or two, I return to my sister’s house in Berke¬ 
 ley for some hours of respite from the dying, which is 
 unlocking memories hunched for years at the bottom of 
 my life. My mother’s body, fragile and helpless, is con¬ 
 tinually before me, and I am a child again. Dust and white 
 bone fill my dreams at night. But I am also escaping Lois’s 
 anger. Her perfect ministrations to her child are accom¬ 
 panied by — perhaps even kept in place by — anger with 
 others in the family, including me. She snaps harshly. She 
 turns her face and sucks her teeth in a familiar gesture of 
 disapproval. She lashes out. 
 
 To the doctors’ amazement, Simeon wakes up on the 
 second day, emerging from the coma, and from then on 
 he moves between wake and sleep, clearly recognizing 
 his mother, his brother and sister, some of his friends. But 
 once when I am sitting near him, talking to him softly, 
 he asks, “Who are you?” Stunned, I return to the front 
 stoop and stare into the sun. Outsider longing to be taken 
 
56 
 
 in — daughter-in-law, I silently berate myself for child¬ 
 ish needs. There is useful work for me to do. I walk back 
 inside and stand in the doorway staring into the sun- 
 room. Lois and Douglas are washing Simmie in a tender 
 collaboration. Douglas lifts the frail body of his brother 
 while their mother changes the sheet. 
 
 On the second night, Adam, an actor, leaves us for his 
 home in Los Angeles because of an important part we all 
 decide Simmie would not want him to sacrifice. He sits on 
 the bed whispering his own private goodbye to the uncle 
 he loves, telling him he has to return to tape a new part 
 on a television show. Simmie smiles, lifts his arm high 
 and draws an arc in the air, as if to say, reach for the sky. 
 Then, standing in the middle of the room, surrounded 
 by people who are witnessing his grief and trying not to 
 stare, Adam weeps a long time in Khary’s arms. 
 
 The Castro district, where Simmie lived, is crowded 
 with people and shops like the Lower East Side of Man¬ 
 hattan, and I walk the steep hills many times a day, buy¬ 
 ing diapers, mattress pads, other supplies, the material 
 necessities of illness usually provided by hospitals. No 
 institutional veil or protection exists for the dying at 
 home, no anesthetizing of the process. You don’t leave 
 the patient for a few hours behind a closed door while the 
 nurses attend to the details, adjust the body to its slow re¬ 
 linquishing of life. Biological systems don’t always break 
 down uniformly. One thing stops slowly, then another. 
 It is often impossible to tell what remains of ordinary 
 consciousness and what is already gone. Simmie lies in a 
 room with no door, separated from the rest of the small 
 apartment by an open archway. We are as close to dying 
 as we can get without dying ourselves. 
 
 Simmie communicates with his eyes, and even with 
 some language, which the doctors thought he had lost. 
 
“There are five of you,” he says once, looking at a group 
 surrounding his bed. Once, he calls for Adam, then raises 
 his lips to be kissed. He keeps insisting he be allowed 
 to get up, and when Gabriel refuses to let him do so, he 
 says, “Fuck you. I have to get my feet on the ground.” 
 Another night, he tells Lois that Sallie, her long-dead 
 mother, is in the room. 
 
 Khary and Tiffani spend their days doing chores, hold¬ 
 ing Simmie’s hands, rubbing his head, much less afraid 
 than I am of the experience of dying. I am remembering 
 all the conflict we had in recent years involving Simmie’s 
 extreme need for attention, his inability, at times, to pay 
 attention to others who needed him. I was angry, then 
 distant, resentful of how easily he made his own needs the 
 center of his life. Then, when I lost track of my needs, he 
 would come to me in a dream, symbolizing an admirable, 
 creative self-involvement. When I began this narrative, 
 I dreamed I was in an old basement where I discovered 
 a manuscript I’d forgotten to complete, a treasure. The 
 manuscript was buried among Simmie’s books and files. 
 During the week he is dying I feel too confused to face 
 such ambivalence. I am afraid that I will prove inade¬ 
 quate to the tasks of care. Anne and Irene encourage 
 me while we walk around the neighborhood or sit in the 
 blessed hours of sun on Simeon’s front steps. These two 
 women, who were unknown to me the week before, who 
 are still in certain ways strangers, give me the courage to 
 continue with the death work by listening to my confes¬ 
 sions of anger and love, reminding me of my place in the 
 family, the need for the kind of emotional strength I can 
 provide. My feelings are raw and ragged, but my actions 
 are protective, my labor efficient and smooth. Like a well- 
 trained orderly, I attend seriously to the cleaning up. 
 
 The circle encloses us: Anne, Irene,Tom, Gabriel, Dan, 
 
58 
 
 Pete, Tommy, a very warm and talkative man who is 
 an Italian from Philadelphia, and Frank, who has aids 
 himself. All these men and women are living in a plague 
 time. They have lost many of their friends. Some of them 
 will soon die themselves. 
 
 Each day, we expect Simeon to die, so most nights we 
 all sleep together on mattresses spread out across the en¬ 
 tire floor. Lois sleeps with Simeon, holding her son in her 
 arms. 
 
 The visiting nurse tells us Simmie is exceptionally 
 strong and could go on for days, and he begins discus¬ 
 sions with us about administering the morphine dose 
 based on his need. Simeon made several of us promise 
 not to prolong his life if the virus went to his brain, and 
 emphasized that when that happened he wanted to go as 
 quickly as possible. Khary and Tiffani urge us to begin, 
 but they are too young to realize how dire a decision 
 in terms of its psychological consequences this really is. 
 I sit by myself on the stoop, for an hour just thinking, 
 not allowing myself to write, afraid the words might be¬ 
 come a story and I will lose track of the barest truth. I 
 try to picture myself doing it, feeding him the liquid that 
 will alleviate his pain but may also hasten his death. I 
 feel I cannot, partly because of my own ambivalent feel¬ 
 ings and conflicts with him. But I tell Gabriel and Anne 
 that if they can do it, I will share equally in the deci¬ 
 sion. We agree that Douglas and Lois should not be in¬ 
 volved since they have given their general consent, that 
 Khary and Tiffani can advise but must not be included in 
 actual medical decisions. Anne says we should wait, that 
 Simeon is still awake too often and, she believes, is wait¬ 
 ing for Dan’s baby to be born. 
 
 We are called to the bedside three times before the final 
 time, all the signs indicating imminent death, but then he 
 
59 
 
 rallies, opens his eyes, asks for food or drink. Each time, 
 the wracking emotions of a last good-bye are followed by 
 the realization that he is not yet gone. Once, he recovers 
 enough to look through his photograph albums, his be¬ 
 loved mementos of his travels, the record of his life. 
 
 Again, he sees Sallie, his long-dead grandmother, 
 standing with his brother Ricky, and his father, Fred¬ 
 erick, at the foot of his bed. If they were there, imagine 
 how confused and pleased he must have been, to see us 
 all there around him, the living and the dead, himself the 
 fragile bridge between life and death for the long week it 
 took him to cross over. 
 
 On the last day, after about five o’clock, Anne and 
 Gabriel begin increasing the doses of morphine. Simeon 
 has not been conscious for a full day and seems differ¬ 
 ent from before. The doctor has assured us he is moving 
 through his last hours. The day before, Dan’s wife gave 
 birth to their son, Simeon. Simmie had been told and 
 seemed to understand. He had been shown photographs 
 of the baby. 
 
 When night was falling and we’d been counting breaths 
 and giving morphine for hours, Dan tells us that several 
 weeks before a voice had come to him in a dream and 
 said: It will be 3-18. His son, Simeon, had been born the 
 night before, on March 10 at an hour that bore no rela¬ 
 tion to the numbers 3-18, so instead of going home, Dan 
 is sitting out the night with the rest of us, at least until 
 3:30 a.m., he says. 
 
 We take turns sitting on the bed, counting breaths, two 
 a minute. Still a fairly strong pulse. We wait. At 11 p.m., a 
 night nurse arrives and says the end is near. 
 
 Khary sits beside him for hours, holding his hand, 
 stroking his forehead. I am afraid he will suffer later, but 
 he is determined to remain close, in part, I think, because 
 
6o 
 
 Douglas is keeping so fierce a distance. Nor can I sit for 
 hours watching every moment of the dying. But wher¬ 
 ever we are in the apartment, we can hear the increasingly 
 loud and labored breathing, not a “death rattle,” more 
 like boulders rolling across the land, or a large drum. 
 Douglas begins to fall asleep, which causes Khary to be¬ 
 come upset and I keep waking him, but then seeing the 
 stress in his eyes, the tightness of his jaw, that he cannot 
 bear this deathwatch, I suggest that he lie down in the 
 other room, where his sister has already retreated, and he 
 falls asleep immediately. Tiffani has gone outside to stand 
 in the night air, and I tell Khary I think she needs him. He 
 goes out and stands on the stoop with her. I wrap them 
 both in one large, red blanket so they look like a homeless 
 couple, two utterly beautiful, lost beings in the night. 
 
 At about midnight, several of us are standing outside, 
 and Dan tells us again about his dream. Khary and I go 
 to a corner store to buy ice cream pops, which every¬ 
 one grabs and devours. I so wish Adam were with us, for 
 his strength and humor, and because we are all so pro¬ 
 foundly cemented by this experience I fear we will never 
 be able to fully describe. 
 
 For hours, those two breaths a minute come. We eat and 
 drink and laugh at ourselves for all the eating. Then the 
 laughter disappears in an instant, like a note with no echo, 
 the sound completely gone. Some drift back to the bed, 
 others to chairs. I go outside for long periods to escape 
 the terrible sound of the breaths. I remember Charlotte 
 Bronte’s descriptions of her beloved sister Emily’s death, 
 the interminable hours of thinking the end is coming any 
 minute, the medications and herbs used to “ease the way,” 
 the sound of the painful struggle for breath as the lungs 
 fill with liquid. She sat in the kitchen waiting for her third 
 sister to die, and she felt her lifelong loneliness surround 
 
6i 
 
 her, familiar in its dampness, its pungent smell. The lone¬ 
 liness was both destiny and curse, partner to “a sense of 
 unworthiness,” she called it, “never to be erased.” * Shad¬ 
 ows cross and recross in the dark, sounds coming from 
 far away, anger coming from far away, love even farther 
 back, a nearly imperceptible shape, as narrow as a line. 
 
 My teeth begin to ache as I write, a familiar sign of 
 powerlessness in myself. I felt powerless in those last 
 moments, not only in the human battle with death but in 
 my own capacity to love as generously as I would have 
 wished. Just as I was expressing my pent-up anger to 
 Irene, the nurse rushed over and said Simmie had died. 
 There was a sudden silence. No breathing. He seemed 
 peaceful, his face expressionless, blank, or pure, his body 
 only flesh, the spirit gone. It was exactly 3:18 a.m. Dan’s 
 dream undid my belief in linear time, my faith in the 
 orderly chronology of human stories. I smelled the acrid 
 loneliness, then it was washed away leaving a blinding 
 emptiness behind. I felt shocked, exactly as if we hadn’t 
 been waiting for seven, almost eight days, ashamed of 
 my angry thoughts at the very moment of his death. As if 
 I had been given the chance to do it over, better this time, 
 as an adult, and had failed again. I wanted to cry in Lois’s 
 arms, to hold Douglas while he cried, to fill the middle of 
 just one silent night with my own cries. But I had no tears. 
 Coldness kept my neck stiff, my angry fists at my sides. 
 
 I woke Douglas and called Tiffani and Khary inside 
 where we gathered around the bed one last time. Every¬ 
 one embraced everyone else, like at New Year’s Eve. Lois 
 knelt by the body and sobbed, “I cannot live without 
 you,” as if there were one last moment when he might 
 still hear. Tiffani lifted her up and finally, after everyone 
 
 * Helene Moglen, Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived (New 
 York: Norton, 1976). 
 
62 
 
 else had stepped away, she and Douglas, her last remain¬ 
 ing son, embraced. 
 
 We covered Simeon, closed his eyes. Lois and Sher¬ 
 rill retreated to the one bedroom behind a closed door. 
 Somewhat madly, Dan, Irene, Douglas, and I cleaned the 
 kitchen. Anne drove Tiffani and Khary back to Berke¬ 
 ley while we waited for the undertaker. When he came, 
 Douglas and I joined Lois and Sherrill in the bedroom 
 so we wouldn’t have to witness the final leaving. I sat on 
 the floor, laid my head down on the bed and in a second 
 fell asleep. In a few minutes I was awake again, listening 
 to the sounds of the body being taken away. 
 
 When we emerged, all was changed, the bed folded 
 back into the couch, the room empty of people and chairs. 
 Lois insisted all she wanted was to be left alone to go to 
 sleep. Douglas and I drove back to Berkeley in the dawn. 
 
 A month after Simeon’s death, we gather in San Fran¬ 
 cisco again for a memorial. I rise to speak to the large 
 crowd, but I keep my eyes on Khary, Adam, and Tif¬ 
 fani. I speak to them about the family, remembering 
 their grandfather Frederick, Tiffani’s father, Ricky, now 
 Simeon joining the dead. The tears I could not shed at his 
 bedside are plentiful now. I am speaking through sobs 
 but I push on, naming the ways I have belonged to them 
 all, seeing the ways I never will. 
 
 Back East, when I record the story of those days, I 
 am sitting on the steps of a house near the Long Island 
 Sound. I raise my face to the sun, which is strong de¬ 
 spite a heavy snowfall the previous night. As I complete 
 the task of record keeping, listening to the sound of the 
 gentle waves, I think of Dan’s prophetic dream and I 
 feel my father near me, for a moment perhaps even my 
 mother. A sense of belonging somewhere, to someone, 
 

 grazes me, the edge of memory calling the name of my 
 need. But now it is gone, replaced again by loneliness; the 
 memory of my mother’s fragile wrists resting on smooth, 
 white sheets; the bones of Simmies skull, his skeletal 
 thighs; the curve of my breast beneath the radiation ma¬ 
 chine; the very loneliness that leads me back to the stories 
 I am trying to knit together with borders of words. 
 
 The first stage of the six weeks of radiation is some¬ 
 thing called a Simulation, a process several hours long 
 that readies the body for treatment. I lie on a table, one 
 arm raised above me, while a mold is made around my 
 head and shoulders. 1 am filmed, measured with wires 
 and rods. Five small marks are tattooed in a circle around 
 my right breast to frame the space within which the radi¬ 
 ation will occur. For nearly an hour I lie on a table with 
 one breast exposed, six or seven doctors and technicians 
 moving around me, filming, measuring. Large machines 
 loom over me, seem as if they might drop any minute, 
 crushing me. My back aches terribly after a half hour, 
 but I am obedient and do not move. Sorrow flows over 
 the future in an infinite wash. Delineation disappears. 
 Time seems horribly amorphous, without normal con¬ 
 tours, and to contain the panic this causes I whisper, 
 August, September, six weeks, five days a week plus two, 
 thirty-two days. 
 
 It is August 6, Hiroshima Day. The papers are filled 
 with old photographs of people burning alive, dying in 
 large numbers from radiation. Daily, there is news of 
 a Republican congress that strips the poor of all sup¬ 
 ports, blaming the weakest among us for their inability 
 to survive heroically against the greatest odds. The Una- 
 bomber prints his mad declaration in major newspapers, 
 and threaded through his homicidal, power-hungry, rac- 
 
6 4 
 
 ist and sexist madness is a quite sane fear of technology, 
 a critique of the very idea of progress. If technology is 
 curing my cancer, I have also been warned that it could 
 create new cancers, cause damage to other organs as the 
 breast is cured. I feel insane, like the Unabomber terri¬ 
 fied of the world. I am filled with rage at politicians who 
 are trying to destroy ordinary people and increase ex¬ 
 traordinary corporate profits. I weep at the sight of old, 
 charred bodies in Japan. Once I constructed a dry, inter¬ 
 nal distance to protect me from feelings always too raw, 
 desires too naked. Now, with the swiftness of lightning 
 in a storm, that distance is crossed by any suffering I see. 
 Inside, I am moist, storm-threatened. I am not heroic. I 
 cry each day before my treatment, and during the treat¬ 
 ment I have to work hard not to sob out loud. 
 
 Summer heat swells my feet and fingers, which need 
 repeated immersion in ice cold water when I am home. 
 At night I drape cool rags across my forehead and chest. 
 Even in air-conditioned rooms, I cannot stop sweating. 
 During the day, I clean house, oil wooden floors, plant 
 and sweep the terrace, reorder shelves, and wash the re¬ 
 frigerator, controlling what I can. 
 
 Some days, lying on the radiation table, I try to think 
 of the Wellfleet Bay I love, but I begin to cry from the 
 contrast, and these tears lead immediately to tears of 
 longing for Adam. I think about his great bravery, his 
 more difficult — because it is daily and lifelong—disease 
 of diabetes. With the tears, my body begins to move, so 
 I decide to block out all feeling, concentrate on the radio 
 music being piped in, the white walls around me, the 
 slightly stained ceiling above. 
 
 On many days, I wait forty-five minutes to be called 
 in, growing more and more agitated as the minutes pass. 
 Other patients recount their stories to each other, their 
 
65 
 
 voices threatening to permeate the walls I have erected 
 around me as I stare into my journal or book. One day, a 
 woman begins to talk to me. “I am out of my mind with 
 fear” she says, and shows me the burn on her breast after 
 three weeks, a large area of nearly blue black on dark 
 brown skin. I have been warned of burns but have not 
 imagined them so definitively. A very ill-looking South 
 American man is accompanied by several members of his 
 family. His throat is bandaged, his face terribly swollen, 
 his eyes swollen too, and bloodshot, from weeping or 
 disease. Every so often, he has to vomit, and a woman 
 places a steel tray under his chin. I close my book and 
 rush into the hallway, pace, turn my back, breathe. 
 
 In the interior waiting room I change out of my shirt 
 and into a cotton gown. Raisa, a new technician, a 
 woman of about twenty, is clearly upset by my crying, 
 and I try to stop for her, but although I can contain the 
 sound, water keeps flowing out of my eyes, down my 
 cheeks, over my chin, onto my throat. I am amazed that 
 I have so many tears, remembering myself at Simeon’s 
 deathbed, eyes as dry as ice. 
 
 Jamar, a warm, competent young man who is the head 
 technician, asks me what is wrong. I try to explain that 
 not knowing what is about to happen to me is terrify¬ 
 ing, that I cannot bear the other patients talking in the 
 waiting room. I tell him that I listen to their tales of ill¬ 
 ness with my eyes cast down, writing ceaselessly so no 
 one will talk directly to me, give me the weight of their 
 stories. I tell him there is an old man who walks around in 
 a diaper, no robe covering him, as if he has given up the 
 struggle for dignity. There is a woman prisoner with long, 
 gray matted hair and a pockmarked face, whose legs are 
 in irons and who comes in each morning accompanied 
 by two women guards. When I don’t hear the stories, or 
 
66 
 
 overhear them, I imagine them, or make them up. I take 
 them in and they become me, and I need all my strength 
 to feel in control of my own story, to get through this 
 ordeal. I tell Jamar all this, finally breaking into sobs, and 
 I apologize, tell him he is probably too young to under¬ 
 stand. “I am not that young,” he says, offended, “I am 
 thirty years old, and I do understand.” From that mo¬ 
 ment on, he gives me detailed coming attractions each 
 day when I leave of what to expect the next day. As soon 
 as he sees me in the waiting room, he ushers me into a 
 quieter hallway where I can pace or sit alone until it is my 
 turn. I feel very selfish compared to those who can talk 
 and listen for hours. But in the following weeks, two or 
 three other people will confess to me the hardest part for 
 them, too, is waiting with the other patients, listening to 
 the terrible stories. So we are a group of a sort, not really 
 selfish, only permeable. 
 
 One day as I wait, I see Dr. C., the radiation oncologist. 
 I ask her if there is any danger to overlapping the radi¬ 
 ation with chemotherapy, as they are doing in my case. 
 “When both are given together there is almost always 
 a worse burning of the breast accompanied by shoot¬ 
 ing pains, but none of it is anything to worry about,” 
 she informs me crisply. “How much pain?” I ask, trying 
 to picture it, give it dimension and so contain my fear. 
 “Just some discomfort,” she responds impatiently. I am 
 being a bad patient again by refusing to see this is all 
 something that can easily be managed with a stiff upper 
 lip. “Well then,” I ask, “why don’t they halt the chemo¬ 
 therapy while I am in radiation?” And right there, in the 
 waiting room, she begins to shout at me: “We are dealing 
 with your longevity here. Do you want to compromise 
 your longevity?!” 
 
 I meet a young woman with a black cross on her throat 
 
marking the place where they direct the ray. As I walk 
 toward her, she tells me she has just finished her treat¬ 
 ments, and she falls into my arms. We remain that way, 
 rocking each other, strangers who will never see each 
 other again.The next day, when I go into the bathroom to 
 get dressed, I see the same black cross on my chest. I try 
 to get it off with water, but it seems indelible, and I am 
 filled with anxiety about what it means. I ask the atten¬ 
 dant, and he tells me with a stunning, callous smile that 
 it is nothing, only a mark for their convenience. No rea¬ 
 son, he repeats. Comes off with an alcohol swab. When I 
 describe the anxiety of finding it and the symbolic mean¬ 
 ing of a black cross, he apologizes for their insensitivity 
 and promises that from now on he will give people the 
 swabs in advance. 
 
 Each day, I lie back on the table, find my place within 
 the blue head and shoulder mold, raise my arm to its 
 awkward position, lift my legs over the pillow they pro¬ 
 vide for some comfort and begin to cry. I lie perfectly 
 still under the machine. In the dark, I close my eyes so I 
 will not see the reflection of my breast. Then, the light on 
 again, the sustained loud screeching noise, which at first 
 intensified my fear by giving sound to the violence being 
 done to my body, is familiar by now, even slightly com¬ 
 forting, something to count against. Between forty-five 
 and fifty-seven seconds, then Jamar and Raisa return, re¬ 
 move the slides, push the machine to the side, give me a 
 hand to sit up and I am through. 
 
 One day after the treatment, I meet my friend Sally for 
 lunch. In a small, book-lined restaurant where we munch 
 on salads and sip diet Cokes, I begin to cry again, for the 
 first time with someone other than the technicians and 
 Douglas. Sally has remained completely focused on me 
 through months of illness, consistently attentive, will- 
 
68 
 
 ing to walk me to the radiation unit in the depths of the 
 basement of the hospital, wait for me there, or meet me 
 afterward, interrupting her own work for an elegant or 
 ordinary lunch. She looks into my eyes steadily. There 
 is no sense of discomfort in her gaze. She will listen as 
 long as I can talk. She is giving me just the thing I need 
 most and cannot ask for. In the attentive warmth of her 
 friendship, I feel its opposite, the hot rage and grief I 
 must have felt as a child slinking around doorways, try¬ 
 ing to be quiet while my mother died. My father, aunts, 
 and grandmother must have been too stunned or fright¬ 
 ened or selfish to listen to children’s cries, which were 
 unassuageable anyway, and might as well be silenced as 
 encouraged. Pieces slide together slowly, right beneath 
 the surface. I try to hold Lois but her grief is too immense 
 for comfort. Her anger ignites mine. It is stiffening. She 
 cannot hold me back. 
 
 A young woman across from me in the waiting room 
 reads her Bible and quietly prays out loud. I write a cal¬ 
 endar of dates in my journal: Next week I will see a close 
 friend who is visiting from Israel. The week after that, 
 Adam is coming home. By then, it will be nearly Sep¬ 
 tember and I will have just two more weeks to go. I feel 
 stronger when I write these notes, and the strength lasts 
 through the treatment and on the walk back across town. 
 But on the subway going home, I sit next to a woman who 
 is holding her child. He is about four or five years old. 
 Dangerously, I notice the fragility of his arms wrapped 
 around her neck, their graceful curving lines. Then I re¬ 
 member the delicacy of Adam’s arms, of Khary’s, when 
 they were that age, their arms encircling my shoulders, 
 my neck. I see the half-moon curve of a child’s thigh in 
 a Kathe Kollwitz drawing. And I see the silhouette of 
 
my breast on the screen. The beautiful shape, the delicate 
 roundness of the curve, the dark oval crossed by com¬ 
 puterized red lines, identifying the target for the rays. 
 
 As the days and weeks go on and my skin begins to 
 burn and scale, my emotions grow large, devouring dis¬ 
 tance and control. Anxiety after only a few moments of 
 waiting. A level of exhaustion I could not have imag¬ 
 ined. Panic threatens each morning as I get ready to go 
 downtown to the hospital. I begin to see I will have to 
 ask for more help, for Douglas or Khary or Sally to ac¬ 
 company me more often. 
 
 One weekend, I return to the grassy beach in Long 
 Island and take a long walk through the shallow sound. 
 Softly, water moves against my body, caressing my breast 
 and my right arm which is still sore from the surgical re¬ 
 moval of lymph nodes. I walk out where it is deeper. I 
 lie down. Fluid and at peace, I let my head sink beneath 
 the water and taste the salt on my lips and tongue. Then 
 at night I hurt my arm slightly when lifting a window, 
 and the small pain opens the flood gates. I cry uncontrol¬ 
 lably. I cannot be quieted. I long for my father to hold 
 me, standing by my bed, which I stand on, so that our 
 shoulders are the same height, to hear him say, Go on, 
 cry, Ketseleh, cry it out. I long to feel his mouth against 
 my hair as his cries rise to match mine until we are both 
 calling her, holding onto each other, patting each others’ 
 backs while he smooths my hair, the flood of our tears 
 intermingling on my cheeks, and I taste the salty water 
 in my mouth. 
 
 Only in the last two weeks do I begin to relax into a 
 slightly thicker skin, partly because the end is in sight, 
 partly because I have become friends with Raisa and 
 Jamar, which eases the surface loneliness. The summer 
 
70 
 
 itself, which loomed so monstrously in May and June, a 
 huge giant of time lying still and unmovable before me, 
 is nearing its end. After the summer, only two weeks of 
 radiation and two more chemotherapy treatments will be 
 left to go. 
 
 In the unit, people reach their last day and emerge 
 with paper diplomas. An emaciated blond woman who 
 must be over sixty looks like a blushing girl when she 
 announces her “graduation,” and her face lights up the 
 room. I tell Jamar that while I don’t want to hurt anyone’s 
 feelings, I do not want a photocopied diploma when I 
 leave, that to me it feels like a trivialization of all I have 
 been through. He reacts with his usual kindness, now 
 made more precious by his growing knowledge of me. “I 
 didn’t think you would,” he says, smiling. I realize, with 
 some astonishment, that when I am finished I will miss 
 these intelligent young medical workers whose capacity 
 for sympathy and fearlessness in the face of suffering is 
 so much greater than the doctors whom they serve. I 
 almost begin to feel at home. Instead of leaving my bra 
 and shirt in a locker, I take them into the treatment room 
 with me now and quickly put them on when I climb off 
 the table, so I can walk swiftly back through the rooms 
 and onto the street. 
 
 In the last week, a new dark-haired young woman ap¬ 
 pears. She looks no older than twenty-one or two, and 
 like me she is quiet, always reading her book. One morn¬ 
 ing she waits and waits, but she is not called. The re¬ 
 ceptionist, in her usual oblivious, haughty mood, makes 
 no mention of it. The South American man is sick again, 
 and begins to vomit. The young woman and I rush to the 
 inner waiting room to escape. I ask if she has been wait¬ 
 ing long, and she responds, yes, for over an hour. Soon, 
 
Jl 
 
 a nurse with a strong New York accent, who has told me 
 she writes “stawrries and po-ems,” a kind woman who 
 welcomes me into back rooms to wait when she sees my 
 “nerves,” comes into the room. But she motions to me 
 that it is my turn. I tell her the young woman has been 
 waiting much longer than I have. She rushes off to in¬ 
 vestigate, finds they have made a mistake, did not know 
 she was there, and thanking me, they take her first. I will 
 have to wait another twenty minutes, but I feel strong, 
 maternal, adequate to the task at hand. 
 
 When I was a child the word mother was precious to 
 me. I hung onto it like the tom edge of a shredded blan¬ 
 ket a child carries around as talisman, omen, secret good 
 luck charm. I felt paralyzed with envy when I heard 
 other children saying Mommy, or Mom (with casual en¬ 
 titlement) or Mother. I’d stand still, watching, trying to 
 match the sound of the lost word with emotions the child 
 speaking must have been feeling. I’d have to stand very 
 still to focus my energy, to will the tears to remain inside, 
 not to move into my throat and become a scream. 
 
 For years when I spoke of my mother, I would never 
 call her Mother, certainly not Mom, or Mommy, but Tul- 
 lah, her name. I tried to face the reality that if mother sig¬ 
 nals the deepest possible intimacy or at least familiarity, I 
 had no mother at all, and when I married Douglas I knew 
 immediately that I would call his mother by her name. 
 We would be friends, I said, long practiced in resisting 
 illusions about substitutes, maintaining a cold, uncom¬ 
 promising eye on the truth. Only after I had breast cancer 
 did I begin, for the first time since childhood, to unearth 
 the impossible desire for someone, anyone, to take her 
 place. During the long months of treatment, I wanted no 
 one more than a mother. I would not say my mother, be- 
 
72 
 
 cause I still had only the barest recollection of her and 
 did not focus my yearning on her particular face. Like 
 many sons and daughters who are themselves middle- 
 aged, even those with living mothers, when I yearned for 
 a mother it was the mother of my dreams. 
 
 During my first few sessions with Aaron, after I had 
 surgery but had still not fully comprehended that I’d 
 actually had cancer, I told him of my mother and the old 
 fear that she and I were somehow the same person, that 
 in order to overcome the deadly identification I had to 
 banish her. He said, “Well, you are not her, but you are 
 her daughter.” The simplicity of his statement stunned 
 me. Both things could be true at once then, an ordinary 
 reality I hadn’t considered for many years. It would take 
 eight more months before I could remember loving her, 
 the searing pain when I lost her forever, before I could 
 reclaim her from her sisters, her mother, my father, all 
 the voices who insisted she was perfectly magnificent and 
 therefore couldn’t be mine. 
 
 Raisa asks me if I am feeling better, as I am crying less. 
 I say becoming attached to her and Jamar has helped. 
 She responds, “Yes, that’s the trouble with this job. You 
 get attached to people and then they disappear; but I 
 understand you, Ms. Lazarre,” she tells me. “My boy¬ 
 friend is just like you. Really sensitive. A lot on his mind.” 
 This is one of the few times I am comfortable being 
 called Ms. Lazarre when I am using the other person’s 
 first name. With building workers, my students, my chil¬ 
 dren’s friends, and certainly with doctors when I am on 
 the other side, I hate the hierarchy of respect this in¬ 
 equality of naming often represents. But here, it is liter¬ 
 ally a saving grace. Like a dancer’s movement, I feel my 
 back straighten, my face raised as if to receive a blessing 
 
73 
 
 from the sky. I put my arm around Raisa for a moment to 
 thank her, place my open palm against her head, feeling 
 the heavy weight of her thick, soft, dark brown curls. 
 
 By the last week, a deep purple line extends under 
 my breast, across the incision under my arm. Otherwise, 
 everything is dark red, looking burnt, which is exactly 
 what it is. I am unable to relax or sleep when I am home, 
 afraid of relinquishing my vigilance. The image of my 
 mother comes to me frequently now. Sometimes her face, 
 staring up at the ceiling as she lies in bed knowing she 
 is going to die. Sometimes, the face in her photograph, 
 which has remained for years buried in a drawer, al¬ 
 though all our other ancestors are framed and cover one 
 narrow wall, a tribute to memory. Sometimes I imagine 
 her bones, what must be left of her body after forty- 
 five years. They lie in the shape of a woman, but they 
 have fallen apart, no longer attached to each other by the 
 connection of flesh. They remind me of my own skele¬ 
 ton as I saw it depicted on a large computer screen the 
 day I had a bone scan. I keep a vigil. Otherwise every¬ 
 thing, the bones, the unattached memories, myself, will 
 fly apart. 
 
 Phobias about words increase — chemotherapy, radi¬ 
 ation, cancer, the doctors’ names — I can neither say 
 nor write any of them. I cringe when other people say 
 the words, especially chemo, that common nickname 
 for something so awesome and dangerous. Exhaustion 
 mounts. Douglas and Khary decide I should not go by 
 myself again, and they make up a schedule, taking turns 
 accompanying me downtown on the days that Sally can¬ 
 not come. When Adam is home, he comes with me. Their 
 devotion strengthens me; my pride in my tall, powerful 
 sons narrows the short period in the hospital with wide 
 
J4 
 
 borders. The walk itself, even the subway ride, is an out¬ 
 ing that fills me with joy. 
 
 On the last day of radiation, I choose to go by myself. 
 On the way to the hospital is the huge open Farmer’s Mar¬ 
 ket in Union Square. Across several city blocks are rows 
 and rows of colorful plants, country-bred flowers, every 
 kind of fruit, vegetable, home-baked bread. I buy corn, 
 plums, a lush plant called Wandering Jew, a large bunch 
 of red, yellow, and pink zinnias for Jamar and Raisa, two 
 dozen black-eyed Susans I recall my mother naming for 
 me as we drove down a country road in her beige Dodge, 
 her violet dress matched by a purple flower in her hair. 
 
 Now, the people I came in with six weeks before are 
 mostly gone, and a new crop waits in the outer room. This 
 small world filled with scary images and a sense of being 
 a part of the doomed will go on, far beyond my treat¬ 
 ments, and Jamar and Raisa will offer their kindness to 
 others, some of whom, perhaps, will be as emotional as I 
 have been. Meanwhile, my breast will heal, the darkness 
 will fade, and even the scar will grow shallow, becoming 
 more of a line than a gouge out of the flesh. 
 
 Before I leave for the last time, I call Jamar and Raisa 
 into the room. I put my hands on their shoulders and tell 
 them they are immensely gifted health care workers, that 
 I could not have gotten through without their sympathy 
 and support. “Coming from you that is really a compli¬ 
 ment,” Jamar says, and I feel that somehow, thanks to 
 their unfailing respect, I have preserved some dignity. 
 I embrace them both and walk out onto the street. My 
 grief is enormous, shapeless. It leans on my chest as I try 
 to breathe. It surrounds me with breathless emptiness. I 
 will not be able to give it name or form until all the treat¬ 
 ments are over, and I still have two chemotherapies to 
 go. But I know I have come through something that has 
 
changed me forever. I walk a city mile back to the sub¬ 
 way, weighted down to earth by the flowers and fruit in 
 my arms. 
 
 75 
 
 There are many days during the months of radiation and 
 chemotherapy when Lois comes to my apartment and 
 remains all day. She understands the comfort of having 
 someone in the house when you are not well and feeling 
 weak, even if you have no specific need. She usually sits 
 in the living room, watching television, doing her bills, 
 reading, or napping. I lie in bed thinking of her child¬ 
 hood, growing up in poverty, shunted around from rela¬ 
 tive to relative, her mother dead when she was five, her 
 father dead before she was born. I am trying to imagine 
 her grief narrative, the words she might use if she had the 
 confidence, the endurance, or the opportunity to write 
 them down. 
 
 Above all, coldness undermines me, makes me feel cul¬ 
 pable, faulted, ashamed, long before I feel any anger. 
 Writing this, I am suddenly feverish, my skin goes hot, 
 my face burns. 
 
 I feel the old grief of losing everything, so there must 
 be some memory of union, or why would I feel loss and 
 not emptiness? But I have no actual memory, only the 
 image of my mother I saw in an old family film made by 
 an uncle when I was a child. She is holding me on her lap, 
 my long legs touching the ground. I am pouting and she 
 is gently mocking me, poking my lips into a smile as she 
 smiles at me. For a moment she is an ordinary mother, 
 I am an ordinary child. And that is all. All the rest is 
 fantasy or cruelty or an incessant, active nightmare that 
 illuminates everything with its shining outlines of the 
 deepest, thickest black. 
 
 I am sitting in Aaron’s room. Every Friday, it seems, 
 
7<S 
 
 there is a storm outside, a perfect reflection of the storms 
 I feel within. He is looking at me intensely, and I feel the 
 immense relief of someone listening. I talk on and on, 
 then stop, embarrassed, and say, “I’m afraid you must be 
 thinking, what in the world is this woman talking about?” 
 He says, “I am thinking that, but not contemptuously. I 
 am thinking, with interest, What is she talking about?” 
 Not to judge, or condemn or even solve with earnest in¬ 
 tention, he is just listening, perhaps closely enough to 
 understand. In the strength and honesty of his emotion, 
 I find my own. I think of Sally in the book-lined restau¬ 
 rant, of Anne and Irene walking with me up and down 
 the San Francisco hills. 
 
 Before shame and anger there is simple need. Between 
 unworthiness and desire lies a loneliness too large for 
 form. Against such shapelessness, what chance is there 
 for a small arm around a mother’s neck, the graceful 
 sloping curve of a breast? Only an image, a perfectly 
 chosen word, a brief moment of intimacy itself. 
 
Out of Her Mind 
 
 At times internal movement is too fast to keep track of 
 easily. Like the blizzards of this past winter, when the sky 
 turned white and everywhere showers of white fell onto 
 white-covered streets, a solid blizzard of feeling storms 
 me, blurring outlines with an indiscrete wash of pale 
 gray. This is, in some ways, the hardest part of the story 
 to tell, writing about writing, a story about loss of my¬ 
 self. It is spring now, but I remember the mountains of 
 snow, six feet, ten feet, and higher, lining the sidewalks 
 only a few months ago. At first a beautiful mixture of so¬ 
 lidity and translucence, they soon become infested with 
 garbage, opaque with street pollution, old papers, food, 
 dog shit, like the piles of garbage my feelings of good¬ 
 ness can suddenly become. 
 
 A dream, several years old, but still haunting: Gloria is 
 still alive. Although she knows she is going to die soon, 
 she is serene, even joyous. In a lush garden, she plants 
 and hoes, turns dirt over and under, preserving and pack¬ 
 ing roots. Nearby is a small bookcase stacked with papers 
 and books that she gives to me. I look into it and realize 
 the contents are mine as well as hers, and as I am leafing 
 through them, the bookcase becomes a stream of clear 
 water. Now, I am looking into the bluish green water, 
 seeing my reflection and hers. She is wearing a red dress, 
 its buttons opened to reveal her breasts; her hair, though 
 in reality it was brown, is a beautiful shade of gold. I 
 feel a familiar and paradoxical sense of tranquillity and 
 excitement, the way I feel when I am in my deepest con¬ 
 centration while writing. I take the papers into a room 
 in her cottage, place them on a table by the window, and 
 gaze dreamily at a wide, peaceful lagoon surrounded by 
 
7 * 
 
 spring-blossomed trees. And then, suddenly, like a the¬ 
 atrical curtain falling, a steel door drops in front of the 
 scene, blocking out my view. The door is old, stained 
 with rusty paint, cracked and broken, covered with mold. 
 
 When I have this dream several years ago, the country is 
 beginning to spin far to the right and many people are 
 feeling out of control. Budgets by Republican adminis¬ 
 trations on all levels of government drain social services, 
 ignore human needs for housing and health care, promise 
 increasingly punitive measures for prisoners, even petty 
 criminals, and for teenage mothers on welfare. Over the 
 next years poverty will surely teem over the cities even 
 more than it already does, colliding with the dangerous 
 injustices and precarious securities of our lives; the suf¬ 
 fering and violence in store for some of us seems almost 
 unimaginable. 
 
 A disastrous personal aspect of this radical shift in 
 American politics is that Douglas has been out of a job 
 for months. Most of the places he might have found work 
 in his lifelong career in progressive government are now 
 controlled by Republicans of the most conservative bent. 
 A large group of former government officials at all levels 
 are competing for the few positions in the private sector 
 that replicate the social, legal, and employment services 
 these people are trained to manage and direct. Our future, 
 everything we have worked for, is suddenly insecure. 
 
 As months go by and I witness the daily job search, I 
 remember when I was a teenager, the years of my father’s 
 unemployment. He walked the streets for hours, he 
 would tell us, ending up in a diner where he drank cups 
 of coffee until it was late enough to come home. Even¬ 
 tually, he settled into a sorrow that never completely left 
 him again. I think of a close friend, a successful business- 
 
79 
 
 man, who was out of a job for several scary months, how 
 he told me he would walk around and around the park, 
 eat in luncheonettes, sit and read in the library, afraid 
 to go home to the silence of the telephone. I was afraid 
 this disaster would break Douglas in some way, that he 
 would have a heart attack and die. I thought of all the 
 scholars I had met since entering the world of univer¬ 
 sity teaching myself, people who are hired part-time so 
 that institutions can save money on salaries and benefits, 
 people who are regularly “excessed” or “let go,” who are 
 unable to do the work they love with any of the securities 
 or dignity supposedly afforded to workers in this coun¬ 
 try; of all the accomplished artists who cannot do their 
 work because there is no regular money to pay for it; 
 of all the people who have no work at all. Work sustains 
 us — work we are committed to, good at — work that is 
 paid for and structures our days. 
 
 Douglas is philosophical, as always, and after some 
 time he obtains several consulting jobs, which, in addi¬ 
 tion to my teaching job, keep us going, but I am fright¬ 
 ened. Everything is precarious. Like many “middle- 
 class” people, we have regular debt that must be paid 
 monthly, nothing saved, and no family money to fall 
 back on. I have known Douglas for thirty years, but now 
 for the first time I comprehend the real meaning of his 
 heroic optimism, how, growing up as a Black man under 
 American apartheid — the virulent and diminishing form 
 of racial segregation known as Jim Crow — he learned 
 how to survive. No rejection or disappointment keeps 
 him depressed for longer than a few hours. Every new 
 possibility is met with enormous hope. I try to imagine 
 his childhood from the many stories I have heard: an in¬ 
 tensely curious child, always out of the house, gifted and 
 smart, often secretive, but once involved, deeply com- 
 
8o 
 
 mitted, first to sports, then to school, eventually to love. 
 Far more pessimistic by nature, I nevertheless try to fol¬ 
 low his example, to keep my hopes up, to spend a certain 
 portion of every day literally counting our blessings. I 
 write them down: my children’s achievements, my job, 
 our health. But I am weakened by the griefs of Gloria’s 
 and Simeon’s deaths and the losses their dying raked up 
 in me; and by anxiety attacks I fear might never be over¬ 
 come; and now I am frightened of losing the greatest 
 sense of safety I have ever known. 
 
 I am kept going by demanding work, my book about 
 race for which I have a good contract with a major pub¬ 
 lisher. The book began forming in my mind years before 
 a word was put onto a page. It came to me first at a 
 reading I attended by the German writer Christa Wolf 
 whose essays and fiction have influenced my writing and 
 teaching for many years. In my notes on the back of 
 the program I wrote: “As writers, we are in love with 
 formal beauty, the traditions and histories of word de¬ 
 signs. Yet, we dare not rest in that simple ecstasy. There 
 is too much evil in the world and it has been perpetu¬ 
 ated by too many generations.” Like Christa Wolf, I live 
 in a country whose history centers on one of the greatest 
 evils ever known: the enslavement of over fourteen gen¬ 
 erations of African people. My own ancestors were not 
 implicated. They were poor and working-class Jews of 
 Eastern Europe and came here only in my parents’ gen¬ 
 eration. But my children, who are African American, still 
 suffer the consequences of this holocaust. I decided that 
 evening to write a memoir about my experience of living 
 in a Black family for twenty-five years, raising Black sons 
 to manhood, about how my entire consciousness and per¬ 
 spective has changed as a result of imagining American 
 history and culture from a Black person’s point of view. 
 
8i 
 
 After two years of writing outlines and notebooks and 
 submitting proposals to publishers, encouraged by my 
 agent who believed strongly in the project, I finally ob¬ 
 tained a contract with a large New York house and an 
 editor who was not only successful but on her way to 
 becoming powerful in the industry. Indeed, while I was 
 writing the book, she moved to another publisher where 
 her position was even higher and more prestigious than 
 before, and she took my book (then in its early stages) 
 with her, a common sign of an editor’s confidence in a 
 work. She loved my proposal, and I allowed long-sobered 
 hopes about being published responsibly and intelligently 
 to rise dangerously high again. I reminded her repeatedly 
 that this would not be a simple memoir, as was the fash¬ 
 ion of the day, a story moving like a conventional film 
 from scene to scene. Mine would be a book including 
 various tones of voice, told not in linear time but shift¬ 
 ing between present and past — for that is how I under¬ 
 stand real psychological change to occur — and I wanted 
 to replicate honestly an experience of deep transforma¬ 
 tion. I told her that I was interested in conveying what I 
 had learned about white racism and that, although their 
 voices would be heard in every chapter, my children’s 
 lives would not be the center of the book. I knew this 
 focus on myself, a middle-aged white woman, was less 
 sexy than the story of two young Black men coming of 
 age in racist America, but the editor supported both me 
 and the idea. Her excitement deepened mine. 
 
 Even at the earliest stages, I understood this book 
 would serve many agendas for me. 
 
 I wanted to speak out against racism in the tradition of 
 African American autobiography I study and teach, to 
 think and feel my way toward a public and audible voice 
 on this most critical American reality. I wanted to undo 
 
82 
 
 what Christa Wolf calls a “fabrication” so that contra¬ 
 dictory feelings and new insights could emerge onto the 
 page, but I knew I would risk criticism and disapproval, 
 as there is no subject more fabricated in American life 
 than race. 
 
 But the ordinary dismissive rejections any artist in this 
 society experiences repeatedly, the pain of being ignored 
 until aspiration comes to feel like grandiosity, self- 
 respect like false pride, had caused a break in my con¬ 
 fidence. I had begun to resist the periods of confusion 
 and chaos in any creative work when images are dispa¬ 
 rate, ideas and feelings only vaguely sensed, irrelevant 
 and all too relevant thoughts surfacing into the mind 
 from some place beyond conscious control. My feelings 
 of self-doubt increased until I reached a point in the draft 
 where the shape emerged, connections came into focus, 
 and I could begin to work within a sensible, perceiv¬ 
 able design. Only that later stage of work could block 
 out in me internalized voices of contemptuous critics 
 trivializing women’s autobiography, especially when the 
 woman’s voice is passionate and emotional, not offering 
 optimistic assurances that everything will be all right. 
 
 Like most writers, I had taken great pleasure in learn¬ 
 ing to see formal intention in literature, which helped 
 me gain control over the structures of my own work. 
 But shadows of my childhood fears and desires, which I 
 had tried to illuminate in my work with Gloria, darkened 
 and grew. In some part of myself I began to subscribe to 
 the dichotomy many of us create between emotional in¬ 
 tensity and formal elegance, a dangerous opposition that 
 can make honest expression impossible. 
 
 Through teaching, I tried to work out a compromise: 
 If I could articulate a synthesis for my students, per¬ 
 haps I could find a way out of my own dilemmas. In 
 
<?J 
 
 my nonfiction classes, I taught Notes of a Native Son, by 
 James Baldwin; In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, by 
 Alice Walker; and other essays whose designs were ele¬ 
 gant and accessible yet conveyed enormous passion. I 
 tried to find words to impart this convergence I needed 
 to see more clearly myself: that passion and order are 
 not opposites. Indeed, in the strongest writing there is a 
 dovetailing of structure and emotional revelation, and if 
 you find the words to describe one, you will have a sud¬ 
 den glimpse into the other. In Baldwin’s Notes of a Native 
 Son, for instance, James, the son, can come to an under¬ 
 standing of his own story, his battle with rage and injus¬ 
 tice, only as he begins to comprehend his father’s story. 
 Structurally, this classic and brilliant American essay uses 
 a story-within-a-story design. The outer story, the death 
 and funeral of the father, is the occasion for the inner 
 story — the son’s growing consciousness of his own rage 
 against injustice, his passionate need to be seen for who 
 he is. The outer story gives the inner story shape, and yet 
 is unraveled by the inner story, itself changed. 
 
 In my fiction classes, I tried to help my students see the 
 beauty of literary structures so they might bring more 
 conscious formal attention to their own work. We built 
 detailed outlines, learning to track the images that come 
 into the mind unexpectedly, to use them with intention 
 and purpose. We made maps. 
 
 At the same time, I was inspired by the easily exposed, 
 raw emotional intensity of my writing students. They re¬ 
 minded me of a nearly lost self, of the way I wrote before 
 I began to distrust my own passions. My feelings spilled 
 over, of course, into panic attacks, bouts of shame, and 
 explosions of rage. But the spillage became more and 
 more rare. Twice I had an ulcer attack. I became too 
 exhausted to write except in my journal, which I now 
 
8 4 
 
 thought of as permanently secret, not merely private; a 
 record I would eventually destroy. 
 
 I hoped that the subject of my new book (a political and 
 social issue I felt strongly about) and its form (the con¬ 
 sciously reasoned personal essay) might serve as a bridge 
 to some new capacity for unifying spontaneity and disci¬ 
 pline, passion and control. I tried to prepare myself for 
 periods of resistance and the anxiety caused by unclear 
 first drafts. I reread the last work I had written purely 
 from inspiration, with no notes or planning ahead. One 
 night, I sat down at the kitchen table, filled with emo¬ 
 tion about Adam’s diabetes, and a perfectly organized 
 story emerged. When I was finished, I felt exhausted and 
 drained. I still liked the story, and I saw that the very 
 process that had once enchanted and compelled me, the 
 thing that turns people into artists in the first place, what 
 is called inspiration, or talent, the part that comes before 
 craft and before art, the deep, personal, mysterious need 
 some people have to repeatedly, often ecstatically risk 
 expression of the inner self—all this terrified me now, 
 made me feel I was in danger of losing my mind. 
 
 Because of my insecurity, I was showing the editor, 
 my agent, and her assistant each chapter as it was com¬ 
 pleted. When I felt embarrassed by this need for approval, 
 I reminded myself of Virginia Woolf’s words that it is 
 no use telling writers not to mind what other people 
 think, because writers are by nature people who mind 
 very deeply what other people think. All three women re¬ 
 sponded with excitement and encouragement, said they 
 felt emotionally moved and intellectually changed. The 
 editor referred to revisions here and there but assured me 
 she meant nothing dramatic. I became very dependent 
 on their reactions, on their voices urging me to go on. 
 
85 
 
 Although I was teaching full-time throughout most of 
 the writing of the book, I was as disciplined as I had ever 
 been in my life, sitting down at the computer or with my 
 notebooks every single day, making my way through five 
 long chapters. I gathered my stories about what I began 
 to call “the whiteness of whiteness,” a state of blindness I 
 saw as the ignorance and denial of the impact of racism, 
 both its history and everyday late-twentieth-century life. 
 Extracted from my journals, then rewritten in notebooks, 
 finally onto the pages of my narrative, I created a method 
 for reworking the stories into a coherent draft. Once the 
 anxiety of the initial draft was past, I relished the revision 
 process, clarifying, shaping language and internal struc¬ 
 ture as I had for so many years insisted my students do. 
 For those weeks of crafting, I was in control and felt I 
 was regaining strength for the next period of uncertainty 
 when perhaps I could dismantle the long-erected wall in 
 myself—a steel wall that comes down suddenly, block¬ 
 ing my view of a beautiful lagoon, protecting my spirit 
 from attack, but also imprisoning, shutting out my most 
 personal vision of the world. 
 
 When I look back now, I am awed by how much was 
 riding on that book for me. I was reworking my own 
 past, writing for my children, but also for my parents. 
 I remembered my mother teaching me how to draw a 
 face, framing my childish pictures and hanging them on 
 a special part of the living room wall, telling me I was 
 an “artist,” and for years I had understood the signifi¬ 
 cance of this naming for me. But my art had become the 
 art of words, and my father was a man of words whose 
 lifelong activism and unswerving dedication to the fight 
 for social justice I had always admired. I was writing my 
 way through a kind of writing block, caused by deep dis- 
 
86 
 
 appointments with the reception of my previous books. 
 Not least, the promise of a decent sum of money was due 
 when the manuscript was complete. 
 
 As I retell this story now, I remember all that I have 
 learned about the way any work, even a simple job well 
 or poorly done, can reach into the bottom layers of self, 
 bringing up old associations of dignity or shame, touch¬ 
 ing a bedrock sense of self-worth that moves and shifts 
 dangerously in some of us. I know I have marveled at the 
 solidity of that foundation in Douglas, in my own chil¬ 
 dren, and recognized its precariousness in most of the 
 writers I have ever known, including myself. 
 
 When I finished a complete draft, I gave the entire 
 book to my readers, the three women who had been crit¬ 
 ics, muses, and friends. 
 
 And now the most banal part of the narrative, the famil¬ 
 iar disappointment, or disaster, of a publishing experi¬ 
 ence that has happened to so many in the past twenty-five 
 years as the industry has become subsumed in enormous 
 multinational corporations, linked to the corporate film 
 industry, dealing in million-dollar contracts and returns. 
 Banal, even cliche; but damaging, nearly crippling. And 
 should we not speak of this loss too, give it the respect, 
 at least, of visibility, of being told in our own voices, the 
 chance to be grieved without shame? 
 
 My editor was on a rung of the corporate ladder that 
 was very near the top, and her business reputation must 
 have been paramount to her at the time. Her immediate 
 superior, the publisher of a large house, must have dis¬ 
 liked my book, or failed to understand it, or even merely 
 seen that it would never bring in the money books are 
 expected to earn in these times. No one ever told me 
 any of this. No one ever acknowledged a superior whose 
 judgment killed my chance for an honest reading. I only 
 
assume it, because my editor reversed herself completely, 
 deciding that she did not like the book after all, that it 
 was unmoving, unclear, and not at all what they had ex¬ 
 pected, which was a linear narrative, a straightforward 
 family memoir, the story of a white woman individually 
 overcoming racism through understanding the pain (not 
 as significantly, the strengths) of her Black family. She 
 denied that I had described the form and subject to her 
 from the beginning, that she had loved the book up until 
 then, most of which she had already read. 
 
 Racist critiques were made with astonishing shame¬ 
 lessness. The various (unnamed, unseen) readers, my edi¬ 
 tor told me, wanted to know when in my childhood I 
 had “fallen in love with black skin”; whether my sons 
 were dating white or Black women; they felt my sons, 
 who were college educated, presented as thoughtful and 
 gentle people, somehow “did not come through as au¬ 
 thentic young Black men.” 
 
 Most damaging of all in a way, because here my own 
 convictions were weakest, their sources still unconscious, 
 I was told by the woman I had trusted and relied on for 
 a year that my book was structurally chaotic and organi¬ 
 zationally incoherent. When I tried to explain the shape 
 and meaning to her, she implied that I was too defen¬ 
 sive to take criticism, that I could not cope with the 
 reality that my work needed to be thoroughly changed. 
 After a three-hour meeting during which I only barely 
 defended myself against these charges by stating firmly 
 that I would not rewrite the book according to her new 
 specifications and accused her of lying to me about her 
 former opinions, I left the office in a daze that, by the 
 time I entered my apartment, had become a full-blown 
 rage, and in a week’s time had transformed into one of 
 the most overwhelming depressions I have ever known. 
 
88 
 
 Later, when the book was submitted to other pub¬ 
 lishers, several white editors complained of being emo¬ 
 tionally unaffected, that the narrative left them cold. 
 During this time, I was encouraged by many trusted 
 readers, some of them Black, and by the intense appre¬ 
 ciation of a largely Black audience where I gave a read¬ 
 ing. Eventually, when the book found a new publisher, 
 I was told that the emotional effect was intense, that 
 many readers even cried. Perhaps, the white editors who 
 were “not affected” were unable to grasp stories about 
 Black people, unless such stories center on the familiar 
 and stereotypical signal of violent rage, or are written by 
 those whose reputations for earning large sums of money 
 for publishers are already assured. I was learning more 
 than I’d bargained for about what it felt like to be Black, 
 caught in the mazelike structures of racist history and 
 racist institutions, the existence of which most whites are 
 pleased to remain ignorant of for as long as they possibly 
 can. 
 
 Yet even now I write against deeply ingrained cul¬ 
 tural assumptions that we must take full personal blame 
 for every failure, whether in family life, professional 
 achievement, or the arts, that understanding the broader 
 political contexts of our failures, or of our achievements 
 for that matter, is only an excuse. The cream rises to the 
 top. If you’re good enough, and determined enough, you 
 can make your dreams come true: a half-truth, crucial 
 to remember when one is falling into self-pity or false 
 blame; dangerous when the odds against you are more 
 powerful than any single individual’s capacity to defeat 
 alone. 
 
 I dream I am working on the computer and suddenly all 
 my work disappears. The screen presents, instead, a basic 
 
<%> 
 
 lesson in how to use WordPerfect, my word-processing 
 program. Patterns I thought I’d overcome years before 
 close in on me again, and I follow old narrow tracks with 
 hideous ease. I begin to feel secretly crazy, convinced “I 
 cannot read the world right,” as I have named this feeling 
 since I was a child and asked all the adults around me, 
 “Is my mother going to die?” Then heard them say, “No, 
 of course not, how could you say such a terrible thing?” 
 The despair is so unrelenting, the sense of unworthiness 
 never to be erased so fully returned, a feeling of failure 
 in the world seemingly so final, that for the second time 
 in my life I make the decision to give up writing entirely. 
 Thus, I lose my last defense. 
 
 I try to emulate Douglas’s relentless optimism, his abil¬ 
 ity to leap out of every disappointment into renewed, 
 energetic hope, but I am afraid we are both in danger 
 of losing heart. We watch hours and hours of television, 
 trying to relax and escape, becoming resident experts on 
 every detail of the O.J. Simpson case. We talk of O.J. 
 Simpson in the dark before we fall asleep, go over the 
 hours of commentary on talk shows every night, check¬ 
 ing off all the points that argue for his innocence. 
 
 Long after the not guilty verdict, when I am still in 
 treatment for breast cancer and trying to unravel all the 
 stories I am writing here, I will dream I am walking 
 through a world of dark, underground caves. In one cave 
 I see Simpson sitting on a rock, bereft and alone. He may 
 have been found not guilty of murder, but he has been 
 found guilty of being a bad person, so he must remain 
 underground and in prison for the rest of his life. He 
 looks into my eyes, and I see we are the same. 
 
 Ice mountains solidify, collect garbage until the gar¬ 
 bage becomes the mountain itself. The steel door, even 
 with its ugly rust and corroded paint, is the only escape. 
 
I begin to take a sleeping pill each night, craving uncon¬ 
 sciousness. For the first time in my life I have to remind 
 myself to write in my journal. With the relief of the deep 
 sleep provided by the pill, even dreams disappear. The 
 moment I leave my classroom, or turn off the television, 
 depression sweeps over me. I am invisible. I am silent. 
 This downward turning feels life threatening, as if I am 
 actually descending into a world of underground caves. 
 It grows darker and colder. I am awakened in the night 
 by intense sweats accompanied by the certainty that I 
 have cancer. I am brokenhearted and fear a heart attack. 
 My grief consolidates. I am enclosed. 
 
 During this period, the early spring of his senior year at 
 Brown University, Khary and his friends at school, all of 
 whom are Black, although from a variety of ethnic back¬ 
 grounds, are increasingly harassed by the police. They 
 are stopped on the street without reason and asked for 
 identification, even threatened. Their parties are broken 
 up violently, false accusations made about selling drugs 
 and liquor. One of Khary’s close friends is arrested and 
 taken to jail, where he will remain frightened and angry 
 all night. Khary and another friend jump into a car to 
 follow him to the station house, determined to be wit¬ 
 nesses and thus lessen the chances of police brutality. 
 But as soon as they start the engine, they are surrounded 
 by several police cars screeching to cut them off, “like 
 in some cop movie,” he tells me. “I have the right to see 
 what happens to my friend,” Khary says to the encircling 
 police, and one cop, his hand on his gun, shouts, “You 
 have whatever rights I say you have.” 
 
 Every day, Douglas and I call deans, assistant deans 
 for “minority affairs,” the head of the college police who 
 himself was once a member of the Providence force. He 
 speaks with careful respect of “African American young 
 
9i 
 
 men,” assures me he knows it is natural for college stu¬ 
 dents to have loud parties and question authority, ad¬ 
 mits that when Black young men are having parties and 
 questioning authority, police immediately tend to sus¬ 
 pect they are part of the drug world. He acknowledges 
 the accuracy of the reputation of the Providence police 
 for racism and brutality, “worse than in L. A“But I told 
 them,” he says, “that Khary and his friends are good guys, 
 and not to even think about harming any of them.” His 
 need to say this escalates my fear of what might happen 
 on any given night when some young African American 
 college student, possibly my son, decides to question the 
 authority of a cop. Then he tells me he knows just how 
 I feel because his own son, a member of the Providence 
 police force, has been targeted by a local gang for death. 
 Silently, I wonder whether the young man has been bru¬ 
 tal or unjust to provoke this targeting. Nevertheless, I 
 sympathize with the father, terrified for his son’s life. As 
 parents we feel the same, although our sons are on oppo¬ 
 site sides of what Khary has called a war. But this is the 
 man who was Khary’s primary adversary on a univer¬ 
 sity committee formed to address the question of college 
 police being armed. He wanted his men to carry guns. 
 Khary and his friends wondered how many Black stu¬ 
 dents would be shot “by mistake.” Several hundred miles 
 down the East Coast, I am wary and desperate. I beg him 
 to keep an eye out for my child, to negotiate with the 
 police. Nothing is sensible or controllable. I am unable to 
 protect my son, and white society at all levels denies the 
 racism threaded into every social structure, every indi¬ 
 vidual mind. At some point, with college intervention, 
 the crisis lessens, but it does not disappear. The police 
 have labeled the house of Khary and his friends a “trouble 
 spot.” At the least, they are robbed of the pleasures of 
 
92 
 
 late parties during the end of senior year. At worst, they 
 may be in real danger. I count the days until graduation, 
 realizing the stories I’ve collected in my book will never 
 be done. I begin to fear, as Derrick Bell and others have 
 said, that American racism is permanent, incurable, an 
 evil we shall never overcome. 
 
 I enter into a period in which my journal is obsessed 
 with fear, self-doubt, and self-deprecation in relation to 
 everyone and everything. More than a year later, these 
 pages are still painful to read. The desire to contribute to 
 public conversations on issues about which I care deeply 
 and have spent my life exploring — motherhood, race, 
 the uses of autobiography to reflect on history — feels 
 doomed. 
 
 There are two equally important aspects of a writing 
 life. One is the bedrock temperamental need to continu¬ 
 ally, as Adrienne Rich put it in one poem, “turn one’s life 
 into words.” The other, which grows as one ages, is the 
 need for impact, for recognition, and thus contribution. 
 Can a woman of fifty who has been writing for twenty- 
 five years have the first without the second? And if not, 
 what possible replacement can there be? These questions 
 plague me and seem unanswerable during the winter and 
 early spring following the shock of this rejection. When 
 I walk from the subway to work, or from home to the 
 store, I have the desire to lie down on the pavement and 
 just go to sleep. She is out of her mind, I hear someone say 
 as he passes my body in the street. I stop for a moment, 
 staring down, strongly attracted by the possibility of not 
 taking another step. 
 
 Toward the end of April, after a year of searching, Doug¬ 
 las finally gets an interesting and apparently permanent 
 job. Two weeks later, I go for a sonogram to test a hard- 
 
93 
 
 ness in my right breast, which I am certain is just the 
 cystic breast tissue I have experienced in the past. But 
 as soon as the radiologist touches me, I see recognition 
 in her eyes, and the needle biopsy she gives me then 
 and there confirms I have breast cancer; a discrete lump, 
 she thinks, hopefully easily removed, she reassures me, 
 but nevertheless a lump. Cancer. A disease that mystifies 
 doctors and researchers with its power to return. In that 
 sense, incurable, at least in any definitive terms. 
 
 And in that moment, standing on the street with Doug¬ 
 las, both of us in a kind of shock, my depression lifts. As 
 if by a harsh, swift wind, despair is blown away. I notice 
 it immediately — the heaviness gone. I am terrified, but 
 also energized by a kind of gathering determination I can 
 only call hope. 
 
 Reaching back into a past I thought was all but lost 
 to me, I begin to write obsessively. I write about my 
 feelings, record information, take notes on the medical 
 knowledge I have to master in a few days in order to make 
 intelligent decisions. I write in hospital waiting areas, on 
 examination tables waiting for doctors to come into the 
 room, on subways, at home whenever I am not occu¬ 
 pied with something else. Long-obscured feelings are 
 suddenly stark and clear. Now I can name the deep and 
 dangerous shift I felt: a loss of faith, or belief in the spirit 
 of my life, as if it were over, nothing to live for; what one 
 writer I read long ago called “a leftover life to live.” 
 
 At first, I am writing only to maintain a sense of con¬ 
 trol. But slowly, after the surgery is over and the period of 
 treatments begins, words assume their old magic again. I 
 am intrigued by their heft and weight, entranced by their 
 music, their capacity to represent so closely what I feel 
 inside and notice in the world. I dream the old dream 
 of finding an unused, dusty but spacious room behind a 
 
94 
 
 door in my apartment, a room I had forgotten was there. 
 
 But I feel a stranger in my body with all its aches and 
 pains, its weaknesses and inabilities, its threats. I lean on 
 everyone, can’t lift a box of groceries, get through a day 
 without sleeping, or a night without crying. It feels in¬ 
 sufficient to say, simply, that I am afraid I am my mother 
 and therefore dying despite positive medical prognoses; 
 or that many people feel illness, especially cancer, as a 
 mysterious, personal failure, resistant to ordinary com¬ 
 prehension and controls. I can list all my griefs, but I can’t 
 knit them together. I need some more specific center. I 
 need to see, or create, a structure in order to understand. 
 
 When my younger sister Emily comes from Califor¬ 
 nia to stay for several weeks, and accompanies me to 
 the first, most frightening, chemotherapy, I look at the 
 woman and remember the little girl. I held her in my arms 
 as we clung to each other in our beds, nights increasing 
 into years as our mother lay dying in her room through 
 the kitchen and down the hall. I remember feeling en¬ 
 raged, wanting it to be over, wanting them to turn the 
 lights on in that room. But those thoughts quickly sank 
 into darkness, and habitual insomnia began. After our 
 mother died, I would crawl into Emily’s bed, pretending 
 I was there to protect her, letting her fall asleep on my 
 shoulder as we listened to our father pacing and weeping 
 outside our door. I remember her long blond hair, which 
 I envied and adored, the intense blue eyes that marked 
 her, and not me, as our father’s child, the small, thin body 
 I smacked in anger, leaving long red marks on her fair 
 skin. I remember reaching out for her hand as our family 
 cruelly divided us, she, her father’s child, I, my mother’s, 
 each of us deprived of half a sense of belonging, which 
 in different ways became not belonging anywhere at all. 
 Over and over, I remember staring up at them as they 
 
narrated their divisive mythologies and reaching down 
 for my sister’s hand. 
 
 Emily is a painter and sculptor, and during one long 
 period she painted double portraits. From each canvas, 
 two faces looked out at me, the two earliest, most familiar 
 faces of my life. Both cast as women, one had my father’s 
 features, and one my mother’s. But the woman with her 
 features in certain paintings could also look like me, and 
 in another light I could see both my sister and myself in 
 my father’s face. When she is sitting in the living room 
 after the chemotherapy is over and I am lying on the 
 couch, nauseated but relieved, I feel an enveloping com¬ 
 fort. When she touches my arm, I feel I am safe at home. 
 
 It is always difficult to call a new therapist, to ask a 
 complete stranger to listen to the most detailed narratives 
 of one’s most personal life. But with Emily’s encourage¬ 
 ment, I call someone recommended by a friend. I was 
 surprised that I was calling a man, and told myself the 
 defining reason was that his office was within walking 
 distance of my apartment. Now I realize there were old 
 and reliable securities embedded in his maleness, a belief 
 in survival itself. When I first meet Aaron, I am struck by 
 his kindness. I have no hopes or anticipation of the pro¬ 
 found changes I am about to undergo. 
 
 During most of the summer, I swing between strength 
 and weakness, confidence and fear. Then, one night, I 
 awaken from a nightmare in a rage so intense I am 
 screaming. Incoherent sounds, roars, or cries are coming 
 from my throat and I cannot stop them until Douglas 
 shakes me. I know I have dreamed about my former 
 editor, the woman who betrayed my book. Like a child 
 changing a monster into some ordinary, familiar shape, 
 I have to turn on the light to wipe out the image of her 
 face in the dark. 
 
S><? 
 
 I describe this experience to Aaron, and we spend the 
 hour sharing feelings of anger at the lies that made me 
 sickened and sick. After the rage is out, there is space in¬ 
 side that slowly fills with unconnected memories. Over 
 the next few weeks, I carefully avoid planning what stor¬ 
 ies I will tell to begin my session. I do not search for 
 insights to bring him. I do not want to present myself, 
 but rather to speak about whatever comes to me at the 
 moment, to feel the relief of getting it all out of my 
 mind. Out of her mind, I think happily, enjoying the echo. 
 And now I see that the accusation of structural chaos 
 was key for me, and I recall old memories, forgotten for 
 years. 
 
 My mother’s slender, elegant body is covered in the 
 long pink bathrobe she wears after her morning shower 
 and her evening bath. Her feet are clad in high-heeled 
 slippers, stripes of silver and blue. It must be the morn¬ 
 ing when she is getting ready to go to work, because I 
 am choosing a flower from the artificial flower drawer, 
 then a folded handkerchief from the neatly stacked pile 
 in the handkerchief drawer. I am changing the contents 
 of the brown bag to the blue one to go with the blue 
 suit with the black velvet collar and cuffs. I have no idea 
 if my mother would have imposed her love of order on 
 her daughters. Perhaps she was a freer spirit, comfort¬ 
 able with or even fulfilled by a child’s difference from 
 herself. But after her death, her orderliness and elegance 
 were idealized. As a teenager, I preferred dirty sneakers, 
 torn black sweaters, and tangled hair. As a child, I threw 
 tantrums and toys around my room. 
 
 I am a small child, sitting in the middle of a messy 
 room. I am surrounded by every toy and piece of cloth¬ 
 ing I own, a sea of chaotic possessions, playing first with 
 one thing, then another. My mother is sitting on the bed 
 
97 
 
 screaming to someone else that she cannot control me, 
 doesn’t know what to do with me. An ordinary experi¬ 
 ence of many mothers and children, no doubt; but for me 
 every moment of conflict with my mother, every pass¬ 
 ing anger, is attached to the memory of her death and 
 my guilty sorrow, until over the years that central mem¬ 
 ory thickens, as if with layers of once-transparent glass 
 streaked with grime, finally becoming opaque enough to 
 hide the infinite variety of my badness. I am sitting on 
 the floor surrounded by the mess I have made. My ele¬ 
 gant mother is weeping, she is covering her face with her 
 hands. 
 
 When I leave Aaron’s office, I feel lighter, unburdened. 
 In recapturing an old source of shame, which now feels 
 like some kind of innocence, the newer sorrow dimin¬ 
 ishes. As I walk home, I have another memory. I am the 
 mother now. First Adam, then Khary is sitting in a com¬ 
 pletely disordered room, and I sit on the floor, my back 
 resting against the wall. I watch as my child begins cre¬ 
 ating a block structure in one corner, using everything on 
 the floor as part of the construction — the blocks, other 
 stray toys, pieces of clothing, a glass half full of juice, 
 colored candies trailing dust from the pocket of his jeans, 
 even a few old hardened crusts of bread from lunch. Out 
 of this mixture of shiny, expensive toys and debris, a 
 spectacular and weird structure is emerging. Blocks of 
 various shapes lie sturdily atop one another. The glass of 
 juice has become a glittering column holding up some 
 sort of terrace upon which small wooden people walk and 
 sit in tiny chairs. An orange Life Saver placed at the pin¬ 
 nacle catches the afternoon light. The memory is sharp 
 and bright, my son so fully concentrated saliva is drip¬ 
 ping from the corner of his mouth (when it is Adam), his 
 tongue protruding through his lips (when it is Khary), as 
 
98 
 
 he creates a corner of balance and beauty, sitting amidst 
 the disorder of his room. 
 
 As I walk down the street, a frigid wind snaps across 
 my forehead. I lift my face to it and let it sting my eyes so 
 that the tears from the cold can increase the tears already 
 on my cheeks. In this image, I have begun to understand 
 and thus recover the essence of my writing life. 
 
 During the afternoon following the sixth of eight 
 chemotherapy treatments, I am lying in bed, hiding be¬ 
 hind my telephone machine, as usual, unable to tolerate 
 speaking to anyone for several hours after I come home. 
 But for some reason on this day when the phone rings I 
 pick it up. It is my former editor who is calling to con¬ 
 gratulate me on reselling my book, cheerfully wishing 
 me the best of luck. There is a long moment of stunned 
 silence. I feel a clean, hard anger move up into my throat. 
 In a tone of furious warning I tell her never to dare call 
 me again, that I do not know how she has the nerve to 
 contact me, that if she wants to convey any message, she 
 should do so through my agent, and I hang up. For the 
 next twenty hours, I am violently ill. I vomit every ten 
 minutes or so, throwing up everything in my system, and 
 then, when there is nothing left, gagging on my own bile 
 as if the entire world makes me sick. I will never know if 
 this extreme reaction is the result of the juxtaposition of 
 chemotherapy with four weeks of radiation, which the 
 doctors suggest is possible, or if it is related to the phone 
 call, the sound of her voice denying the impact of her 
 actions, my regurgitated rage replacing the self-effacing 
 and muted response I controlled myself into having in 
 her office six months before. 
 
 For the next few months I begin to plan this narrative as 
 if it may save my life. I will weave my story with fervent 
 
yet skeptical faith that somehow, if I get close enough 
 to the least-apparent truth, I will complete my cure. Not 
 only must I write my narrative to strengthen that myste¬ 
 rious entity, my immune system, but by the time I reach 
 the final pages, I hope to glimpse some bedrock reality 
 about my experience of these successive griefs that sug¬ 
 gests a bridge to walk on from here. I want a structure 
 that is stone solid, yet flexible, so that I can accommo¬ 
 date alterations I discover along the way. An outline of 
 sorts. A map. 
 
 While I am still in the middle of treatments, I receive a 
 call from an old friend, my former stepmother, Maurine. 
 She came into my life when I was twelve, like one of those 
 old unknown rooms in the back of a house that suddenly 
 sheds a different light on everything that was there be¬ 
 fore. She is a profoundly optimistic soul, involved with 
 lifelong spiritual and physical disciplines of all kinds, an 
 actress and director who, though she never gained a wide 
 reputation, has grown more and more serious and accom¬ 
 plished through the years. She is in her middle eighties 
 now, and she is calling to tell me she has recently been 
 diagnosed with breast cancer. Like me, she will be all 
 right, a survivor, and in many of its particulars her can¬ 
 cer is similar to mine. This experience frees something 
 inside me. In that extra room, sheets are suddenly swept 
 off old furniture, the furniture itself moved around to 
 frame a clearer, more open space. If Maurine has breast 
 cancer, though its source may include an insidious com¬ 
 bination of physical and spiritual weakness, there is one 
 thing it is not. It is not punishment. For who would pun¬ 
 ish so sunny and sturdy a spirit as hers? 
 
 And so I know, in a way of knowing far more certain 
 than mere analysis, that I am not being punished. Not 
 with cancer, not with any loss from death or coldness or 
 
100 
 
 some ever-present ordinary or extraordinary risk to my 
 children’s lives. In that moment of relief when I see loss 
 and pain and even maternal anxiety as life’s sorrow, and 
 not a purposeful infliction aimed at my own guilt, I see its 
 opposite more clearly than ever before. All my griefs, dis¬ 
 appointments, and conflicts have felt like punishments to 
 me. Punishments not only destined, but deserved. “You 
 are not guilty. You must stop looking for your badness 
 everywhere. You didn’t kill your mother. It’s time to leave 
 it go,” Aaron nearly shouted at the end of one session 
 when I had equivocated, always stopping short of ex¬ 
 onerating that little girl waiting for her mother’s death, 
 never exonerating the woman for any mistake, limita¬ 
 tion, wrong word, any failure to provide. And I begin to 
 wonder if the weight of his insistence might be strong 
 enough to undermine the lifelong cast, an acquittal to 
 prevail against a prison so long lived in it feels like home. 
 
 My stories have crowded his room, and I am opened 
 as I do not recall being opened ever before, as if a sharp 
 scalpel has slit apart my mind like a sharp scalpel slit apart 
 my right breast. My oldest rage and griefs had flowed 
 back into my system, flooded it with poison, break¬ 
 ing down immunities built up over years, immunities I 
 thought were reliable, protective, learned. But there was 
 a fault in the structure. Broken down like a dam attacked 
 by a hurricane, the structure cracks and breaks and the 
 story pours through. 
 
 Inside, there has always been a channel, or what I have 
 called a channel. Suddenly, it opens and I am in a place 
 where the deepest connections I see easily find language. 
 This is what I have been resisting, rushing to fill the 
 hectic space with ordinary tasks, company, reading, tele¬ 
 vision, anything to dim its stunning intensity. 
 
 Writing these pages, nearly a year after my surgery, I 
 
101 
 
 am amazed at the truth of that sentence. I was afraid I 
 had nothing. As if I didn’t have my children, Douglas, 
 the other people I love; as if I didn’t have the Wellfleet 
 Bay on a cloudy day, its tall grasses and soft waters; the 
 exciting combination of deep red and gold, or the tran¬ 
 quillity of pale green near a grayish blue; as if I didn’t 
 have the perfect words, a sense of unworthiness never to be 
 erased or intimacy itself. I was afraid I had nothing. My 
 vision cut off by a wall of steel, there was nothing to keep 
 me from death. 
 
 This is the climax then, the moment of creation, the 
 transformation of the layers and sources of my feelings 
 into some alternative form, a corner of careful building 
 to place them out of my mind. I am aroused. As with 
 the emphatic, rhythmic percussion of an orgasm giving 
 both ecstasy and relief, my body is alive with liquid sen¬ 
 sation. I cannot, like some, plan and order my dreams, 
 but I descend to the hard ground of my channel and I 
 kneel down. There is my spirit, or heart, washed out of 
 the cave by a storm. It lies on the damp sand, beating. 
 
Remake 
 
 If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are 
 free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look 
 where your hands are. Now. 
 
 — Toni Morrison, Jan 
 
 It has been five months since the last chemotherapy treat¬ 
 ment. During this time I have lived in a state of near 
 solitude and inward focus bordered only by the comfort 
 and security of Douglas and Khary coming home each 
 night. Even then, they are both quiet souls. We share 
 news of the day, eat a meal together, and then, often, I 
 return to this room, this chair, where I pull out my note¬ 
 books and narrative and descend again. At times I feel 
 guilty for this long period of self-involvement. With no 
 students to teach, no children to raise, little connection 
 to much outside my own mind and imagination, there 
 is no daily giving to ground a sense of goodness in my¬ 
 self. Self-preoccupied, even self-absorbed, I am regularly 
 accosted by critical voices reminding me of all the ex¬ 
 traordinary troubles in the world and ordinary needs of 
 family and friends. But I have had a kind of vision, a see¬ 
 ing into things I cannot ignore. I will return to the world, 
 I tell myself, the needs of the people I love, work with, 
 share life with. But surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation 
 did not complete my cure. I am certain of this. I have 
 interior jungles to journey through. I dream them all 
 winter, darkened thick places where narrow paths twist 
 ahead of me in unmistakable invitation. Cars and trucks 
 are leaving just as I get to the stopping place in the road. 
 I am waiting at desolate snow-filled stations for trains 
 that are so late I fear they may never come at all. Suit- 
 
103 
 
 cases filled with old possessions of my father’s and my 
 mother’s are locked in storage while I try to find the claim 
 ticket that will prove they are mine. Often, I am carrying 
 a small child in my arms — a blond baby, or an olive¬ 
 skinned boy — who has been in my dreams for as long as 
 I can remember. It is apparent I have to walk each step of 
 this journey burdened by no impediment to my energy 
 for looking within. Only the most personal writing en¬ 
 ables me to feel secure, to wait on the roads and stations 
 with some sense of faith that I will reach a destination, a 
 place to lay my head. 
 
 Children are so sturdy. They can make survival ac¬ 
 commodations to wounds and losses and cruelties and 
 injuries with seemingly endless variety. But we are also 
 fragile creatures, for in those accommodations we ampu¬ 
 tate and cripple parts of ourselves. How did I finally get 
 to this place after so long a time, to be able to retrieve my 
 mother’s photograph from the bottom of a hutch drawer, 
 frame it, and hang it on the wall? How did I come to 
 be able to wear her pearls, which I’ve had almost all my 
 life and have never been able to wear? Somewhere in my 
 notes, the clear line of the story must be evident, and I 
 want to follow it now. This time chronology serves, for 
 it is the end of the narrative of my grief. 
 
 It is December, a few days before Christmas. I have re¬ 
 cently completed the six months of treatments for breast 
 cancer, and slowly my energy has begun to return. One 
 evening, I am waiting for members of my family to arrive 
 from other cities. I am cooking several dishes for dinner, 
 stopping to clean out rooms and empty dresser drawers 
 for guests. While I work, I am listening to choral music, 
 and behind the voices a rhythmic beat of a bass keeps 
 track. The repetition of song and beat builds sensuously 
 until I am high, gaining and losing myself in the same 
 
104 
 
 moment of joyful energy. This is how it begins. A feeling 
 of life, my brain finely tuned, my body pulsating with 
 passions of all kinds. I believe I can find the words for this 
 narrative, that I will be free of disease, and behind it all, 
 the image of Aaron’s attention during my sessions, his 
 memory for detail, his interest, the intensity of his gaze. 
 
 I remember having this feeling many years ago after 
 a cervical cancer scare, which was resolved with minor 
 treatments. I remember living in its sometimes blind¬ 
 ing glare during the year I became, and then passed, my 
 mother’s death age of thirty-eight. I thought I could have 
 and do everything. My power was limitless. I felt I could 
 change the world. Was it then I became certain, as well, 
 that every failure or loss was a punishment of the magic 
 girl I shamefully believed myself to be? 
 
 Like a dry canyon slowly moistening and filling with 
 water, my sexual feeling intensifies, sometimes just a gen¬ 
 eral sense of sexual life, not directed at anyone in par¬ 
 ticular, spread out and medicinal, as though old cells are 
 being healthfully rearranged. Throughout January, the 
 strange happiness continues, strange because it is wedded 
 to an explicit articulation of grief. I write out the details 
 of my recent sorrows, relive the treatments I have only 
 just escaped, trying to sort one thing from another or 
 gather what seems similar into one place. 
 
 The beggar girl I thought I’d locked away has returned 
 with all her greedy hopes and hopeful needs. I touch her 
 filthy rags. I run my fingers through her greasy hair. I 
 look her in the eye. I have always known the roots of 
 all my fears lay in childish terrors, but now I feel the 
 connections as if they were my own pulse or breath, see 
 them as clearly as blood drawn from my vein. My anxiety 
 is triggered by a certain kind of anger. I am impotent, 
 then terrified. I am the victim and the furious attacker. A 
 
child is pounding her fists against a slab of stone. As the 
 weeks go by and I am increasingly focused on describ¬ 
 ing her, my anxieties begin to diminish, not to dissolve, 
 but to lessen considerably so that I am able to keep them 
 under control before they rise into panic. Now, if Adam 
 doesn’t call, I imagine he is busy, not in danger or ill. If 
 Khary or Douglas is late coming home and sirens screech 
 down my block announcing multiple disasters, I watch 
 my fears begin, but I am more often able to remain calm. 
 Sometimes I truly believe they are unharmed. When I 
 see the beggar girl is not me, I glimpse the possibility of 
 safety and well-being. When I see she is me, I find her 
 sad and beautiful, a desperate, harmless child. 
 
 I buy myself a new Walkman and begin to listen to 
 Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A, then become especially 
 compelled by the second movement. Because of the ear¬ 
 phones, the music seems to be inside my head, within 
 my own imagination. As soon as the clarinet solo begins, 
 joined later by the violins, then the clarinet again, a low 
 cello behind, I am forced downward, as if hypnotized. 
 I am literally entranced. For a moment it seems possible 
 that the meaning I sense will burst into language. I sud¬ 
 denly feel my breaths going deeper, taking longer. I feel 
 my blood slow down. 
 
 As the winter proceeds, I spend more and more time 
 with the dead. My memory is crowded with scenes, old 
 voices, old dreams as vivid as the ones I had the night 
 before. One night, listening to the Clarinet Quintet as I 
 write, I remember how much my father loved music. I see 
 him pacing back and forth in the living room, humming 
 and weeping, as a Tchaikovsky piano concerto plays over 
 and over on the old record player. I open a box that con¬ 
 tains a few of his belongings: aTimex with a broken black 
 band, a pipe, a pair of blue woolen gloves. I was leaving 
 
io6 
 
 his apartment and heading uptown. It was a cold after¬ 
 noon and I had no gloves, so he took his off his hands 
 and gave them to me. “It’s cold,” he said, “put on some 
 gloves.” I wore them home, and several days later we 
 found him dead in his room. He was a gentle soul, full of 
 love and anxieties: perhaps because of his childhood in 
 Russia, always threatened by local Christian anti-Semites 
 and their pogroms, as well as by his father’s brutal beat¬ 
 ings of his brothers, his mother, and himself; perhaps be¬ 
 cause of his life as an American Communist, imprisoned 
 in his youth, for years followed by the FBI; perhaps be¬ 
 cause of the loss of a young wife whom he loved deeply, 
 leaving him with two young daughters, one of whom he 
 found difficult to understand. He used to tap each piece 
 of furniture ritualistically each night before he went to 
 bed. After a turbulent marriage to Maurine and a pain¬ 
 ful divorce, he was increasingly and intentionally alone. 
 Toward the end of his life, when he was sixty-seven, he 
 fell in love for the first time in years with a woman much 
 younger than himself, but she, like my mother, got can¬ 
 cer and died. Soon afterward, he had a heart attack, and 
 two years later he died. But when I was a child he was a 
 charismatic and magnetic man. I remember his passion¬ 
 ate laughter and anger, his lectures to me about American 
 fiction and Marxist theory, the approval that sometimes 
 shone in his pale blue eyes. My love of words originates 
 in his voice commenting and arguing, his ongoing analy¬ 
 sis of politics and love. Even now, I converse with him in 
 my head. I miss him with all the longing of this difficult 
 year. But my father died when I was twenty-eight. It is 
 my mother I know I have to find. 
 
 One afternoon, six or seven past journals spread around 
 me, my narrative in progress open on my lap, writing first 
 in one place, then in another, I realize that the essence of 
 
radiation was loneliness, and that loneliness has always 
 been at the heart of my life. Yet even loneliness is a recov¬ 
 ered feeling, and every recovery feels precious. I cling to 
 it for days, suffering and brave. I feel another sea change, 
 as Gloria once described that long-ago transformation. 
 Tides shift dramatically. Sea life from far-off shores is 
 suddenly rampant and close by. The very feel of the water 
 is changed. At times I feel crazy, thinking about my daily 
 obsessive, joyful, sorrowful digging. I feel slightly mad. 
 By now I am listening to the Quintet many times a day. 
 The music is exquisitely familiar. The relationship be¬ 
 tween the violin and the clarinet in the second move¬ 
 ment brings Aaron’s face into my consciousness almost 
 as visibly as if he were sitting in my room or I were still in 
 his. I conjure him up. My feelings for him are a towrope. 
 He fishes me out of dark water where the ocean meets 
 the bay. In that dream he is a sea monster who looks like 
 a tall skeleton. A j-ee-monster who rises from the dead, 
 surprisingly benign. Gender differences melt back into 
 narrow, distant margins. In the center, I feel a sense of 
 protection. I feel loved. During the sessions I am aware 
 of a familiar yet odd luminosity to his skin, although 
 when I enter and leave the office he is an ordinary man. 
 
 In February, Gloria has been dead four years. I reread 
 her obituary, several of her articles, stare at her photo¬ 
 graph. Aaron tells me a story about a little girl he once 
 knew, his daughter’s friend. She had been through a trau¬ 
 matic experience in a hospital, a severe illness during 
 which time she had to be separated from her mother and 
 her home. Afterward, she would visit his family and play 
 with a dollhouse, but in her play the dollhouse would 
 always be a hospital, the dolls nurses, doctors, and pa¬ 
 tients. 
 
 On a plane heading for the West Coast, I am writing 
 
io8 
 
 in my journal as usual, listening to the music. Perhaps 
 it is because I am on a trip by myself for the first time 
 since being ill, or because I am literally above the earth, 
 suspended in the sky, but suddenly I emerge from what 
 has become this ordinary state of extraordinary intensity. 
 With great pleasure, I watch a light, foolish movie about 
 love, which also pretends America is really a good coun¬ 
 try; a Clinton-like president setting it on the right track 
 by telling everyone what values really are; how we really 
 do know right from wrong; that as a people we must take 
 care of others or lose care ourselves. After watching the 
 movie, I begin to rub a smooth new vitamin E cream 
 into my hands. These two small, effortless activities are 
 the kinds of thing I could not do as a child and young 
 woman without paralyzing self-consciousness. Ordinary 
 tasks seemed to belong to a universe from which I was ex¬ 
 cluded. Others might be lighthearted, pleasurably super¬ 
 ficial. I had to be vigilant, keeping track of the dead. 
 There was a time when I couldn’t dress without great 
 anxiety but, instead, had to throw on one particular black 
 sweater over one particular black skirt and rush away 
 from the mirror as if in escape. I noted the easy sensu¬ 
 ousness other women had with their bodies, their homes, 
 but all that seemed precluded to me. I was always afraid 
 I would lose all memory of what I was supposed to do 
 if I didn’t keep still, sit and stare, write everything down. 
 I rub the cool cream into my hands and remember the 
 time in my life when I could not do simple things, but 
 always had to be that little girl, making a hospital out of 
 a dollhouse. 
 
 As the weeks go by, the harmonies and rhythms of 
 Mozart become part of my consciousness, connected like 
 a keyboard to the strings of my concentration. Each time 
 the violin reaches for its highest note and the clarinet re- 
 
IOC, 
 
 sponds, the music suggests a place of belonging—within 
 — and a way to get there — writing. On March i, my 
 mother has been dead for forty-six years. From a high 
 shelf I take down the few possessions I retain of hers: a 
 handkerchief, a string of pearls. Touching them, I am in a 
 long moment of ecstasy. I feel a sense of being open and 
 the desire to be seen, to be known. I hear my children’s 
 voices, Watch me, Mommy, watch me. And I watch, the 
 boy running faster than ever before, the child swimming 
 his first strokes, the infant lying on his back and gazing 
 up at my face as my hands caress and attend, his legs 
 pushing at air, his arms flailing, his whole body moving 
 with excitement and pleasure. 
 
 Several weeks later, a late March evening, the world 
 outside my window is dark. I have loved the early win¬ 
 ter nights and am sorry to see the days becoming longer. 
 The night makes me feel more alone, as if the world I 
 have been living in is an actual place outside me. The 
 dead, the ungrieved losses, the banished feelings meta¬ 
 morphose around me into visible, tangible shapes. They 
 surround a woman who stands alone in a courtyard, and 
 I know it is the courtyard behind the arches in the paint¬ 
 ing on Aaron’s wall. The woman is singing, talking, re¬ 
 peating sounds I cannot translate into words but whose 
 meaning I know as surely as I know there is music in my 
 ears, darkness in the outside world. The work of the grief 
 narrative is to recover the original desire of wanting my 
 mother more than life but terrified of death, which is 
 where she is. I must recover this desire so its hopeless¬ 
 ness can be separated from all other desires, its horrible 
 futility leaving me with shame or with dread or with 
 nothing or with rage. I remember her in bed in the hos¬ 
 pital, in bed in her room, sitting up and laughing in the 
 afternoon, lying in the dark, sitting in a wheelchair by 
 
the Christmas tree, taking a cinder out of my eye as I 
 stand on the closed toilet under the light. She is emerg¬ 
 ing from the bathtub before she pulls her pink bathrobe 
 around her. She is placing a Kotex between her thighs. 
 
 I write the details as they come to me and then the 
 shading between her and my children blurs. Boundary 
 lines between bodies and passionate loves evaporate, and 
 the blending is so brilliant it is like looking into the sun, I 
 fear my eyes will burn, that I will lose my eyes. The clari¬ 
 net plays what the strings played before, a long phrase 
 whose beauty I thought was gone, and I am in a split 
 second of time when I felt adored the way I adore my 
 children, their flesh, their faces, their skin magical, lumi¬ 
 nous, absolutely singular, irreplaceable. Then their eyes 
 are on my face and I am irreplaceable, absolutely singu¬ 
 lar, illuminated and adored. Aaron’s words from nearly a 
 year before, “You are not her, but you are her daughter,” 
 gain substance, shadow, a rich tome of subtext and im¬ 
 plication. “I call her Tullah. I never call her Mother,” my 
 cold answer, months later. I have known a narrow pit of 
 loneliness, a place where no one could ever find me again. 
 Now, I move slowly into the shadow of her being, this 
 time not obliterated or insubstantiated, but a mother’s 
 daughter like all the other daughters, not in some weird 
 sense motherless, a being who can never belong. 
 
 I remember nearly a year before, my surgeon leaning 
 over me, undoing the surgical stitches from my breast. 
 With tiny scissors she cuts each loop then pulls the slen¬ 
 der, colorless thread out of my flesh. A neat scar remains, 
 but for several months afterward I am afraid the inci¬ 
 sion will open like a seam coming undone and expose my 
 wounded tissue leaking blood. 
 
 Now I feel the same, too open for the world, nearly 
 
faint walking down Broadway. Yet, I am solid in a way, 
 strong enough to face this new, eloquent pain. 
 
 For weeks, each time I turn on the music and the strings 
 begin, I hear the sound of my own voice narrating stories 
 of old love, anger, and gaping need. In the echoing clari¬ 
 net, I hear Aaron’s voice repeating my words to me in a 
 different tone. She is emerging from the bathtub. I see her 
 body clearly. Her thighs are like mine, her breasts smaller 
 like my sister’s, her face is composed, not yet decom¬ 
 posed, short black hair sleek from the water, cut close 
 around her head, skin olive smooth. She pulls a towel 
 back and forth across her back. I see the graceful slope of 
 her waist, the tiny indented valleys on either side of the 
 base of her spine. She puts on a sanitary belt and attaches 
 a Kotex to both ends. Does she stroke my face? I don’t 
 know if I am remembering or imagining but I see her 
 stroke my face, smile slightly, and while this image is in 
 my head another image joins it, as if one picture is super¬ 
 imposed on the other yet both can be seen at the same 
 time. I am sitting in Aaron’s room. He is watching me 
 closely, his attention so focused and powerful I can relax 
 for a moment, for an hour, I can trust it will not disappear. 
 
 The words my darling come back to me, and I remem¬ 
 ber when she died, thinking. Daddy calls me Baby, or 
 Sweetheart, or Ketseleh, I will never hear darling again. 
 Now I begin to hear darling in my head whenever I en¬ 
 counter a person, or image long beloved. When I see one 
 of my sons. When I hear the phrase at the center of the 
 second movement of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet. When 
 I see Douglas’s face in the gray darkness just before I 
 fall asleep. Even in lines of poetry that seem to name 
 perfectly some inchoate feeling of my own. Hands drip¬ 
 ping with wet earth/ head full ofshocking dreams. I see the 
 
112 
 
 movie Jane Eyre, a novel I have studied and taught and 
 loved for many years, the story of a motherless daughter 
 written by a motherless daughter in which both writer 
 and character take possession of the narrative of their 
 lives. The actress is so like my image of Jane it is as if she 
 is Jane, and when I see her face on the screen for the first 
 time, I think — my darling — as if I have found someone 
 lost long ago. But I do not say the words out loud. I keep 
 them to myself, a private sign of other emotions sud¬ 
 denly possible to share. 
 
 I take the pearls out of an old box. A block away from 
 my house is a small jeweler’s, an old-fashioned shop run 
 by an old man who can fix anything. I show him the bro¬ 
 ken clasp, but it is nothing unusual, no big problem for 
 him. He only needs to know if I want gold, or silver like 
 the old one. I want silver, and in two more days I can 
 pick it up. “Good pearls,” he tells me, “worth fixing.” 
 The first time I wear them is in April when we go to Los 
 Angeles to see Adam in a play. 
 
 As I sit in the audience waiting for the play to begin, 
 fingering the pearls, a memory comes to me. In his first 
 year of college, his first time living away from home, 
 Adam’s adjustment is made infinitely more difficult by 
 the onset of diabetes just after his high school gradua¬ 
 tion. He is vulnerable, though as always excited to be out 
 in the world. One night he calls me after seeing an old 
 movie about a mother who is banished from her daugh¬ 
 ter’s life. He describes the plot, the mother poor and un¬ 
 loved, watching her daughter’s marriage into a wealthy 
 family through a crack in the doorway of the church. 
 Then, as her daughter emerges in a flowing elaborate 
 gown, she edges in from the back of the crowd and tries 
 to identify herself, but when her daughter sees her she 
 
H3 
 
 turns her head from the shabby stranger. He is crying 
 as he tells me the story, and I keep asking, but why are 
 you crying so much? “I don’t know,” he repeats. Then 
 finally, “I just know I have always been haunted by your 
 mother.” 
 
 I have often wondered why this generally sturdy, some¬ 
 times fiercely bounded, confident son was so fragile in 
 the face of that story of a banished mother. Now I think 
 perhaps he took in my anguish and my anger. A child 
 with an almost frightening receptivity, perhaps he was 
 unhinged by the conflicting emotions this empathy gave 
 rise to in himself. 
 
 For hours after the play, he seems distracted, recover¬ 
 ing from the powerful emotions that are written into his 
 part. As I watch him exchange the intensity of art for the 
 restraints of ordinary life, I see him as a strong, separate 
 adult, my child elusive, and all weekend my eyes burn 
 with tears. Yet the emotions he brings to the part come 
 from his life story, which branches out of mine. There in 
 the man is my boy, my child, my infant, the heavy turn¬ 
 ing mass inside my body, the solid flesh and skull pushing 
 down the river of blood and pain between my thighs. I 
 have begun to recover my mother through memories of 
 my children’s childhood. Their small hands on my face. 
 Their dark eyes staring at me as if to penetrate my skin. 
 Then at last, after nearly a year of incomprehensible cries 
 and generic gurgles, their voices, and in the memory of 
 their voices finding a name for me for the first time, I 
 hear the faint sound of my own child’s voice calling the 
 lost name. 
 
 A picture forms in my mind and spreads out, forcing 
 everything else into the shadows. I am looking down at 
 my mother in a coffin, as if the coffin is on the floor and 
 
U4 
 
 I am standing over it, looking inside. But not only did I 
 never see my mother in a coffin, coffins are not gener¬ 
 ally placed on the floor so that a child would be standing 
 over it, looking down. Then the image changes suddenly. 
 I am high up, in my father’s arms. I am looking down 
 on my mother in a hospital bed. I am about to leave for 
 my aunt’s house and must have sensed I was seeing my 
 mother for the last time, so I have asked to say good-bye. 
 The room is dim. Her face is tiny, skeletal. Thin brown 
 arms lie across pearly white sheets. And I say softly, be¬ 
 cause I have been told over and over to speak softly in 
 this room, Good-bye Mommy. She doesn’t answer. Her 
 eyes are closed. There is no response. 
 
 Once again I am uncertain if this is actual memory 
 or imagination, a scene generated out of the formless 
 energy of emotion. The relation between fiction and au¬ 
 tobiography has often been a problem for me, and I am 
 always making up scenes. But I know I retained a lifelong 
 discomfort with a certain kind of silence. When I speak 
 and no one answers, I am filled with anxiety, then anger, 
 then desperate need, then hopeless, grief-stricken love. 
 And that is what I am sure I remember as my memory or 
 fantasy floods my consciousness, what I buried all those 
 years. How much I loved her. And so I realize I love her 
 now. 
 
 I remember emerging from anesthesia and the feel¬ 
 ing of Khary’s hand in mine. His large palm, the sharp 
 knuckles, his oddly small nails. Willing to do anything to 
 penetrate the fog and see his face. Gripping his fingers. 
 Hearing his voice. Climbing out of lost time. 
 
 In our hallway is a black hutch that once belonged to my 
 great aunt, my grandmother’s sister. On a low shelf are 
 
albums of photographs carefully organized by time and 
 place. But in three drawers, the overflow gathers into a 
 thick, disorderly pile. Baby pictures of my children, my 
 nieces and nephews, lie right on top of Douglas or me as 
 infants ourselves. I am a young woman with long brown 
 hair, and an aging woman whose hair is white. My father 
 is holding Adam, the only grandchild he lived to see, and 
 he is a young boy in the old country, his facial struc¬ 
 ture and features remarkably like my nephew’s, my sis¬ 
 ter’s son. At the very bottom of one of the drawers is the 
 old portrait of my mother that once was framed in green 
 leather and stood on our bookcase when I was a child. 
 She is wearing a scarf with the triangular point coming 
 over her forehead. Her smile is broad and passionate, 
 her dark eyes full of life. She suffered a terrible illness, 
 died young, and was then exiled by the stories that spun 
 around her corpse, buried in old boxes and the bottoms of 
 drawers. The injustice of it catches in my throat. I frame 
 her picture in narrow gold, like many of the other old 
 family photographs I have hanging on a wall. It will be 
 necessary to take some down, move them closer together 
 to make space for hers, and I do. I take some down and 
 move them closer together to make space for hers. 
 
 And now I don’t want the reiteration of all the blame 
 and anger, not now, not when I’ve finally remembered 
 her thighs, her breasts, the color of her skin. I don’t want 
 those old harangues, complaints, confessions, rage at¬ 
 tacks, that guilt-ridden self-defense, not when I walk by 
 the wall and see her face at last. After all these years, I am 
 able to pull a towel back and forth across my back when 
 I emerge from the shower without it feeling like a dance 
 of death, back and forth until I’m sucking her earth, un¬ 
 able to breathe, trapped down there before my time. No. 
 
il6 
 
 Those screams of don’t leave me, and anguished waits 
 for her returns, those vague and numerous losses that 
 still leave their precise tracks, all those are for some other 
 time, future or past. But not now, not in this moment 
 when I turn the necklace around so I can see what I’m 
 doing in the mirror and slip the sharp point into the tiny 
 ffligreed box. The clasp is just like the old one. The pearls 
 fall gracefully across my bones. 
 
 And what is left to describe? In recent weeks, I have been 
 x-rayed, mammogrified, the inner lining of my uterus bi- 
 opsied, my blood tested for every kind of disease includ¬ 
 ing cancer. I am fortunate, a survivor, and for now the 
 story of illness comes to an end. I would never say I am 
 glad I had cancer, yet it was cancer and my stories about 
 it that cured me of an even more obscure and enigmatic 
 affliction. I no longer feel the dull pain of amputation. 
 Somehow, as if miraculously, I no longer feel masked. 
 
 It is nearly summer again, and I will revisit the ocean, 
 Sally’s peaceful house, the Wellfleet Bay. There are no 
 more tests scheduled until September, so I will assume, 
 each day with a joyous sense of peace, that my body is 
 healed, its scars clear but fading. My breast is perma¬ 
 nently darkened, it seems, the area beneath the scar sensi¬ 
 tive to pressure of any kind. It feels as if everything inside 
 is in pieces, just like wood or some other solid mass might 
 feel if burnt to a crisp, broken apart into cinders and coal. 
 I hold it at night, stroke it, remembering the dark silhou¬ 
 ette in the radiation machine. I have been told my mother 
 had a double mastectomy when they were still trying to 
 save her life. I do not remember seeing that terrible in¬ 
 jury. I do not remember feeling her breast against my 
 cheek. Perhaps if I began with these images, however, I 
 
might be able to reconstruct that story. Language is the 
 carrier of passion for me, its absence the sign of irretriev¬ 
 able loss. It is also the labor that gets me through my days. 
 
 The work of recollecting memories is not over, but every¬ 
 thing can never fit into one story. Rather, I must choose 
 the elements of each piece of work. A crucial time in 
 my childhood that changed my life forever, the mem¬ 
 ory of which might change my life again. This strange 
 and unique love for a therapist who listens so closely he 
 enters into the inside of my stories while still remaining 
 separate, different from the rest, staring at me from an 
 ordinary chair. A piece of music I become enthralled by, 
 listening to it until it is the background of all the feel¬ 
 ing rising up within me, then the foreground, the subject 
 that contains all the others, the very thing itself. 
 
 The violin begins, the clarinet echoes, then the two 
 melodies separate into harmonic difference, an erotic and 
 sorrowful relation, moving over each other, away from 
 each other, back together again. It is the brief moment 
 when the two instruments overlap their notes that draws 
 me down to a place where I have only tears, then out 
 to a desire for words. I have listened over and over try¬ 
 ing to get at what it is about the overlap that thrills me 
 each time, and all I have come up with is this: the low 
 note is held by one, the high note of the other enters into 
 precisely the same moment, and in an ecstatic compre¬ 
 hensible instant, all my grief and love is transformed into 
 
 As I write this sentence, I write memory instead of 
 melody. Your eyes on me. Your voice responding to my 
 voice. Surgical threads stitched, unstitched, then stitched 
 again. I find no perfect chords to bring this story to a 
 
u8 
 
 close. But when I put on my earphones and listen, I en¬ 
 counter an alluring shadow of previous intensity. Then 
 I am back in the revelatory darkness within a series of 
 arches. I look around and feel my darling. Someone is lis¬ 
 tening. The earth beneath my nails is damp with blood. 
 
And now when I reread my own words and once again 
 come to the closing pages of this narrative, I see that 
 even the pattern I have followed here might shift again. 
 In a sense it is arbitrary where I bring this story to a close. 
 Gloria was right. When I am in the midst of a book it is 
 as if my mother is back with me, and when the work is 
 done I have to let her go again. I have only recently re¬ 
 membered that in an unpublished novel I wrote when I 
 was just past being a girl myself, I imagined a girl visit¬ 
 ing a beautiful enclosed park on cold afternoons. In this 
 park — was it bordered by arches? — she would see her 
 dead mother, who could not speak or be spoken to. But 
 she could be looked at, and she could look back in return. 
 
 Memories come to me in pictures, vivid scenes or vague 
 impressions. But I find the pictures are elusive unless I 
 preserve them with words. 
 
 It is Sunday night, our regular “book talk,” and my fa¬ 
 ther’s questions are about the book we have both read 
 that very week. Beneath us is a worn green rug, to my left, 
 floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with books. The black 
 desk where my mother stored her beautiful accessories is 
 his desk now. Scattered papers cover a tom green blotter 
 for his fountain pen. Reflected light from the windows 
 across the street jumps and slides across the large win¬ 
 dow at the end of the room. My mother has been dead 
 for about three, perhaps five years. My younger sister is 
 asleep. My own bedtime, an hour later in honor of my 
 age, is as far off in time as the end of a journey when 
 a journey begins. My father’s white hair waves thickly 
 back from his pale forehead, around his unusually large 
 ears. His blue eyes behind large glasses have always con¬ 
 veyed a sense of mystery for me. Different from my dark 
 
120 
 
 eyes, from my mother’s dark eyes, his are overwhelm¬ 
 ing somehow, like the sky. In his large rough hands, he 
 holds the Russian novel he has assigned that week. He 
 spreads the navy blue covers, opens to a page marked by 
 a navy blue satin ribbon attached to the binding, and be¬ 
 gins to read a passage aloud. He may pause to tell me a 
 story of his own childhood or youth in the early years of 
 twentieth-century Russia, stories that, because he is an 
 emotional man, often evoke his laughter or his tears. 
 
 Light in golden streaks shines from the yellow shaded 
 lamp whose copper base is glistening, dark orange, 
 golden brown, crisscrossing and complicating the light 
 already on the window pane, and I think I do not hear 
 my father’s words, I am so enchanted by his laugh, and 
 laugh in response, then agonized by his tears and I cry. 
 But when he asks me for my thoughts about the book, I 
 somehow have been listening after all, and he seems to 
 like the words I find to answer him. When my words are 
 right and my father admires them, I forget for a moment 
 that my sister’s blond and blue-eyed beauty is easier in 
 his heart, that I don’t have him all to myself, that my 
 mother is never coming back again. I will never forget 
 this feeling, repeated in classrooms where I am a student, 
 then a teacher, in intimate conversations with friends 
 and lovers, in therapy sessions, in audiences when I read 
 from my books, the knowledge that the other person 
 likes my words. Nor will I ever forget the opposite, when 
 I know my words are failing somehow, graceless, dishar¬ 
 monious, horribly flat. 
 
 At times, sitting in my father’s room with its dark 
 greens, pale blues, and copper light, I feel mute, in some 
 kind of swoon that is both erotic and dangerous. What is 
 inside me that I might let out now? What must I hold in, 
 sitting on my heel for hours until my face turns red and 
 
121 
 
 my father sees what I am doing and shouts at me to go to 
 the bathroom. But he cannot force me, of course. I hold 
 in what I must. Over the years, I try to comprehend what 
 I might shape well enough to release. 
 
 Once you have had breast cancer, the chance of having 
 it again is greater than before. These are the statistics, 
 numbers which are one sort of language to describe his¬ 
 tory, no less real than loneliness, itself the trail of loss too 
 great to be mended or restored. But I have survived can¬ 
 cer twice, once my mother’s, once my own. Both times a 
 charged, powerful desire for life infused me, the first time 
 searing guilt into the thick fabric of my loss, the second 
 time forcing me to narrate old stories once again. 
 
 This time I don’t want to forget anything. Not even the 
 nightmares, or the shock of possibly impending death. 
 Once again, I am walking through the doors to the oper¬ 
 ating room, lying down on the table under an enormous 
 light. What are the names of the hooks you have written ? 
 Later, I am holding Khary’s hand, frightened of lost time. 
 My right arm must have been placed at an odd angle be¬ 
 cause for several weeks it was sore, its muscles aching dif¬ 
 ferently from the pains caused by the loss of lymph nodes. 
 My doctor must have needed the arm to be raised and 
 pulled to the side so she could cut a neat line, peel open 
 flesh while someone blotted blood, looked for the signs. 
 
 Nearly two years later, my arm will still begin to ache 
 like an old sorrow suddenly real again in one of those 
 too vivid dreams. I lay it against the softest pillow of 
 the three I use, the one in the silkaline pillowcase, deli¬ 
 cate white embroidery bordering its side. I do not really 
 need such luxurious comfort now, the ache is dull, the 
 sharp pain beneath the scar on my breast occasional. But 
 I want to remember the nights when the pain was so 
 
122 
 
 bad I wept, so I can remember the nights I cried in terror 
 that I was going to die, so I can remember how certain 
 I was I wanted to live as long as I could, and what was 
 important and what was not. 
 
 Sometimes lately, I sit still and silent in Aaron’s room 
 and try to bear a feeling of liquidity, of slow, out of con¬ 
 trol, undulating movement. I am more comfortable now 
 with interior confusion, with stories not yet formed, de¬ 
 sires not yet protected by a crafted phrase. Time moves 
 but does not always tick its seconds so audibly, with such 
 extraordinary threat, and even when I am not writing, 
 I can occasionally forget its relentless movement, allow 
 its velocity to slow or quicken in response to the quality 
 of a moment, the recognition of some simple or enor¬ 
 mous need. I look around at the small, carved animals 
 Aaron collects—oak, rosewood, ebony, some of them 
 streaked with silver lines — lined up on a high bookcase, 
 standing in a circle on two low shelves of glass. When I 
 look at the animals, I think of pain and desire, their in¬ 
 escapable impact, their natural brilliance. I think of the 
 preciousness of ordinary life and of the strange, hard 
 truth that outside fiction, some stories never end. 
 
Jane Lazarre is on the faculty of Eugene Lang College, New 
 School for Social Research. Her books include Beyond the 
 Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black 
 Sons, and The Mother Knot, both memoirs published by Duke 
 University Press; the novels Some Kind of Innocence, The 
 Powers of Charlotte, and Worlds Beyond My Control; and a 
 volume of essays, On Loving Men. 
 
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 Lazarre, Jane. 
 
 Wet earth and dreams : a narrative of grief and recovery / 
 
 Jane Lazarre. 
 p. cm. 
 
 ISBN 0-8223-2206-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 
 
 1. Lazarre, Jane — Health. 2. Breast — Cancer—Patients—United 
 States — Biography. I. Title. 
 
 RC280.B8L298 1998 
 
 362.i'9699449'oo 92 — dc2i 
 
 [b] 98-10116