SHARON WHITE

Self-Portrait

Along the Schuylkill River were flotillas of geese and all those turtles, about twenty, on the branches stuck in the shallow edge. There was the oldest, as big as a trash can lid, and then a series of teenagers and babies.

My body is learning how to walk again. Scott kept track and we turned around at one and a half miles. It sounds like nothing, doesn’t it, but to me it was heaven, three miles at once in the trees surrounded by birds. Here’s the list: northern cardinal, American robin, red-winged blackbird, grey catbird, cedar waxwing, song sparrow, mourning dove, blue jay, eastern bluebird, red-eyed vireo, eastern wood-pewee, tufted titmouse, field sparrow, Baltimore oriole, warbling vireo, pileated woodpecker.

They were flying and singing and puttering through the trees. The little birds chasing the woodpecker away. Cinnamon feathers flashing in the leaves. Some songs we remembered and others we picked up on Scott’s cellphone. I was walking on the soft trail touching the tassels of flowers and grass. Damselflies, iridescent blue scattering on the track. All along the path the river flowed toward Delaware Bay. A man stood on boulders tumbled in a pile at the start of the walk. When we came back to the beginning, I could see he was fishing. His children playing in the sandy shallows where a stream joined the river.

The Baltimore oriole was a surprise, flying low over the brush, blazing orange wings, and then circling higher, his wings spread so we could see the black and orange displayed. Everything was vibrating. The light, the white buttons on the tips of flower stems, the flags of tassels on the grasses. And the leaves, and bark, and the chestnut tree flowers falling in red tipped petals on the path. I let everything go in the warble of the vireo and the catbird trying out his tunes. I let everything go.

***

I was terrified at first when my primary care doctor told me I might not make it, and then relieved once I spoke to my oncologist and surgeon at the hospital. Maybe I wasn’t going to die after all. They had a plan. I had a path to follow.

I didn’t want to write about the emergency rooms, the men and women with their life in large suitcases getting up and wandering around, smoking by the doorway, the teenager who had taken himself to the ER because he couldn’t take care of himself anymore. The two old men whose clothes were falling off as they shuffled up to the desk. Muttering in Chinese. The doctor in the tiny cubicle who said, don’t leave. My doctor had told me to bring slippers, and I did and sat on the stretcher in the hallway for hours until they found a room. I didn’t want to write about everything going into the bag on my stomach, all the water that should be in my cells, washing out of my body so it was hard to walk or eat or sleep. And the rush of the infusion in the IV. How good I felt after those bags of liquid.

***

I’m reading about lineage in the south seas. How does a lineage of cancer read? Do I smell differently now that I’m “riddled” with cancer, as my mother would say, riddled with drugs. Polynesians could recite stories of their ancestors back hundreds of years, and everything was an ancestor from the beginning. My ancestors are lost in a wash of people who didn’t want to remember, or didn’t have time to remember. They were in a new place where it wasn’t as hard as the old place. They didn’t really keep records of who they were before.

Will I be utterly changed by the time I come out of the other end of this journey? Who knows.

My bones are rubbing against each other in a kind of cricket-like song. My hair is hanging on in patches. I can count the strands at my widow’s peak.

“But we’re alive,” my friend Carmen said yesterday.

“That’s a good point,” I said. The CT scan to figure out if my tumor has shrunk is on Tuesday.

The National Cancer Institute tells me my pee is dangerous. Full of chemicals. I have to flush twice.

I have the first dream where I tell a friend at work that I have cancer. I know she says, I saw you walking in the parking lot. It’s written all over you. I got your book, she says, called Tension. I don’t think I’ve written a book called that, I say. We’ve been waiting ages for coffee. I haven’t seen you before, the worker says. But you’ve seen my friend lots of times, I say. She’s a good customer. And then I tell my friend I have lots of my books at home. I’ll bring her one I’ve actually written about gardens, vanished gardens. I have to order some of those, I think in the dream. And then I think I’ll have to remember not to walk like that, stooped over. I’ll pretend everything is fine.

I have two weeks until my third chemo infusion. The first time we sat in the waiting room for a long time as people came and went. A name was called and then the person raised their hand, or fumbled with their bags, or repeated their name and then disappeared. I couldn’t see any logic to the whole thing. Why did some people stay away? Others appeared almost immediately.

Two men with matching shoes arrived, the taller man with his arm around his companion’s shoulder. The shorter man was the one with the white plastic hospital wrist band. An older man dressed like a construction worker sat near a younger man with a full head of hair who could have been his son. I saw him at the next chemo session and he had shaved his head. His hands looked weathered, but his face was young.

A tall woman with a turban wound around her head wore a matching long skirt. A woman in a pink t-shirt, white shorts, and a big white leather bag, her hair growing in, dyed orange, a bag full of apple fritters from Wawa.

An older woman with green pants and a pink shirt takes a long time to pack up her things when she’s called, folds a brochure and puts it in her bag.

On the television, Good Morning America is telling me how to survive a riptide, intimate details about Anne Heche’s life, the weather. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion, famous along with Cardi B for the song “WAP,” lip-syncs a new song, and then a nurse calls me.

Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee tells me in his recent article in The New Yorker, “Sleeper Cells”: “This is a chilling duality of cancer: each individual cancer cell comes from a single cell, and yet each cancer contains thousands of clones evolving in time and space. Treating or curing cancer involves tackling this incredible degree of genetic diversity. It’s a clone war. And the clinical relevance is obvious. Clones that develop mutations conferring resistance to anti-cancer therapies are the ones that flourish and form metastases.”

He talks to cancer researcher Charlie Swanton, at the Francis Crick Institute in London, who explains how sleeper cells awake with inflammation. Swanton tells him, “There’s some bad luck involved—you have to have a bad cell at the bad place at the bad time, and over a long period.”

***

When I wake up at night and the door opens, a stair creaks, the mirror reflects a woman who’s losing her hair, or has almost lost all her hair. She has to pee so many times. Her teeth are wooly with the night.

“You were laughing when I came to bed,” Scott says.

“Oh, I was laughing with Irene. We were back at Oxford, we were standing on a bridge, we were talking about boys and Welsh cakes, we were watching the cows along the river, we were drinking champagne.”

Third chemo coming up. The woosh and then the sleepiness and then the chemicals swirling around in my body, the skin not knowing what to do—too much of it, too spotted, too scratchy.

***

I know about riptides from my years at the Cape. There was the shallow water at mid-tide, scooping my body along the furrows of the sand with just enough water to cover my arms and legs as I swam along the bottom. I loved being liquid like the ocean, nosing along the ridged bottom of the shallow pools like a shark. Riptides were something else. They swept you out to sea, usually where the waves collided as the tide was coming in. We knew not to play in those spots. But one of our friends was pulled out into the ocean one summer. He was old enough to know better. It was tragic. He was such a good swimmer. He was the youngest of all the brothers. The one his mother loved the most, since he was one of those surprises that was swept away from her.

***

I got some good news yesterday and clapped twice like we do in my barre class. Once for the third-year resident and once for the oncologist. This is good news, the resident said. This is good news, the oncologist said when he arrived with a flourish. I know, I said and clapped again for him, saying yeah! This is the primo outcome, the best it gets, the best scenario. This is what we wanted to have happen. It’s all for the surgery.

The resident’s mask kept falling underneath his nose. “I wanted to just show him how if you twist the ties once it would stay up,” Scott said later.

“Don’t ever do that,” I said.

We were trying to be straightforward so we didn’t alienate anyone before the surgery, especially the surgeon we saw before the oncologist. He was very grumpy at our first meeting. He was just back from having Covid and then taking a two-week vacation. I’d heard several things about him from different sources: he was the best surgeon in the city for this operation; he didn’t have much of a bedside manner; he’s a guru; he’s a funny man with brown hair cut like a bowl on his head; he’s excellent at what he does, so why worry about what he says.

I had worn a flowered silky shirt, easy to pull aside to access the port and take my blood. It was something about the bright orange and sweet yellow flowers on a blue ground that brightened everyone up I think, like Monet’s garden.

The surgeon had two assistants—one to take notes, the other a third-year resident who sat in the corner and smiled off and on behind her mask. I liked her immediately. The surgeon seemed like a different person. Friendly, warm. He told us about the operation, how another surgeon would also be there to take a small part of my liver (it was just on the surface anyway), but now the scans looked so good, nothing in the lungs (he didn’t think there was in the first place) and the tumors in the cavity had shrunk to manageable size, just what they wanted. I could see him smiling behind his mask, too. It felt like a tiny miracle: I’d been bad-mouthing this surgeon for three weeks.

“Is it the little pill that I’ve been taking, you think, that makes me feel like everything is okay?” I asked Scott this morning when we woke up, the heavy blue curtains still pulled shut against the light.

“Or is it that I just react to stuff like this like this? Remember when I had the melanoma and the infection, I was pretty calm and I wasn’t on these pills.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re on the lowest dose. I’m a ball of nerves.”

I think I hear geese in the middle of the night flying over our house. In the morning I see them in their straight line heading west. Flying diagonally into the sky.

***

The insurance company approved my operation over the weekend. Scott read the sheet that detailed what the surgeon and his team will be doing. Just about scooping out and tying up all of my reproductive system. I know I don’t need it anymore, after all it’s turned against me, but it’s a strange feeling thinking about that cavity inside me. I’ve been worrying about whether I’ll feel sexy anymore. What happens to my orgasm? I know so little about how everything coordinates to give you that Dinah-Moe Humm as Frank Zappa sings.

I’m not alone. An article in The New York Times tells me that hardly anyone understands the clitoris, how it’s just the tip of a larger iceberg, the organ extending like a bulb. How doctors discount it during their surgery.

“They won’t be going anywhere near it,” Scott says. “Don’t worry. All I’m worried about is whether you’ll be alive.”

In Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix set in the Middle Ages, Marie, a child crusader, is sent to an abbey by her guardian, Eleanor of Aquitaine, to eventually become the prioress. She’s seventeen. The abbey is falling apart, wracked with sickness. Marie becomes a novice and grows into her stature as a prioress, fierce and brilliant. She appoints a Welsh nun, beautiful Nest, as the infirmatrix. Nest’s secret is she knows just the right way to stimulate the nuns who need release. And tells them there’s nothing wrong with that. She puts her mouth beneath their shifts and sets the ripples off. The prioress knows this too. Nest is gentle with her. Marie wants to save the abbey from the outside world and builds a labyrinth around the property.

The body is what this is all about. The body that makes and breaks and gets sick. So sick she may not make it to six months, the surgeon told Scott, so sick and she doesn’t even know what’s where, so she buys a book by Bill Bryson all about the body since she’ll probably be writing about her body, won’t she, and art and artists and making things and being a mother. But once she opens the book, she knows she won’t want to read it, just out of the hospital after the twelve hours in the cold under the knife, she doesn’t want to know how much of her intestines are missing crushed by the tumor and then no good, no good at all, actually dangerous, that could kill her too and all this thinking about illness is so wound up and useless. She’s thrilled when she’s walking on Lemon Hill this morning right up to the house and then back around again on the path she walked during the pandemic when there was so much death, so many bodies failing to breathe. She doesn’t want to know why her stomach bubbles up in waves, why the hair is growing back in odd places, she never had hair there before. Her surgeon tells her it grows back curly, and she’s not sure if he’s talking about on her head or somewhere else. Now she’s typing at her desk, coffee at her fingertips, the sparrows are singing their spring songs over and over again, the chimney swifts are flying to Lemon Hill and back again, now there’s conversation about joy, joy at getting her feet to move up the path again, even though they’re still not working quite right.

***

I cross myself every morning with holy water from Lourdes my neighbor gave me, along with membership in the Spiritual Union of Perpetual Adoration from the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters or Pink Sisters. I believe that prayer from far-flung places and people in the neighborhood has helped me through this year.

One of my other neighbors suggested I read a book called Sacred Medicine by Lissa Rankin. She said, “It helped a friend of mine who had cancer.”

Rankin tells me that sometimes you just have to believe, and you’ll be healed. The body is “miracle prone.” Mysterious and efficient. In Rankin’s book she describes traveling to Lourdes during a difficult time in her life, a doctor, a scientist who wanted to find out more about the spiritual power of healing. She describes her heart opening up when she saw the pilgrims in Lourdes, the grotto where the Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Bernadette eighteen times. The waters that have cured thousands of pilgrims, though the church has only counted less than one-hundred as miracles. So I am dipping my finger in a little plastic bottle and blessing myself with the water from the holy spring.

Rankin describes the blue sash on the Virgin Mary, how she told Bernadette to build a chapel “at the site of the visitations,” the Grotto of Massabielle in the foothills of the Pyrenees. And to find the miraculous spring that would heal people and invited her to drink and bathe in its healing waters. Bernadette “squatted” inside the grotto and dug into the dirt until the water flowed.

She writes about synchronicity and coherence of the holiness of some places like Lourdes where so many people gather and ask to be healed. A history of spiritual force. “Does something in our DNA respond to the prayers for healing that often occur at such springs? Is water the only substance that can help people in this way? What about the sacred dirt reputed to facilitate cures at the Santuario de Chimayo?”

I went to Chimayo a long time ago when I was young, just married to my first husband. In a few months he would die from a brain tumor, fast growing, impossible to operate on. We were on vacation and went to Santa Fe. I can’t remember if he touched the sacred dirt. I have a feeling he didn’t. I remember the arched red walls, the altar full of fruit and leaves, food as offerings. I remember the cold dirt, like wet sand, the silent walls curving above my head. I can’t remember what I asked for. I didn’t know then that I should have been praying for Steve.

My hair is growing back for the second time, just a brush with renewal the first time around; now it seems like it’s really going to town. Even my pubic hair seems to be inching along my skin.

Soon my neighbor who’s an angel will bring me bread. She’s been feeding us off and on through these months.

When I was in Japan a few years ago, Scott bought me a little owl carved with a tiny owl inside, supposed to be endowed with good luck. It was a hot day and we were coming down the steps of the village after walking up a dappled path, leaves glistening in the sun. I don’t remember if that’s when I couldn’t see and had to sit on the side of the trail, flashing lights in my eyes. I thought it was my glasses or the light or the heat. But we didn’t make it to the top, instead we turned around.

The flashing headaches came back after my first operation, in the hospital and then at home.

Do you think it’s stress, I asked Scott. What do you think? he said. I had a bad one when I had to change into a hospital gown in the radiology department to have my liver drain checked. The drain is curved like a snail in my liver in the space that shouldn’t be there. The place where the infection can grow again. I climbed up on a step to reach the flat metal bed as lightning crashed in my eyes.

“I’ll help you,” one of the nurses said.

“It should go away soon,” I said, “I’m just a little dizzy.”

Scott gave me some opaque watercolors and two pads for our anniversary. Thirty-two years. The New York Times book review tells me that time has warped since the pandemic. Time out of joint, the universe upended like in the 1960s when Joan Didion felt sick, panic- stricken. The center not holding at all. What’s time for the wild miniature strawberries on the lawn at Lemon Hill? For the chimney swifts swirling and diving above the grass or hanging on the garbage cans? An infinity of something, each day marking time. The strawberries have been ripe for a few weeks now, but I know it’s just a ripple of ripeness from one plant to another. Someone must eat them.

I went to see an exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday: “Seeing with empathy: the female gaze in American modernism” (A type of looking—achievable by anyone—that focuses on perceiving people’s interior selves, as opposed to objectifying their bodies, according to the printed panel at the exhibit).

I’m looking at the notes I took:

“Birthday” Dorothea Tanning 1910-2012

(Surrealism—) her lover named it. Later he was her husband. 1942. She lived to be over 100.

What stands out is how flat the paint on the canvas is, a sheen of different colors merging. Self-portrait. A monkey with wings just sitting there at her feet, yellow eyes wide. She’s barefoot, lightly polished toes, the monkey-eagle clutching the floorboards.

She’s a medieval witch, her breasts bare surrounded by doors with white porcelain knobs. Her hand on a knob, but she’s steady, not going anywhere. Her blouse is Elizabethan purple and gold.

She wears a bustle of animals with antlers (about the size of mink) and a drapey purple/blue skirt. She’s looking into the future I think. Her breasts are the focal point of the painting bathed in light; her eyes withdraw into herself.

The floors reflect—you notice the shine on everything—

The rooms going off to the right almost forever.

She wrote this about “Birthday”:

“One way to write a secret language is to employ familiar signs, obvious and unequivocal to the human eye. For this reason I chose a brilliant fidelity to the visual object as my method in painting Birthday. The result is a portrait of myself, precise and unmistakable to the onlooker. But what is a portrait? Is it mystery and revelation, conscious and unconscious, poetry and madness? Is it an angel, a demon, a hero, a child-eater, a ruin, a romantic, a monster, a whore? Is it a miracle or a poison? I believe that a portrait, particularly a self-portrait, should be somehow, all of these things and many more, recorded in a secret language clad in the honesty and innocence of paint.”

Muriel Streeter’s “Self-Portrait” is near Tanning’s. I learn later that they were close friends. The painter is looking off her left shoulder, her hand with a heavy gold ring on her finger, like a class ring, holding her brush, a paint-stained rag in her other hand—her apricot skirt, her deep blue sleeveless blouse. She’s standing away from the easel—a jar of summer blue larkspur and red carnations and pink roses perhaps on the shelf of a rough wood cupboard. The light fills her satin skirt.

Is she in a shed, a barn? She doesn’t trust the observer. This is what I do, she seems to be saying, let me keep working. Somehow, we’ve interrupted her. Or is the painting the scene? She’s looking at herself. Her expression is quizzical then. She’s surrounded by shadow but lit with a glow. Her face is the most important spot on the canvas. The flat brushstrokes fill in the canvas.

Self-portrait=memoir. How the painter treats the canvas or board.

A museum guard leads me through the gang of people near the main door, clustered around donuts and coffee.

***

Novelist Dorthe Nors writes, “I felt grief for the losses that have been and the losses to come. I turned the dogs in random directions, wishing I could hold time still…but we can’t stop time. We can’t escape the force that draws us through the world. We have magnets in our body.”

The body as miracle prone—an interesting way to put it. We’re all miracles I suppose, how does any of this make any sense? And so many people try to make the world as difficult as they can. I don’t think I want to write about miracles, too iffy, too hard to prove. Birds singing this morning near our house—tufted titmouse, northern mockingbird, Carolina wren, house sparrow, white-throated sparrow, robin.

Last night we saw a few chimney swifts, maybe five. Now a whole flock of them are back, tracing that air above our heads with their chittering as we sit on the deck. It’s been a year since I first knew I was sick.

How do the godwits reclaim their skin and muscles, their tawny feathers after their very long flight to New Zealand from the Arctic? Is this year my spiritual flight to New Zealand? And why is it so hard to get back my tawny feathers, my skin that was taut and smooth. My heart clear of fear. Just walking up to the shoulder of Lemon Hill maybe gives an answer to this.

“You can’t overdo it,” Scott says. “Don’t try to do too much.”

I watched the godwits stick their curved beaks into the muck of the inlet in New Zealand. Would their organs respond quickly to the food? I’m not equipped with the gift to rearrange my body after surgery, after two surgeries and two sessions of chemo and a liver infection and a wound that wouldn’t heal. But I’m here. I’m typing. I’m determined to get my muscles back.

Sometimes I feel like I can’t write. I’ll never return to New Zealand artist Anna Caselberg’s life. I’ve lost the thread. Sometimes I feel like the sky is splitting open and godwits are flying past me—after their ancestors, opening the doors to life on an inlet behind the dunes where sea lions breed. It’s miraculous all of it. The cardinal calling in the same place he was calling yesterday as we walked up the sidewalk to the statue of Lincoln and then crossed the street and then went up the path to the road that circles Lemon Hill. My first time in almost a year, my feet on the soft dirt, my arms swinging.

David. J. Linden, a professor of neuroscience, writes in an essay in The New York Timesthat although you can’t fight cancer with mere thought, cancer progression can “be affected by behavioral practices like meditation and breath work.”

He explains, “One potential biological explanation is that some type of signal must be sent from the brain to the cancer cells in the body. The main way that the brain communicates with the body is through nerve fibers that form paths from the brain to the body to conduct electrical signals, which in turn release neurotransmitter molecules at their endings (The brain can also communicate with the body through molecules that are secreted into the bloodstream.)

“To me, the innervation of tumors and its role in cancer progression suggest an interesting hypothesis in mind/body medicine. If behavioral practices like meditation, exercise, breath work or even prayer can attenuate or reverse the progression of certain cancers (and, granted, that’s a huge if), then perhaps they do so, ultimately by changing the electrical activity of the nerve cells that innervate tumors.

“I’m left wondering if this hypothesis relates to my own situation. It’s not known whether the remnant tumor in my heart is innervated or not, and if so, by what type of nerve fibers. But if there is such a connection, it opens up the possibility that my own cognitive approach to terminal illness—in my case, hopefulness coupled with curiosity—could contribute to keeping my cancer at bay and do so, not through supernatural means, but by altering the electrical activity of the tumor-innervating nerve fibers. I hope so, as however they are granted, these extra innings are a pure delight.”

***

The scarlet lilies with their buddies, bright yellow and orange, bloom in a blaze in the garden right now. I’m clipping an errant leaf, I’m pushing in the dirt around the anemones, I’m smiling at the tall rudbeckia, cousins of the common black-eyed Susans where the common yellow throat eats the seeds of the chocolate brown centers for at least an hour as I watch from the stairs. And the deer flies over the road between here and the garden center where there’s patches of wild land and towering trees hidden in the suburban streets, and you can see the yearling jump, all muscle and light brown flank, over the pavement and into the bushes at the edge of the slope.