the pings and the people who just might save us

in which i open the books on the words and the wisdom of life-saving souls . . .

They were my inner sanctum. The ones who knew the way in to the holy of holies, that innermost chamber where all can be spoken. And unspoken, too—a language all its own.

In the land where cancer is the common denominator, friends can come fast. But only a few find their place on the seat right beside you. The ones whose mere presence is all you need to weather the storm of the hour. The ones whose irreverence can dynamite the most suffocating of fears. And, in my case, the ones whose gift for language was the very elixir I needed every time—most often tapped out in missives of varying lengths, a text or a treatise, their words and their wisdom and wit amounting to digital lifelines.

Two of my three are gone now. Eileen and Annie. The one whose hand I clung to the longest, Eileen, is no longer. She died Friday. The last text I’d sent her was from the bowels of the room where I awaited my scan a week ago Tuesday. I’d asked if she was anywhere in the labyrinth of floors above me, and whether I could pop up to see her in the lull between my scan and my sit-down with my oncologist. (Eileen had been spending stretches of time in the hospital as her cancer had kicked into overdrive, and her last text to me—just the week before—was whether I thought radiation to her brain might make her ditzier.) I never heard back from the last text I sent her.

We had a chain, Eileen and I, of thoughts and questions and wonders and worries that darted and wove and wended across the last three years, three of the bumpiest in my life’s-long adventure of finding my way through this pock-riddled terrain we know as our life.

Because we live in an age where those flat-screened appendages we tuck in our pockets, the ones we plug into the wires that stretch to the wall, the ones that ping and purr and sometimes sound like a spaceship, because those odd gadgets have a way of becoming the central operating stations of our lives, keeping photos and snippets of people we love, as well as appointments we’d better not miss, I found myself scrolling back over that tapped-out record Eileen and I shared. The one that sometimes pinged at the oddest hours. Deep in the night. First thing in the morning. From the ICU where she’d landed too many times of late. And, not even three seasons ago, from her husband’s near-death bed. (He died in early December; and their two beautiful daughters, each with children of their own now, are left—in the span of eight months—parentless.)

At this so-called table where we pull up a chair, where I try to bring whatever most lit up my heart or my soul each week, I know nothing more blessed to bring here this morning than a few lines plucked from the script Eileen and I cobbled together over these years. They’re a peek into what happens when we humans pry open the walls of our tucked-away parts—our hearts known to tremble, our brains bursting with questions and doomsday scenarios, and whatever is the vessel where the deepest empathies stir. I think you’ll read right away why I so loved Eileen, and why I hope you, too, find an Eileen when you need one.

Here’s one of the first ones she wrote to me, after her husband (who was deep in the throes of his own cancer) had spent a good hour on the phone with me, convincing me I needed to climb into my big-girl boots, buckle my seatbelt for an airplane ride to New York City, and find out what the good doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering had to say about my quirky little cancer. I was dreading that trip with every cell in my body, and Eileen, who by that point was fending off two cancers of her own, one of which had spread to her lungs, knew just how to coax me along. She wrote:

You are not alone and these docs you meet are used to being with new 2nd opinion patients. So be the smiley bitch and take lots of notes. You will probably never see them again, so go in like a small, but sweet and cute koala bear and get what you need. Call and text anytime. We’re on it and know you are doing Exactly what you need to do! With love,🙏 e and b.

On my way to the airport, the phone in my pocket pinged. Eileen’s timing was a marvel:

Life can be scary, but you’re doing the right thing. Onward.

Not long after I’d gotten back from Sloan Kettering with more questions than answers, she once again pinged:

You can call me anytime…I’m all about crying. You have to let it out. But, like you, I need to keep [the ones who loved her—and worried—the most] in a good place and maybe diminish, just a bit, just how truly scared shitless I am.

And then this:

The reality is that it’s all a crap shoot and there is nothing we can do against playing these odds. Except, like you and me, asking the really hard questions that no one wants to answer. I never thought of me as a pain in the ass person, but now I don’t care. This is MY life and no one is going to make me feel like an a/hole for being me….or asking lots of questions. Oy, just sick of this life that is always a plethora of questions. Hang in, friend.

And in the thick of one of her many medical mystery tours, when the latest strange symptom of hers had appeared out of nowhere, she displayed her uncanny fluency—finding just the right place to insert just the right expletive:

She [the doctor] did a biopsy [on the just-appeared cyst] but has no idea what it is. Fan-fucking-tastic! Ok then, I’ll be fine.

Her most frequent refrain: But tell me about you, please.

During a particularly scary spell when it seemed I might need to travel to an oncologist in Utah who knows more than most about my kind of cancer, Eileen stepped right up (mind you this is a woman who was entrenched in her own chemo calendar, and with whom I’d never shared so much as a cup of coffee before all this began): Oh dear love. You’ve got this. I am happy to be here for you. I would be happy to go to Salt Lake City with you. Is that possible?

And this, just two weeks ago, was her very last text to me, weighing whether she should submit to brain radiation for the tumors just found there: . . . cuz it will make me ditzier but help my body symptoms. I think I should. Any thoughts?

From the first to that last, the texts plumbed the depths of stripped-bare humanity. The questions cannot get much harder. Nor the wisdom more true. The undying thread every time: love in its most potent, undeniable, all-curable concentration.

They were my inner sanctum, Eileen and Annie.

They still are: though now I direct my calls up and not over . . .

---

Eileen’s sharp wit, her all-encompassing warmth, and her irreverence whenever I needed it most, is matched by Annie’s profound eloquence, and her palpable sense of the proximate sacred. Here’s a wee taste of my beloved Annie, only 42 when she died in February, from one of her many missives, this from an early-on one, not long after we’d landed inside each other’s stories…:

It’s Annie again, pestering your inbox, here to report that I’ve been dropping a novena with your name on it into the inbox of the Big Guy in the sky, the water, the pea soup-gray, wondrous lady house finches, and certainly somewhere within all the twinkle lights imitating the heavens in my dark-sky, rancher neighborhood.

Only patients of life-threatening illnesses like cancer know how deep you have to scour within to find courage hearty enough to sustain you through days and even years of unending uncertainty. It has to become a way of life. I think all humans desire various forms of security, some sense of control, but it’s not a luxury afforded us. When there is no guarantee of the most precious things, even life itself, what do you put your security in? I think it just has to be God. I have a husband so loving and devoted that I should enter him in some kind of contest. I have a family so close that my parents spent the hottest summer in recent history (2023) living out here when I was first starting chemo. (They called themselves the ‘Dodo Birds’ (rather than ‘Snow Birds’). They told people they were a little confused...) But in those dark nights, when I felt like I couldn’t find anyone to talk to about the real topics on my mind without horribly upsetting them, questions about meaning and mortality and how to walk through this with grace, I had to bring that to God. Trust me when I say that most people my age have not begun to think in the way you need to when you get a Stage IV Cancer diagnosis. . . .

When I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning in high school, in the midst of radiation treatment, I was so inspired that he could still see God at work even in the misery of a concentration camp. I was moved that he could see his experiences, even as they were happening, as ‘opportunities for growth’. I found hope in the idea that there was a redemptive power in suffering. All I know to do these days is to take all the pain, the fear, the doubt and use it to draw myself closer to God and to just ask Him to help me to do whatever His will is for me for the moment. I try to write. I try to live in the moment. I try to maximize time with my loved ones. I try to still be of service wherever I can, even if sometimes that has to mean letting other people be of service to me and accept that I am truly giving people an opportunity they need in doing so.

As you know better than I, I’m sure, so many mystics (perhaps Harold Ramis of ‘Groundhog Day’ among them ;) ) talk about how the only, only true reality is this moment. They talk about ‘kairos’ or ‘sacred time’, those not-enough extended moments when we are genuinely present with God and no longer ensnared by the illusion of linear time (after first probably having thrown our phones in a lake). I think that terminal cancer patients get some kind of fast pass to learning the wisdom and freedom that comes with truly living ‘one day at a time.’ . . .

Speaking of being in fear, I’m now horribly fearful that this reads like I am a pompous schmuck who is giving advice. I am not, and I’m sure anything I’m saying here sounds horribly pedestrian to a spiritual gladiator like yourself. This is just the stuff I say to myself, more or less, because I’ve come to some kind of conclusion that life is a practice of letting go more and more. It helps me. I guess I always did like a challenge...and living without being able to lean on the normal forms of security or even the ability to plan certainly is a challenge. It certainly makes precious what you give your time and energy to when there are no guarantees of anything. I feel more at home in the world...in a strange way. It seems less important who I am or what I do and more important to treasure the world and its people and appreciate how it will keep turning in its beauty. . . .I guess I just mean that a lot of this requires meeting God alone. But, oh, it is a gift to have a friend who has walked through this too...

Not hard to see why I loved them through and through. And why not a day goes by that I don’t reach for their hands….

What I hope most is that you find, or have found, an Eileen or an Annie when you need one the most. And my question of the week: have you? and might you share a bit of the story?

Because it’s beautiful, I am going to share Eileen’s obit here.