The Pocket Angel

Saturday evening (yesterday) I was going through my mail. One of the things I got was a big packet of info from the American Cancer Society. I think it must have been sent by my Reach for Recovery volunteer….

As I sat there and looked through some of the booklets on breast cancer, etc., I became more and more upset. The lit described cancer treatments so nonchalantly, as if they were no big deal—not toxic, not destructive, not life-threatening, themselves. Just as if they were these great responses to a deadly disease. It made my stomach turn.

I decided that I needed to call my Recovery volunteer back, finally. I needed to thank her for the things she had sent…and I wanted to talk to her about my feelings. Had she ever felt the same way I did? I wanted to talk to someone who had had the same highly negative opinion about cancer treatment, and learned to accept it with equanimity. I hoped she would be such a person. But I couldn’t find her name and phone number any more. I looked high and looked low…but no luck. So I called the ACS to ask them if they could have her contact me again.

And as I talked to them, I continued to get more and more upset. I began to cry, to sob. All of these horrible, horrible procedures, described in their lit so casually, almost in a mode of celebrating everything that can be done for cancer treatment today.

Celebrating. Not describing with sober apology. But celebrating.

The young woman who answered the phone at the ACS offered to stay on the line if I wanted to talk for awhile. I said, “But that would be kind of like Harry Potter calling Lord Voldemort to talk about how afraid he is of dying. You know what I mean?” She said she wasn’t a Harry Potter fan and had no idea.

She objected to the idea that the ACS literature celebrates cancer. It is just a dispassionate statement of the facts about cancer and cancer treatment, she said. It doesn’t celebrate anything.

But it doesn’t decry anything either, I thought. It seems not to approach the idea of cancer and cancer treatment with humility and some sense of apology for the fact that it is so barbaric and brutal. Instead, it seems to be an advocate for the “ain’t modern medicine wonderful” approach.

And I just can’t stomach that. It seems disingenuous to me. Dishonest, even. As long as modern medicine is this brutal, it ain’t wonderful.

And yet here I am, caught in this horrible, horrible system that, horrible as it is, still offers me my best chance at beating the disease.

And I cried and I cried and I cried. Big, heaving sobs. It all seems so meaningless. So pointless. It’s essentially just one big meat grinder, and I am caught in it. Becoming a part of the meat grinder offers me my only hope.

And this feels so evil to me.

Finally I decided to get on about the business of reading my mail, and I saw a card from Jane. I opened it, still sobbing, and I read her message.

She was sending me, she said, a small silver pocket angel that had been given to her during a time in her life when things looked particularly bad. The giver had told her to remember, when she touched it, that she was loved and was not alone.

Jane said that she had kept the pocket angel long after her acute need for its reassurance was gone. She had been saving it to pass along, one day, to someone else who was facing what seemed like an overwhelming life crisis. To someone else who might need a touchstone for comfort and joy.

I clutched her card with the attached angel to my chest and just sobbed and sobbed some more.

Was it true, I asked whatever angel might be hovering near me. Was it true? Is there more meaning in what I’m going through than JUST the fact that I’m caught up in a meat grinder—the meat grinder of cancer treatment, which is exceeded only slightly by the meat grinder of cancer itself? Is there some aspect to this cancer that makes it about more than just the cancer? About more than just the physical danger and the suffering inherent in modern cancer treatment?

At that very moment, the power to the house went out for one brief moment, and it felt as if the cosmos had just nodded.

And I found myself laughing through my sobs. “OK,” I said silently. “OK. OK.”

I stopped crying, dried my tears, and continued to read my mail.