The Road to Right Now

Follow-up to Slipping the Ballroom

(If you have not read my prior post, Slipping the Ballroom, you may want to read that one first. This one may not make as much sense otherwise.)

The day after I posted my last entry about my friend having terminal cancer, I booked tickets to go see him. I leave next Thursday. The two of us will hit the road for four or five days and then I’ll catch a redeye back. I have room to extend it to a week maybe.

We have no itinerary. We’ll see where the road takes us. I have no expectations. I just thought the visit might be good for my friend, so I’m going.

I’m glad I can.

Now, with that tidy little update complete, this is where this post goes a little sideways… or, better put, this is where the drafting of this post has been going sideways for three days now.

I first sat down to write this entry on Saturday. I thought it would take me an hour. I was so sure it would be an easy exercise, I put my fishing rod in the car thinking I’d sit down by 1:00 and be fishing by 3:00.

I hit the starting line on time. I was at my laptop in an empty Panera by 1:00 p.m. Then I spent the better part of the next three hours just thousand-yard-staring out the window. Not even typing. Just sitting there with my mind a million miles away, not writing a thing.

All the world was off enjoying a beautiful autumn day while I was spending the afternoon staring blankly across a deserted strip mall parking lot.

I’m not used to writing coming hard or not at all. The thousand-yard staring out at nothing… that, I know quite well. We go way back. We wasted a lot of time together back when my mother-in-law was ill.

There is a thing about terminal illness, about its nature:

It is a thief of presence.

It robs both the person who is ill and everyone close to them. It is a persistent criminal who gains entry at diagnosis and begins the ransack immediately. Ultimately, it’s largest theft is of someone’s presence in the lives of others; before that though, it steals from everyone in petty increments. It’s theft is a subtle larceny. It makes off with minutes or hours. It takes people out of the moment, out of the room.

My long sit on Saturday was oen of those thefts. It was a hijacking of my ability to be in the present because of unwelcome intrusions by the past and future.

The past came bearing grief; the future came bearing fear.

The specifics, naturally, relate to my trip next week. They sprung up on Saturday and have been plaguing since because of how the trip came to be.

A couple weeks ago, I got a call from one of the friends in my circle of old friends. Out of all of us, he is probably the closest with the friend with cancer. He was calling mostly to update me but also to vent a little.

Now, in the last few days, I’ve written probably 5,000 words about the content of that conversation, the dynamics at work, and how they intersect with the vast, swirling, ball of emotional energy which is yours truly. However, in an absolutely startling break from precedent, I am going to spare you that torment and just give you the synopsis:

Our friend with cancer has been sliding into a dark place. A gloomy isolation. His local friends have been trying to help pull him out of it. Their efforts have seemed to widen the distance rather than narrow it. They’ve left him feeling like they just don’t understand what he is going through.

To make matters worse, beyond his local friends, his support system gets thin in a hurry. The friends he is closest with from our group - who love him like a brother and would do anything for him - are 1,000-2,500 miles away. His family is a chaos factory.

He is largely without the support of people who are both nearby and who are equipped to handle where he is and what he’s carrying. He is without people who can just let him be. Just simply exist. Just be without task, responsibility, or obligation. Without having to meet expectations or tend to others.

In my prior post, I wrote about the dance that goes on around terminal illness. It is a circling shuffle around a painful truth. It goes on because the people around the person who is sick aren’t able to handle their illness or its looming outcome yet or are incapable of doing so ever.

Most people close to someone with a terminal disease eventually come to terms with the hard, painful reality. They find some measure of acceptance and leave the dance floor. Some never do though. Some never find that acceptance and thus, can never cope without the dance around the truth.

At some point though, the person who is ill just needs to stop dancing. They’re exhausted physically and emotionally. They’ve been tending to the dancers for so very long. They are just wrung out and need to just… sit down for a while… rest… be still.

At some point people with terminal illnesses need spaces in their life emptied of dancers but not of company.

I think my friend is there. I think he needs that now.

While it makes me uncomfortable to say this, I think being able to offer that borders on my fucking calling. Inhabiting hard rooms comfortably for the purpose of bringing comfort, I think I have been practically built for that role over a lifetime.

I truly believe that my life experiences from childhood through the last decade have all just aligned and combined at this point like some dysfunctional comic book origin story.

I believe that. I do.

But I am also incredibly uncomfortable believing it.

I worry it is a narrative I simply want to believe is true because it would mean I emerged from the long hellfire of my mother-in-law’s illness somehow stronger in the broken places, more resilient, more capable, changed alchemically by fire into a rare metal.

Whether that narrative is true of me or not, it is one I have been telling myself for over a decade now.

So, when my friend called a couple weeks ago, I felt summoned. Fucking summoned. I felt called upon and not by my friend but by a chance to be of some support to someone I care about.

It felt like an opportunity to tap into something borne of pain so as to help ease someone else’s.

If there is anything that could be more gratifying than that, more fulfilling, I don’t know what it would be.

I felt called; of course, I would answer.

Since then, however - being a person ‘gifted’ with the compulsion to leave no affirmation unrebutted - I have, naturally, been racked by a swirly-twirly whirlpool of self-doubts and insecurities. I’ve questioned whether the things I tell myself and believe about myself are actually true.

Am I made for this?

Am I really?

Right behind that set of doubts is something even harder to shoulder though because it is certain. It isn’t a maybe. It isn’t a doubt. It is certain. And it is something I suddenly realize I’ve been glossing over in my little internal narrative.

In my internal storytelling about the experience of being close to my mother-in-law throughout her cancer, I have focused a lot on 1) my having been able to be in hard rooms comfortably despite terrible realities; and 2) the moments of blue sky amid the hurricane that happen those rooms… and how beautiful and special and precious they are.

The thing I had glossed over is that those blue sky moments are made so deeply meaningful by what surrounds them:

Pain.

Grief.

Loss.

Fear.

Pain that robs you of the present and being present. Fear that throws you into a thousand-yard stare in a coffee shop in Rochester, New York, until you have no choice but to step out of line because you are trying so hard to not cry that you can’t read the menu board.

That is what bookends the rare preciousness of moments in the eye.

It is what makes precious the time spent out on the patio with people who have slipped the ballroom.

This is going to hurt. Stepping closer to my friend’s terminal illness is going to hurt.

I am not afraid that it will hurt. I am afraid of how much. I am afraid I might be less strong in the broken places than I would like to believe. I am afraid it might be more than I am prepared to manage.

This is going to hurt. That is certain. I am afraid of how much.

Even so, I am not remotely wavering on whether I want to wade closer.

Ultimately, if you have been through painful things and there is even a chance that you might be able to use what came of that experience to be of comfort to someone else – someone you care about - you do that.

You take what comes from that without reservation knowing there will be a cost. And then you weep upon that bridge when you come to it.

That is what you do.

That is what I will do.

I honestly don’t know how this trip is going to go. I think it will be good for my friend.

I have no idea where we’ll go. I don’t know what we’ll do. And honestly, I don’t much care.

The thing I care about is carving out an intentional opposite of my afternoon on Saturday.

I spent the first three hours I devoted to writing this lost in a thousand-yard stare, my mind entirely hijacked by a rising din. It was a dual cacophony of both a past remembered and a future feared. It stole me from the moment and the place. It took me prisoner.

Next week, I’m flying out to the west coast to pick up a rental car and then my friend.

Then we are going to set off to make loud the fierce present.

Alive to it. Alive in it.

For a time, at least, there will be nothing more.