THE SHADOW OF THE ANVIL

THE SHADOW OF THE ANVIL


It's the good girls who keep the diaries," pronounced the inimitable Tallulah Bankhead. "The bad girls never have the time."
I have not kept a diary throughout my life. Perhaps that tells you what kind of girl Tallulah would consider me.
Sometimes I very much wish that I would have had the discipline and desire to journal regularly. For me, life has always been either too busy to allow for the time for self-recording or, it seems, too boring to hold up under the self scrutiny. I have friends who have kept an ongoing record of their lives and I have come to envy them. It would be fascinating to look back at the What-I-Thought-Then of my past with the overlay of the What-I-Know-Now of the present. Moreover, it would be a chance to turn my journalistic instincts on the story of my self. I wish I had a journal for what was going on in my life exactly one year ago, the week before Mother's Day. It was the last week of my old life.
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The week ahead is going to be a week like none I have experienced.
My first instinct is to acknowledge that I am facing it with feelings of apprehension, fear and dread.
But if I have learned anything in this past year, it is this: the one thing--the only thing, really--that I can control is my feelings. I can choose apprehension, fear and dread. Darkness is very seductive.
Or.
Or I can choose to approach this week with an attitude of renewed gratitude. Of hope. Of strength.
I can take the well lit path instead.
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The week before Mother's Day, one year ago. For the most part, I believe it was a normal week in the life of my family. My husband and I went to work. My youngest daughter was probably working on mastering her skateboard. I recall being preoccupied with my two older children. My son was just returning home from college after completing his second year away. My daughter was weeks away from graduating from high school. As summer loomed, we were busy settling him back into a few months at home and planning for her exit a few months later.
Was the weather fine or foul? What was annoying me? What occupied my dreams?
Can't say.
I wish the particulars would come into finer focus. Instead, when I think about my life one year ago, I am left with a nostalgic feeling and any number of overwrought metaphors.
One year ago, I was living on a fault line that I didn't know about . I was dancing toward a cliff and had no idea about the steep drop off. I was perched on the side of a volcano, unaware that a river of fire was about to burst through the surface.
I was a cartoon character goofing off under the big black anvil that was about to fall and flatten me.
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When I was an English major, I learned how to identify the literary technique known as foreshadowing. It's how an author, the god of the imaginary universe created in the narrative, subtly warns the reader of how the story is to unfold. This allows the reader to be somewhat prepared when the plot makes a dramatic pivot.
Perhaps you've noticed that real life does not unfold like book life.
Most times, we get no foreshadowing to prepare us for the earthquakes or cliffs or volcanoes in our lives. Or we're simply too ignorant or myopic to read our own scripts and see the telltale shadow of the anvil.
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I remember that last year, Mother's Day dawned clear and warm. As I had for the past few years, I joined FM107.1 listeners to Walk For The Cure. As always, I was moved by the river of pink, the sheer number of people touched by breast cancer. As always, as I marched along in the pink pack I made a point to think about my connection to the disease: my beloved grandmother. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer back in the Bad Old Days, before chemotherapy and support groups and reconstruction surgery. They cut off her breast, radiated her chest and wished her luck. Her diagnosis came from the era when women with breast cancer were called victims, not survivors. But survive she did. She lived almost 40 years after her initial diagnosis, dying at age 93. Not of cancer.
Then, last year, after the walk I know we went out for brunch. (Where? What did I eat? Was it good?) And surely I got presents from the kids and my husband. (What? Was I touched? Were they thoughtful? Surely the good moms remember this stuff.)
It's all gone. Did what happened next obliterate the details of the time immediately preceding it? I so wish I could retrieve those minor memories and build them into a mosaic to see what it was like to be the person who inhabited that Sunday, that week, that life.
Because then it was Monday, the day after Mother's Day and after work I blithely showed up for my routine mammogram.
And that was the beginning of my new life.

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And now I realize that, sometimes when I'm sad, it's because I miss Her.
I miss that person who I was one year ago this week. The person who had no idea that she was going to have to take a test she was so completely unprepared for.
Why was she so petty? So unappreciative of what she had? Worried about such silly stuff?
I look back on Her as if she was a child. You know how children get anxious and worried about the little kid problems in their life and, while trying not to patronize them, you want to tell them to relax and enjoy the carefree nature of their lives. You have to hold yourself back from dismissively murmuring that these aren't problems at all. That someday you will wish for the troubles that worry you today.
I am the grown up version of the childlike me of a year ago.
When I think about who I was, I can only call me She, because she's not really Me any more.
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Now almost a year has passed and it's all behind me. The surgery and the chemotherapy and the radiation. I don't have cancer any more. The scars have healed. The pain is mostly gone. My hair and, blessedly, my eyebrows have grown back in.
But I am different. I can never leave my diagnosis behind. For the rest of my life, there will be medicine and checkups and scans. I will be under a doctor's care to make sure that what got me once won't get me again--and if it does, that we find it early, before it has a chance to get me good. Or bad. I am what I have never been before--vulnerable. Twice shy, because of the once burned.
I am wise where I was once innocent.
However. In some ways, I am so much happier. I appreciate the sweetness of life so much that it is sometimes almost unbearable. That appreciation gives small moments a deeper pleasure and gives my days a new zest. I have realized how much I love life and don't take it for granted in the way I once did. I love it so much that the thought of losing it is more threatening than it ever would have been before.

I'm thinner, grayer, stronger. I am still making friends with this new version of my old friend.