To Return

I.

I’m sitting on the shores of Lake Washington, amazed at what I can do. I recently finished a solid draft of my second novel. Today I danced hard, biked to the beach, swam in the green-blue waves, and will later have to bike back up all those hills to home. But I can do it. My body and—miraculously—my mind are in the best shape of my life.

Not bad for someone who’s come back from the dead.

Coming back isn’t an accurate way to put it though. I died two years ago when I was diagnosed with an aggressive ovarian cancer. I was burnt down, ash of myself sifted through the hands of my doctors and nurses and those who cared about me. Now a new self is writing this—someone I don’t quite recognize, but who I love and want to get to know.

II.

I was diagnosed with clear cell carcinoma in May 2021, a few days after my second COVID-19 vaccination shot. After my surgery the next week, removing (along with all of my reproductive organs) a 14-centimeter tumor from my body, I spent a lot of time watching movies and trying to read as I convalesced. I noticed something I never noticed so much before—cancer is everywhere in books and movies. Sometimes it’s a main event, like in Big Fish, and other times it plays a cameo role or hovers in the shadows. But it is almost always there.

I think fiction takes on cancer because it’s a nearly universal experience—everyone has either experienced it first-hand or knows someone who has experienced it. Giving a character cancer can make them change (or die), move or twist a plot. It can work as a believable deus ex machina in reverse, since anyone at all can suddenly have cancer, no matter how healthy, rich, or smart a person is. A very healthy person can get it (like myself) and it’s a toss-up whether they will get better (like myself) or die of it.

Cancer is nearly universal—but when it happens to you, the journey you go on is yours alone. And it seems totally unbelievable—a case in which life is stranger than fiction.

III.

In my journals of that time, I described cancer as a failure of the body. But I don’t think it is. It seems more like an overexcitement of existence, so many cells dividing that they threaten the organs we need to live. Cancer is part of being a multi-cellular organism—it’s the risk of being alive. Perhaps the disease could be considered a type of creativity. The body births a strange beauty of extra cells, which collect into sculpture-like tumors. It creates its own blood supply to feed its dangerous art form. There is some kind of care taken to tend to the tumors, to assure their longevity and growth—while the rest of the body, the body that wants to live, wages war.

Looking at images of clear cell ovarian cancer cells, I can appreciate their strangeness—even their beauty. Stained, they can look like marbleized paper, or abstract painting, or globs of dripped paint. Sometimes, they look like knitting, a shawl made not for wearing, for it won’t keep out the cold, but for its design alone—for the many open spaces.

IV.

Surgery first emptied me out, then chemo gutted and hollowed what was left. At my most empty, I had no idea if I’d return from this. And if I returned physically, would my mind?

On a trip to Whidbey Island with my partner at the time, we met a friend of his I’d never met before—an acupuncturist who took one look at me and said, “That woman you were—she’s not here anymore.”

V.

I’m in a bikini on the beach, waves lapping my toes. The new moon stamps the sky. A thick scar begins at the delta of my stomach and curves around my belly button all the way down—a kind of seam where the dangerous sculpture was extracted. Where I was sewn back together, made into another art. It’s a single line painting by Miró. It contains a story, marks the point of no return. It’s the pain of a cracked egg and the beauty of birth. It’s what’s left of the woman I was, and from where I birthed a new self.

I’m no longer self-conscious of this scar, or feel it’s worth hiding from others. It’s etched on me the way Mt. Rainier is etched in the sky today, every glacier visible and clear.

VI.

The toxic medicines used to stop my over-exuberant cancer cells also seemed to stop the creativity in me for a time. It was the emptiest time. At least, that’s how I remember it.

My friend and writing partner, Suzanne, came to see me every third week—which was my best week—after chemo. She came bearing sunlight, fattening snacks, her laptop and notebooks. We’d make a picnic and sit together out in my courtyard or at my dining room table, be in each other’s silence and presence, and write.

The process of writing is blank in my mind. I know I worked on a story about the Soviet invasion of Prague, a moment that changed all of my characters’ lives irrevocably and forever. The tanks rolled in like rampant cancer cells, and nothing would ever be the same again.

I felt like I was mimicking myself—the self I remembered from before. Before, I wrote. I was a writer. But who was I now? I was just typing, trying on a writer’s coat in the presence of another writer. I clacked on the keyboard, stringing letters into words, and words into sentences. So this is what a writer does, I thought. Clack, clack, clack. Clack.

VII.

I didn’t know, but I was stringing together a path to return. Like dropping stones to find your way out of a deep, dark wood.

VIII.

Later, after the big bad chemo was over and I was on my year of chemo-lite, I opened the file of my novel-in-progress to see if it would have any meaning for me now. My brain was still repairing from the damage the chemo caused and together with massive anxiety, I could only focus for a few minutes at a time, so it took me a while to get back into the material. When I did, I was surprised to find passages I didn’t recognize. I had, apparently, also worked on the novel in my sessions with Suzanne.

I rediscovered that much of the book centers on the concept of identity, as the characters are guinea pigs for a Witness Protection Program so nascent it has no name yet. I found a note in the margins I’d written a few years ago: “If you get to live, but don’t get to be who you are—is being alive worth it?”

IX.

It was like I was writing to my future self, whoever that would be—like I had known what was going to happen to me. Somehow, I knew I would need this—that note, this novel about identity—to help me find a way to a self.

While my characters were grappling with their multiple iterations of selfhood, I found my answer to that marginal question—a resounding fuck yes.

X.

Returning, I realized, isn’t about going back.

It’s about picking up stones, one at a time, marveling at their shapes, their heft, their colors—their aliveness.