All Eyes on Me

It's growing back again. My mother's tumor's growing back. Always, she goes in, endures the treatments in all their hell, is all right for a while after, and then it grows back again. This is how it is.

We knew it would happen. It's always going to happen, from now until when she dies. All this awful chemo and radiation and drugs, and it's just going to keep coming back.

Cancer, and cancer, and cancer, C.S. Lewis wrote. I think of it often now. Sometimes I want to dig the phrase into the wall with a pocket-knife. Cancer took his mother too, then his father, and finally his wife.

When I picture her, I still see her as she always was, blonde and lovely and perfect. When I see her in person it's always a surprise. She doesn't look sick, really, but so different... so much worse. When I was home, someone commented on the difference. She pulled out her driver's license, with its photo from before-- from when her face was still pretty and heart-shaped and she still had her long golden hair. Now she is puffy and though her hair has grown back it's so different now, short, darker, wiry. I knew how she had been dreading that moment. The only thing worse was the time that child who hadn't seen her in a while refused to believe it was her now, because "JoAnne is pretty, and has long blonde hair."

It's like a punch in the guts just thinking about it. She told me about it in rueful terms, as if it were just a little embarrassing. If I had been her then, I would have slit my wrists.

In and out. Back in, back out. Her hair will be gone again. She will be sick, weak, tired, and still the cancer will be there. I don't know how she does it. I would rather dig open both my wrists than get sick, get fat, lose my hair, and die anyway. But she does. Coughing up blood and pretending she's fine, that she doesn't get tired, that she isn't afraid. That's what we do in my family. We do not want pity. We do not want worry. We do not want you to see when we are weak.

I think of my grandmother with lung cancer before my mother. My grandmother, my mother, then me. Will we be cancer, and cancer, and cancer? I don't smoke. But Christopher Reeve's wife Dana never smoked a day in her life, and she got lung cancer and it ate her.

All the women in my family get cancer. Both my grandmothers died from it. At least they were old when it happened, and lived to see their grandchildren. Grandma Julia Leone was lucky, her tumor was in a place where she could just have part of her lung removed. She lived long enough to get another cancer, melanoma that time, to come along and kill her. And Gigi, too, Gertrude Roberts my other grandmother, who got breast cancer and pretended she was fine and pretended she was fine and kind of discouraged us from visiting to never let anyone see her sick. And both of them, it spread to their bones and then their bones consumed them from within, just like Lewis's wife Joy Gresham. And just like my mother does, both of them hid how bad it was.

I would do that too. If I got sick, or started hurting myself, or stopped eating, you would never know. You would never know in a million years. Because if I know anything, I know that pity is like knives, shame is worse than cancer, so I know that you can hide anything from anybody if you really want to. You can hide your smoking from your children who lived their whole lives in the same house with you for eighteen years, you can hide it from everyone else for thirty. You can hide your breast cancer from your whole family until you die from it. And why not, because there's nothing anyone else can do, the cancer's going to eat you anyway, so if you're going to have everything else taken from you, your health, your beauty, your family, your life, you might as well die with your pride.

Cancer, and cancer, and cancer.

Had a very nice Easter yesterday, if a little more work-intensive and annoyance-riddled than I would have expected. My family and I went out to a lovely Easter dinner at this beautiful inn in town called the Glasbern. It is a converted farm with lovely old farm buildings like barns and stables converted into dining rooms and lodgings, with gorgeous landscaping and actually raises a lot of its own livestock on sight. Homegrown chicken is very tasty, it turns out. I also ran into an old friend, a girl, Debbie, working there who went to my old high school, and in fact played Selene in the very first production of To Think of Nothing four years ago. I told her that I got a chance to direct it for myself just recently, and she said she loved the role and had very good memories of putting on the play.

The only problem was that I got quickly and inexplicably carsick on both the drive there and the drive home. Fortunately it wore off by the time dinner arrived, but I was really angry. There was no reason for me to get sick; the trip was short and over easy roads. I'm kind of afraid to get into a car again.

Fighting a very mild remnant of nausea for the rest of the night, I finally checked over and sent out all forty character sheets for my two games. It took hours, and feeling slightly sick did not help. And we had a drop in Oz RIGHT AFTER I sent out all the sheets. We had someone on the waitlist, but if that drop had occurred just a little earlier we could have redone the casting. The character that had to be filled is extremely well-suited to a particular kind of player, and I can think of others who probably would have enjoyed it. Ah, well. It will be fine, and I'm just grateful that the games are still full.

Friday night saw the closing performance of To Think of Nothing. Jared's and my parents came to see it-- I was also delighted to see emp42ress and ultimatepsi made it, so sweet of them --and it was flawless. I was so proud, and my dear ones were proud of me. Afterward, because they wanted it so badly, we did a naked tech run. Now, to say this was superfluous is putting it mildly. The naked tech run's primary purpose is to let the actors blow off steam after the stress of a long tech week, and the secondary purpose is to get in one more cue-to-cue before the show. This tech week had been so straightforward and positive that nobody was stressed, and we certainly didn't need to practice the tech for a show that had finished it's run! But the actors really really wanted it, so we went ahead. It turned out to be really fun and funny, and it didn't totally and utterly hurt my feelings to have my show ripped apart in front of me. ;-) We finished the night with a cast trip to IHOP, which was lovely. I don't know how I got so lucky that all the actors I wanted were not only talented but fun to hang around with. I'm also not sure how "hanging at a dirty pancake place" became the proper way to celebrate a good theatrical run, but it's a tradition that so many theater groups seem to hold dear.

Spent Saturday hanging with the family and doing chores. My brother and his girlfriend were both in shows in an Emerson showcase this weekend, so my family and Jared's went out to see it. After a lovely dinner at Legal Seafood (must get a recipe for that fantastic red onion jam on my swordfish) we saw Casey in a weird little piece that he was good in but I didn't get, and Sarah as Mrs. Breedlove in theatrical adaptation of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Sarah's a quiet girl in real life, but onstage she has quite a presence, and it turns out she's pretty talented too. I was so tired by that point (after a tech week spent sick) that I wish we hadn't stayed for the last show, which was long and stupid and didn't involve anyone I cared about, but my mom wanted to spend a little more time with me. I was falling over by the time I finally crashed into bed at 1AM that night. I was glad my brother and Sarah did so well, and that my family and Jared's had such a good time together.

Sunday was spent doing a whole lot of nothing. I was so burnt that all I wanted to do was lay around and sleep, so I did. I feel quite refreshed after it, and almost back to full health. It feels so good to have accomplished that play. It's even caught on film to keep as a memento. There's still a few more things left to handle about it-- getting pieces back to the HTP storage room, planning the cast party, things of that nature --but we have achieved what we set out to do. I directed a play I wrote. And it's one of the coolest things I've ever done.

Thank you so much for sharing it with me.

Saturday I finished writing my personal statement for graduate school, sent it in to the teachers I asked for recommendations, and celebrated having that weight off my mind. Then I made the perilous journey out to the Natick Mall to do Christmas shopping for my family before I go home. Even the place hadn't been wall-to-wall packed with people-- I had to creepily follow patrons who were leaving in my car in order to find a parking space --this job would have been hard enough to get done, since my family except for Casey is so hard to buy for. My dislike of stuff is mirrored to varying degrees in my parents; if it's not nice stuff my mom can do without it, and if you quit looking at stuff too long in our house my dad will throw it out to escape the burden of its stuffy imposition. For Mom I got beautiful black leather gloves with cashmere lining, which are attractive and functional and I actually wouldn't mine owning a pair myself, so I'm pleased there. My brother will get this fantastically ugly hipsterish plaid flannel that apparently is his style these days. As for my dad, well, picking something for him was hell, and none of the ideas I had panned out. He wants nothing, needs nothing, prefers nothing, and on the rare occasion he does want something he will immediately get it for himself in precisely the style and variety he finds optimal for his needs to a degree that no outside gift-giver could ever possibly equal. I settled on nice beer glasses, since he's taken to brewing his own beer, but chances are he's already found himself exactly the beer glasses he wants and I will just throw up my hands at trying to honor the Christmas generosity ritual with him at all. 

On Wednesday I collect my bags, my gifts, and my brother and head on home to Allentown for the end of the week. I won't be gone long, just until early next Sunday, which I'm glad for, but it'll be nice to spend the holiday with the family. Alas when I return I will no longer have the house to myself. *sigh* Ah, well. It was heavenly while it lasted.

My cousin totally did this to my aunt.

As you may know, most of my family is Italian-American; both of my grandfathers were the sons of Italian immigrants. But my maternal grandmother is Russian, and my paternal one, my Gigi, is half-English, half-Scotch-Irish. My Gigi's mother was a scion of an old Scottish family in Pennsylvania called the Lynns. They're the only even vague connection to class my family has, the rest of us being various varities of European peasant. ;-) The cool thing is, the Lynns, being Scottish, quite old, and at one point the vassals of a family with royal blood, were permitted to wear a particular tartan, which I have come upon:



I actually kind of like it. So technically, being a descendant of the Lynns and with no other superceding Scottish ancestry, I have the right to wear this plaid as my family tartan. :-) Kind of cool, huh?